SMA Student Representatives help the committee discover what sort of workshops, seminars and conferences are of interest to emerging scholars, and take a lead role in organising and developing our programme of student events. Profiles of the Student Representatives are given below.
Email: students@sma.ac.uk
Rebekah Donn
Rebekah is currently reading for a PhD is Music Education at Edinburgh Napier University, supervised by Dr Zack Moir and Bryden Stillie. Her PhD focuses on Scottish secondary school music provision and the nature of its relationship with degree-level music study. While her PhD examines this provision as a whole, Rebekah is particularly interested in issues relating to the development of musical literacy within this context.
Rebekah completed the BMus (Hons) programme at Edinburgh Napier University in 2016, specialising in piano and music analysis in her final year. She then obtained an MMus with distinction from the University of Hull in 2018 where her masters thesis comprised an empirical investigation into the pedagogy of Schenkerian Analysis in contemporary UK university music curricula. Alongside her (part-time) studies, Rebekah works as a private music teacher in South Ayrshire, Scotland, teaching piano, flute, recorder and music theory. Rebekah is also an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and enjoys assisting with teaching on the BA (Hons) Music programme at Edinburgh Napier University.
Aidan McGartland
Aidan McGartland is a doctoral candidate in music theory at McGill University. His dissertation examines the serial works of Elisabeth Lutyens from the 1960s, synthesising post-tonal, formal, timbral, and sketch-based approaches to evaluate her style and technique, and to situate her music within the broader landscape of twentieth-century modernism.
Aidan holds a First Class Honours degree in classical voice and musicology from the University of Melbourne and a Master’s degree in musicology from the University of Oxford. Focusing on musical modernism, he has published analytical articles on the music of Elisabeth Lutyens and Igor Stravinsky, with forthcoming work on Benjamin Britten, Margaret Sutherland, and Maurice Ravel. He has also written book reviews for journals such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society and contributed numerous public-oriented articles to The Conversation.
Alongside his research, Aidan teaches undergraduate music analysis and musicianship at McGill. He has presented his work at conferences of the Society for Music Theory and the Musicological Society of Australia. Since 2021, he has been an active participant in the Society for Music Analysis’ annual conference and is excited to serve as student representative, helping to connect and support the next generation of music analysts.