Education, Music, and the Lives of Undergraduates: Collegiate A Cappella and the Pursuit of Happiness

About the Author
Roger Mantie is Programme Director of Music and Culture and Associate Professor at University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada, and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education (2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure (2016).
Brent C. Talbot is Professor and Head of the Department of Music at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. He researchers power, discourse, and issues of justice and equity in varied settings for music learning around the globe. He is editor of Marginalized Voices in Music Education (2018) and author of Gending Rare: Children's Songs and Games from Bali (2017).
The undergraduate years are a special time of life for many students. They are a time for study, yes, but also a time for making independent decisions over what to do beyond formal education. This book is based on a nine-year study of collegiate a cappella - a socio-musical practice that has exploded on college campuses since the 1990s. A defining feature of collegiate a cappella is that it is a student-run leisure activity undertaken by undergraduate students at institutions both large and small, prestigious and lower-status. With rare exceptions, participants are not music majors yet many participants interviewed had previous musical experience both in and out of school settings. Motivations for staying musically involved varied considerably - from those who felt they could not imagine life without a musical outlet to those who joined on a whim. Collegiate a cappella is about much more than singing cover songs. It sustains multiple forms of inequality through its audition practices and its performative enactment of gender and heteronormativity. This book sheds light on how undergraduates conceptualize vocation and avocation within the context of formal education, holding implications for educators at all levels.