Gareth Dylan Smith

Gareth Dylan Smith is active nationally and internationally as a teacher, speaker, researcher and drummer. His main research interest areas are drum kit studies and popular music education, and his principal disciplinary approaches are sociological, philosophical, and autoethnographic. Themes in his scholarship include eudaimonia, improvisation, creativities, punk pedagogies, and meaningfulness. Gareth’s work has been published in journals including Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education; Music Educators Journal; International Journal of Education and the Arts; Research Studies in Music Education; Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education; Music + Practice; Punk & Post-Punk; Journal of Music, Technology and Education; British Journal of Music Education; and Artivate. He has written dozens of articles for encyclopedias including several pieces about drummers in the Grove dictionary of American music. Gareth’s books include I drum, Therefore I Am: Being and Becoming a Drummer; Sociology for Music teachers: Practical Applications (with Hildegard Froehlich); Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning (with Mike Dines and Tom Parkinson); The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education (with Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran and Phil Kirkman); Sound Advice for Drummers; Eudaimonia: Perspectives for Music Learning (with Marissa Silverman), and Magical Nexus: A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit. Gareth’s first love is to play drums.

Career highlights as a drummer include a partnership of more than 20 years with award-wining Welsh composer, producer ,and guitarist, Stephen Wheel; 100+ punk shows across the UK, Ireland, Europe, and USA with London-Irish psycho-cèilidh band, Neck; touring and recording with singer-songwriters Gillian Glover and Daniel Spiller; four albums with garage rock band, the Eruptörs; making and releasing an album with Iron Maiden alumni, V1; a stint as the house drummer for the global Guitar Idol finals; and playing in dozens of regional and off West End musical theatre productions around London and England. Gareth is currently working on an album of duets and a concept album with Stephen Wheel based on the John Le Carré novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He plays drums for new wave band, Black Light Bastards with Dan Sheehan, Andy and the Rattlesnakes, and with Zack Moir in rock-jazz-electronica duo, Build A Fort.

Gareth has served as a board member of the International Society for Music Education and as President and Vice President of the Association for Popular Music Education. He is Chair of the National Association for Music Education’s Special Research Interest Group on Popular Music Education and a member of the steering committee for the International Society for the Sociology of Music Education. Gareth is founding editor, with Bryan Powell, of the Journal of Popular Music Education.