CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

2024-2025 National Resilience and wellbeing study

An extension of the 2023 Victorian pilot this funded study applies measurement techniques and findings gathered, exploring national and state-wide diversity and nuance in student well-being and flourishing through instrumental music participation. The first and most elaborate of its kind in Australian music education, the study throughout 2024 gathers data from Victorian, NSW, QLD, SA and WA secondary schools, their students and teachers in gaining insights into the promotors of wellbeing and resilience instigated through instrumental music learning.

2023- 2028 Inclusive pedagogies in music education: the Adaptive Bridging Program and MYO.

The Adaptive Music Bridging Program is open to students aged between 8 and 14 years, who have a disability, chronic illness, mental health condition or are Deaf or neurodiverse. It is suitable for both new learners who have struggled to access instrumental music education, and current players whose needs are not being met by standard instruments or teaching techniques. 

Students meet once a week, rehearsing at the same time and in the same buildings as other ensembles in the MYO community. Our team  works with students to assess their physical and musical skills and preferences to help them to choose and/or adapt an instrument that is suitable to their needs. Led by Dr Anthea Skinner, with Dr Leon de Bruin the engagement eam provides the foundations of instrumental music education, including music literacy, performance and ensemble skills to prepare them to audition for MYO ensembles or take part in other musical experiences depending on their interests.

Musical instruments used in this program fall into three main categories:

• Standard Instruments
• Standard Instruments with Adaptations
• Specialist Adaptive Instruments

Supported by an ARC fellowship grant this project will continue to be funded and expand into 2027 and beyond. For more information see:

MYO Adaptive Bridging Program

https://myo.org.au/programs/ensemble-program/adaptive-music-bridging-program/

2024-Music Education for People with Disability: Engaging with International Communities of Practice

This funded initiative supported by Creative Australia assists in the future visioning of the Adaptive Bridging program and its place in the music education and performance landscape. U\This funding allows for University of Melbourne scholars and the METAL Lab to engage in international collaborations, deliver workshops and expand the Adaptive Bridging program in Australia. it allows for:

Collaboration and activities with the Paris Paralympic orchestra and organization, Conservatoires and Hospitals in Southern France.

Deliver Professional development activities in inclusive music practices to professional and pre-service music teachers in Melbourne and throughout Australia.

Expand the Adaptive Bridging Program to an affiliate initiative in Brisbane in late 2024

2023-24 GUERRILLA MUSIC

This project provides a timely exploration of how we may begin to think about what music does uniquely as a mode of expression, and relate this more overtly to acts of resistance, defiance, and subversion. This project invigorates and advances music into wider scholarly debates about social power, colonization, and communication while simultaneously open up social semiotics concerning music and music communities. This project unveils powerful new ways of understanding human communication and the power of music, and what musicking means to people in the twenty-first century. 

This international project culminates in the first of a  Book series presented by Lexington (Bloomsbury) titled Guerrilla music. Look in our publications section for more details

2024-25 GUERRILLA MUSIC II- MUSIC, DISABILITY AND RESISTANCES 

Inclusion of musicians with disability remains a critical challenge for any music practitioners and educators who aim for an open, expansive, negotiated, and democratic space for all participants. For us, inclusion in musicking allows and legitimates confrontations and resistances to inequities, powerlessness, and discrimination. We pose the question, how do we as music practitioners and educators address authoritarianism, hegemony, and hierarchical strictures, and behaviours? We embrace the broad spectrum of how musicking may occur – across continua between institutions and the community, formal and informal practices, and different ways of being and doing. 

2024-25 SOCIAL JUSTICE AND MUSIC EDUCATION

There are common principles that underpin the concept of social justice: human rights, access, participation, accountability, non-discrimination and equity, empowerment and legality (Australian Human Rights Commission [AHRC], 2023). As with the conflation of social justice and fairness, social justice and human rights are frequently used synonymously in an almost symbiotic relationship – a just society is one in which the rights of all are protected. In this book authors are called to explore and respond to dimensions of the question, we as researchers investigate how music educators address authoritarianism, hegemony, and hierarchical social and educational practices, and the concomitant pedagogical approaches that constrain teachers and students and their shared musicking practices’. Expert voices use the notion of ‘othering’, an extension of the ‘global south’ in order to provide important perspectives, practices and experiences to social justice and music education. Insights gained from applying social justice principles to music education can contribute to ongoing discussions about teacher and student learning histories. The aim of capturing these critical evidence-based research discourses is to provide a platform for knowledge sharing and in turn the potential for them to create more democratic, equitable, inclusive, accessible and emancipatory practices in music education, reflecting the core values of social justice.

MUSIC IN SCHOOLS

OUR RESEARCH

_{National Music Study 2025-26; Instrumental Music, Wellbeing, and Resilience in Secondary Schools}

Powerful research asserts substantial correlational evidence of instrumental music positively impacting high-school cohorts’ numeracy, literacy, and critical thinking, and heightened general academic compared to non-music learners (Hallam & Rogers 2016; Guhn et al., 2020), but this study is novel in that it seeks to find the reasons why instrumental music participation in secondary schools provides such benefits.

Its findings support the UNESCO (2021) argument for a revisioning of how school approaches and music education can impact a whole child approach to learning and wellbeing, placing schools as important community assets. Our research findings in the area of resilience, wellbeing, and instrumental music education points to how this aspect of a schools’ culture offers unique benefits within education and promotes many of the ideals schools value and aspire to achieve.

There are factors that impact music educations’ ability to impact; employment of professional instrumental teachers; planned sustainability and growth; a ‘home’ designated area; and an ensemble program that enhances the benefits of students immersing with peers and other expert adults. Our work reinforces music teaching and learning as a unique aspect of primary and secondary education, from which all domains of teaching can benefit from its qualities, application, and benefits.

Instrumental music pedagogy

Extra-curricular activities involving instrumental music vary widely from State to State. Schools across Australia with a specialist music teacher on staff take on a variety of extra-curricular musical activities, including choir and band rehearsals in public primary schools, music camps, school musicals, school ensembles, annual school concerts and other official events. Music education is valuable and essential for all Australian school students. International and national research shows that music education uniquely contributes to the emotional, physical, social and cognitive growth of all students. Music in schools contributes to both instrumental and aesthetic learning outcomes; transmission of cultural heritage and values; and, students’ creativity, identity and capacity for self-expression and satisfaction.

Cognitive apprenticeship emphasizes the importance of the process in which a skilled teacher passes that skill to a learner. It is learning and teaching designed  among other things, to bring often hidden processes into the open, where students can observe, enact, and practice them with help from the teacher. Such teaching allows masters to model behaviors in a real-world context with cognitive modelling

Teaching music involves the ongoing cultivation of strategies, approaches from experience. It involves the transformative journey from musician to pedagogue. Through multifaceted experiences, we  become the kind of teacher we aspire to be, involving a  perpetual series of turns, each leading to new avenues of being and becoming.

Health and wellbeing

Resilience occurs when individual, social, and environmental factors promote a positive trajectory from risk pathology to the ability to overcome adversity. Research on resilience articulates challenge-based learning models that empower, innoculate and promote adaptive responses to challenges, whilst ameliorating exposure to risk. Music promotes resilient capacities in students associated with caring and supportive adult relationships that provide opportunities for meaningful student engagement and a powerful teacher- student learning dynamic.

Resilience and wellbeing connect to aspects of place and space.  Identity and belonging are pronounced social and emotional benefits that extend to social group interactions social emotional learning and the maintaining of positive goals. Schools provide protective social and environmental factors and promote resilience by providing an environment that buffers against adversity by including supportive peers, positive teacher influences and opportunities for success. Our research highlights how instrumental music education provides prolonged, unique, and sustained proximal learning encounters that promote these qualities (de Bruin, 2022).

Resilience and self-efficacy correlate with many asserted benefits from instrumental music, that include enjoyment, and benefits of extra-curricular activity. It points to the unique benefits direct, focused and explicit instruction situated in instrumental and vocal music learning. Significantly our research also reinforces how resilience can be built via caring and supportive adult relationships within Instrumental music departments.

Flourishing

Flourishing is one of the most important and promising topics studied in psychology. Not only does it relate to many other positive concepts, it holds the key to improving the quality of life for people. Discovering the pieces to the flourishing puzzle and learning how to effectively apply research findings to real life has tremendous implications for the way we live, love, and relate to one another. Flourishing is the product of the pursuit and engagement of anauthentic life that brings inner joy and happiness through meeting goals, being connected with life passions, and relishing in accomplishments through the peaks and valleys of life. Flourishing is not a trait or a characteristic; it’s not something that you “either have or don’t have.” Flourishing is not a static, immutable piece of who you are, it is a process that requires ongoing action. Anyone can flourish, but it will likely require some effort to get there, and at the very least, positive emotions play an important role

Victorian study 2023: Resilience and wellbeing pilot project

A total of 627 students across 5 schools participated in this study. Students were represented from Years 7 to 12, and they were asked a total of 50 questions: four demographic, and 46 relating to outcomes of music learning in school.

Students responded strongly or very strongly to senses of pride and accomplishment in the music department, the vast majority feeling part of a team, whilst being able to socialise with students who may be different reinforcing friendship cultivation in this facet of behaviour and socialisation, highlighting the vertical or cross age group organisation of learning activities such as bands, ensembles, choirs, and group music orientated events.

Aspects of perseverance and resilience were an area in which students provided strong response to. The evidence shows that students responded strongly or very strongly to feeling confident and supported, persevering to be the best they can be in their musical endeavours and being cared for by their music teachers. Students also provided strong positive affirmation of rules within the music department, and the shared understanding of operating within this environment as being conducive to promoting senses of safety.

Linear modelling provided insights into student perceptions across the six years of secondary school study.

What is evident is that Year 7s commencing instrumental music studies arrive with an enthusiasm, positivity and ‘joie de vivre’. The biggest trend is downward as they move into Year 8, picking up positively across the middle years of schooling. Senior schooling and the move to high stakes performance and testing appears to reduce the social captivation students feel toward the subject, but not their involvement in it. Social connectedness refers to coming to the music department, engaging in lessons and ensembles, but also engaging with peers and teachers beyond the classroom such as before/after school and in breaks.

There is less ’talk’ between students at Year 12, but more focus on working with expert teachers and concepts with adults. Music department belonging showed a general overall increase, with all year levels increasing, except from Years 7 to 8, when there is a decrease. There was also a significant bounce-back effect in the way of an increase from Year 8 to Year 9. There is also a general increase from Year 11 to Year 12, except for being included in activities. Year 11 cohorts also do not feel happier at school than usual compared to Year 10, and from one to two years of instruction there is an increase in agreement with each statement.

What is clear is that students show a marked increase in looking forward to coming to school, their enjoyment in music when at school, their acceptance within the music department.

Researching resilience and wellbeing  

There are many different routes to a flourishing life. People will derive wellbeing from each of these five building blocks to varying degrees. A good life for one person is not necessarily a good life for another. Positive psychology is descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, this study is not telling people what choices to make or what to value, but research on the factors that enable flourishing can help students, teachers and schools make more informed choices to live a more fulfilling life that is aligned with their values and interests.

Positive psychology

Seligman’s PERMA theory of wellbeing articulates five components that are intrinsically motivating and that contribute to wellbeing. These five elements or components are:

Positive emotions include hope, interest, joy, love, compassion, pride.

Engagement involves indication to commitment, watching, listening, and observing what happens around you, and learning about your character strengths.

Relationships encompass all the various interactions individuals have with partners.

Meaning implies having sense of worth, value, and belonging and/or serving something greater than ourselves.

Accomplishment is a result of working toward and reaching goals, mastering an endeavor.

Positive Emotions: This route to wellbeing is hedonic – increasing positive emotions. Within limits, we can increase our positive emotions about the past (by cultivating gratitude and forgiveness), our positive emotions about the present (by savoring physical pleasures and mindfulness) and our positive emotions about the future (by building hope and optimism).

Engagement: Engagement is an experience in which someone fully deploys their skills, strengths, and attention for a challenging task. This produces an experience called “flow” that is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, rather than for what they will get out of it. The activity is its own reward. Flow is experienced when one’s skills are just sufficient for a challenging activity, in the pursuit of a clear goal, with immediate feedback on progress toward the goal.

Relationships: Relationships are fundamental to wellbeing. The experiences that contribute to wellbeing are often amplified through our relationships, for example, great joy, meaning, laughter, a feeling of belonging, and pride in accomplishment. Connections to others can give life purpose and meaning. Support from and connection with others is one of the best antidotes to challenges that raise self doubt and is a good way to bounce back. Developing strong relationships is central to adaptation and is enabled by our capacity for love, compassion, kindness, empathy, self-sacrifice, teamwork, and cooperation.

Meaning: A sense of meaning and purpose can be derived from belonging to and serving something bigger than the self. There are various societal institutions that enable a sense of meaning, such as family, religion, science, politics, work organizations, schools, and music departments provide a hot-housed environment and community.

Accomplishment: People pursue achievement, competence, success, and mastery for its own sake, in a variety of domains, including the workplace, sports, games, hobbies, among others. People pursue accomplishment even when it does not necessarily lead to positive emotion, meaning, or relationships. Instrumental music education in schools provides individual, group, vertical and peer (horizontal) learning environments, each delivering a particular accomplishment.

Supportive relationships in instrumental music education contexts

Research indicates that people need supportive, positive relationships and social belonging to sustain wellbeing Many current indicators do not measure the quality of social relationships and therefore omit this key contribution to wellbeing- a compelling reason for this study. The fact that strong social relationships are essential for wellbeing offers implications for school curricula that explicitly educates students about the importance of long-lasting social relationships, as well as teaching the social skills that nurture supportive and intimate relationships.

Our findings

Our findings suggest student-teacher and student-student interactions, the intense aspects of instrumental music tuition and socially shared experiences of ensembles, and the learning and relational cultures evident in instrumental music departments influence student resilience and wellbeing.

The study highlights student development, growth and evolving sophistication of concepts studied. Learning music offers a range of challenges but over time learners’ skills, coping mechanisms and self-regulatory capacities evolve to accommodate such challenges. Students described self-esteem, accomplishments, respect from peer and perserverance and committment to involvement in their music learning.

These results provide a range of information regarding student connectedness to teacher, to peers, and the music department as a part of a community. The data reveals that the learning relationship, environment and musical cultures often embedded in school music engagement are all important and prescient factors involved in students developing senses of happiness, satisfaction and wellbeing in music learning. The students iterated beliefs of music as an energizing and socialising force.  The data shows music education enacts learning, challenges to be overcome, emotional control, and maturity.

These reflections show that music learning is supported by teachers, peers, and environment. The findings also suggest that from what students say and reflect on, there is a transfer of skills, approaches and strategizing gained from instrumental music that is utilised in a range of other subjects.

Implications for instrumental music education

School environments that promote autonomy supportive classrooms can increase students’ concept of self-worth, competence and wellness (Deci et al., 1981). Though not unique to instrumental music engagement, the range of one to one. Small group and ensemble learning and engagement in activities offers a wide ranging striated and interconnected impact on student behaviour.

Intrinsic motivation plays a significant part in motivating student engagement and outcomes (Froiland & Worrell, 2016). As above, the striated experiences available in instrumental music education provide a strong impact on students’ intrinsic motivation.

More autonomous motivation produces more sustained engagement, greater commitment to goals, better performance, greater satisfaction, increased prosocial attitudes and behaviours, and sense of community and belonging. Music students apply themselves to practice if they feel higher levels of autonomy, and they rate the quality of their own practice higher if they are more autonomously motivated (Evans & Bonneville-Roussy, 2016). This continuum of motivated states also supports the more autonomously developing student, in that the more positive the outcomes the more satisfaction, positive affect and sense of wellness students feel (Howard et al., 2021).

The key for schools is to support instrumental music environments and contexts by supporting their changing social, community, collaborative and teacher -learning relationships.

As is evident in the data and the student recollections of powerful learning moments, resilience and wellbeing can be supported by helping students to experientially acknowledge and work through instances of adversity with the teacher acting as a guide on the side, apprenticing the student through processes, behaviours and traits of success that can adapt their thoughts, behaviours, and emotions to help navigate adversity. Highlighting how these adaptations in cognition, behaviour, and affect promote successful outcomes would then, in turn, help students to build their resilience over time.

Successful Music departments

Ways to build positive emotion may include:

• Organising learning activities around sustained and developmentally organised learning events where students spend time with people they care about – this includes students and teachers (Kok et al., 2013).
• Organise learning through creative activities that are enjoyable (Conner et al., 2018).
• Listen to uplifting or inspirational music (Juslin & Sakka, 2019).
• Organising student reflection on things that are going well in their life (Emmons & McCullough, 2004).

Ways to build relationships:

• Participating in organised group activity that is of interest to students, and that they can develop a shared goal toward.
• Be in learning situations that provide a sociality and curiosity of others, where thay can ask questions of the people they don’t know well to find out more about them.
• Have the opportunity to create deeper friendships with people they are acquainted with.

Ways to build meaning:

• Provide learning opportunities that activate shared goal orientations, motivations and outcomes toward things that matter to them (Tang et al., 2022).
• Provide learning opportunities where students can try new, creative activities to find things they can connect with.
• Provide learning and engagement opportunities that allows students to present their passions but also work to use their passions to help others.
• Allow time for students to spend quality time with people they care about.
• Provide learning opportunities that foster optimism; the belief that life will have more good outcomes than bad. People who are optimistic are more likely to be resilient to stressful life events (Segerstrom et al., 2017).

Resources

• The Helmsman Project – Giving Disadvantaged Adolescents Skills to Flourish – School Report 2019
• GAT – Cultivating Capability – Final Report 2013
• AARE blog 2019 All our children have a right to instrumental music education- https://blog.aare.edu.au/music-education-is-not-a-luxury-heres-why-all-australian-children-should-be-learning-music/
• Australian teacher Magazine. The Victorian Government has shamefully neglected music education
• Music education in Australian schools: An essential place for all students. Professional Voice- The New Basics13.3.5. AEU. 
• Loudmouth online music forum. Vision 2030 – Australian perspectives 3: Finding the cure for music education in Australia.

2022-23 MUSIC ECOLOGIES AND COMMUNITIES

Music has always been part of a human sense of community. Whilst many may argue for a definition of what community music is, our concern is what community music does –  to the people that create it, enact it, listen to it, and participate in some way, musical communities  offers a horizon of possibilities, encompassing a sweep of music engagements that includes both informal and formal contexts, amateur and professional practitioners, institutional and non-institutional settings, that can  occur at age and gender specific times, accreditations, affiliations, and allegiances. Community music- making can affirm cultural norms Western, non-Western, and those that synthesise, resist or hybridise. Music is an exciting facet of contemporary society.

Music-making is a universal constant  that accompanies all cultures, all musics, and all peoples. Music may be a motivating force or catalyst that forms connections between people and their environment  and experiences that allow people to sense belongingness to and membership in a group. They can also experience having their musical and social needs met by the group as well as connecting with each other. This type of connection may involve evolving histories, and similar experiences that, when shared, promote a sense of validation, well- being, and belonging.

We investigate how community music-making globally can  serve as a vehicle for activating relationships between people; how musical communities and the participants within them build, nurture, replace, erode, and perhaps implode their musical communities; and how they negotiate the social dynamics of collectivisation, power, resistance, and subversion – all through the ‘auspices’ that collective music-  making and community music- making provides.

Our team are excited in exploring community music across the world, investigating the spirit, need, compulsion, and fervour with which musicians and audiences congregate. Often, there is  much more than the music going on, although  for some, it is all about the music.

OUR RESEARCH PARTNERS AND AFFILIATES

Dr Sylvain Jaccard– University Directeur de site Valais-Wallis, Coordinator de l’orientation MUSEC, HeMU-Haute Ecole de Musique, Vaud Valais Fribourg, Switzerland.

Dr Bridget Sweet– University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Dr Bridget Rennie-Salonen– Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Dr. Yiannis Miralis– Director, Instrumental MuEd & Research Lab.

European University, Cyprus

Dr. Carina Joly -Federal University of Cariri, Brazil.

Sandra Oberoi, UCL IoE Research Scholar, HARMONY- The Music School.  

Dr Pamela Burnard, Professor of Creativities & Educations University of Cambridge

Dr Karina Coba, PhD. University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès,

Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse (isdaT)

Dr Emily Achieng Akuno.Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Sciences & Technology, Kenya

Dr Jane Southcott,  Professor, Monash University

ISME International Society for Music Education. Instrumental and Vocal Music teaching Commission

Q & A with Dr Leon de Bruin– October 2024

Can you tell me a bit about your research? 

My research ideas emminate from simple questions- why do we teach, and why do we learn in particular ways? From an instrumental  music perspective this involves teacher practice and learning relationships, music and educational psychology. Looking at ways we teach the child and not just the instrument across a range of formal and infomal approaches are profoundly important questions considering diminishing engagement in instrumental music worldwide.

Why do we make music, and what is its effect on us? Music is such a powerful manipulator of human emotion and action. Quite often there is much more than the music going on, that can span myriad social, political and cultural meanings involving resistances, defiances, and subversions of dominant forces, as well as the reifying and promoting of this dominance.

Music’s hold on us is fascinating- it takes us to places, people, events, histories. We lose our sense of time and self, often gripped by the earwitness of our past and present. How does that shape our attitudes, beliefs, energies to our future selves? Music has a big part to play in our future societies and I’m interested in that from a range of research perspectives.

How did you find your way to this area?

As a music student, and then teacher, I’ve had, and seen the good, bad, and ugly of teaching! As a teacher helping other teachers become better, my path from student to professional performer, teacher, researcher and now teacher of the next generation of instrumental music teachers provideas a full circle of musical and educational experiences.

Can you tell me about some “hits” e.g.  what research activity of yours do you feel has had the greatest impact?

Spanning music psychology and socio -cultural perspectives has availed breadth and impact of my research. Researching instrumental music teaching practices- an area underexamined and often cloaked in secrecy advances impactful pedagogy worldwide. My book; ‘Musical ecologies’redefines the complexity in which people socially come together to make music. Another, ‘Guerrilla Music’ highlights many Indigenous and minority music making practices that rebel or resist domination. ‘Revolutions in Music Education’ proudly rights many wrongs and dispels myths music and music education still carries into the 21^st century. An article exploring instrumental music practices in Victoria during COVID revealed the relational, communal, and wellbeing oriented approaches many instrumental music teachers took to engaging students during COVID-when in other classes they switched off. That resonated with a worldwide audience, affirming practices I feel continue to be fostered. A music education advocacy piece in the AARE blog was a viral hit with 406,000 shares, and won a social media award.

Can you tell me about some “misses”? E.g.  What did you work on and not get? Are you going to try again?

I’m awaiting for the unicorn to appear in the form of a DECRA. Thing is, it’s a great project that I piloted last year and with the benefit of a Unimelb ECR grant is unfolding this year. Its investigating instrumental music engagement, wellbeing and resilience. Philanthropic grants come with lots of zeros, and developing a flagship Australian disability orchestra (for people with a disability) needs that funding. It will happen, just need to find the right grant!

What are your longer-term goals?

I hope my teaching and research changes lives. Crafting knowledgeable, skilled, but also relational, caring music teachers promotes an accessibility, equity and equality to music education that for many is out of reach. The METAL-Lab (Music Education Teaching and Learning) I’ve established with my colleagues in the Conservatoriun of Music brings together staff teaching in the MMPt program to collaborate in various research, outreach, advocacy and professional development in schools. Nurturing the symbiotic relationship between secondary schools and the Conservatorium, from a music performance, wellbeing, and education perspective is important for the future of the Con and for a vibrant instrumental music edauction landscape. Representing Australia in the world body, the International Society for Music education (ISME) helps provide an international profile.

What’s the hardest thing about research, and the best thing about research?

Juggling teaching, marking, advocacy, and research projects is a set of skills that are acquired over time. Staying up late, and getting up early for grant writing or international meetings requires discipline and sacrifice. My book projects have grown from international audiences at conferences. Meeting fascinating people with interesting perspectives provokes my thinking and research ideas. Getting grants to fulfill ideas is great- receiving a recent Creative Australia grant sees me off to France to work with the Paris paralympic orchestra and various Music Conservatoires there with my  MYO Adaptive Bridging Program colleague Anthea Skinner. That project involves students with a disability wanting to learn an instrument, and the grant funds PD to Victorian teachers and expands our program to Queensland with connections across Europe.

Have you received any good advice over the years?

Take care to do good work and the work will take care of you in your  journey.  Talk with people from different cultures/perspectives, it enriches your own understanding. The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know; be curious to seeking opportunity for yourself and others.

Dreaming up research collaborations – what areas would you like to connect with?

Continued international collaborations with my ‘Guerrilla Music’ book series- exciting areas in Music and sexualities/sensualities, Indigenous musics, Disability and musicmaking- all necessitate collaborations, continued learning, and exciting flow-ons. A national study on the benefits of arts engagement is needed, and working with leading colleagues in the field across the arts would be exciting. Establishing a conference that brings all these musical, social and cultural intersectionalities, and research ideas that it would generate is an exciting prospect.

Thanks, Leon!