Gamelan and Semiotics I’ve been thinking lots about the semiotics of sound and music, particularly regarding gamelan. Semiotics is essentially the idea saying that music often represents something that it doesn’t inherently represent. It sounds more complicated than it is, because a few examples show quite clearly how this can be. Usually music is an […]
Running and Producing The festival block ended last week, and finally I can get around to publishing this newsletter. Just prior to festival, Eugene, the artistic director, told me he’d been thinking that an ultra-marathon runner is a great set of skills to have in a production manager too. It sounds crazy at first, but […]
Music Festivals and Survival It’s a bad time to be a music festival. By now, most of us have seen the news of big name music festivals shutting down. In Canberra, the Spilt Milk and Groovin the Moo festivals both had to shut down (although Spilt Milk has now had a resurgence). Across Australia, other […]
Does Classical Music discourage young Musicians? Over the past month, I finished reading “Class, Control, and Classical Music” by Anna Bull. It’s an ethnography of young musicians in England, participating in youth orchestras and youth choirs. It’s a damning work which doesn’t shy away from the impacts of classical music on young people — for […]
A New Newsletter for the New Year?!? That’s right — with the new year I thought it was finally time to update how I do things, given I didn’t publish anything for three months. This newsletter structure is prioritised around better quality content, fewer times a year. It’s more sustainable for me and less junk […]