Musicological Society of Australia (WA Chapter) Annual Conference

Theme: Eco-Performance

As part of the 2021 Musicological Society of Australia (WA chapter) annual conference we were pleased to host a special ‘eco-performance’ event, consisting of a keynote and an ecomusicology roundtable, and a paper presentation. The keynote and roundtable are available to watch on this page.

Hosted by the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, Wednesday 24th November, 2021, 9am (WST)

Keynote: Ecomusicology and aesthetics of Noongar keniny

Environmental crisis is not just the fault of flawed science and economics, but also a disconnection between culture and nature, humans and landscapes. Indigenous language, song and dance support human connection to the environment, are key to people’s everyday wellbeing, and may be crucial to our shared future. The ARC funded project ‘Restoring on Country Performance’ seeks to sustain such traditions in WA’s southwest through innovation within an ecocentric Noongar tradition of practice, guided by Country itself. Given historical suppression of Noongar language and song, this process is also informed by knowledgeable senior Noongar, and younger Noongar who will be responsible for continuing traditions into the future. Experiencing Country through visceral experience and embodied movement creates possibilities for increased connection between people and Country.

A/Prof Aaron Allen

Aaron S. Allen is director of the Environment & Sustainability Program in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Sustainability, in the College of Arts and Sciences, and an associate professor of musicology in the School of Music, in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, at UNC Greensboro. A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century Italian reception of Beethoven. His BA in music and BS in ecological studies are from Tulane University.

Aaron co-founded and for five years chaired the Ecocriticism Study Group (ESG) of the American Musicological Society, and he co-founded and chaired the Ecomusicology Special Interest Group of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is co-editor with Kevin Dawe of the collection Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (Routledge 2016), which was the 2018 recipient of the Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is currently co-editing with Jeff Titon a volume entitled Sounds, Ecologies, Musics (Oxford).

Professor Pierre Horwitz

Professor Pierre Horwitz is a Professor of Environmental Sciences in the School of Science at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, co-Director of Edith Cowan University’s Strategic Research Centre for People, Place, & Planet (CPPP), and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the international journal PLOS-Water. For the last 30 years his research and teaching have included an ecosystems approach to the relationships between biodiversity, culture and human health and well-being, with a particular interest in karl and gabbi in Noongar boodja.

A/Prof Clint Bracknell

Clint Bracknell is a musician and researcher from the south coast Nyungar region of Western Australia. He holds an Australian Research Council fellowship as Associate Professor at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and Kurongkurl Katitjin, Edith Cowan University. Clint recently co-translated a complete Shakespearian theatre work and a dubbed feature film in Nyungar, both world-firsts for languages of Australia. He received the 2020 Barrett Award for Australian Studies and is an elected AIATSIS Council member.

Trevor Ryan

Trevor Ryan Noongar/Yamitji stage and screen performer and drama teacher with a strong interest in language and cultures. His recent career highlights include performing as King Duncan in the Noongar Macbeth, Hecate (2020) and as Yoshida in the Noongar-dubbed version of the classic Bruce Lee film, Fist of Fury Noongar Daa (2021). As a constant member of the Wadumbah Aboriginal Dance Group, Trevor performed for the Queen on her arrival to Perth and at the opening of CHOGM 2011. Trevor is currently completing a Masters of Performing Arts researching the links between Noongar performance and Country.

Professor Emeritus Linda Barwick

Linda Barwick is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney’s Sydney Conservatorium of Music. A musicologist, she specialises in the study of Australian First Nations musics, community and immigrant musics, and has also worked on cultural traditions of the Philippines and Italy. Linda has published extensively in ethnomusicology, digital humanities and archiving, and has collaborated with many other researchers and communities in winning funding to support research on sustaining and developing performance traditions. She is co-founder of the digital archive PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures. Her edited volume (co-edited with Jennifer Green and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel) Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond (Sydney and Honolulu: Sydney University Press and University of Hawai’I Press, 2020) was recently awarded the Australian Society of Archivists 2020 Mander Jones Award for “publication making the greatest contribution to the archives profession in Australia”. In 2019 she was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the SOAS University of London. Linda is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

Roundtable: How can music, singers and performers effectively bridge the gap between culture and nature in Australia?

Emeritus Professor Allan Marett

Emeritus Professor Allan Marett’s main fields of research include: Australian Aboriginal song, in particular, the wangga of NW Australia; and Sino-Japanese music, including Japanese court music (gagaku) and Japanese Noh drama. His book Songs, Dreamings and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia won the 2006 Stanner Award, and in 2017, a seven-CD set of Wangga songs, co-authored with Linda Barwick, won the National Indigenous Music Award for Best Traditional Release. Prior to his retirement in 2007, Allan was Professor of Musicology at the University of Sydney and before that, Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong.

Dr. Reuben Brown

Dr Reuben Brown (PhD Ethnomusicology, University of Sydney) is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow in the Research Unit for Indigenous Languages, Faculty of Arts and a Research Affiliate with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. Reuben’s ARC DECRA investigates how ceremonial performance at Indigenous festivals in northern Australia enacts diplomacy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants, and between different clan and language groups. Reuben is a non-Indigenous (Settler/Balanda) scholar who has collaborated with ceremony leaders, artists and researchers to document living song traditions such as kun-borrk/manyardi, wangga, thabi and junba from the north of Australia, and to support community efforts to maintain and revitalise public ceremony.

Reuben presents alongside long-time collaborators: Renfred Manmurulu, singer for the Inyjalarrku (mermaid) songset of Western Arnhem Land, Rupert Manmurulu, Inyjalarrku singer and ‘bamboo man’ playing didjeridu for other singers and ceremonies across the region, Jenny Manmurulu (Renfred and Rupert’s mother) – lead dancer and Inyjalarrku leader, Isabel O’Keeffe, researcher at National Acoustic Laboratories and honorary in ethnomusicology at Sydney and Macquarie Universities, and Ruth Singer, ARC Future Fellow and linguist based at Melbourne University.

Jesse Hope-Hodgetts

Jesse Hope-Hodgetts is a singer and educator and is a descendant of the Ngiyambaa and Wiradjuri people of Western New South Wales and was born and raised on Darkinung country on the Central Coast.

Jesse is a part of the academic team at University of Newcastle – Wollotuka Institute, as an educator for Aboriginal Education, Policies and Issues, guiding undergraduate teachers in embedding Aboriginal perspectives in their curriculum and connecting with their local Aboriginal community.

Jesse is currently completing a PhD in songs and Language of Ngiyambaa and Wiradjuri speakers. He is exploring historic cultural songs and how they can inform Aboriginal song and Language revitalisation in New South Wales today.

A/Prof Myfany Turpin

Myfany Turpin has been working on Australian Aboriginal songs and languages since 1996. Her research interests include the relationship between language and music, especially of lesser-known cultures; and identifying ways to support the continuation of endangered languages and performance arts. More specifically, her work examines Aboriginal song-poetry and its relationship to spoken languages. She is also involved in linguistic documentation of the Aboriginal language Kaytetye as well as Indigenous ecological knowledge and the lexicon in Arandic languages.

Dr. Catherine Ingram

Catherine Ingram (英倩蕾) is an ethnomusicologist and an ethnographer of contemporary Chinese culture. Her main focus is Chinese musical culture, and especially the music of China’s minority groups. She is the first non-Chinese to complete substantial research into Kam (in Chinese, Dong 侗) minority song—including study of Kam “big song,” the important Kam song genre that was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009 and that was the focus of her doctoral research (Ethnomusicology/Chinese studies, University of Melbourne, 2010). Before commencing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney in late 2014, Catherine was a Newton International Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London, 2013-2014), a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies (University of Amsterdam, 2011), and an Endeavour Australia Cheung Kong Research Fellow (Research Institute for Ritual Music in China, Shanghai Conservatory of Music (上海音乐学院), 2010-2011).

Candace Kruger

Candace is a Yugambeh yarrabilginngunn (song woman) and proud Kombumerri (Gold Coast) and Ngugi (Moreton Island) Aboriginal woman.

Candace is the founder and director of the Yugambeh Youth Choir and author of Yugambeh Talga: Music Traditions of the Yugambeh People (2005). Candace’s Master’s Research Thesis ‘In the Bora Ring: Yugambeh Language and Song Project’ and doctoral study ‘Yarrabil Girrebbah Singing Indigenous language alive’ are investigations in the fields of Indigenous musicology, Indigenous studies and Anthropology. Candace’s research captures the songwoman’s work, contributes to the development of Indigenous methodologies, and demonstrates one way in which an Aboriginal community are reconstructing Aboriginal knowledge for sustainability and legacy outcomes.

A/Prof Sally Treloyn

Dr Sally Treloyn (PhD Ethnomusicology, USYD) is an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology and Intercultural Research in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. As Co-Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Arts and Cultures at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, Sally plays a strategic role in the Indigenous research and research training agenda of the Faculty.

Sally serves on the University’s Education, Fine Arts Music and Business Human Ethics Sub-Committee, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music Inclusion and Diversity Committee, is a member of the Wilin Executive Committee, and is Graduate Convenor of Wilin’s Masters and PhD programs. Sally’s ARC Future Fellowship ‘Singing the future: Assessing the effectiveness of repatriation for the vitality of Indigenous song’ investigates the interplay of legacy recordings and cultural dynamics, particularly the role of database and content management systems in music sustainability.

Dr. Robin Ryan

Dr Robin Ryan connects a love of music and natural environments to collaborative research with First Nations Peoples. Her MA thesis on urban Aboriginal music was followed by a PhD on Indigenous gumleaf playing. Robin’s 12 publications as an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at WAAPA, ECU include a chapter in Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (Routledge, 2016). In 2019, Robin was awarded the Rebecca Coyle Prize for Research of Regional Significance in the Australia-Aotearoa nexus by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Robin currently resides in Eden, NSW with her husband, the Yuin Elder Uncle Ossie Cruse.

Hollis Taylor

Violinist/composer, zoömusicologist, and ornithologist Hollis Taylor is an ARC Future Fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and a member of the Sydney Environment Institute. Her previous research fellowships include the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin), the Museum of Natural History (Paris), the University of Technology Sydney, and Macquarie University. Supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, her birdsong concerto for recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey has been featured with the Adelaide Symphony, the London Sinfonia, and the Melbourne Symphony. In addition to her double CD, Absolute Bird, and monograph, Is Birdsong Music?, her practice takes in sound and radiophonic arts, all celebrating the aesthetic achievements of animals.