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Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 24, Issue 3, Pages 280–286
“HONK! Pedagogy” and Music Education
Reebee GarofaloUniversity of Massachusetts, Boston
Today I am here to talk about HONK! Pedagogy—that is, the
pedagogical aspects of the alternative brass band movement associated
with the HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands.1 Full disclosure: I am
a member of both the festival organizing committee and of the band that
started the annual event some seven years ago—The Second Line SocialAid and Pleasure Society Brass Band.2
First let me try and put into words a festival that you really have
to see and hear to appreciate. HONK! is an independent, grassroots, non-
commercial, three-day festival that features more than two dozen outrageous
and unruly marching bands from all over the world. This is not your average
music festival. In the first place, it’s free. Except for the CDs and t-shirts that
we sell, there’s no commercialism of any kind—no sponsors, no corporate
logos, no vendors. For three days we house and feed some 400 to 500
band members for free, including musicians, dancers, jugglers, hoopers,
fire breathers, flag twirlers, and stilt walkers. In return, the bands play for
free and all their performances are free and open to the public (except for the
closing night all-band blowout, which costs, like, 10 dollars for 20 bands,
or, as we like to say, 50 cents a band).
Because large marching bands are loud, acoustic, and mobile, there
is no need for electric amplification at HONK! It’s a very green event,
with no setups or sound checks to delay the action, and no technological
barriers separating artist and audience—just continuous unmediated music,experienced up close and personal in multiple performance areas. There
are also no stages at HONK!—nothing to elevate the performers above the
crowd in any way. The bands do not just play for the people; they play among
the people at street level and actively invite them to join the fun. At HONK!
there is a feeling that no one is in charge and that anything can happen. And
it usually does!3
The first HONK! Festival in 2006 featured a dozen bands with names
like The Rude Mechanical Orchestra (Brooklyn), Environmental Encroach-
ment (Chicago), and The Brass Liberation Orchestra (San Francisco)— clearly not your parents’ marching bands. It turns out that there had
C 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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“HONK! Pedagogy” 281
been a growing movement of such bands for some time. Bands like The
San Francisco Mime Troupe Gorilla Band, The Seed and Feed Marching
Abominable from Atlanta, and the Bread and Puppet Circus Band fromGlover, Vermont—bands that would be called HONK! bands today—had
been plying their craft in the streets since the 1960s and 1970s. And dozens
of others have formed since. The 2006 HONK! Festival simply codified this
resurgence, gave it a name for the new millennium, and provided its main
point of convergence in the United States.
The name HONK! (all caps with an exclamation point) resonated
immediately and has begun appearing in the press as a generic term for
community-based, socially engaged marching bands. Meanwhile the festival
has spread to other cities like Providence, Brooklyn, New York, Seattle, and Austin (in fact, as I’m delivering this paper, my own band is playing at
the HONK! Festival in Austin). The movement is further supported by an
active Yahoo Group called StreetBand and a fledgling online journal called
Harmonic Dissidents.
Demographically, the movement is predominantly, though not
exclusively, white, with considerable diversity along the lines of gender,
sexuality, and to some extent, age. Musicians come to HONK! from DIY
punk outfits, sophisticated jazz ensembles, and everything in between.
Repertoire ranges from Balkan, Romany, and Klezmer musics to punk,
reggae, samba, and the New Orleans second line tradition, played with all
the passion and spirit of Mardi Gras and Carnaval.
Although the term “activist” can be controversial in describing
HONK! bands, most are civically engaged in some way, if not in outright
political protest than at least in some form of community-building activity.
Because of their commitment to playing in the street, HONK! bands
exemplify a forceful political statement about reclaiming public space in
a time of profound privatization. Because of their mobility, HONK! bandscan boldly go where no bands have gone before.4
As some bands have become more involved in the educational aspects
of music making, HONK! practices have begun to yield an interesting and
innovative body of knowledge about how bands can be formed and led, how
new members can be incorporated and nurtured, and how musical repertoire
can be developed, learned, and disseminated. These are the practices that
comprise what I call HONK! pedagogy.
In many ways this resurgence of brass bands represents a new
incarnation of a time-honored tradition of marching brass bands in towns and hamlets throughout the land. The deeper history of this phenomenon also
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282 Reebee Garofalo
incorporates the worldwide connections of brass and percussion militarism,
imperialism, and religious conversion. For the purposes of this paper, suffice
it to say that the use of brass and percussion in military operations dates back centuries, if not millennia. Christian missionaries also tended to understand
their role in military terms and often employed small-scale replicas of
military marching bands to help them achieve their spiritual ends. Indeed,
in the period leading up to the modern era, it is probably fair to say that the
first exposure to brass band music for most people in the world was by an
invading colonial army or an evangelizing Christian mission. But there is
also a flip side to this coin.
As empires crumbled, civilian bands acquired military brass
instruments and adapted their use to local popular musics, creating newcultural forms that served quite different ends. To give but one example:
Imagine how differently the New Orleans Second Line tradition might have
developed were it not for the glut of military brass instruments dumped on the
black market by troops returning from the Caribbean theater of the Spanish-
American War. Within a few years every neighborhood in the Crescent City
had a brass band. The results: Inclusionary cultural practices, unconventional
playing styles, learning by rote, an emphasis on improvisation, a tolerance
for mistakes, and an unrestrained spirit of expression. All elements of what
I would include as part of HONK! Pedagogy.
At the heart of HONK! practice is the principle of inclusion—the
notion that anyone can be a musician. Asked how one joins The Bread and
Puppet Circus Band, Ron Kelley, who has played the role of recurrent music
director for decades, and who teaches music at Leland and Gray School in
Vermont, responds simply: “You show up.” When asked whether any level
of proficiency is required, he answers: “No.” 5 Titubanda, a celebrated street
band from Rome that has been around for years and that numbers about
35 players, claims never to have turned away anyone who wanted to jointhe band. At the 2009 HONK! Festival, one of its members explained, “If a
person comes to us who can only play one note, we will assign him that one
note. And at the point where he learns a second note we will assign him two
notes.” Interestingly, both bands—and many others like them—routinely
deliver energetic performances with elaborate arrangements.6
But how can this work? How can rudimentary players contribute
meaningfully to sophisticated sounds? Marcus Santos, a master samba
drummer from Bahia who now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, offers
some insight: “The great thing about Brazilian drumming is that there aresimple parts that are as important as the more intricate ones . . . . [T]he
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person will know that ‘I can stay here playing quarter notes. . . . and they
need me,’ or it can give them a reason to maybe study more and change
instruments.”7
Even in instances where HONK! bands perform their own original
compositions, this kind of inclusion is a sensibility that permeates the
movement. Referring to original Hungry March Band tunes such as
“Monserrat Serrat” and “Bumper to Bumper”—both high energy crowd-
pleasers—philosopher/composer/trombonist and longstanding member of
the band Sebastian Isler argues that the goal is “not to bring a song down to
the lowest common denominator . . . . It’s a matter of writing a composition
that is stimulating for the beginner, stimulating for the so-called expert and
open enough for everybody to be able to participate. . .
. It takes a lot towrite something like that.”8
For most HONK! bands, playing with feeling is of paramount
importance. This predisposition raises questions about the place of sheet
music in HONK! Many HONK! bands use some form of written notation to
learn music. Others learn by rote—that is, playing “by ear.” But you almost
never see HONK! bands parading around with sheet music in performance.
Implicit in this practice is the notion that musicians can and should bring
their own experiences to a performance and that music as performed does
not always sound like music as notated. These deviations from the way music
is written on a page—notes that are flatted slightly for effect or rhythms that
are played just before or just after the beat—are what Charlie Keil long
ago called “participatory discrepancies.” Concluded Keil: “Music, to be
personally involving and socially valuable” must be “out of time” and “out
of tune.”9
For many HONK! bands the key to achieving this unorthodox,
anything-goes sound is improvisation. This can be seen in impromptu solos
or in what Ron Kelley calls “on the spot arranging.”
10
As elaborated byGregg Moore, who spent years working with traditional village bands in
Portugal and fanfare bands in the Netherlands, and who used to lead Northern
California’s Bandemonium workshops, improvising opens up a world of
new sonic possibilities “by constantly considering performance alternatives
rather than a dogmatic insistence on realizing what’s on the paper. Tempos,
articulations, and dynamics can be changed, backgrounds behind improvised
solos can be changed, alternative improvisational ideas can be suggested, and
all this can be communicated with comic references and a feeling of play.”11
Moore’s comment points to another deeply held principle of HONK!: thatlearning and performing music should be fun.
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284 Reebee Garofalo
Given this emphasis on the joy of music making, we are again
confronted by questions about the place of written notation in music
education. One of the challenges posed by notation-centric music education,according to Ron Kelley, is that “it’s usually based on learning to read at
the same time that you learn to play the instrument.”12 These are clearly not
the same things. The danger of stressing written notation before learning
to play is that “the notes written on the page mean fingerings rather than
sounds. So students are completely tied to the (written) music in order to
push down the right valves.” What can get lost in this process, says Kelley, is
the fact that “they’re trying to play music, not just trying to do some activity
correctly.”13 So at one point Kelley gave his students a recording of Hungry
March’s “Bumper to Bumper” and told them to learn it by rote.14
In the end the question of reading notated music is not an “if”
question, but rather a “when” and “how” question. “I think there’s a lot
of validity, right from kindergarten, to being very musically literate, and
I push this with my staff,” says Rick Saunders, music director for the
Somerville, Massachusetts school system, and HONK! musician in his
spare time. “Music literacy is huge, but the way it’s done is different . . . .
Learning music in a non-traditional way, does not exclude reading or writing
traditional western style notation. It’s just a way to get kids to be playing
first.”15
Needless to say, Kelley and Saunders’s pedagogies represent very
different conceptions of band class than are found in most organized,
institutionalized settings, where stressful auditions, rigorous sight reading
requirements, and an intense focus on western musical notation can serve
as obstacles for many would be participants.
Over the years, there have been a number of non-traditional programs
that have tried to utilize the experiential aspects of music making as the basis
for learning. More than 50 years ago, Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki began to apply the basic principles of language acquisition to learning music.
In the Suzuki method students learn to play instruments before learning to
read music. In el Sistema, the Venezuelan network of free, neighborhood-
based music programs that has taken the international concert world by
storm, “Early instruction includes singing and playing with the student’s
instrument, often focusing on a single note within a group song; this helps to
develop a sense of quality sound. Learning how to use full standard notation
often takes many years and is incorporated into their learning organically.”16
More recently there has been an attempt to incorporate the informal processes involved in learning popular musics directly into a national
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“HONK! Pedagogy” 285
school-based curriculum in England. Musical Futures involved more than
1500 students in 21 schools and mandated practices such as “using only
musics that the students selected for themselves; learning by ear; and self-directed and peer-directed learning.”17 Significantly the program prohibited
formal instruction by the teachers. In comparison to what the students called
“normal” lessons, preference for this approach ran from 90 to 97 percent,
and “the word ‘fun’ cropped up in 25 of the 40 group interviews.”18
Clearly, what I have termed “HONK! pedagogy” has something to
bring to the music education table. If traditional music education builds
ensembles to create art, “HONK! Pedagogy” uses art to build community.
These are not necessarily mutually exclusive goals. But if I had to pick one,
I’d choose the latter.
Notes
1. See http://honkfest.org/.
2. See http://slsaps.org/.
3. Check out a great video of Honkfest at http://honkfest.org/about/#video.
4. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = -79pX1IOqPU for a video of
the Brass Liberation Orchestra fighting for workers’ rights at the St. Francis Hotelin San Francisco.
5. Kelly, R. (2010), Interview by author, 13 July.
6. This can be seen in a video of Titubanda performing at the HONK!
Festival in 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= −8D3zYrexZI.
7. Santos, M. (2010), Interview by author, 8 June.
8. Isler, S. (2010), Interview by author, 16 June. See a video of “Bumper
to Bumper” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = -8D3zYrexZI.9. Keil, C. (1987), ‘Participatory discrepancies and the power of music’,
Cultural Anthropology, 2: 3, August, p. 275.
10. Kelly, R. (2010).
11. Moore, G. (2010).
12. Kelly, R. (2010).
13. Ibid.
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14. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5ijZ08BY8c for what they
came up with.
15. Saunders, R. (2010), Interview by author, 23 June.
16. El Sistema-USA (2009), http://elsistemausa.org/el-sistema/venezuela/.
Accessed 5 January 2011.
17. Green, L. (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New
Classroom Pedagogy, London: Ashgate.
18. Ibid.