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

Marta Riccardi

Marta is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Music at the University of Liverpool, supervised by Prof Kenneth Smith and Prof Michael Spitzer. She is investigating the harmonic language in Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s operatic works, with an emphasis on non-diatonic techniques and scale collections. Her research comprises elements of historical musicology, focusing on the Russian repertoire, and a strong analytical and theoretical background, particularly engaging with neo-Riemannian theory.

Originally from Rome, Italy, she completed a MA with distinction in Music Psychology at the University of Sheffield in 2019, where her dissertation explored music perception and affect in operatic and film music. She holds a first class honours BMus from the University of Edinburgh, completed in 2018, where she specialised in music analysis.

She has presented at national and international conferences, including BrumMAC 2021, EuroMAC 2021, the 17th International Conference of the Gruppo Analisi e Teoria Musicale, the RMA Student Conference 2021, the Institute for Russian Music Studies Conference in 2021, the Society for Musicology in Ireland Conference in 2022 and NewMAC 2022. She is passionate about issues of equality and inclusion and has been serving on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee of the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership since 2021.

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.