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Event

Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Colin Enright and Kelsey Lussier

Wednesday, March 25, 2026 16:30to18:00
Elizabeth Wirth Music Building A-832, 527 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 1E3, CA
Price: 
Free Admission

Doctoral Colloquium:Colin Enright (Music Education); Kelsey Lussier (PhD candidate, Music Theory)

Title: Resilience-Supportive Processes in Community Drumming (Colin Enright)

Community music engagement has been increasingly recognized as a context for social connection and wellbeing, yet research examining the processes through which resilience may be supported within those contexts remains limited. Guided by a social-ecological framework, this research examines participants’ experiences in two community drumming programs in order to map resilience-related mechanisms that may be enacted within participatory music environments. Drawing on a qualitative case series design including semi-structured interviews with members and facilitators, the study identifies three interrelated domains central to participants’ accounts: ecological resources, relational processes, and outcomes and transfer. Together, these findings illustrate how commonly identified psychological and social elements in music and wellbeing research—including positive facilitator influence, a non-punitive environment, belonging, feeling valued, experiences of achievement, shifts in self-efficacy, and strategies for managing stress—may function more specifically as resilience-supportive processes. The presentation considers implications for future work in community music, resilience research, and the design of inclusive participatory music environments.

Colin Enright is a PhD candidate in Music Education and Interdisciplinary Studies. His research examines music participation in community and educational contexts and its relationships with resilience, mental health, and well-being, as well as its implications for pedagogical practice. He is an educator, conductor, and co-editor (with Andrea Creech) of the volume Pedagogies for Later-Life Music Learning and Participation: Facilitating Creative Musical Development in Later Life.


Title: The Roles of Texture, Timbre, and Orchestration in Popular-Music Grooves (Kelsey Lussier)

Musical grooves are repeating “large-scale, multi-layered patterns that involve both pitch and rhythmic materials” (Zbikowski 2004). This definition suggests the importance of parameters such as rhythm, meter, texture, and orchestration to the structure of a groove. However, much of the existing analytical and perceptual literature tends to consider a groove’s rhythmic elements in isolation, painting an incomplete picture of a groove’s structures. This is partially because effective analytical technology for synthesizing observations about timbre, texture, and orchestration with observations about other musical parameters is currently lacking. Therefore, this project aims to broaden the scope of approaches to analyzing popular-music grooves by presenting a new analytical methodology for incorporating observations about timbre, texture, and orchestration into groove analyses, and by investigating trends and patterns in groove orchestration. My analyses result in orchestrational profiles and comparisons of grooves in both funk music from 1967–1989 and Quebecois popular music from 1990–2026.

Kelsey Lussier is a PhD Candidate in Music Theory whose research focuses on intersections of timbre, texture, and orchestration with rhythm and meter, especially in a popular-music repertoire context.

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.

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