Bold Transition Seminars 2021: Memory, Raw Materiality and Transformation
A collaboration involving Music and Music Therapy, the Writing and Society Research Centre, the Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture, and the MARCS Institute
In September and October 2021, the Music Program hosted two online practice-led research seminars under the umbrella of Bold Transitions, conceptualised by Associate Professor Bruce Crossman. These interdisciplinary seminars brought together creative practitioners from Music and Music Therapy, the Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture, and MARCS; innovative poets from the Writing and Society Research Centre; guest composers and improvisors with strong links to WSU; and School of HCA postgraduate students from a range of disciplines. The events were supported by the School of HCA.
Improvisation, intercultural exchange, materiality, and memory were the core guiding principles for these events. Both seminars opened with a live performance by an eminent improvisational artist. The first featured Dr Peter Knight, Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra; while the second began with a performance by Dr Hyelim Kim, world-renowned traditional Korean taegum performer and former WSU Research Fellow, who joined the events from London.
The seminars also brought together four clusters of WSU creative practitioners from across Music and Music Therapy, the Writing and Society Research Centre, the Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture, and the MARCS Institute. Two of these clusters also featured HDR students from WSU’s Music, Music Therapy and Writing programs. Over several weeks, each cluster created an improvised composition based on a guiding piece of poetry. Files were shared and edited to generate finished work, and pre-recorded versions of those improvisations were played during the seminars.
Bruce Crossman wrote in his notes for the series: “The format of these seminars will start with the materiality of sound—live, in-the-moment improvisations on trumpet and taegum over zoom from Melbourne and London—and then open up to presentations on ‘raw materiality’ and ‘memory’ as transformative creativity, before, finally, moving to studio recorded multimedia improvisation presentations and discussion responses from Western Sydney’s creative communities.” Where the first seminar focused especially upon materiality and hybridity in media and form, the second touched upon ideas of memory and grief, including ecological and post-settlement traumas.
Below are links to the audio files for all four creative collaborations. You can also link to two films that were made by Addy Fong (Technical Officer, Music), Noel Burgess (Senior Technical Officer, Music) and Mitchell Hart (Senior Technical Officer, Music). These films record both seminars in their entirety and feature the opening live performances by stellar improvisers Peter Knight and Hyelim Kim, plus all staff and student presentations.
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Narrator/poet: Emeritus Professor Hazel Smith
Musicians: Professor Roger Dean (piano/electronics), Mr John Encarnacao (guitar/samples) and Dr Brendan Smyly (saxophone/electronics)
Producer: Dr Brendan Smyly
Biographies:
Emeritus Professor Hazel Smith is a writer, performer and poet and an Emeritus Professor, Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She works in multidisciplinary collaborations with the innovative group, austraLYSIS. Smith is active in the areas of poetry, performance and new media and her work has appeared in numerous international literary magazines and in literary, musical and multimedia anthologies. A recent electronic chapbook of poems, Learning to be Human, was published by SOd Press in 2020.
Professor Roger Dean is a composer/improviser, and researcher in music cognition/computation at MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University. He founded austraLYSIS, which has performed in 30 countries. His performances on the bass, piano and laptop range from the Academy of Ancient Music to the London Sinfonietta; his improvising collaborations from Ted Curson to Evan Parker. He has extensive experience in contemporary jazz and free improvisation, mainly playing piano and computers, but previously also bass and vibraphone: with Graham Collier Music (1975 until its final recording in 2013), LYSIS and austraLYSIS, the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, a numerous others from Europe and Australia.
John Encarnacao lectures in music in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney. His book, Punk Aesthetics and New Folk, was published in 2013 by Ashgate. John’s research interests include popular musicology, composition and music education, and he has presented his research internationally. In 2014-15 he co-supervised doctoral projects to completion in music composition, photography and film; cross-disciplinary supervision is a particular interest. Recent releases include albums by The Nature Strip, Espadrille and Warmer, as well an album of solo guitar improvisations, Giraffe Solos (2014). He heads the independent labels China Pig and Psychopyjama.
Dr Brendan Smyly is saxophonist who made a living in the 1990s with kitsch-bizarre showband The Andy 500 and guested on recordings by The Gadflys, Front End Loader and Jimmy Little, among others. Since the mid-2000s he has featured in improvising groups The Monstrous Now and Espadrille, the latter with John Encarnacao. In those groups he has worked with electronics as well as saxophones. Dr Smyly is an Associate Lecturer, Music & MCMT in performance and sound production at Western Sydney University.
featuring HDR students
Narrator/poet: Josh Mostafa
Musicians: Jin Ju Yang (gayageum), Joe Tabua (electric guitar/Fijian Lali percussion), Jo Truman (voice/piano), Dr Andrew Milne (keyboard, producer)
Producer: Dr Andrew Milne
Biographies:
Josh Mostafa is interested in the spaces between things: between prose and poetry, idea and narrative, the written and the spoken word. He is currently a doctoral student at the Writing & Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University, where he is researching prehistory in fiction (including ideas of narrative, form and representation). http://joshuamostafa.info/
Jin Ju Yang is a composer and gayageum player, currently enrolled at WSU to research Korean women’s folksongs from Chungcheong Province.
Joseph Tabua’s sound world embodies large slabs of colours that juxtapose indie rock influences with aleatoric and minimalist finesse. Tabua’s Fijian and Australian heritage intertwine profoundly to create an electrifying and distinct compositional voice. In February 2016, Tabua was the recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award and began his PhD in the Music program at Western Sydney University.
Jo Truman’s remarkable voice exceeds three octaves, from dark mezzo to high soprano, improvising flights of song, birdcalls and didgeridoo cries, resonant with microtonal complexities and haunting overtones. The artist’s express focus is on “the voice and its ultimate potentials,” realised over some 30 years in live performance and an extensive catalogue of radio appearances and radiophonic works. Truman (voice, piano, looping) appeared at the 2013 Mona Foma music festival in Hobart in two dramatically mercurial improvisations with Len Marks on guitar and Daniel Grinvalds on electronics and sampling.
Dr Andrew Milne joined the MARCS Institute as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in late 2013, shortly after completing his PhD in Computational Musicology at The Open University, UK. In 2016, he won an ARC DECRA award ($369,000) for a three-year research project entitled “Uncovering Universal Mechanisms for the Communication of Musical Emotion.” His research also engages with new musical interfaces, including the algorithmic generation of music, as exemplified by his suite of free music applications available at the Dynamic Tonality website, which includes the widely used musical loop generator XronoMorph.
Narrator/poet: Dr Kate Fagan
Musicians: Dr Waldo Garrido (bass/sound design), Dr Nicholas Ng (erhu/electronics/sound design)
Producer: Dr Nicholas Ng
Biographies:
Dr Kate Fagan is the Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She is an internationally recognised poet and songwriter whose third collection of poetry First Light (Giramondo, 2012) was short-listed for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. Her album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive Award for Folk Recording. In 2020 she was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Outstanding Citation for Exceptional Research Response to Crises and Recovery, for her work in establishing and directing The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging Western Sydney writers and arts workers.
Dr Waldo Garrido is a Lecturer in Contemporary Music at Western Sydney University. He is a well-known bassist, composer, and producer. He has produced two solo albums and has had two radio hits in his native Chile. As a songwriter, he is currently signed to BMG. Garrido researches and writes on the music of Chile and on the migrant experience of Syrian musicians in Berlin. As a bassist, composer and producer, he has worked with some of Australia’s top musicians such as The Catholics, The Party Boys and Disco Montego. No stranger to the Latin American charts, he is also one of the first contemporary Latin writer/producers to sign with the giant Warner Chappell music publishers.
Dr Nicholas Ng is an ethnomusicologist as well as a musician with special expertise in traditional Chinese music and Australia-China music exchange. A practice-led researcher specialising in composition and performance, Nicholas curated the festival Encounters: China (2010) and has appeared at a number of prestigious international festivals and conferences. His life as a researching artist has been documented on SBS Mandarin Radio, ABC Music Show, and in the ABC Compass program, Divine Rhythms (2018). He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with WSU’s Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture.
featuring HDR students
Narrator/poet: Jake Goetz
Musicians: Gwenda Davies (harp/voice), Claire Deak (transducer/sound design), Dr Brad Gill (percussion/sound design), Dr Nicholas Ng (húlusi/sound design)
Producer: Dr Nicholas Ng
Biographies:
Jake Goetz’s writing has appeared in various Australian journals, including Rabbit, Island, Overland, Plumwood Mountain, Southerly, Cordite and he has also twice been shortlisted for Overland’s Fair Australia Prize. In 2019 his first book, meditations with passing water (Rabbit), was shortlisted for the QLD Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance. He is the editor of the sporadically published online magazine, Marrickville Pause. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Western Sydney University. This poem is forthcoming in Cordite Poetry Review and is excerpted from his doctoral research project.
Gwenda Davies (Celtic harp) completed an MA in creative arts, then pursued harp interests, including studying traditional Welsh folk music at UNW Bangor, Wales. Upon her return to Australia, Gwenda completed an MMus(musicology) at UNSW in 2000. She joined the teaching faculty at Mitchell Conservatorium, Bathurst in 2005. Gwenda performs under the banner of ‘Emlyn’s Harp’ (solo or ensemble). She is currently a Master of Research candidate at Western Sydney University exploring a practical approach to teaching the small (Celtic) harp to WSU Masters in Creative Music Therapy students, for active music-making with future clients.
Claire Deak is a Melbourne-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and instrument collector. Her music blurs genre boundaries to focus instead on affect and narrative as well as the beauty of the sounds themselves. Her debut album The Old Capital (in collaboration with Tony Dupé/ saddleback) is out October 2020 on Lost Tribe Sound. She is currently a Master of Research candidate at Western Sydney University.
Dr Brad Gill is a composer, percussionist and co-artistic director of the composer-performer collective Sideband as well as member of the experimental improvisation project 'Mind on Fire' and the Dreambox Collective. He has also seriously studied Javanese Gamelan and North Indian Tabla and jazz improvisation. Current focusses are projects incorporating collective exploratory improvisation and intersections with non-Western music traditions. His personal composition and vibraphone approaches are grounded in and extensions of Chan practice. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Western Sydney University.
Dr Nicholas Ng is an ethnomusicologist as well as a musician with special expertise in traditional Chinese music and Australia-China music exchange. A practice-led researcher specialising in composition and performance, Nicholas curated the festival Encounters: China (2010) and has appeared at a number of prestigious international festivals and conferences. His life as a researching artist has been documented on SBS Mandarin Radio, ABC Music Show, and in the ABC Compass program, Divine Rhythms (2018). He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with WSU’s Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture.
Thursday, 5pm-6.30pm, 9 September 2021
From program notes by Associate Professor Bruce Crossman:
"In recent Chinese architecture of Rossana Hu and Lyndon Neri at The Waterhouse at South Bund in Shanghai, they celebrate life—popping out with cuts of revealed raw memory of place, collapsing public and private spaces to suggest revealed intimacy and flow between people, as in a Shanghai nong tong alley ‘full of discovery and surprise’ (Hu and Neri 2017, pp. 34-36). In this pandemic time of between spaces—between the vibrancy of before and the promise of fractured renewal, where there lies a suspended dreaming awaiting change—how do we transition to a better creative future within music and its intercultural interconnections to the world? Architects Rossana Hu and Lyndon Neri point to a sustainable future, through a transferrable model which could drive our intercultural musical creativity, where ‘accurate cuts reveal the traces of the walls with its turbulent past’ (Li 2018, p.280) but with a type of qiyun energy flow between spaces where ‘the public realm invades deeply into the core of the private sphere’ (Hu and Neri 2017, p.34) to create a new fractured hybridity of surprising intimacies in space into engagement with people.
This creative first thinking seminar within the liminal space of the continuing pandemic in 2021, pivots the discussion of memory, raw materiality and transformation in the light of Hu and Neri’s creative principles around an outstanding intercultural musician—from the multicultural space of Melbourne. Innovative improvising trumpet performer, Dr Peter Knight (artistic director, Australian Art Orchestra), will discuss the cultural intersections of ‘being’ in presence of people as creating ‘raw materialities’ of sound towards an Australian multicultural hybrid transformation of sound in ways that are ‘full of discovery and surprise’ (Hu and Neri 2017) in the first seminar, Fracturing Through Hybridity of Experience as Authenticity. The overarching principle of the exploration, is to hear how Melbourne’s rich intercultural improvising people communities move the transformative beauty of their creativities, as bold transitions towards the United Nations 2030 Agenda, Sustainable Development Goal 11, to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’."
Biographies:
Dr Peter Knight (Artistic Director, Australian Art Orchestra): Australian trumpeter, composer and sound artist, Peter Knight, is a multidisciplinary musician who has gained wide acclaim for his distinctive approach, which integrates jazz, experimental, and world music traditions. Peter’s work as both performer and composer is regularly featured in a range of ensemble settings, he also composes for theatre, creates sound installations, and is the Artistic Director of one of Australia’s leading contemporary music ensembles, the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO). Perpetually curious, Peter’s practice defies categorisation. He works in the spaces between categories, between genres, and between cultures: “Hard to categorise… hauntingly memorable” The Wire (UK). “Honest, inventive and original” Hour Magazine Montreal. “A serious work of stringent originality” BBC Jazz on 3. “If trumpet is an element, then Knight is an alchemist” (New York City Jazz Record).
Dr Daniel Portelli is an Australian art music composer, who was awarded a PhD in composition at the University of Huddersfield (United Kingdom) with principal supervisor Professor Liza Lim and co- supervisor Professor Peter Ablinger. He is now the unit coordinator and casual lecturer in music at Western Sydney University (WSU), in Australia. His music has been performed by Tracensemble, Soundstream Collective, Adelaide Philharmonic Choir, Two New Duo, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tamara Anna Cislowska, ESMUC Ensemble, Claire Edwardes, Liu Ying, and by a robotic piano named RHEA. He completed a MA (Hons) at Western Sydney University (WSU) in Australia with Associate Professor Bruce Crossman. He guest lectured at the University of Sydney to undergraduates about his artistic research. And gave a webinar about cultural resilience at WSU. He was the winner of the Winston Music ECF commission at the Soundstream Emerging Composers’ Forum.
Additional participant biographies:
Please see the audio works ‘Headless Reminiscences’ and ‘Laughter and Forgetting’ in this showcase.
Thursday, 5pm-6.30pm, 7 October 2021
From program notes by Associate Professor Bruce Crossman:
"This second creative thinking seminar within the liminal space of the continuing pandemic in 2021, pivots the discussion of memory, raw materiality and transformation around improvising virtuoso border crossing traditional taegum performer, Dr Hyelim Kim (Visiting Research Fellow, Bath Spa University, UK), who will explore cultural ‘memory’ in relation to traditional Korean Gugak performance, its geopolitical uncertainties of trauma, and intersections with London’s intercultural improvising musicians towards hybrid transformation of ‘sonic visibility’ in the second seminar, Visibility of Culture as Sustainability for People. The overarching principle of the exploration, is to hear how London’s rich intercultural improvising people communities move the transformative beauty of their creativities, as bold transitions towards the United Nations 2030 Agenda, Sustainable Development Goal 11, to "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable."
Biographies:
Dr Hyelim Kim (Visiting Research Fellow, Bath Spa University, UK): Hyelim Kim is a world-renowned traditional Korean taegum performer and intercultural improviser. She has worked with Australia’s leading intercultural improvisers including Simon Barker (drums) and Peter Knight (trumpet) and collaborates with leading musicians all over the world, recently performing on BBC Radio 3 with Nils Frahm and Ghostpoet as part of Late Junction Sessions. She has also graced the stage at the London Jazz Festival and Omi World Music Concert (New York) using her instrument to promote exchange with a wide variety of musical cultures.
Additional participant biographies:
Please see the audio works ‘Bird Calendar (Earth List)’ and ‘Stumbling upon a brick chimney shaft’ in this showcase.