Staff Research

Following a Junior Fellowship at Trinity College of Music Jamie began pursuing a varied professional career. As a soloist he has performed mostly in the UK and Scandinavia giving recitals for The Yorke Music Trust, Ullapool Guitar Festival, Classical Guitar Retreat, Exeter Guitar Festival and the Copenhagen Renaissance Music Festival.

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Dr Laura Bissell is a Lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practice BA (Hons.) and part-time Lecturer in Research at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Laura is a visiting lecturer on the MRes in Creative Practices programme at Glasgow School of Art and has taught on the Transart Institute MFA in Berlin. She has a PhD (Feminism, Technology and Performance: Performing a Feminist Praxis, University of Glasgow), an MPhil by Research (The Posthuman Body in Performance, University of Glasgow), and a first class MA(Hons) degree in English Literature and Theatre Studies (University of Glasgow). Laura has a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Arts Education and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She worked as at the University of Glasgow in the Theatre Studies department as a lecturer prior to her appointment at RCS.

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Stephen Broad is an islander in exile, researcher, teacher, community conductor and occasional broadcaster. He studied at the Music School of Douglas Academy (Piano with Anne Crawford and composition with William Sweeney) and then at the University of Glasgow, where he won prizes in music and physics. He undertook a DPhil in Historical Musicology at Worcester College, Oxford with the late Robert Sherlaw Johnson and with Annegret Fauser, and is Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

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Colin Broom is a composer based in Scotland, UK. He studied composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama.

Colin is Jazz Coordinator at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and teaches both in the Composition and Creative & Contextual Studies departments.

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Phil has been described as ‘a superb, innovative instrumentalist, with not simply the fastest fingers in the West but some of the most sensitive ones, too! The man who, in Scotland at least, made the accordion respectable again and also plays fine keyboard and whistle; composer, whose range extends from heart-tugging slow airs to vibrant tunes for a string of successful theatrical productions and to full-scale concert suites.

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Born and raised in Alaska, Josh arrived in Scotland in 1992 to study Scottish Gaelic at the University of Aberdeen (MA, 1996). He then undertook doctoral research in the history of the piping tradition of the southern Outer Hebrides at the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh (PhD, 2001).

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Canadian-born, Scotland-based composer Emily Doolittle grew up in Halifax Nova Scotia and was educated at Dalhousie University, the Koninklijk Conservatorium in the Hague, Indiana University and Princeton University. From 2008-2015 she was  Assistant/Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Cornish College of the Arts. She now lives in Glasgow, UK, where she is an Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

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Rachel is a freelance musician and researcher working predominantly in the field of music education and psychology. She is the creator and composer of BabyO and SensoryO, two groundbreaking operas for infants aged between 6 and 36 months, for which she has received international acclaim.

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Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she runs psychoanalytic seminars at various UK and European institutions.

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Roy Howat is internationally renowned as both pianist and scholar whose concerts, broadcasts and lectures regularly take him worldwide.  A graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, he made a special study of French music in Paris with Vlado Perlemuter, and is one of few British artists repeatedly invited to teach and play French music at major French-speaking Conservatoires and on French radio.  He is especially known for his lively lectures and masterclasses, which he has given worldwide at venues including the USA’s Juilliard and Eastman Schools.

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South Korean-born Sinae Lee leads a busy life as a soloist, chamber musician and lecturer based in Glasgow. Since her UK début with Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), playing Brahms Piano Concerto No.1, she has also played with Korean Symphony Orchestra, St. James Orchestra, Glasgow Orchestral Society as well as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) Orchestra and Wind Ensemble.

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Karen has curated music materials at RCS since 1988, initially as Music and Academic Services Librarian and since 2017 as Performing Arts Librarian. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

Karen graduated with a PhD in Music from the University of Glasgow in 2009. Her book, Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era, was published by Ashgate in March 2013.

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Jill is a graduate from Trinity College London where she specialised in piano accompaniment. She has a Master’s degree in Psychology for Musicians from Sheffield University and attained a PhD in Music Psychology from the University of Edinburgh. Jill previously taught Keyboard Skills and Listening and Musicianship at Edinburgh University where she is a member of the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development. She has extensive experience as an educator, having taught both class music in schools and piano to individual students.

At the RCS, Jill leads the Practitioner Enquiry module on the MEd Learning and Teaching in the Performing Arts programme. She lectures on other undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and is a co-coordinator of the Introduction to Music Psychology module in the School of Music.

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Arnold Myers completed his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh with research into acoustically based techniques for taxonomic classification of brass instruments. He has worked in parallel as an information scientist and as Curator and Director of Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments. He is now a Professor Emeritus in the University of Edinburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

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Allan Neave studied at the RSAMD (1984) and the RNCM (1988) and since then has been performing worldwide. He is a regular guest at many of the worlds leading musical events and has worked with many influential musicians including Nikita Koshkin, Edward McGuire, Hans Werner Henze, Gordon McPherson and Stephen Dodgson.

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Fali Pavri enjoys a busy and varied career as soloist, chamber musician and teacher. Born in Mumbai, India, where his first teacher was Shanti Seldon, he studied the piano at the Moscow Conservatoire with Professor Victor Merzhanov and at the Royal Academy of Music, London with Christopher Elton.

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Brianna is a Lecturer in Historically Musicology and has a particular interest in the field of historically informed performance and eighteenth-century studies.

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Since settling in the United Kingdom in 1984, Aaron Shorr has established an international career as soloist, chamber musician and educator. As well as appearing as soloist at London’s South Bank in over thirty concertos, he has toured extensively as a recitalist and chamber musician worldwide.

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Marc Silberschatz holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and an MA with Distinction in Classical and Contemporary Text (Directing). Since 2004, he has directed twenty-five productions in New York, Scotland and England.

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Tommy Smith (born 27 April 1967) is a Scottish jazz saxophonist, composer and educator. The jazz critic Richard Cook said of him, “Of the generation which emerged in the mid-80s, he might be the most outstandingly talented”.

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Dr J Simon van der Walt is Glasgow-based composer of mixed descent. Over the course of his career has created a varied body of work, ranging from score-based composition to installation, sound art, performance, and devised musiktheatre.

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Bethany Whiteside is Research Lecturer and Doctoral Degrees Coordinator at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Her research focuses on the cultural and social analysis of participatory dance, often through ethnographic means, with a particular focus on the ballet, Highland, and Irish dancing genres.

Bethany has published in a range of peer-reviewed publications, presented at national and international conferences, and was a founding Co-Editor of the Scottish Journal of Performance. In 2014, Beth was a Visiting Research Scholar at Temple University, funded by the ESRC as an Overseas Institutional Visit.

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Sarah Hopfinger is a lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practice at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She is a practitioner-researcher with specialisms in performance and ecology, intergenerational practice and chronic pain performance. Her practice sits between theatre, live art and choreography and her practice-led research explores how performance can engage with the ecological. She devises new performance works with diverse collaborators including children and adults, disabled and non-disabled people and professional and nonprofessional performers.

Sarah has presented her performance work and research both in the UK and internationally, published several peer-reviewed publications in leading performance journals including RiDE and Performance Research, and presented at national and international conferences.

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Dr Fabrice Fitch is a composer and musicologist specializing in Renaissance polyphony and its performance. His monograph Johannes Ockeghem: Masses and Models (Paris, 1997) remains the only full-length book in English on the composer. He has published widely on Obrecht, Agricola, Josquin, and other composers of that generation, as well as the music of the Eton Choirbook; and on the intersection between his musicological and compositional work. He is a member of the editorial boards of Early Music and the Journal of the Alamire Foundation, and has been a reviewer with Gramophone for over 25 years.

His compositions have been performed by leading soloists and chamber ensembles (including Richard Craig and Neil Heyde, the Diotima and Kreutzer String Quartets, Distractfold, Ensemble Exposé, Leones, Fretwork, Exaudi, and the Orlando Consort) and broadcast internationally. He taught at Durham University and was Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal Northern College of Music, and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

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Dr Stuart MacRae is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Born in Inverness in 1976, his works include a Violin Concerto (2001), Hamartia for cello and ensemble (2004), Gaudete for soprano and orchestra (2008), and Courante for the Dunedin Consort (2019), all of which have been performed at the BBC Proms. In recent years Stuart has composed many works for the stage, for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Scottish Opera and Music Theatre Wales, including the operas The Assassin Tree (2006), the critically acclaimed The Devil Inside (2015) and the award-winning Ghost Patrol (2012) and Anthropocene (2018). Anthropocene will receive a new production in Salzburg in 2021.

Recent concert works include Courante, written for The Dunedin Consort and premiered at the 2019 BBC Proms, and Prometheus Symphony for two singers and orchestra, premiered at the 2019 Lammermuir Festival.

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Charlotte is an AHRC Leadership Fellow and is leading a study which explores the potential of applying innovative AI, AR and IoT to qualitative research methodologies across a diverse range of artistic settings, audiences and practices, such that the research experience becomes a part of and embedded into the artistic experience.

Arts based practice is a central theme of Charlotte’s funded work. For example, with the development of QUAL (www.qual.org.uk), a research resource developed with and for arts practitioners (AHRC Creative Economy); the enactment of taste-making in contemporary classical music (AHRC Cultural Value); an exploration of the lived experiences and artistic practices of advertising creatives (ESRC); in addition to a vast array of studies exploring artists’ identities, organisational and artistic practices, for example, with Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (University of Edinburgh), Islington Mill (University of Edinburgh) and the Red Note Ensemble (AHRC/University of Edinburgh). Charlotte is currently working with artists from Craft Scotland, Vue Art, the University of Edinburgh Collections and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to explore resilience during / post COVID-19 (AHRC/Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). Charlotte’s research has been supported throughout by Creative Scotland.

Charlotte’s work has been published in Work Employment and Society, Human Relations, Management Learning, Dialogues in Critical Management Studies, British Journal of Management, and she co-edited Organising Music: Theory, Performance and Practice [Cambridge Press].

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Professor Celia Duffy has held senior positions in the performing arts and academia. After early retirement from the Senior Management Team of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland she continues to be active in the sector as a researcher, teacher, expert reviewer and consultant and is currently a Senior Fellow in Knowledge Exchange at the RCS. As the first Head of Research at the Conservatoire she led the team responsible for management of research, consultancy and knowledge exchange activities and the development of the Conservatoire’s practice-based research programmes. She was awarded a Professorship in 2010 and an Honorary Doctorate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2015. She chairs the Boards of the Red Note Ensemble, Scotland’s leading contemporary music ensemble, and The Wallace Collection.

Career experience ranges from lecturing in music at Goldsmiths, University of London to commercial software design and using digital technologies in higher education.  Celia’s research and consultancy interests are in performing arts education, conservatoire staff and policy development, quality management and knowledge exchange. Her wider activity in the sector has included membership of national and international boards, advisory panels and consultative groups, often as an advocate for small specialist arts institutions.

She is particularly interested in working collaboratively and the interaction between academia and the arts and creative industries. With her RCS colleague Charlotte Gilmore she developed QUAL (www.qual.org.uk), a research resource developed with and for arts practitioners (funded by the Arts and Humanities research Council under its AHRC Creative Economy strand).  As part of her current Fellowship she has recently produced a report on the extent and nature of Knowledge Exchange (KE) in the Conservatoire.

Last year she worked extensively in Norway, Finland, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong; in 2020 she went virtual and did a lot more piano practice. Celia’s work has recently been published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, Ashgate and Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.

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