Five Peer-Reviewed Articles and My First Academic Year at LASALLE

As my first academic year at LASALLE comes to a close, I find myself reaching a small but meaningful milestone: five peer-reviewed journal articles published! While I am grateful for the number, what matters more is that these articles have begun to make visible a research direction that has been taking shape across teaching, supervision, performance, and writing. The topics differ, but the underlying concern persists: how musicians learn, judge, communicate, and make sense of practice in higher education; Practice-led research.

My first academic year at LASALLE taught me a multitude of things, but what stayed with me most is this: in music, some of the most important knowledge remains tacit, and higher music education still needs better ways to articulate it without flattening it. What I mean in a nutshell: Strong musicians often know how to do things before they know how to explain them; they can shape time, direct energy, respond to ensemble movement, and make judgements in real time; they know when something lands, when something drags, and when something is technically correct but musically dead. The problem is that higher music education still too often either leaves that knowledge tacit or translates it into language so blunt that the musical (and emotional) intelligence disappears!-That has become one of the central concerns of my work.

Concurrently, my ongoing work at Singapore Raffles Music College has kept these questions grounded in day-to-day lecturing, supervision, and principal instrumental drum set study. Across undergraduate and postgraduate settings, I kept seeing the same challenge from another angle: students often have meaningful musical experiences, rehearsal decisions, and artistic instincts, but need stronger structures for explaining what those experiences show. That has made the connection between performance, reflection, judgement, and assessment feel even more urgent.

Hence, the five articles are not separate achievements to me, instead being early markers of a research programme taking shape:

One asks how rhythm curricula might be broadened through global groove practices.

Another examines ensemble musicianship and emerging performers.

The next considers creative health through the lenses of identity, listening, and belonging.

Another examines judgement and validity in arts assessment.

The final one looks at genre-inclusive curriculum design and how contemporary theory can better reflect the musical worlds students actually inhabit.

Different topics, same underlying problem: how to make musical knowledge legible without over-academisation.

Too often, practice and research are treated as though they belong to separate worlds. Pedagogy sits in one corner, performance in another, and academic legitimacy somewhere above them both. In my opinion, as a practitioner who's been both in the halls of academia and the trenches of showbiz, I do not think that reflects how music and musicians actually operate.

Thus, what this year has sharpened for me is the need to bridge practical knowledge and theoretical know-how without insulting either. I kept returning to the same question: how do we articulate strong practice academically without draining it of the very thing that makes it worth articulating in the first place? That, to me, is where practice-led research becomes genuinely important rather than decorative. Instead of using it as a way to avoid rigour (students choosing it because of reduced word counts, the chance to submit compositions or recitals as "artefacts"....), it is a way of demanding a different kind of rigour, one that takes sound, judgement, interaction, and embodied knowledge seriously enough to examine them properly. Furthermore, the need appears especially urgent in contemporary music, where the gap between real-world practice and academic language can still be wider than it should be.

Important caveat: I do not plan to move away from performance into research. I see the research as a way of returning more carefully to performance, teaching, rehearsal, listening, and sound, so that the endgame provides better language for what musicians and teachers already know, resulting in this knowledge being taught, assessed, supervised, questioned, and developed more responsibly.

The epiphany wrought during my first year in academia: contemporary music higher education still needs stronger ways to articulate what good musicians and teachers actually know. It needs frameworks that are intellectually serious, pedagogically useful, and still applicable and of interest to people who make music in the real world.

Sound above all.

P.S. For those interested, the five peer-reviewed journal articles are:

1. Decolonising the Rhythm Curriculum: Integrating Global Groove Practices in Undergraduate Aural Skills

2. Creative Health Through Music Pedagogy: Case Studies in Identity, Listening, and Cultural Belonging in Higher Education

3. The Intentional Pocket Project: A Jazz-Informed Workshop Series for Emerging Ensemble Musicians

4. Designing Genre-Inclusive Diploma Pathways in Contemporary Theory: A Practice-Led Curriculum Framework for an Independent Awarding Body

5. When Formal Criteria Fail: Judgment and Validity in Arts Assessment