research biography

for further details, publications, and outputs, see Jack’s research profile at Lund University

research and teaching

Jack is currently a post-doctorate fellow at Lund University (based at Malmö Academy of Music and the Inter Arts Centre), where his research explores the meeting point of materiality, timbre, and performance practice; or in other words, the relationship between objects used to make music, the type of sounds that they make, and the way that they are produced. His work focusses on four central themes:

  • Sustainability: how artists can address long-term, systemic issues surrounding interpretation practices carried out by musicians today and will do into the future, framing self-reflection within broader chronological perspectives

  • Experimental historicism: combating biases in artistic research towards the new by placing contemporary practices within the context of the old, respecting heritage by treating it experimentally, and using it as a lens through which the present and future can be viewed

  • Interdisciplinary methodologies: promoting inclusivity and building up a critical approach to self-reflection by viewing multiple perspectives simultaneously, utilising historical musicology, acoustic science, quantitative organology and ethnography as ways of approaching performance-based research

  • The tuba family: exposing how this instrument family has been historically ill-defined and misunderstood as a result of a systemic lack of information in terms of the instruments themselves, the sonic material they present, and how these can be controlled and exploited by performers and composers, and creating resources to address these issues. His first major publication in this area was The Playing Techniques of the Tuba / Die Spieltechnik der Tuba / La technique du tuba (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2020).

Jack’s current projects and publications centre around three main project areas: the history of tuba family and its associated performance practices, the creation of new music for old instruments (particularly the serpent, ophicleide, and other bass horns), and rethinking resonance through development of the feedback tuba.

As a visiting researcher at the Musikinstrumentenmuseum der Universität Leipzig in 2021, Jack undertook cataloguing projects and collaborative analysis using their collection of brass instruments, and was subsequently invited back to give a guest seminar in July 2023. He also undertook training in research consultancy with Code-Switch Consultants, working for the charity In Place Of War.

Alongside giving regular presentations and lecture recitals on these themes at conferences and symposia across the world, he will be giving Ph.D seminars in 2024/25 on artistic methodologies and systematic organology, as well as a guest seminar at Mälardalen University. In addition to his experience in giving practical coaching and direction, Jack aims to support to students in order for them to think critically about their work, to challenge assumptions about why they choose to perform certain music and in a certain way, and to develop and promote themselves and their own creative practices. With expertise across both historical and contemporary music fields, he promotes an approach to artistic practice that is based in rigorous theoretical concepts, using training in harmonic theory, acoustic and timbral analysis, and experimental structural frameworks in order to foster creative development in graduate and undergraduate students.

education

Jack was awarded his Ph.D in performance practice research from the Royal Northern College of Music (in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University) in 2023, supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom through the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership. He was supervised by Prof. David Horne and Prof. Martin Iddon, and his thesis was examined by Prof. John Miller and Prof. Jonathan Impett. His thesis, which included over three hours of recordings on thirteen historical instruments, as well as recordings of four newly commissioned works for solo tuba, was described by the examiners as “an important contribution to a subject area of musical performance that has seldom been examined with rigour and relevance to a broad musical context” and which “could only have been undertaken by an expert performer, and few such players could have addressed the remit of this project with complementary knowledge of performance practice and organology.”

He graduated from the Solo Class at the Hochschule für Musik, Theatre und Medien in Hannover, Germany under Professor Jens Bjørn-Larsen, having also completed his Master of Music there. His studies in Germany were generously supported by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust, the Deutsche Akademische Austauchdienst (German Academic Exchange Service), the Sir James Caird's Travelling Scholarship Trust, and a Study Abroad Studentship from The Leverhulme Trust.

At undergraduate level Jack studied in Manchester, UK, graduating in 2010 with a first class honours Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Manchester, specialising in composition, analysis and aesthetics. He simultaneously studied tuba at the Royal Northern College of Music with Robin Haggart, Brian Kingsley and Ewan Easton MBE, being awarded 95% in his graduate diploma final examination in 2011.

He participated in masterclasses across Europe with many esteemed brass pedagogues, including Roger Bobo, Øystein Baadsvik, Håken Hardenberger, Michael Lind, Mel Culbertson, James Gourlay, Roland Szentpalí, Les Neish, Stefan Heimann, Hans Nickel, Oren Marshall, Kristian Steenstrup and Dirk Hirte.