General Areas of Research Interest
I've been leading a somewhat parallel life as an academic and an artist, though I would say the balanced is tipped quite far in the direction of the arts! That said, you can learn a little about my research interests and activity here.
I've always had an interest in other cultures, well at least since teenage years. My high school year book photo listed my ambition as: Cultural Anthropologist. Probable Fate: Playing drums with an African tribe. Turns out, both were true! When an undergrad student in cultural anthropology at Memorial university of Newfoundland/MUN (yet focused mostly on music) I would spend on hours in the library looking through issues of Percussive Notes magazine, as well as whatever ethnomusicology textbooks I could find on African music (my interest early on). When I later switched to a BFA at York University I would do the same. Yet grad school was never something I thought about, I just wanted to play.
Fast forward 2011 or so, after I had been in Vancouver for a couple of years. I had inquired about the Ethnomusicology program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) after meeting with Dr. Michael Tenzer at his house one afternoon. I told him I'd keep testing the waters as a musician in Vancouver before thinking about grad school. Fast forward to 2013 and I enrolled in the MA program which fast-tracked into the PhD program.
In 2019 I graduated with my PhD in Ethnomusicology. If you want to know more about PhD research, you can just go to that page, but in a nutshell it was a study of the vodu shrine of Torgbui Apetorku in Dagbamete, Ghana. I dug deeply into the history of the shrine, the spiritual practices of the people, the unity that their beliefs provide, the importance of music and dance, and how all of this has helped the community thrive in the modern age while still maintaining their indigenous spiritual, and adapting to social, cultural and political change.
Since graduating with my PhD in 2019 I've done relatively little in the way of academic pursuits. I went heavy in the other direction of focusing on artistic work and focused on my new album. However, I luckily received a postdoctoral fellowship from SSHRC (2020-2022) and am working towards some of the goals of that at present.
My postdoctoral research is focused upon the oral transmission of culture in the rural village of Dzogadze in southeastern Ghana. Essentially, I am interested in collaborating with leaders of the community in mitigating the threats posed to the transmission of the music and dance traditions for which the community is widely known. This type of Applied Ethnomusicology will take the shape and action in the form of dedicated teaching sessions, recordings for documentation, a festival that celebrates traditional music and musicians, as well as other education-focused activities at the community and post-secondary level.
- Ethnomusicology (African music, South Indian music, ritual music, jazz)
- African history, society, culture, religion
- Oral Transmission of culture
- Colonialism and its aftereffects
- Community building through the arts
- Music theory and analysis (composition; rhythmic studies)
- Music education (world music pedagogy; curriculum development)
- Arts administration and arts production
- Recording arts and technology (audio and visual)
- Public scholarship and Applied Ethnomusicology
I've been leading a somewhat parallel life as an academic and an artist, though I would say the balanced is tipped quite far in the direction of the arts! That said, you can learn a little about my research interests and activity here.
I've always had an interest in other cultures, well at least since teenage years. My high school year book photo listed my ambition as: Cultural Anthropologist. Probable Fate: Playing drums with an African tribe. Turns out, both were true! When an undergrad student in cultural anthropology at Memorial university of Newfoundland/MUN (yet focused mostly on music) I would spend on hours in the library looking through issues of Percussive Notes magazine, as well as whatever ethnomusicology textbooks I could find on African music (my interest early on). When I later switched to a BFA at York University I would do the same. Yet grad school was never something I thought about, I just wanted to play.
Fast forward 2011 or so, after I had been in Vancouver for a couple of years. I had inquired about the Ethnomusicology program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) after meeting with Dr. Michael Tenzer at his house one afternoon. I told him I'd keep testing the waters as a musician in Vancouver before thinking about grad school. Fast forward to 2013 and I enrolled in the MA program which fast-tracked into the PhD program.
In 2019 I graduated with my PhD in Ethnomusicology. If you want to know more about PhD research, you can just go to that page, but in a nutshell it was a study of the vodu shrine of Torgbui Apetorku in Dagbamete, Ghana. I dug deeply into the history of the shrine, the spiritual practices of the people, the unity that their beliefs provide, the importance of music and dance, and how all of this has helped the community thrive in the modern age while still maintaining their indigenous spiritual, and adapting to social, cultural and political change.
Since graduating with my PhD in 2019 I've done relatively little in the way of academic pursuits. I went heavy in the other direction of focusing on artistic work and focused on my new album. However, I luckily received a postdoctoral fellowship from SSHRC (2020-2022) and am working towards some of the goals of that at present.
My postdoctoral research is focused upon the oral transmission of culture in the rural village of Dzogadze in southeastern Ghana. Essentially, I am interested in collaborating with leaders of the community in mitigating the threats posed to the transmission of the music and dance traditions for which the community is widely known. This type of Applied Ethnomusicology will take the shape and action in the form of dedicated teaching sessions, recordings for documentation, a festival that celebrates traditional music and musicians, as well as other education-focused activities at the community and post-secondary level.