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 […]
Hidden within Brisbane’s rather unassuming industrial suburb of Wacol is a secret. Half of this secret is grown-over bushland, with the only hint of its past some concrete foundations out by the side of the road that leads to the local prison. The other half is a collection of army buildings at the former Wacol […]
For a long time, artistic practice (think performing, composing, panting, etc.) was not considered research. Research, traditionally, has always been in written form. We might even think of the scientific methods: hypotheses and experiments and results and the write-up of these results as the most traditional research, and it’s something most people are exposed to […]
When people ask me what my favourite movie is, I usually go for Whiplash (2014). It’s an oddball choice for sure — and it’s definitely not one because it’s a feel-good movie. Indeed, I think it gets to the heart of what a favourite film is: this is undoubtedly the film that I think is […]
I’m currently working on the creative work for my thesis. It’s a theatrical work, with both a script and music which accompanies this script. It’s my first time scriptwriting, and it’s something I’m really enjoying. The problem is, I’m adapting a sequence of real-life events – a “based on a true story” type script. And […]
I’ll be honest: no-one reads this blog. Maybe you are, right now, reading these words. But I have access to the numbers, and I can tell you: no-one is reading this blog. Or at least, that’s how it feels. Because of course, some people read this blog: just not many, not many at all. Less […]