Raina Murnak, studio director of contemporary voice at the Frost School of Music, has been elected vice-president of the Association for Popular Music Education (APME). The group, with 572 members across the United States and internationally, researches and advocates for teaching popular music to students of all ages with the same rigor, quality, and respect given to classical and jazz music education.
"As an educator, I want everybody's voices included, to bring recognition to all music," says Murnak, whose studio, part of the M.A.D.E. program, has 120 students. "I want popular music to have the same respect as other institutions."
Murnak, who is also the program director of the Masters of Arts in Popular Music Pedagogy at the Frost School, became active with APME in 2017. (The Frost School is a member organization.) Her new position automatically leads to her becoming president in July of 2025. She hopes to connect APME with music industry groups, as well as with similar, much larger advocacy organizations for classical and jazz music education. APME holds several conferences and publishes The Journal of Popular Music Education, which features scholarly articles, news and reviews, and shorter features.
"Part of my mission is to use [APME] as education for its own members by bringing in people from the industry," Murnak says. "I'm hoping to partner with the organizations in other fields so we can see what we are all doing."
In a sense, Murnak wants to lift the profile of teaching popular music in both the academic world and the larger world.
"On planet Earth, popular music is music," says Murnak. "But to look at school systems, you would never know that. I think opening a conversation about that is very important before we address it."
