The World Percussion Group (WPG)

The World Percussion Group (WPG) is an ensemble devised and developed by Jason Huxtable & Timothy Palmer (Maraca2 Percussion Duo) to address the professional development needs of young professional percussionists around the world. Research process: The WPG’s first tour took place in 2016 and the ensemble has, over the course of four previous incarnations, provided opportunities for 45 young performers from 18 different countries, engaging percussion students, staff and audiences at 27 leading Higher Education Institutions. In addition to the direct contact with percussive communities, the WPG social media video output has achieved over one million views through partnership with industry sponsors and media broadcasters. Within this research an Impact Case Study is conducted with the intention of assessing the impact the WPG has made and the extent to which the original ‘Rationale’ for the project has been achieved. A Thematic Analysis of previous member’s Survey response provides the qualitative data, developing identity of themes which are then positioned within a ‘Thematic Map’ image. Research insights: Thematic Analysis of survey data reveals that the WPG is a significant and prestigious project which provides tour members an opportunity to develop professionally and personally through a challenging, reallife tour experience. Outcomes of the project relate to both the individual members and the percussion community more broadly with the benefits of ‘Cultural Sharing’ straddling these two domains. The success of previous projects has fed back into the ‘Prestige’ of the group, creating a positive feedback loop for future participants. This research shows that the WPG project is not only beneficial to individual members but to the Percussion Community more widely. Dissemination: Media outputs produced by the WPG have been viewed over 1,000,000 times

Pop-out and pop-in: Visual working memory advantages for unique items

Attentional control is thought to play a critical role in determining the amount of information that can be stored and retrieved from visual working memory (VWM). We tested whether and how task-irrelevant feature-based salience, known to affect the control of visual attention, affects VWM performance. Our results show that features of a task-irrelevant color singleton are more likely to be recalled from VWM than non-singleton items and that this increased memorability comes at a cost to the other items in the display. Furthermore, the singleton effect in VWM was negatively correlated with an individual’s baseline VWM capacity. Taken together, these results suggest that individual differences in VWM storage capacity may be partially attributable to the ability to ignore differences in task-irrelevant physical salience

Revisiting Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual: A Roundtable for Perspectives on Academic Activism

In this roundtable discussion, we revisit Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993) as a departure for examining how and where academic activism can take place. This is situated both within and apart from existing public struggles, including #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) and other current movements. Academic activism will be explored as an intellectual project that may at times problematise notions of the public, the intellectual, and the activist. We will examine how academic activism contributes to activist projects, while also interrogating how “public” representational claims are made. This includes important questions: who is responsible for publics that are not yet constituted as such? What voices are not yet heard, seen, or understood? And what is the role of academic activists in relation to these? This in turn raises ethical questions of how to represent and be accountable to the disadvantaged and/or subaltern. In addressing these issues, the roundtable will explore activism both inside and outside the classroom, offering various figurations of academic activism. The discussion will draw on the participants’ experiences of university teaching and popular education within local contexts, as members of staff at Birmingham City University in the UK

Pragmatic White Allyship for Higher Education Popular Music Academics

The world watched the killing of George Floyd from a position of covid induced captivation. The succeeding global protests and Black Lives Matter movement justly prompted us all to consider our own complicity with the modes of systemic racism which have normalised anti-Black thought and action. The Wonkhe@Home: Black Lives Matter event (July 2020) sought to share pragmatic advice for ‘taking action to tackle racism across HE’, aware of the responsibility for the Higher Education sector to acknowledge its own role in consecrating racist forms of knowledge. This ‘statement’ translates session outcomes for Popular Music Educators (PME), provoking the ethical imperative to reflect upon individual situational praxis’ towards White Allyship action. Through consideration of PME’s typical fields of agency, suggestions are made towards development of anti-racist learning cultures within Popular Music Higher Education

Dictionary of percussive coordination

The output is an artefact, ‘Dictionary of Percussive Coordination’, comprising rhythmic notation. Research process: The point of departure for this research was a philosophical investigation upon the nature of, essentially, what percussion playing is and how percussionists conceptualise their activity. This enquiry led to a conception of percussion-playing as the activation of a potentially finite set of interactions across two limbs which interact with time and space. The research seeks to catalogue all the possible interactions, or kinetic ‘letters’, two limbs can encounter within specified parameters: • Occur within one Crotchet (1/4 note) beat. • Use either triplet quaver (1/8th note) or semiquaver (1/16th note) subdivisions. • Use two dynamic positions: pronounced, unpronounced. The systematic integration of these motion coordinations provide artist percussionists with all the possible units of coordination within these specified parameters. Research insight: Drumming is ‘Dance’; an artistic interaction within time and space curating a set of motions which interact with a range of surfaces for the purpose of sound production and emotional communication. Codifying these motions within a single text contributes to our discipline through an alternative conception of what the percussive ‘rudiments’ essentially are and how they can be expressed. Freedom of motion and artistic expression develops as kinetic language is identified, internalised and activated. We ‘speak’ what is possible to speak. Our aim is to speak with freedom, clarity and eloquence. This aim of this text is to develop motion coordination vocabulary and eloquence of activation. Dissemination: This artefact is used as a teaching resource and disseminated amongst Leeds Arts University students

Music as a language: ‘Developing a rhythmic pedagogy’ & ‘rhythm and language: ‘spaces in time’ as phonology’

Research process: The notion that Music functions as a ‘Language’ is often stated but without clear comparison or application. This body of research seeks to make more explicit links between language and music, identifying intersections across the ontological objects of Language, Space, Rhythm and Time, considering how linguistic theory and modes of language acquisition could apply to rhythmic skill development and pedagogy. The point of departure is through an initial investigation as to whether Music is a Language, and by which definition. Drawing upon Mills and McPherson (2006), a critical comparison of current modes of language/musical skill acquisition is drawn, problem posing the potential for a review of modes of rhythmic pedagogy. Cantwell and Millard’s (1994) hierarchies of music/linguistic structures are used to justify the representation of Grebb’s (2013) ‘Rhythmic Alphabet’ as basic rhythmic units or ‘Rhythmic Phonemes’, organised in multiple ways, representing infinite rhythmic potential. These ‘Rhythmic Phonemes’ are used as building blocks for modes of perception, able to organise and communicate ‘Rhythm’ with respect for its ‘Space’ and ‘Time’ components. Pedagogy is, finally, informed by findings, disseminating at Music Education and Musical Language conference events. Research insights: Explorations of the links between language and rhythm can help develop an understanding of rhythm as ‘phonological constructions of ‘phonetic’ units, deployed across space and time as communicative action’. This understanding develops our ability, as musicians and educators, to perceive, organise and explain rhythmic material, impacting upon communications within performance and pedagogy disciplines. Dissemination: The work was disseminated at: ‘Developing a ‘Linguistic’ Rhythmic Pedagogy’, York Music Education Conference: Connections and Communications in Instrumental and Vocal Teaching, 26-27 June 2018. ‘Pedagogy of Rhythmic Language’, Music Education Solutions – Curriculum Music Conference, Walsall, 21 March 2019. ‘Rhythm and Language: ‘Spaces in Time’ as Phonology’, University of Birmingham, 14th May 2019

Music Theory in Higher Education: The Language of Exclusion?

This study analyses the entry requirements for undergraduate higher education music courses. This shows how high-level music theory skills and instrumental grade attainment relating to theoretical understanding of score notation can be a barrier to music higher education. It is argued that modes of institutional capital relating to theoretical music skills represent an exclusive and excluding form of implicit discrimination. This leads to unrepresentative populations within HE music programmes and onwards into the music profession. Through an ontological justification of Western art music, and the corresponding ‘grammar’ of music theory, as a language, the nature of exclusivity implied by these entry requirements is identified. It is proposed that music theory requirements result in severe marginalisation of aspirant young musicians who do not ‘speak’ the ‘correct’ language, as defined by institutional and professional gatekeepers. The socio-economic culture of music education becomes fixed in elitism through this narrowing of the ‘language of access’. The intersectionality between race and class exists to compound the elitism of modes of musical language, further ensuring ‘what music is’ is decided by unrepresentative groups. Suggestions are proposed of what music departments can do to widen access and participation, moving towards a broader definition of musical literacy and the theoretical tools applied to a more diverse range of musical objects

‘Performance’ Measures as Neoliberal Industrialisation of Higher Education: A Policy Archaeology of the Teaching Excellence Framework and Implication for the Marginalisation of Music Education

Instrumental measures pledging to assess the ‘quality’ of education represent the latest turn in the unabating neoliberalisation of the UK education sector. As the proliferation of league tables, accountancy measures and ‘common-sense’ rhetoric around ‘value for money’ become normalised, the education sector continues to transform into a site of battle; a hierarchical competition of economic Darwinism. Higher education has not been immune to this seemingly irresistible cultural hegemony, embracing its own system of valuation, validation and competition through adoption of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Conducting a Policy Archaeology (Scheurich, 1994), I seek to show that the TEF embeds a neoliberal governmentality, aimed at entrenching marketisation and industrialisation at the expense of teaching excellence. Through exploration of the policy’s inception, the TEF can be viewed as an apparatus of industrialisation and represents one within a consort of educational policies which seek to devalue music education

Practise as praxis: A Freirian approach to instrumental practice within the conservatoire

Research process: Taking a Freirian theoretical perspective, Huxtable explores the potential for individual practise, within the Conservatoire, to be an emancipatory act. The nature of oppressive ideologies at play within these institutions will be first identified, providing examples as to how they manifest within student attitudes and student/teacher relationships. The research process involved analysis of a number of secondary source materials using Critical Pedagogic theoretical tools.Research insights: Through the application of Critical Pedagogy tenets of ‘Praxis’, a model for Praxis/Practise has been introduced, ‘problem-posing’ the many relationships found between the student, teacher, institution and society leading to suggestions as to how practise methods could liberate students, teachers and the Conservatoire. This research output builds upon existing scholarship around application of Critical Pedagogy within Music Education through application to Higher Education contexts, particularly that of elite Conservatoires. The ‘Problem-Posing’ theoretical model provides a tool for educators to uncover previously hidden attitudes, beliefs and biases within students as a means of transforming current realities and contemporary ‘common sense’ epistemologies.Dissemination: Findings of this research where disseminated at the MayDay Group Colloquium, feeding into an institutional research event (Research Tuesday at Leeds Arts University)

‘Threshold: for Solo Timpani, Two Percussion and Orchestra’

‘Threshold’ was a commissioning project between Joseph Pereira (Composer and Principal Timpanist: Los Angeles Philharmonic), Maraca2 Percussion Duo (Timothy Palmer, Jason Huxtable), the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and Gustavo Dudamel (Music & Artistic Director, Los Angeles Philharmonic) with generous support from Marcia and Gary Hollander. Research process: The piece received its World Premiere on January 25th 2018 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (Cond. Gustavo Dudamel) with subsequent performances on January 26th, January 27th (The Granada Theatre, Santa Barbara) and January 28th. ‘Threshold’ received its Asian Premiere on 3rd May 2019 at the Esplanade Concert Hall with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (Cond. Pascal Rophé). Research insights: ‘Threshold’ contributes to the Percussive/Orchestral repertoire in a number of ways. Percussive Forces: Threshold is unique as a concerto for Timpani and Percussion Duo, providing new programming opportunities for percussionists and orchestras. Spatialization: The composition explores techniques of spatialization through evolving/transitioning staging. ‘Where’ the sound is produced takes new primacy as a compositional device. Extended Techniques and Instrumentation: The composition extends instrumental possibilities through reimagination of found sounds (e.g. pitched ceramic tiles) and instrumental fusions (e.g. gongs on timpani, sleigh bells inside temple bowl). A consistent and thorough use of extended techniques applied to all the instruments of the Orchestra contribute to a ‘new’ sound world and textural/timbral combinations. Dissemination: The work was disseminated via a number of performances