Abstract:
Popular music is an increasingly common tool for music education, with a fresh
enthusiasm for the pedagogical potential of this vast new repertoire. The goal of this dissertation
is to provide extensive notated examples from popular music that music theory instructors can
incorporate into their lesson plans when teaching tonal harmony. The phrase "popular music" in
this case is used broadly, referring mainly to commercially successful pop/rock songs from the
past seven decades, but also with occasional forays into film scores, video game soundtracks,
Christmas carols, musical theater, patriotic songs, even television jingles and nursery rhymes.
The target audience for this project are theory teachers who want to integrate popular music into
their classes but who are unfamiliar with the repertoire or are uncertain how to do so. This
collection provides that repertoire, organized into three chapters (fundamentals, diatonic
harmony, and chromatic harmony), along with suggestions of how to use each example to
maximize its educational benefit.
