Adam is Associate Professor in Music and Head of Pedagogy at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. He is an expert in both music education and medieval and Renaissance music, being much in demand as a speaker, contributor, and author on these subjects. 

Adam is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is an internationally recognised scholar in musicology and music education, having given invited lectures and talks for All-Party Parliamentary Groups, University of Padova, Heidelberg University, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford), and All Souls College (Oxford). He teaches right across the UG and PG courses at RBC and enjoys helping students to develop as music educators.

He has researched widely in the fields of music education and musicology, and has taught music in a range of settings. He is interested in the ways in which musical pedagogies have changed over time, and what these changes can tell us about our current pedagogical approaches. His research in education has been debated in the House of Lords and he has appeared on a panel with the Children's Commissioner. He has also been a panellist on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters, Radio 4’s Rethinking Music, and has provided comment for national newspapers and leading industry magazine publications on a wide range of issues in music education.

His work has been published in leading academic journals and book publications, including Early Music History and British Journal of Music Education. He recently co-edited ‘History as Fantasy in Music, Sound, Image, and Media’ (Routledge, 2024) and is working on a monograph on the fifteenth-century music theorist, Johannes Tinctoris. In Autumn 2019 Adam was the Albi Rosenthal Visiting Fellowship in Music at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, giving him privileged access to rare books and manuscripts held in the Bodleian Special Collections. He has since been involved in research projects examining traditions of exemplarity in medieval and Renaissance musical theory, the reception history of early music, and music education in the modern world.

Adam leads and co-leads a number of research projects, having previously been a Co-Investigator on the AHRC Network ‘Representing Classical Music in the 21st Century’. He sits on a number of music education advisory groups, is Chair of the Plainsong & Medieval Music Society, and a member of the Cantus International Governing Council.