KPU students can help run the Wake Up! social justice music festival next semester

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Next semester, a new focus for the special topics course in Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s music department will be offered to students to help organize and run the institution’s second annual in-house music festival, “Wake Up!”

“MUSI 3500: Special Topics,” taught by KPU music instructor Gordon Cobb, will plan the 2024 Wake Up! social justice music festival with classes scheduled every Wednesday from 4:00 to 6:50 pm at the Surrey campus. All KPU students, regardless of their area of study, are able to register for the course.

“We’re really hoping that [the course] could be this creative utopia, where we get journalism, fine arts, business, and design students to all come and take this class where we throw a party together, and the party is social justice music, and we learn from each other,” Cobb says. 

The music festival took place for the first time in February and celebrated the voices of local BIPOC and queer artists, an initiative Cobb and Shelley Boyd, dean of the faculty of arts, came up with after looking for ways to rebrand the music department. 

“I’m very proud of what happened [at the festival]. We brought Quanah Style to KPU who is a two-spirit, trans drag queen from Vancouver … along with a lineup that was completely BIPOC. The majority of the performers were also women,” Cobb says. 

“The show was great, the performers were awesome … and so this year, we wanted to do it again.” 

After learning about the logistics of running a music festival by creating one himself, Cobb says he and Boyd decided to turn this process into a course so students can learn new skills and gain new perspectives from this hands-on experience.  

“The potential for a course like this, that is truly interdisciplinary, that builds bridges between all the different departments, could create magic amongst the students and community,” he says. 

MUSI 3500 is typically a lecture-focused course that requires various prerequisites for enrollment. However, with the music festival taking over the course, Cobb says they’ve gotten rid of these prerequisites and students only need 18 credits to enroll, which is rare for a third year course. 

The course will follow five main categories. The first is live event planning which involves tickets, tables, permits, and catering. There’s also live event tech, which entails stage and equipment set up, in addition to stage managing, which will cover communications and contracts, and marketing and promotion, which will dive into website design, filming and photography, video editing, and branding. The last aspect of the course is hosting where students will write scripts to rehearse and work with Cobb to host the event. 

“It’s going to be a really rich, layered learning experience,” Boyd says.

“[The course] speaks to the heart of KPU [being] a polytechnic university, where experiential learning is very much part of our mission and vision. … This is a way for KPU and the music department to really connect with our local communities in some really important ways to let both our students and Surrey shine.”

Wake Up! 2024 is set to take place on March 13, meaning students in the special topics course will do pre-production for the festival up until that date, and continue their studies with post production work for the remainder of the semester. 

As a composer and sound designer, Cobb says the modern musician needs to be their own event planner, technician, stage manager, marketer, and post-production expert to support their careers, skills students will learn in the course. 

“This is my attempt to share my knowledge … with anybody at KPU who has a curiosity around [this], and then maybe they’ll come and take more music courses with us because all of our courses are designed for non-musicians,” he says. 

Cobb hopes to run MUSI 3500 as an event planning course for the music festival each year until KPU’s new music diploma is complete in which it will become its own course. Cobb and Boyd have been working to decolonize and revamp the music diploma so it’s more accessible, inclusive, and reflective of the modern music scene. They’re aiming to have it complete by fall 2025. 

“My vision for [MUSI 3500] is that students at KPU, who would never consider taking a music course, will actually come and work with us, and potentially be exposed to a world that will be exciting, engaging, and will leave an impact,” Cobb says. 

“I’m hoping that students will get a deeper understanding of what music is in our current era, but also create connections with people who they would otherwise have never met before. I also hope that they remember the party that we threw at KPU, in 2024, for the rest of their lives.” 

For more information about the course, connect with an academic advisor at advisorconnect@kpu.ca.