Dr Adam Whittaker
Dr Adam Whittaker is Head of Pedagogy and Associate Professor in Music at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, having previously worked as a Research Fellow in BCU’s CSPACE, and at the University of Nottingham.
He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is an internationally recognised scholar in musicology and music education, having given invited lectures and talks at Heidelberg University, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford), All Souls College (Oxford), the Royal College of Music, and All-Party Parliamentary Group for Music Education.
Adam has researched widely in the fields of music education and musicology, and has taught music in a range of settings. He has been involved in research projects examining traditions of exemplarity in medieval and Renaissance musical theory, the reception history of early music, and music education in the modern world. He is interested in the ways in which musical pedagogies have changed over time, and what these changes can tell us about our current pedagogical approaches.
His work has been published in leading academic journals and book publications, including Early Music History and British Journal of Music Education. He recently co-edited ‘History as Fantasy in Music, Sound, Image, and Media’ (Routledge, 2024) and is working on a monograph on the fifteenth-century music theorist, Johannes Tinctoris.
Adam has been a panellist on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters, Radio 4’s Rethinking Music, and has provided comment for national newspapers and presented at the APPG for Music Education. In Autumn 2019 Adam took up the Albi Rosenthal Visiting Fellowship in Music at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, giving him privileged access to rare books and manuscripts held in the Bodleian Special Collections.
Adam leads and co-leads a number of research projects, having previously been a Co-Investigator on the AHRC Network ‘Representing Classical Music in the 21st Century’. He sits on a number of music education advisory groups and is a trustee of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society.