The latest offering in Cambridge University Press’s acclaimed series on musical topics, the Cambridge Companion to Percussion discusses the evolution of percussion from historical, scientific, academic, and applied perspectives. Edited by noted percussionist Dr. Russell Hartenberger, this book includes contributions from many of today’s leading performers and composers including William L. Cahn, William Moersch, Garry Kvistad, Rick Mattingly, Colin Currie, Aiyun Huang, Russell Hartenberger, Steven Schick, Bob Becker, Steve Reich, Peter Erskine, B. Michael Williams, Adam Sliwinski, and Michael Bakan (a complete list appears at the link below).
Dr. Schutz’s chapter Lessons from the laboratory: The musical translation of scientific research on movement summarizes numerous studies on movement and music, emphasizing their practical implications for percussion performance and pedagogy. The chapter offers a plain language discussion of how to best use scientific research on movements to improve performance and pedagogy. The book is scheduled for release in North America in May 2016. Click here for more information.
Through a partnership with the Scholarly Research Committee, we ran testing stations at PASIC (Percussive Arts Society International Convention) in 2013 and 2014 as part of a large-scale project exploring the effects of musical training on music perception. Across these years, lab members tested over 150 percussionists, and engaged in an outreach effort to explain the relevance of lab projects for performing musicians, educators, composers, and scholars alike.
Dr. Schutz and David Gerry performed in the School of the Arts Lunchtime Recital Series at Convocation Hall. The program featured a variety of works for flute and percussion, including Homage to Keith Jarrett and Gary Burton (Barbar Kolb), First Flight (Michael Colquhoun), and Adriadne for Flute and Percussion (Lou Harrison). In addition to the duos, Gerry performed two solos: Wake Up! For piccolo and alarm clock (Dehnhard) and Valentine Piece (Gorecki). Schutz also performed two solos including Trilogy: Three movements for solo vibraphone (Huesgen), and Blues for Gilbert (Glentworth).
Eight lab members travelled to Indianapolis, IN for five days to test expert percussionists on rhythm perception. Our goal was to better understand how the types of movements used in playing an instrument might lead to different listening experiences later in life. We also staffed an “experiencing research” poster session discussing how research on music cognition can inform musical education and performance. The lab is grateful to Petro-Canada for sponsoring Dr. Schutz’s 2014 Young Innovator Award providing support for this valuable endeavour. For more information about this project click 
Dr. Schutz was featured on Judith Shatin’s latest album, performing with percussionist I-Jen Fang and oboist Aaron Hill. He premiered this piece at PASIC in Austin, Texas after co-commissioning it with Fang. This was Shatin’s third solo album with Innova, and is available through both Amazon and iTunes. To preview this work, visit 
