Emily Langerholc is a music educator who actively explores connections across a wide variety of music makers and musical traditions. She is currently in her 18th year of teaching music in public schools across Florida. She has taught middle school band, chorus, adaptive general music, and high school music history and currently teaches elementary general music. She is passionate about the inclusion of popular music at all levels of the academic music curriculum and is also a specialist in woodwind instruction.

She is currently a doctoral student at the Center for Music Education Research at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include popular music in K-12 settings, musical imagery in families, and technology’s influence on music preference. She holds prior degrees from the University of Central Florida and the Florida State University. Her interest in the overlap between academic music and popular music began in her undergraduate years, having written an Honors thesis about parallels between French composer Erik Satie and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. In her master’s degree program, she began compiling prominent examples of music theory concepts heard in popular songs.

In 2016, she started the Rebel Music Teacher blog to continue compiling songs for this project. She hopes to keep making connections between popular music and academic music through her writing and her teaching. Her work gained notoriety on social media, even getting an inadvertent shout-out during Lizzo’s Hot Ones interview in 2022. Guide to Teachable Features in Popular Music is her first book. When she is not teaching, writing, or practicing, she spends quality time with her family & friends or comfort-watches Gilmore Girls for the hundredth time.