Popular Music History
Cohort 5
A six-week live program exploring the full arc of popular music — from African retentions to contemporary pop — through structured listening sessions, group discussion, and direct analysis with Dr. Smith.
History as a compositional
tool.
The Popular Music History email course gives you the framework. The cohort puts that framework into practice — six weeks of structured listening, genre analysis, and discussion that turns historical knowledge into compositional intelligence.
Format
Six structured weeks, one focused topic per week. Each week opens with lesson material delivered by email, followed by a group or individual work session. Coaching tier members join three live calls with Dr. Smith for direct feedback on their work.
Community
Every cohort member gets access to a private cohort Discord channel for the duration of the program — peer feedback, work-in-progress sharing, and direct communication with Dr. Smith between sessions.
What You Finish With
A completed piece of work — a finished track, composition, or catalog review depending on the cohort — plus a Certificate of Completion from composeproducemusic.com, suitable for professional development documentation.
What happens
each week.
Every week has a clear focus, a deliverable, and either a peer review or direct feedback from Dr. Smith. You always know exactly what you’re working on and why.
The Roots — Africa Through the Blues
Guided listening session on African retentions, Work Songs, Spirituals, Gospel, and the Blues. Group discussion on how each style’s rhythmic and harmonic DNA carried forward.
Jazz — From Dixieland to Fusion
Deep listening across the jazz arc. Analysis of how harmonic language evolved from New Orleans polyphony through Bebop to Fusion. Discussion of what each era borrowed and what it rejected.
Rock & Roll, Soul & the British Invasion
Comparative listening: R&B vs. Rock & Roll, Motown’s harmonic formula, Gospel’s influence on Soul delivery. Group analysis of structural similarities across the decade.
Funk, Disco & the 1980s
Rhythmic analysis of Funk and Disco. Discussion of Punk as cultural reaction and 1980s pop’s synthesis of electronic and organic production. Applied: what makes each genre identifiable in 5 seconds?
Hip Hop — Structure, Sampling & the Producer Era
Structural analysis of Hip Hop from the Bronx to streaming. Sampling as composition. Discussion of the Baraka thesis on commercialization. Applied: how to write authentically in the Hip Hop tradition.
Contemporary Pop & The Through-Line
Analysis of today’s genre-fluid landscape and its roots in everything covered in weeks 1–5. Final discussion: how do you apply this arc to your own compositional practice?
Two ways to
join the cohort.
Both tiers include the full six-week program and all recorded materials. The difference is the level of live access to Dr. Smith.
- All 6 weekly lesson modules delivered by email
- Private cohort Discord community access
- All course articles, diagrams, and reference materials
- Peer review sessions each week
- Permanent access to all recorded session materials
- Certificate of Completion
- Everything in the Core tier
- 3 live group calls with Dr. Smith during the 6 weeks
- Live call format: teaching + your work critique + Q&A
- Direct feedback on your work at each call
- All calls recorded and added to your permanent library
- Priority Discord access — Dr. Smith responds directly
- Certificate of Completion
Both tiers include:
Six weeks of direct access
to Dr. Smith.
Dr. Smith is a published ethnomusicologist and the author of Hip Hop as Performance and Ritual and Jazz as a Language — two works that form the academic backbone of this cohort. He has been teaching Popular Music History at the university level for over 30 years.
The Popular Music History cohort brings that scholarship into a live discussion format — six weeks of structured listening, analysis, and conversation that builds the genre intelligence composers and producers use every day.
Know where every style
came from.
Six weeks of guided listening, genre analysis, and discussion with a published ethnomusicologist. 25 spots.
