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Looking for volunteers to help establish a C21MP Virtual Research Centre

I’m looking for volunteers to help me develop the 21st Century Music Practice research network between now and May 2026. At the moment there is some content on the website, we have held various events and conferences, there is the Cambridge Elements series and the JISC mailing list. I would like to develop a C21MP virtual research centre involving all of the above plus PhD student support resources and events, visiting research fellows, temporary collaborative research teams coming together to address specific problems through experimentation, analysis and discussion, national and international lobbying and consultation about practical musical research governance and policy and, of course, a podcast.

The idea of the virtual research centre aims to provide an umbrella structure for a research community that is free of specific institutional ties and is a hub for the C21MP community. It will allow researchers into the practices of 21st century music – including practice research – a communal platform for their research outputs and various mechanisms for collegiate discussion and practical experimentation about relevant research topics. It will also provide resources about methodology and methods for research students and early career researchers engaged in practice research and autoethnography as well as links to examples of good practice. It will start with a six month open-access experiment to assess the value, viability and demand for these resource and then aim to replace volunteer labour with some remuneration system – potentially by putting some of the custom-created content and open access to community participation on a subscription basis (either institutional or individual). However the development of the idea will depend on how much interest and engagement there is and will be determined by the whole community of participants.

Please get in touch if you can spare a few hours a week and have skills in any of:

  • Website design and maintenance (WordPress at the moment but open to change)
  • Podcasting
  • Video making and/or editing at a relatively basic level – especially distance-based.
  • Building an archive of useful research resources
  • Event planning management and support

As mentioned, this is on a volunteer basis to start with but the idea is to create a viable and sustainable financial model as part of this initial phase which would provide some levels of remuneration for the centre’s administration in the second half of 2026.

Please email me if you are interested and we can discuss it further.

Forthcoming Events

After a brief hiatus following the C21MP Conference at the Townshend Studio last year, there are various events and projects in the pipeline:

  • 14th June 2025 – Practice Research and Musical Innovation: a 21st Century Music Practice research network session at the Innovation in Music Conference, Bath Spa University.
  • 9th July 2025 – Just Doing It: the particular challenges of practice research in popular music – session at the IASPM Conference at the Nouvelle Sorbonne in Paris.
  • 13th July 2025 – Performance Studies Network conference panel with Amy Blier-Carruthers at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London.
  • 4th September 2025 – session on formatting and presenting practice research on popular music for PhD submission at the IASPM UK & Ireland PGR Conference at Leeds University.
  • 7th – 8th October 2025 – We are collaborating with Hidden REF to set up a working group on non-traditional outputs and hidden roles in practice research and aim to run a session at the Festival of Hidden REF at Birmingham Science Museum – details TBC
  • Autumn 2025 – Contemporary Uses for 20th Century Electronic Music Instruments: performances and discussion at the Townshend Studio, University of West London – details TBC
  • Spring 2026 – Transcultural Musical Practices: performances and discussion at SOAS, London in conjunction with Peter Wiegold and the Third Orchestra  – details TBC
  • Spring 2027 – C21MP conference at Florida State University, Tampa, FL. Details TBC

If anyone is interested in joining the Hidden REF working group, please contact me off-list. One of the key features of the working group will be to explore innovation and creativity in professional / artistic practice and how it contributes to and shares ‘new knowledge’. The aim will be to organise new distribution platforms that document and disseminate these tacit forms of ‘new knowledge’ and encourage public discussion to simultaneously analyse and peer review it. The Townshend Studio  and Transcultural Musical Practice events will be experiments in this regard.

About

Most academic research events or publications that use the term ‘music’ in their title (without an epithet such as ‘popular’) refer to western art music but that is a tiny subset of the music that is played and listened to in the 21st century. Indeed, the musical lives of contemporary musicians are far more inter-disciplinary than the academics who study them. This research network was established as a contribution to several recent trends towards more inter-disciplinarity in the academic study of music. By organising a series of study days about quite broadly defined themes the aim is to bring together academics and practitioners from a range of musical cultures – popular music, musical theatre, performance studies, music for visual media, recording, electronic and electroacoustic music, live sound, ethnomusicology and composition.

The focus on practice is also important in that it highlights the idea that music is a process or an activity rather than a thing. That doesn’t dismiss the music itself, but it does suggest a study of the ways in which listeners, composers and performers interpret the sound as opposed to the study of certain intrinsic features in a score. Indeed it’s not an ideological attempt to oust this more traditional approach to studying music, simply an attempt to continue a trend to see both flourish.

The 21st Century Music Practice Research Network was established by Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas of the University of West London in the summer of 2016. The aim is to encourage and disseminate research and scholarly collaboration that includes all areas of contemporary musical activity. In particular the network will seek to stimulate discourse between disciplines: bringing together scholars from popular music, musical theatre, performance studies, music for visual media, recording, electronic and electroacoustic music, live sound, ethnomusicology and composition to discuss broad themes that are relevant across subject boundaries.