Staff and Student Activities and Achievements
- Lecturer in Composition Elliott Gyger will be in the San Francisco Bay area for the premiere of a new choral work at the beginning of March. "Dancing in the wind", a three-movement setting of words by W.B.Yeats and the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, explores contrasts between childhood and adulthood, sense and nonsense, with the playful rejuvenation of language as a central metaphor. The work was commissioned jointly by Volti, the only professional chamber choir in the US devoted exclusively to new music, and Piedmont Children's Choirs. These forces will perform the work in Berkeley, Sacramento and San Francisco, under the direction of conductor Robert Geary. The program for these concerts will also feature Elliott Gyger's "Fire in the heavens", written in 2003 for Australia's national children's choir Gondwana Voices, to words by Christopher Brennan.
- Berlioz and Debussy: Sources, Contexts and Legacies. Essays in Honour of François Lesure. Ashgate, 2007.
Assoc Prof Kerry Murphy, together with Barbara L. Kelly of Keele University, has recently edited a collection of essays by scholars of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French music has been assembled in homage to the influential and inspirational French musicologist François Lesure who died in 2001. Lesure's immense erudition was legendary and spanned music from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Two French composers who were particular foci in his scholarship were Berlioz and Debussy and this collection is based on scholarship around these two composers and the sources, contexts and legacies relating to their work. - Congratulations to the Melbourne-based TinAlley String Quartet on winning Canada's prestigious Banff International String Quartet Competition (more info).
- Listen to Barry Tuckwell on UpClose
- Internationally renowned Faculty of Music graduate, Li Wei Qin, gave a cello masterclass on 16 April (link to Melbourne Voice).
- Time Capsule. Students enrolled in Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music (740-356) since 1998 have been required to record sounds in the natural environment, including community spaces, and then to re-interpret the ‘sounds’ of our environment through computer processing and digital deconstruction of audio samples. These range from a response to the bombing of the world trade centre towers, to choirs of singing sheep and rap rhythms generated from the slamming of old car doors and basketballs. It is a document of what the next generation hear in the environment that surrounds us.
- Faculty of Music staff students are well represented at the Castelemaine Festival. Faculty related events includes:
- Ern Malley project (new works by present and past students and staff of the faculty), Saturday 7th April.
- Australian premiere of Stuart Greenbaum's opera "Nelson', Saturday 7th April.
- World premiere of Johanna Selleck's song cycle 'Becoming", Friday 6th April.
- A/Prof Denise Grocke's book Receptive Methods in Music Therapy has been published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London. Co-authored with Prof, Tony Wigram (a Research Fellow with the Faculty of Music) (more information)
- Prof John Griffiths has been appointed to the Australian Academy for the Humanities (link to UniNews)
- University of Melbourne music therapy researchers Assoc Prof Denise Grocke and Dr Clare O'Callaghan report on their work with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (link to UniNews)
- Faculty of Music graduates have won several important prizes recently. Amir Farid and Ke Lin took out the first and second prizes respectively at the 2006 Australian National Piano Awards, while violinist Cameron Hill won the 2006 Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year Award (link to UniNews). Soprano Elena Xanthoudakis won the Salzburg International Mozart Competition 2006.
- Undergraduate composition student, Lorenzo Alvaro has been chosen to represent Australia at the Asian Composers League Young Composer Competition in Hong Kong in 2007.
- Launch of Lyrebird Press and renaming of music Library (link to UniNews). Prof John Griffiths will be talking about the recently donated Louise Hanson-Dyer with John Faine on the Radio 774 'Conversation Hour' on Friday 11 August.
- The internationally renowned harpsichordist and Baroque music expert, Kenneth Gilbert, was awarded a Doctor of Music (Honoris Causa), at a recent special conferring ceremony at the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art. (link to UniNews)
- PhD student Peggy Lais is working on the conservation of a collection of historic Victorian concert programs held in the Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library’s collection. (link to UniNews)
- John Slavin's review of the Opera Project's performance of Eccle's The Judgment of Paris, July 2006 (link to The Age). UniNews coverage of these performances (link to UniNews)
- UniNews article on undergraduate French horn player, Lin Jiang (link to UniNews)
- The Melbourne Community Gamelan (link to UniNews)
- William Hennessy, Head of Strings, on current high quality of Melbourne music-making (link to The Age)
- Brenton Broadstock's chamber opera Fahrenheit 451 is performed as a co-production of Theatre Bonn and the Kammeroper NRW in one of Bonn's finest theatres with sets by one of Germany's leading contemporary artists (Markus Luppertz).
- Merlyn Quaife's Classical protest CD hits a passionate note by releasing a "classical" protest CD, Lest We Forget, with pianist Andrea Katz. (link to UniNews) It features classical interpretations of wide-ranging music, from John Lennon’s Imagine, Lewis Allen’s Strange Fruit, to Poulenc and Kurt Weill. For more information see www.tallpoppies.net.
- Uni hosts ‘lost’ Vivaldi’s Australian premiere (link to UniNews)
- Premiere of passionate Broadstock choral opus (link to UniNews)
- Internationally noted musicians Profs Nelli Shkolnikova and Barry Tuckwell join UoM (link to UniNews)
- Several members of Faculty of Music staff have recently released CD recordings of their work:
- A CD featuring the Via crucis of Professor Brenton Broadstock (Head of Composition) and works by other staff members Dr Stuart Greenbaum and Dr Linda Kouvaras, launched on Friday 21 April 2006.
- Professor Ian Holtham (Head of Keyboard) has released Forest Scenes, featuring the piano music of Robert Schumann. It is available on ABC Classics.
The Musicians' Agency promotes the University's talented musicians (link to UniNews)
Results of A/Prof Kerry Murphy's ARC projected on music in Melbourne published in dedicated issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (link to UniNews)