The sound of water? Improvisation? AI? Oh my! The American Musicological Society’s 24th annual Teaching Music History Conference took place June 5-7 in New York City. The 2026 conference featured teaching demonstrations, a K-12 cohort discussion group, and lots of positive pedagogical dialogue from a diverse group of musicologists, performers, historians, librarians, and music educators. The AMS Pedagogy Study Group, chaired by Matteo Magarotto, hosted the event at the AMS offices at New York University (NYU), with forty-six in-person attendees. Matt Brounley and Grant Woods facilitated the technology for the twenty-two live-stream attendees and kept the schedule on track. The hybridity of the conference itself highlighted the themes of flexibility and inclusivity that pervaded much of the program.
This was the third year in a row K-12 music teachers were encouraged to attend via a generous grant. Participants were required to attend a round table where they networked, discussed ways in which the AMS could assist them in finding lesson plans, and problem-solved pedagogical issues. They were encouraged to use AMS’s “Music Means” website for lessons on American musical traditions. Several paper presentations featured K-12 teachers, including Michael Bennett and Kimberly Frederick of Concord Academy, an arts high school in Concord, MA, who created an interdisciplinary course studying American musicals. Students learned about local history through archival research, and their capstone project was creating a clever class musical based on Concord itself.
Central to both the K-12 cohort attendance and the conference itself was Kwame Coleman’s (NYU) keynote teaching demonstration “Teaching American Music in the K-12 Classroom.” This talk, funded by AMS’s Many Musics of America, addressed “existential questions for all music educators.” What is music? What is improvisation? What is jazz? Coleman wended his way through the history of Free Jazz, noting that the conference venue was located near the Five Spot, where Ornette Coleman debuted what would eventually be termed Free Jazz. He concluded his presentation with a handful of volunteers from the audience singing freely improvised work, accompanied by a pianist who was also improvising, for about one minute each. Coleman encouraged attendees to incorporate this fun activity in any music classroom, even if students have no prior improvisatory, singing, or piano-playing experience.
Multiple presentations focused on case studies. Two particularly noteworthy examples focused on using local resources for case studies, allowing students to experience the power of archival research close to school. Molly Doran shared her experiential learning unit, exploring the history of ensembles at Wartburg College through local archives. Likewise, Nancy Riley of Belmont University encouraged changing only one or two weeks of a course into a case study. In contrast, Erinn Knyt of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, spent all semester with J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The deep dive allowed students to kindle (or rekindle) a love for Bach while they explored the rich variety of recorded interpretations, as well as other selected repertoire.
Other presentations incorporated live performance and the study of recorded sound, encouraging students to examine music critically for themselves. With support from West Chester University, Hayoung Heidi-Lee was able to showcase student chamber ensembles in her music appreciation class. Students were highly engaged during interactions with their performing peers, and Lee’s students’ final assignment included creating promotional material for the performing groups as though they were an artist management company. Investigating the history of recorded sound as its own primary source lay at the foundation of Linyu Jolene Shao’s newly created course for music majors at Arizona State University. They investigated the Acoustic, Electrical, Magnetic, and Digital Eras of recorded sound, critically examining how these processes influence listening.
Many presenters acknowledged the quickly changing landscape of music education, and Kimary Fick focused on accessibility for all in her reworking of Oregon State’s music curriculum requirements. Eschewing the conservatory model that no longer acknowledges the experience of students nor their future career pathways, Fick and her colleagues created a four-year model that places global and popular music on an equal footing with the Western art music canon, arguing that this reshaping of coursework better meets the needs of all types of music students. For instance, they noted their music technology, education, and therapy majors were happy to see repertoire important to their areas included in academic music courses.
AI-powered gamification, as well as Music and AI courses, also inspired lively discussion at the conference. Crystal Buck of Washburn University encouraged using Gimkit and Wayground to address the issue of shortened attention spans. J. Drew Stephen of the University of Texas, San Antonio, provided a week of carefully cultivated AI prompts to investigate historical musicology arguments such as absolute vs. program music. Students had to evaluate the AI content using scholarly sources as well as other AI models for comparison to give them the tools employers feel are necessary to be AI literate. Finally, Jessica Grimmer of the University of Maryland flexed her digital humanities skills in designing a course for both undergraduate and graduate students that had different music and AI topics each week. Grimmer argued that encouraging students to engage in processes and imagined futures rather than focusing on memorization and assessment aligns with an AI-powered instructional environment. Of the topics, the most striking was the speculative futures section, where students attended a lecture from a disability studies professor and then created materials that would enable the environments of disabled performers or composers (e.g. gloves that helped piano players with hand tremors).
In contrast to the excitement over AI, one of the most moving papers centered on using water, its sound and influence on music, as a course. Eco-musicologist Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University, Acoustic Ecology Lab) offered a series of units on the variety of sounds water produces. Students studied the sounds of water itself, from drinking and digestive uses to lakes, rivers, waterfalls, and oceans. Each class involved improvising replication of these sounds, and these activities were paired with listening to both major canonical works about water and newer compositions that incorporate environmental sounds. This encounter with water and its music expanded the repertoire of music education students and performance majors and also impacted their thinking about the fragility of water access, under threat from plastic use, data centers, and other climate issues.
Overall, attendees of the conference came away with many fresh ideas to incorporate in their music classrooms, regardless of level. Diving into local archives, embracing AI (or not), finding ways to gamify the classroom, and encouraging every student to improvise, all provide avenues for music teachers to meet students where they are, improve accessibility, and engage with new technologies and pedagogies to prepare students to make a difference in their future lives and communities. With these tools, attendees accessed many new ways to infuse their students with the excitement they share for all types of music-making.
