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PDX Pop Now! Programs in Local Schools
PDX Pop Now! wants to bring local music to your school!
How would your relationship to your school and learning be different if some of the best bands, emcees, DJs, singer-songwriters and laptop wizards in Portland came to your school to play a concert for you and your classmates, and to speak with you and your teachers about music history, technology, education, songwriting, and changing your community through art?
PDX Pop Now! wants to help you find out! And to give you a hint, here’s how things looked at Parkrose Middle School on May 4, 2007 when The Shaky Hands, Syndel, Soul P and Alela Diane came by for the day to perform, teach and just talk. And that wasn’t all. Instructors from some of Portland’s best music education organizations – The Rock’n’Roll Camp for Girls, The Old Library Studio, Spun Academy and The School of Rock – were also in attendance to tell students about their programs and scholarships, as well as to let them rock out on guitars, keyboards, drums and basses, and mix it up on turntables that had been brought in specially for the day.
PDX Pop Now! is planning 3 events like this one for 3 different Portland-area schools in 2008, so let us know if one of them should be yours.
As a key component of our mission to expand participation in the vibrant music community of Portland, OR, PDX Pop Now! strives to reach out to our area’s young people as collaborators and supporters. In spite of the fact that the most engaging, influential and fecund regional communities in the history of modern music have been driven primarily by the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of people under 21, this demographic often gets left out of our local creative culture because of a lack of viable all-ages venues and the overly aggressive, homogenized mainstream music apparatus of major labels and commercial concerns.
We believe that young people who are active in their local music community, as musicians, organizers or fans, are fundamentally more engaged citizens, better prepared to advocate for themselves and the issues they believe in, inspired by the empowering do-it-yourself ethos of independent music. Where better to introduce Portland’s young people and adult musicians to each other than directly in schools, where they can draw connections between what students are learning in their classes and the inherently exciting culture of popular music? Who better to encourage students’ interest in the arts than local musicians who create in styles students are already interested in?
For more press on the Parkrose event, here are articles and photos from:
Local Cut (Willamette Week)
The Portland Mercury
and CMJ
Email us if you have any ideas or suggestions about PDX Pop Now!’s school-based programs, or would like to set up an event in your school.
