The Aesthetic Pedagogies of Underground Music: G.L.O.S.S., Sarah Hennies, and Realizing Freirean Codifications Within DIY

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Play(ing) With Media: Cultural Artifacts, Aesthetic Pedagogies, and Multimodal Assessment

Abstract

Scholars of do-it-yourself (DIY) music traditions have long considered the intersection between formal education and DIY culture (see Miklitsch, 1994; Schwartz, 2015; Torrez, 2012). However, extant literature has rarely considered the pedagogical experiences within DIY music communities themselves. In response to this oversight, I explore video recordings of performances from two highly contrasting DIY musicians: hardcore band G.L.O.S.S. and experimental percussionist Sarah Hennies. By comparing the aesthetics enacted by these artists to the work of Freire (1970, 1973), contrasting epistemological assumptions behind these differing genres emerge. These assumptions produce a divergent set of aesthetic pedagogies, as G.L.O.S.S. reinscribes the banking model of education within their performance while Hennies utilizes codifications to engender forms of communal knowledge construction.

Author

• Peter Jacob Woods, Massachusetts Institute of Technology