ABOUT Robert Damm

SESSION TITLE: Drum Circle Facilitators Workshop

Robert Damm is Professor of Music at Mississippi State University where he teaches classes about World Music, Music of Africa, Music of Latin America, Native American Music, African American Music, World Drumming, and Mississippi Blues. He studied music and culture in Cuba, Ghana, and Mali.  He is a certified Orff-Schulwerk teacher and a Smithsonian Folkways certified teacher of world music. His teaching reflects his commitment to community engagement, best practices in interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential learning, and the African philosophy of human interconnectedness known as Ubuntu. Damm has facilitated hundreds of drum circles for thousands of participants since 2009 when he hosted a “Drum-a-ganza Community Drum Circle” celebrating health and wellness sponsored by PAS and REMO. Because drum circles so effectively build a sense of community, he provided a recreational drum circle class for the First-Year Experience program at MSU from 2013-2021 (returning in 2025). Damm is co-chair of the PAS Interactive Drumming Committee which he joined in 2014. He published eight PAS articles about interactive drumming/drum circles including “A Brief History of the PAS Interactive Drumming Committee” (2013), “The State of the Arts of Interactive Drumming” (2023), “Foundational Rhythms for Drum Circles” (2021), “Exploring Meter in a Drum Circle” (2020), “African Drumming and Drum Circles” (2017), and “Recreational Drum Circles for University Students” (2015). He published 15 other articles on related world drumming topics including the Afro Roots music of Mongo Santamaria, the Pinkster African festival of New York, hand drum duets, fanga and bamboula rhythms, the jembe of Mali, and the udu clay-pot instrument of Nigeria. Damm studied percussion with Hugh Soebbing at Quincy University, Tome Siwe and Fred Fairchild at the University of Illinois, and Robert Schietroma, Ron Fink, and Ed Soph at the University of North Texas.