HONK! Pedagogy: Lessons in Inclusive Music-Making From the Street-Band Movement

A new way of teaching music (hint: it’s called HONK! Pedagogy)

What happens when you match a grassroots brass-band festival with music-education philosophy? You get something called HONK! Pedagogy. That’s the focus of this article: the teaching-and-learning practices that have emerged from the alternative street-band movement centered on the HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands.

Full disclosure: I serve on the festival’s organizing committee and also play in the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, the ensemble that kicked off this annual event about seven years ago.

HONK! is the kind of festival you really have to experience firsthand. It’s an independent, grassroots, non-commercial, three-day gathering featuring more than two dozen wildly exuberant marching bands from around the world. This is nothing like your typical music festival. For one thing, it’s free. The only items for sale are CDs and T-shirts; there are no sponsors, corporate logos, or vendors. Around four hundred to five hundred band members—including musicians, dancers, jugglers, hoopers, fire breathers, flag twirlers, and stilt walkers—are housed and fed for free over those three days. In return, all performances are free and open to the public (except the closing-night all-band blowout, which costs about ten dollars for twenty bands, or, as we like to say, fifty cents per band).

Because large marching bands are loud, acoustic, and mobile, no electric amplification is needed. HONK! is an exceptionally green event: no setup time, no sound checks delaying the action, no technological barriers between artist and audience. Just continuous, unmediated music experienced up close in multiple performance zones. There are no stages either—nothing lifts performers above the crowd. Bands do not play for the people; they play among the people, at street level, and actively invite everyone to join the fun. At HONK! you get the sense that nobody is in charge and anything can happen. And it usually does.

The first HONK! Festival in 2006 featured a dozen bands with names such as The Rude Mechanical Orchestra (Brooklyn), Environmental Encroachment (Chicago), and The Brass Liberation Orchestra (San Francisco)—clearly not your parents’ marching bands. It turns out a growing movement of such bands had been building for decades. Groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe Gorilla Band, the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable from Atlanta, and the Bread and Puppet Circus Band from Glover, Vermont—bands we’d now call HONK! bands—had been active in the streets since the 1960s and 1970s, and many more formed later. The 2006 HONK! Festival simply brought this resurgence together, gave it a name for the new millennium, and established its primary gathering point in the United States.

The name HONK! (always all caps with an exclamation point) caught on immediately and has increasingly been used in the press as a generic term for community-based, socially engaged marching bands. The festival has since spread to Providence, Brooklyn, New York, Seattle, and Austin (indeed, as I deliver this, my own band is performing at the HONK! Festival in Austin). An active Yahoo Group called StreetBand and a fledgling online journal named Harmonic Dissidents further support the movement.

Demographically, the movement is predominantly—though not exclusively—white, with considerable diversity in gender, sexuality, and, to some extent, age. Musicians come from DIY punk outfits, sophisticated jazz ensembles, and everything else in between. Repertoire ranges from Balkan, Romany, and Klezmer music to punk, reggae, samba, and the New Orleans second-line tradition, all played with the passion and spirit of Mardi Gras and Carnaval.

While the term “activist” can be controversial when applied to HONK! bands, most are civically engaged in some way—whether through outright political protest or community-building activities. Their commitment to playing in the streets makes a forceful political statement about reclaiming public space during an era of intense privatization. Their mobility allows them to boldly go where no bands have gone before.

As some bands have increasingly embraced the educational side of music-making, HONK! practices have generated an innovative body of knowledge about forming and leading bands, incorporating and nurturing new members, and developing, learning, and disseminating repertoire. These practices are what I call HONK! pedagogy.

In many ways, this resurgence of brass bands is a new incarnation of a time-honored tradition: marching brass bands in towns and hamlets throughout history. The deeper story here also includes worldwide connections between brass and percussion with militarism, imperialism, and religious conversion. For this article, suffice it to say that the use of brass and percussion in military operations dates back centuries, if not millennia. Christian missionaries often understood their role in military terms too, using small-scale replicas of military marching bands to achieve their spiritual aims. In fact, leading up to the modern era, most people's first exposure to brass-band music likely came from an invading colonial army or an evangelizing Christian mission. But there’s another side to this story.

As empires collapsed, civilian bands acquired military brass instruments and adapted them to local popular musics, creating new cultural forms that served very different purposes. Just one example: imagine how different the New Orleans second-line tradition might have been without the glut of military brass instruments dumped onto the black market by troops returning from the Caribbean theater of the Spanish-American War. Within a few years, every neighborhood in New Orleans had a brass band. The results: inclusive cultural practices, unconventional playing styles, rote learning, an emphasis on improvisation, tolerance for mistakes, and a free-spirited expression. These are all elements of what I include as part of HONK! Pedagogy.

At the core of HONK! practice lies the principle of inclusion—the idea that anyone can be a musician. When asked how a person joins the Bread and Puppet Circus Band, Ron Kelley, who has served as recurring music director for decades and teaches music at Leland and Gray School in Vermont, replies simply: “You show up.” When asked if any level of proficiency is required, his answer is: “No.”

Titubanda, a celebrated street band from Rome with about thirty-five players that has been around for years, claims never to have turned away anyone who wanted to join. During the 2009 HONK! Festival, a member explained: “If a person comes to us who can only play one note, we will assign him that one note. And at the point where he learns a second note we will assign him two notes.” Remarkably, both bands—and many like them—regularly deliver energetic performances of elaborate arrangements.

How can this possibly work? How can beginner players meaningfully contribute to sophisticated sounds? Marcus Santos, a master samba drummer from Bahia now living in Somerville, Massachusetts, offers insight: “The great thing about Brazilian drumming is that there are simple parts that are as important as the more intricate ones. [...] The person will know that ‘I can stay here playing quarter notes [...] and they need me,’ or it can give them a reason to maybe study more and change instruments.”

A powerful emphasis onplaying with feeling shapes most HONK! bands. This leads to questions about the role of sheet music. Many HONK! bands use some form of written notation for learning music; others learn by rote (playing by ear). But you almost never see HONK! bands parading around with sheet music during a performance. The implicit assumption is that musicians can and should bring their own experiences to a performance, and that music as performed does not always match music as notated. These deviations—notes flatted slightly for effect, rhythms played just before or after the beat—are what Charlie Keil long ago called “participatory discrepancies.” Keil concluded: “Music, to be personally involving and socially valuable” must be “out of time” and “out of tune.”

For many HONK! bands, improvisation is the key to achieving this unorthodox, anything-goes sound. It appears in impromptu solos and what Ron Kelley calls “on the spot arranging.” Gregg Moore, who spent years working with traditional village bands in Portugal and fanfare bands in the Netherlands and used to lead Northern California’s Bandemonium workshops, elaborates that improvising opens up a world of new sonic possibilities “by constantly considering performance alternatives rather than a dogmatic insistence on realizing what’s on the paper. Tempos, articulations, and dynamics can be changed, backgrounds behind improvised solos can be changed, alternative improvisational ideas can be suggested, and all this can be communicated with comic references and a feeling of play.” Moore’s remark points to another deeply held HONK! principle: learning and performing music should be fun.

Given this emphasis on joy in music-making, we again face questions about the place of written notation in music education. One challenge posed by notation-centric education, according to Ron Kelley, is that “it’s usually based on learning to read at the same time that you learn to play the instrument.” These are clearly not the same activity. The danger of stressing written notation before learning to play is that “the notes written on the page mean fingerings rather than sounds. So students are completely tied to the (written) music in order to push down the right valves.” What can get lost, Kelley says, is the understanding that “they’re trying to play music, not just trying to do some activity correctly.” At one point, Kelley gave his students a recording of Hungry March’s “Bumper to Bumper” and asked them to learn it by rote.

In the end, the question about reading notated music isn’t an “if” question—it’s a “when” and “how” question. “I think there’s a lot of validity, right from kindergarten, to being very musically literate, and I push this with my staff,” says Rick Saunders, music director for the Somerville, Massachusetts school system and a HONK! musician in his spare time. “Music literacy is huge, but the way it’s done is different. [...] Learning music in a non-traditional way does not exclude reading or writing traditional Western style notation. It’s just a way to get kids to be playing first.”

Needless to say, Kelley’s and Saunders’s pedagogies represent very different concepts of band class from what you find in most organized, institutionalized settings, where stressful auditions, rigorous sight-reading requirements, and intense focus on Western musical notation can become obstacles for many would-be participants.

Over the years, several non-traditional programs have attempted to use experiential aspects of music-making as the basis for learning. More than fifty years ago, Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki applied the basic principles of language acquisition to music education. In the Suzuki method, students learn to play instruments before learning to read music. In El Sistema, the Venezuelan network of free, neighborhood-based music programs that has taken the international concert world by storm, “early instruction includes singing and playing with the student’s instrument, often focusing on a single note within a group song; this helps to develop a sense of quality sound. Learning how to use full standard notation often takes many years and is incorporated into their learning organically.”

More recently, England tried incorporating the informal processes of learning popular music directly into a national school-based curriculum. The Musical Futures program involved more than 1,500 students across twenty-one schools and implemented practices such as “using only musics that the students selected for themselves; learning by ear; and self-directed and peer-directed learning.” Notably, the program prohibited formal instruction by teachers. Compared to what students called “normal” lessons, preference for the Musical Futures approach ranged from 90 to 97 percent, and “the word ‘fun’ cropped up in 25 of the 40 group interviews.”

Clearly, what I’ve termed “HONK! pedagogy” has something to offer the music-education conversation. If traditional music education builds ensembles to create art, HONK! pedagogy uses art to build community. These goals are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But if I had to choose, I’d pick the latter.