Portfolio Items - Zack Moir

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education draws together current thinking and practice on popular music education from empirical, ethnographic, sociological and philosophical perspectives. Through a series of unique chapters from authors working at the forefront of music education, this book explores the ways in which an international group of music educators each approach popular …

Crouch

Crouch is a free improvisation group made up of staff and students from the music programmes at Edinburgh Napier University. ‘First’ (see below) is our debut album.

IDDM

IDDM is a piece for tape and improvising musician which draws on data from my diabetes to generate pitch content. The first performance of this piece took place in St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, on Friday the 10th of February, as part of the ‘Old Town / New Music’ concert series. This version was played in quadraphonic diffusion with …

Your Feedback Is Important To Us

This music is taken from the installation of the same name, which was an interactive, generative sound art piece that gathered text from Twitter (using a hashtag that audience members used, pertaining to the event) and sonified this textual data in the installation space. Microphones in the space fed the sounds back into the system …

How Does This Work Then?

Whenever I get to play around with a cello or think about writing for it, I instinctively seem to see it as some sort of ‘orchestral’ version of the bass guitar – an instrument that I am more familiar with. As such, this music was composed to represent the exploratory, experimental ‘bass-like’ mentality I naturally …

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Mesmer

This international group (comprising vocalists Rebecca Schaefer, Stefanie Schmachtel-Maxfield and Jess Abrams, with saxophonist Zack Moir and electronic artist Mr Hay) aim to flip the traditional roles of instruments and voices to produce beautiful and disorienting textures and melodic landscapes.

Build A Fort

‘Ignorant Populists’ is the debut EP from transatlantic saxophone and drums duo Build A Fort. The band is Zack Moir (Edinburgh) on saxophone and Gareth Dylan Smith (New York) on drums and together they create powerful, energetic, groove-based music that is an experimental blend of jazz, rock, and electronica. ‘Ignorant Populists’ will be released for …

DIALOGUES / concerning…

‘DIALOGUES / concerning…’ is a collaboration with poet and playwright Dave Fargnoli. The album is a combination of original music and spoken word featuring ‘…beautifully tense textures and infectious melodies‘ (BBC Radio Scotland) which find a counterpoint in the dramatic lyrical texts of Dave Fargnoli. ‘Improvisational and Inspirational, eclectic and restlessly inventive‘ (The Scotsman).

The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education

Popular music is a growing presence in education, formal and otherwise, from primary school to postgraduate study. Programmes, courses and modules in popular music studies, popular music performance, songwriting and areas of music technology are becoming commonplace across higher education. Additionally, specialist pop/rock/jazz graded exam syllabi, such as RockSchool and Trinity Rock and Pop, have …