I keep seeing posts like "Where can I find (insert WAM-influenced compositional device like a whole-tone scale) in a popular music song?" Why? Why must we do this? Why can't we just let popular music speak for itself?
Look, I know this stance isn't revolutionary. And better pedagoges than I have addressed this well (Acevedo & Rush MTWMW pres. comes to mind). But I am still baffled when it happens. Talk about timbre or texture or basically anything else that doesn't pay lip service to WAM.
When you point to the one Radiohead song that uses the WT scale and say "Isn't that neat?" what exactly are you accomplishing? Why is there so much pressure to use popular music to teach WAM concepts? It's not like Radiohead breaks up the white-male canon.
It's great to talk about the overlapping features between WAM and popular music. It's not great to give students the false impression that the latter is somehow derivative of the former.
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