Emily Langerholc
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.
Find Emily:
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Posts by John Doe
The Essential Work of the Arts: A Productive Response for Teachers
This post is a response to the post "The Essential [...]
Musicast Episode 5: Young Band Directors Panel- Finding and Remembering Your “Why”
\A panel of high school band directors who have been teaching for 6 years or less come together to discuss the good, the bad, and the inspirational parts of being a band director. The discussion includes topics about leadership, COVID era teaching, and finding and remembering why they became music teachers. This episode will feed your soul! [...]
The Essential Work of the Arts
As a young educator, I was always tasked with the [...]
Musicast Episode 4: Kirsten C. Kunkle – Passionate Pioneering
Soprano Kirsten C. Kunkle has been hailed as an outstanding singing actress with a voice that has been described as beautiful, ethereal, powerful, fiery, and bewitching. he attended Bowling Green State University and the University of Salzburg for her undergraduate studies, majoring in voice performance with minors in Italian and German. Her graduate degrees are in voice performance from the University of Michigan. A voting member of the Muscogee Nation, Dr. Kunkle commissioned and premiered sixteen original compositions, including one of her own, based upon the poetry of her ancestor and highly-acclaimed poet of the Native American Muscogee Nation, Alex Posey. [...]
Research to Practice: Using Data for More than Just Grades
I used to think that research was complicated and couldn’t help me in my classroom. I used to see the Music Educators Journal arrive in my mailbox, flip through, sigh, think to myself – “If I only had time….,” and then add the issue to a growing pile on my dining room table. [...]
Musicast Episode 3: Lucky Chops – Streets & Stage: Funkifying Music Education
Lucky Chops has been unleashing high-energy brassy funk on the world since forming in NYC in 2006. The intensity of the band’s energy is fueled by their desire to share the healing and inspirational power of music with others. That power has resonated with audiences around the globe, giving the band hundreds of millions of views on their online videos and leading to live performances in more than twenty five countries. Lucky Chops maintains a busy schedule touring across several continents. [...]