Emeritus professors

Professor John Baily is an ethnomusicologist who conducted fieldwork on the music of Afghanistan from 1973 to 1977, accompanied by his wife Veronica Doubleday, who researched women's music-making. In 1990, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The Afghanistan Music Unit (AMU) was launched in 2001 to investigate the state of music in Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era. Baily's resultant report led to establishing a music school in Kabul for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which survived until the return of the Taliban in 2021.

His research continued over the years, focusing on the music of Afghan migrants in the UK, Ireland, Germany, the United States, and Australia. In REF 2008, the AMU Impact Case Study was awarded a grade of 4*. From 2009 to 2011, Baily held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship at Goldsmiths to write a monograph on the relationships between political change and the state of music in Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora from 1977 to 2010.

In 2011, Baily visited the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), the coeducational vocational music school in Kabul founded by Afghan musicologist Dr. Ahmad Sarmast. In 2014, Doubleday and Baily attended the ANIM Winter Academy in Kabul as teachers and performers of Afghan music. Also 2014, Baily published *War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan: The Ethnographer's Tale*, which included a DVD containing four of his fieldwork movies.

In 2023, Baily and Doubleday led concerts of Afghan music at various locations: Goldsmiths during a book launch for Community Work with Migrant and Refugee Women, the Afghanistan and Central Asia Association; Somerville College, Oxford; the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies at the University of Sussex; and the Milton Keynes Arts Centre, a concert for Afghan migrant families.

In 2024, Baily and Doubleday received the Avicenna International Award for Intercultural Cooperation for Peace for their work documenting, promoting, and performing Afghan music.

View a selection of John Baily's research on Goldsmiths Research Online.

John Drever works across acoustics, audiology, soundscape studies, experimental music and sound art, and has devised listening experiences and practice research projects related to place, listening and hearing in many different contexts and configurations, often in collaboration with other artists. Drever’s practice represents an ongoing inquiry into the affect, perception, design and practice of everyday environmental sound and human utterance.

Following his acoustic study of public toilets and the impact of 'ecological' hand dryers on accessibility, Drever calls for a new paradigm for understanding hearing that extends from a medical classification of the otologically normal to a socio-cultural conception of the auraltypical, heralding a new agenda of aural diversity and aural relativism within music, sound studies, acoustics and urban design. He first presented these ideas at Hearing Landscape Critically: Music, Place, and the Spaces of Sound, Harvard University in 2013, subsequently presented and published widely and created a number of art works exploring aural diversity, most recently on spatial perception. With Prof Andrew Hugill he co-edited Aural Diversity (Routledge 2022).

Collaborators include: Rachel Gomme, Alice Oswald, Alaric Sumner, Tony Thatcher, Tony Whitehead (RSPB), Louise K. Wilson, Suiji Okada and comedian Mark Kelly. He is a member of Blind Ditch and worked on many projects with the poet Lawrence Upton. Commissions range from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Paris (1999), Shiga National Museum, Japan (2012), Trumpington Park Primary School, Cambridge (2021-22) to IMMA, Dublin (2023).

He has been a Visiting Scholar at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong (2007), a Visiting Research Fellow at Seian University of Art and Design, Japan (2012-13) and a Guest Professor in The Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University (2016). In 2013 he became an Academician of The Academy of Urbanism.

View a selection of John Levack Drever's research on Goldsmiths Research Online.

As a composer Ian Gardiner has received major awards, including a Prix Italia and Sony Award for his work for radio, Monument, and a British Composer Award for Toccata, Canzona, Ricercare for symphonic wind and brass. In 2012 his piece for solo bass clarinet and ensemble, spinning and weaving, was also shortlisted for a British Composer Award in the chamber music category. He works regularly with major British orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Britten Sinfonia, and contemporary music groups such as Ensemble 10/10 and the Nieuw Ensemble of Amsterdam. He has also written for soloists including Andrew Zolinsky, John Harle, Sir Willard W.White, Dame Evelyn Glennie and Peter Donohoe. For eight years he directed and played percussion in the idiosyncratic new music group George W Welch, for whom he wrote many pieces and transcriptions. 2025 sees the release of an album of his solo piano music, Line Drawings, played by Andrew Zolinsky.

As an arranger and orchestrator, he has collaborated on projects with Toumani Diabaté, Abel Selaocoe, the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, Jocelyn Pook, Hiba al-Kawas, Stevens & Pound, Adrian Utley, Goldfrapp and OMD. In 2011 he recycled Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture for an orchestra of instruments made out of scrap materials, performed in the Royal Albert Hall at the BBC Proms, for the BBC4 TV documentary Scrapheap Orchestra. His arrangements for Toumani Diabaté and the London Symphony Orchestra can be heard on the World Circuit album, Kôrôlén.

Ian studied at Royal Holloway College and the University of Keele, lectured at the University of Salford, Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and the University of Liverpool before coming to Goldsmiths in 2006. He taught composition, arranging and orchestration, devised the MMus in Creative Practice, as well as developing modules in the theory and composition of media music and sound. He was Head of the Department of Music from 2015-18, and directed Goldsmiths Sinfonia and the Contemporary Music Ensemble, for which he created many pieces and arrangements. He founded and edited (for 13 years) the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (Liverpool University Press), and with Tom Armstrong, co-leads a research project into British postminimal composers and ensembles of the 1980s and 90s.

www.iangardinermusic.com

https://soundcloud.com/y-n-garedunord

View a selection of Ian Gardiner's work on Goldsmiths Research Online.

Simon McVeigh’s earlier books include Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge), with its associated Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800; and The Italian Solo Concerto 1700-1760 (Boydell), the result of a large-scale collaboration with Jehoash Hirshberg. An edition of Arne’s oratorio Judith, with Peter Lynan, was selected for Vol. 100 in the prestigious series Musica Britannica.

Current research centres on Britain around 1900. An AHRC-funded project on London concert Life 1880-1914 (in collaboration with Leanne Langley and the late Cyril Ehrlich) culminated in Music in Edwardian London (Boydell), exploring the rich diversity of music-making in the capital and its relationship with music across the world. The book is again supported by an extensive archive of concert data at the associated website. The focus on urban musicology also led to the founding of a new series of Elements in Music and the City for Cambridge University Press.

Following doctoral studies at Oxford University, Simon took up a lectureship in Aberdeen before joining Goldsmiths in 1980. He was appointed Professor of Music and Head of Department in 1997. From 2001 to 2013 he served as a member of the College’s Senior Management Team, as Pro-Warden (Research and Enterprise) and then as Deputy Warden. From 2018 to 2020, he was President of the Royal Musical Association.

A frequent contributor to radio and TV (including BBC2’s ‘The Birth of British Music’ and Radio 4’s ‘In Search of the Black Mozart’), he is also a violinist, viola-player and conductor, directing the London Mozart Players and the Hanover Band in concerts and recordings. Formerly a governor of Trinity College of Music and of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, he was made an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 2007.

View a selection of Simon McVeigh's work on Goldsmiths Research Online.

Keith Negus is internationally recognised for research on the music industries and cultural production, and for contributing to the study and teaching of popular music. Before joining Goldsmiths he taught at West Surrey College of Art and Design, The Centre for Mass Communication Research at Leicester University, and the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. He is the author of Producing Pop (1992), Popular Music in Theory (1996), Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (1999), Bob Dylan (2008), co-author of Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value (2004), and Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (1997, 2013), and co-editor of Popular Music Studies (2002).

His peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters include studies of the songs and music of individual artists, research on fans and working life in record companies, and contributions to debates about cultural theory. His research covers all aspects of creating, producing, distributing, and consuming popular music, and explores the links connecting texts (lyric, voice, sound, gesture, image) and contexts (media, political systems, technology, commercial and state organisations, social and natural environments). He is on the Editorial Board of the journal Popular Music and was coordinating editor 2000-2012. A member of the international advisory board of several journals, he has participated in many expert panels and project teams. He regularly presents his research in the UK and internationally, recently speaking at various universities in China, Japan, and South Korea, as well as in Europe, and the United States.

Keith is collaborating with Dr Qian Zhang, Communication University of China, Beijing, researching the history, culture, and organisations of the popular music industries in China. He is researching the history of creative interactions between British and Japanese musicians with Dr Masahiro Yasuda, Kyoto Seika University, and Dr Naomi Matsumoto, Goldsmiths. He is also working with Dr Martin Clancy, founder of AI:OK, and Dr Daniel Nordgård, University of Agder, researching how artificial intelligence is affecting creative practices, work in the music industries, and systems of regulation.

View a selection of Keith Negus's research on Goldsmiths Research Online.

Keith Potter’s book, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge), was published in 2000, with a paperback edition in 2002; The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, co-edited with Kyle Gann and Pwyll ap Sion (Ashgate), appeared in 2013.

Recent research on the American composer, Steve Reich – arising in particular from Keith’s extensive work in the Reich collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland – has appeared in Tonality Since 1950 (Franz Steiner), Rethinking Reich (Oxford) and the journal Contemporary Music Review. His book on Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is scheduled for publication by Oxford in 2026.

Recent conference and seminar papers have focused mainly, but not exclusively, on Reich. He has delivered several keynote lectures, including at the First Biennial International Conference on Music and Minimalism at the University of Bangor, Wales, in 2007; at the conference, ‘Minimalism: Location, Aspect, Moment’, at Winchester School of Art/University of Southampton in 2016; and at ‘More Sounds, More Personalities: British Postminimalism, 1979-97’ at Goldsmiths in 2024.

Keith studied at the University of Birmingham, University College Cardiff and the University of York. Appointed to a lectureship at Goldsmiths in 1976, he was Head of the Department of Music from 2004 to 2007. Other positions there included membership of Council, of the Honorary Degrees and Fellowships Committee and of the Academic Progress Committee. He was also on the Advisory Council of the Institute of Musical Research in the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

The co-founder and, for seventeen years, Chief Editor of Contact: a Journal of Contemporary Music, the 34 issues of which were republished online in 2019, he has also been a regular music critic on The Independent. For many years he served as a trustee of the Hinrichsen Foundation and as a founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music; he was also, at various times, Chair of both these organisations. He continues as a writer and reviewer, both for academic journals and for The Guardian and Opera Magazine.

View a selection of Keith Potter's work on Goldsmiths Research Online.

Roger Redgate is a composer, conductor, and improviser. He graduated at the Royal College of Music, where he won prizes for composition, violin, harmony, and counterpoint, studying composition with Edwin Roxburgh and electronic music with Lawrence Casserley. A DAAD scholarship enabled him to study with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber in Freiburg. From 1989 to 1992 he was Northern Arts Composer Fellow, lecturing at Durham and Newcastle Universities. He was invited as guest composer and conductor at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik from 1984 –1994, where he received the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis for composition.

He was conductor and artistic director of Ensemble Exposé with whom he performed at many European festivals and radio stations, including BBC Radio 3, Radio France Musique, RAI (Italy) and Hessische Rundfunks. He has published articles and book chapters on composition, notation, improvisation, music and politics, and the music of Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy.

His compositions have been performed extensively throughout Europe, Australia and the USA and he has received commissions from the BBC, the French Ministry of Culture, Radio France Musique, The European Commission, Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, the Huddersfield Festival, Venice Biennale and Ensemble 21 New York. CD recordings of his works are available on the Coviello, Oboe Classics, NMC, Migro Records, Metier and Edition Zeitklang labels. His compositions are published by United Music Publishing, Ltd, Editions Henry Lemoine, Paris and the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music.

rogerredgate.com

United Music Publishing

https://soundcloud.com/roger-redgate

View a selection of Roger Redgate's work on Goldsmiths Research Online.