Music BA Honours

Dr Inglis makes and writes about music. He studied at City University London (PhD, MA) and the University of Durham (BA), and has previously taught at Trinity Laban and the Royal College of Music. Having been involved in a range of genres and projects, including 2000s artrock band Hicks Milligan-Prophecy, his music and arrangements have been heard at the Sonorities Festival (Belfast), Huddersfield Festival, Spitalfields Festival, Deal Festival, Guildford International Festival, Secret Garden Party, Greenbelt, Truck, Bestival and I Kärlekens Namn (Sweden) as well as on BBC Radios 1&3, BBC2, BBC Wales, Radio Cymru and Bayern 2 (Germany). His interests encompass composition, musicology and journalism, and his writing projects include pieces for Tempo and PRS for Music’s M magazine and for BBC performing ensembles/Proms.

Recent projects include a piano music album Living Stones (Sargasso); book chapters on classical music and copyright for The Classical Music Industry (Routledge) and on music and spirituality/John Tavener (Peter Lang); and an acclaimed edition (with Barry Smith) of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s letters to Peter Warlock (Routledge). He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, a trustee and board member of alternative classical record label Nonclassical, and an organiser of the international research network Music, Spirituality and Wellbeing.

Read more about Dr Inglis

Mike Dines is a musician, writer, scholar and publisher. He gained his undergraduate degree in Music from the University of Chichester and gained an MA in Music focusing on aesthetics and musical analysis at the University of Sussex. He then moved to Salford University to complete his PhD on punk under Professor Sheila Whiteley. His thesis focused on the anarcho-punk scene of the 1980s, specifically on the work of Crass. He founded Itchy Monkey Press, a DIY punk publisher with the publication of the anarcho-punk novella the darkening light (2014), followed by Tales From the Punkside (2014), Some of Us Scream, Some of Us Shout (2016), and And All Around Was Darkness (2017).

As a scholar, Mike's research interests cover subcultures and the cultural context of popular music, recently co-editing The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global (Intellect, 2019), Punk Now!! Contemporary Perspectives on Punk (Intellect, 2020), Trans-Global Punk Scenes: The Punk Reader Vol. 2 (Intellect, 2020) and Punk Identities, Punk Utopias: Global Punk and Media (Intellect 2021). His current writing takes him in the direction of popular music and spirituality with the co-edited collection Exploring the Spiritual in Popular Music: Beatified Beats (Bloomsbury, 2021).

David Clements is a musician, producer, sound engineer and music programmer. As a producer, David has worked for some of the UK’s most prestigious dance record labels including Fabric, Low Pressings, Mute, Renaissance, Pacha, and many others. David has regularly featured in DJ magazine, Mixmag and other dance music journals. As a DJ he performed across the world, including at classic clubs such as Back 2 Basics – Leeds, Propaganda – Moscow, and radio spots on Kiss FM and Radio 1. David has done various sound engineering work in Leeds and London studios covering various projects including film and documentary platforms across a wide range of music styles from electronic music, jazz and pop to contemporary classical.

As well as teaching production, sound engineering and sound art at Middlesex, David’s particular specialisms are in performance audio tools such as Max/MSP, SuperCollider and PureData. He is currently researching algorithmic improvisation, using machine learning to produce original music. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Dr Palermo studied sonic art with the composer, performer, instrument inventor and musicologist Hugh Davies. After obtaining an MA in sonic art researching on concrete and sound poetry, he was awarded a PhD on Davies’ work in 2015. He has presented his research internationally and at institutions such as the British Library and the V&A.

In 2012 he co-curated the Sho-Zyg exhibition at Goldsmiths College. His latest output details how a queer, critical organology could help understand better Davies’s invented instruments as well as serve to question received notions about musical instruments more broadly.

Dr Palermo is also interested in popular music studies and in particular in the articulation of queer identities in song. His current publication focuses on exploring the mechanisms and metaphor of the gay closet in the genres of pop/country, indie/rock, and dance/electronica. He presented this research at the twentieth conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) held in Canberra, Australia.

Jenna is a platinum-selling songwriter, lyricist and musician. Training in voice and piano, she has been writing and producing commercially-released works, under the pseudonym Jenna Donnelly, for over a decade. With US Billboard #1, Japanese Oricon #1 and Spanish iTunes #1 records under her belt, she has also diversified into music for primetime ITV television shows and critically acclaimed musicals.

Signed to Galactic Music and Peer Music as a member of production house Audiofreaks, Jenna is also one half of Donnelly & Maltby, with works published by Theatrical Rights Worldwide. She also recently contributed a chapter to Innovation in Music: Performance, Production, Technology and Business, published by Routledge.

Saxophonist Rob Townsend has performed with many notable jazz artists such as Eddie Henderson, Sam Rivers, Django Bates, Mark Lockheart, Iain Ballamy and Tim Garland. He plays regularly with iconic acid-jazz organist James Taylor. As well as working with jazz artists, Rob is a member of legendary Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett's band, appearing on more than 10 CDs and DVDs. Rob has also performed with Rick Wakeman, Bill Bruford and played with Robbie Williams at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee concert.

As a composer, Rob works mostly in the commercial world. He has scored 8 computer games for companies such as Sony, Disney, Supermassive Games, DR Studios, Frontier Games and Blitz Games. Most recently, he wrote the music for F1 Racestars, a multi-platform worldwide release for Codemasters. Rob has written music for BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five and Discovery. In 2011 he wrote the music for Mechanical Musical Marvel which was nominated for BAFTA in the best childrens' animation category.

Sam is a London-based jazz pianist described by JazzFM as 'One of the brightest stars in the Jazz piano galaxy, a heavenly improviser, and a brilliant prospect for the future.' His eponymous 2011 debut album was listed in MOJO as one of the 'Top Ten International Releases of the Year.' The 2013 follow up, Places, was described by The Guardian as 'surefooted creativity... way beyond respectful expertise,' and by BBC Music Magazine as ‘assured and sophisticated acoustic jazz with deep roots in the tradition, that knows exactly what it's trying to do - and succeeds.’

Jamie Cullum introduced Leak's cohort as ‘the heavyweights of the British Jazz scene’ and described himself as a fan of the band in his regular BBC broadcast. In 2018, Leak released Adrift, a duet with New York's Dan Tepfer, a long-time collaborator of legendary veteran saxophonist Lee Konitz. Of this album, The Wire wrote: “Sam Leak and Dan Tepfer are two of the best pianists of their generation, and their convergence on this recording is astonishing.” The New York City Jazz Record described it as "magical" and "constantly evolving and engaging."

He’s a regular jazz and pop performer, having played internationally with jazz musicians including Gregory Hutchinson, Colin Stranahan, and Stan Sulzmann, and pop musicians including Detroit Techno Pioneer Derrick May, B*witched, and Postmodern Jukebox's Aubrey Logan. He holds a BMus Hons in Musicology from Kings College London, an MMus in Jazz Studies from the Royal Academy of Music, and is currently working towards a PhD in Music Psychology at Cambridge University.

His main research interest is in absolute pitch (otherwise known as perfect pitch). Recently, he has also embarked upon research, alongside Julia Haferkorn and Brian Kavanagh, into monetisation strategies for online content for musicians, in the wake of coronavirus. He is an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Richard is a music scholar and researcher. He has played in several bands, worked in music retail and music copyright, and published widely in the field of popular music studies. His academic qualifications span a BA in English Literature and History, an MA in Popular Culture and a PhD in Cultural Studies.

Richard’s research interests include the music industries and music technologies. His book Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record was published by Ashgate in 2012. He co-edited Mute Records: Artists, Business, History, published by Bloomsbury in 2018. An edited collection, Music by Numbers: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in the Music Industries is in press; a monograph on sound recording copyright is forthcoming. He is engaged in a new research project examining creators’ earnings from streaming.

Richard is reviews editor of IASPM Journal, and his blog Pop Bothering Me looks at a wide range of popular music matters.

Dr Keegan-Bole is a composer who writes for instruments and voice, sometimes in combination with electronics. He studied at the University of Bristol and (as part of his PhD) undertook a residency at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York. His music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, performed across the UK and in the US and Canada, most notably at the New York Electroacoustic Music Festival 2017. He was a recipient of the 2020 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and is a London Symphony Orchestra Soundhub Associate Composer. His chamber opera ‘The Interrogation of Adam Pollo’ was premiered at Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival in 2012 and won a Director’s Choice Award from the Boston Metro Opera Company in 2014.

He is currently working on a large-scale project exploring settings of Thomas Hardy’s poetry across 100 years (1923 – 2023). This includes new music for string quartet, a song-cycle for guitar and voice and a suite of arrangements of previously unpublished 20th Century Hardy settings alongside canonic songs from this period. An album of this music is set for commercial release in 2024. He is also developing a dance piece based on Dorian Gray, a developmental suite was performed by the LSO in June 2022.