Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about music education. This has something to do with my university, ANU, choosing to save money by integrating the school of music into a broader school combined with the art and design school and the centre for museum and heritage practice and making several staff redundant, but it’s also […]
Last week, I had the pleasure of assisting with a wayang gamelan performance for the 60th anniversary of the Indonesia Project at ANU. If you’ve never seen wayang before, a form of Indonesian (mainly Javanese and Balinese) theatre. It uses shadow puppets, which has a big screen with a light projected onto it, with the […]
One of the big takeaways from me from this year’s IASPM Conference, the biggest meeting of the top academics in popular music studies, was that Spotify sucks. The really interesting thing about Spotify, is that almost everyone who uses it seems to dislike it in some way. I’ve seen numerous complaints about their renumeration to […]
Last Saturday, I was blessed with a free ticket at the Canberra Theatre Centre. I was umming and ahhing about going to this production: tickets for under 30s were $60, plus a fee which brought it up to almost $70. I had never seen this opera before, but I thought the tickets were quite steep […]
I’ve started to approach my work like I do my running. In running, we have cyclical training: a program for a race is often split into multiple phases, with allocated “de-load” weeks spaced throughout. This provides a foundation to solidly build toward a goal without overloading and crashing out. I think this is a useful […]
The last time I was in Berlin, it was on a school trip. We stayed somewhere near some remnant of the Berlin Wall, in a dingy hostel. We went to the Legoland centre and the Opera, and apart from that I don’t remember much of it (it was almost 10 years ago). I do remember […]
I had the pleasure of presenting at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) in Cologne, Germany this week. If you’re thinking that’s an odd choice for a musician, you’d be slightly right, but even though it says “theatre”, really it was all about performance. My research does look into performance a lot, and it […]
I’m sitting on the 2nd floor of the Beethoven Haus Museum, which is situated in the historic house Beethoven grew up in (although, renovations have changed it significantly from Beethoven’s time). It’s a little room, with a set of couches arranged in a cross in the middle of it, a few windows, and a sign […]
On Thursday, I hit a personal record — 5000 words written in a day. On Thursday, I backed this up with another 4000 words. I’ve been trying to finish a chapter of my thesis before I leave for conferences in Europe — I quite like this as a deadline, as it means I won’t feel […]
Last week, I was listening to some Indonesian news through SBS, one of Australia’s publicly-funded broadcasters. They do a range of news programs in many languages, and it’s a great learning resources. Now, normally, when listening to Indonesian I can make out the general gist of a story even if I don’t know the meaning […]