honk pedagogy & music education

8/10/2019 Honk Pedagogy & Music Education

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/honk-pedagogy-music-education 1/7

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.



“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



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




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.



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




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.



286 Reebee Garofalo

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.

honk pedagogy & music education

Documents