As a boy McPherson played soprano cornet in the Parkes Town Band, and by the age of 16 had won over 50 regional, state and Australian titles before he changed to trumpet in the last two years of high school.

He obtained his Licentiate and Fellowship in Trumpet Performance from Trinity College, London in 1975–76 and then undertook a Master of Music Education at Indiana University, graduating in 1982.

He has played a key role in the development of the Music, Mind and Wellbeing initiative; an ongoing collaboration between the MCM and the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences.

[13] He has served on the editorial boards of all the major English language research journals in music education.,[14] McPherson's wider academic work has been cited over 7000 times.

Largely informed by his corpus of work looking at attitudes of musicians toward their own practice, and broader community perceptions of music learning, he has worked extensively to promote the value of music training and exposure in people of all ages, particularly in childhood,[16] having given hundreds of teacher workshops and presentations across all parts of Australia, Europe, the UK and the USA.

McPherson was chair of the scientific committee convening the International Symposium of Performance Science hosted by the University of Melbourne in July 2019.

McPherson was a co-founder, along with Hong Soo Lee (Korea) and Tadahiro Murao (Japan), of Asia-Pacific Symposium on Music Education Research (APSMER), to provide a forum for Asia-Pacific researchers, graduate students and teachers in music education to meet every two years.

He has also performed and recorded extensively with smaller ensembles, and for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and served as an adjudicator for competitions and eisteddfods throughout Australia.

McPherson was awarded an Artium Doctorem Honoris Causa, Honorary Doctorate at the Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, Sweden in 2021.

The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance, of which McPherson is editor, consists of a two volume, fifty four chapter compendium that involves eighty scholars from thirteen countries.