Eight years ago, I started a journey looking into schools to get a doctorate. At first, I started looking into CCM programs – but as most of you reading know, at the doctoral level they don’t exist. Especially for someone like me who doesn’t sing any classical music or musical theatre at a professional level (my background is jazz/songwriter). I finally chose a Music Education PhD with an emphasis in popular music at The University of Miami. I was also very fortunate to be granted a teaching assistantship, largely within the contemporary program (popular musics), where my duties included teaching private contemporary voice lessons, contemporary theory and ear training, songwriter’s ensembles, and songwriting classes.

My intention going in was to figure out how to design a curriculum for a CCM program to help singers gain the skills they would need to succeed in the music industry. Rather quickly however, both through working in the contemporary program and through the research I got involved in, I discovered that in order to really help these kinds of singers, I needed to understand the much larger world of Popular Music Education (PME) and Higher Popular Music Education (HPME). In current academic settings, this is where those singers (singing in popular musics) and their voice teachers would be housed.