“I have had some wonderful feedback about how mind-blowingly good your course was.”
I’m a Lecturer in Music Education at the Royal College of Music and Trinity-Laban Conservatoire and I was Head of Higher Education and Research at Sage Gateshead from 2010-19.
My research focuses on group singing, music health and wellbeing, musician training and Community Music, as well as pioneering the use of ‘distributed ethnography’ as a method for research into cultural phenomena.
My philosophy suggests that:
music is about the performance of ‘relationships’ as much as it is the performance of ‘works’, and that the implicit tensions within these contrasting perspectives can be resolved through a foregrounding of their ‘paramusical’ benefits and effects.
Music making is also about the ‘performance’ of ethical (post-)Humanist values - love, reciprocity and democratic equality - which are the foundations of a more equitable and sustainable society, making it a potent form of ‘civic imagination’
“A brilliant lecture by a superb academic and practitioner! ”
Bear with me… I haven’t updated these pages for a while so am in the process of doing so. Life and work has got in the way of keeping everything up-to-date, but normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. I need an assistant…
On this website, you can find:
Current Research
Current projects, new ideas, projects in development, including Fellowship of Hill and Wind and Sunshine, Making Sense of Group Singing, and SINGS-VR...
Publications
Journal articles, book chapters, reports and other publications I've authored or co-authored...
Presentations
A series of Prezis to accompany lectures, speeches and presentations.
Here’s a Padlet summary of my published outputs - I’m still updating it, but it will eventually have hyperlinks to everything///
“Your talk, while brief, gave me one of those lightbulb moments of clarity and purpose in my path. Aha - this is the reason I’m compelled to write and play music! Finally it all made sense. You explained in 10 minutes the actual missing link between music and a better future than I’ve been searching for, seemingly my whole life. That’s the sign of a bloody great teacher isn’t it.”
You can also follow my research on: