Michael Davidson

Michael recently completed the MA Music in Development at SOAS. His PhD research focuses on barriers and enablers to embedding musical inclusion practice within the core activities of Music Education Hubs.

Michael has worked for Hertfordshire Music Service for 30 years, also playing and delivering workshops at community festivals. After beginning teaching classical guitar, he has led the development of musical inclusion projects, many of which develop dialogue between formal and community music pedagogy. His role combines writing funding bids, recruiting and training music tutors, and research, development and evaluation of instrumental music teaching models. Michael was part of the Musical Futures pathfinder in Hertfordshire and is currently co-leading the research and development of MusicNet East, (www.musicnet-east.org.uk) a strategic partnership of Hertfordshire, Essex and Cambridgeshire Music Education Hubs and Youth Music. Running from 2015-18, the project seeks to develop ways for music service instrumental music tutors to teach music for personal and social outcomes. For this project he’s developing a community music workshop that uses informal music pedagogy to teach classical guitar technique and to build community.

Some workshop recordings can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/michael-davidson-74

Selected projects developed for Hertfordshire Music Service:

• Hertfordshire Songwriter
• Family Music
• Music for a Generation
• Musical Memory Box

• Musical Citizenship
• Practice as research
• Informal Learning
• Interdisciplinary Dialogue