Composition and Music Technology - Staff
Chair/Associate Professor
Matthew Hindson AM, MMus Melb BMus PhD Sydney
Professor
Anne Boyd AM, HonDUniv DPhil York BA Sydney
Senior Lecturers
Michael Smetanin, BMus PhD Sydney
Daryl Pratt, BFA Calif IA MA Calif
Lecturers
Anthony Hood, BMus MSc DPhil York
Trevor Pearce, BA BMus PhD Sydney
Damien Ricketson, BMus PGradCert RoyalConsHague PhD
Ivan Zavada, MMus(ElectroacousticComp) Montreal PhD Sydney
Part-time staff
Judy Bailey OAM, ATCL
John Bassett MDes Sci Sydney
Nigel Butterley AM, HonDMus N'cle(NSW)
Roslyn Dunlop, BMus
Brad Gill, PhD Sydney
Peter McNamara, MMus Sydney
Rosalind Page
Paul Stanhope, MMus PhD Sydney
Chair/Associate Professor
Matthew Hindson AM, MMus Melb,BMus PhD
Matthew Hindson is a composer and Associate Professor in Composition & Media Technology and Arts Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His research interests include Australian music, music for video games (particularly for the Nintendo Entertainment System) and musical composition with Apple’s GarageBand.
Hindson studied composition at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne with Peter Sculthorpe, Eric Gross, Brenton Broadstock and Ross Edwards and his compositional influences range from classicism to the heavy metal band Metallica. One of the most distinctive composers of his generation, Hindson’s pieces are performed regularly both nationally and internationally. He has worked in close collaboration with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Sydney Youth Orchestra; has been featured extensively by Musica Viva Australia, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in Wales and Ballett Schindowski in Germany; and was the Queensland Orchestra's Composer in Residence for 2005.
Hindson has co-authored a composition text for senior high school and early tertiary music students called Composition Toolbox, and is Artistic Director of the Aurora Festival of New Music.
http://www.hindson.com.au/
Professor
Professor Anne Boyd AM, HonDUniv DPhil York BA
Anne Boyd is one of Australia’s most distinguished composers and music educators.
Her research focuses on the influences of landscape and Asian music upon Australian composers. Recent publications include: ‘Landscape, Spirit and Music – An Australian Story’ in The Soundscapes of Australia (ed. Fiona Richards, Ashgate: 2007) and ‘Dreaming Voices: Australia and Japan’ in Intercultural Music: Creation and Interpretation (ed. Macarthur, Crossman and Morelos, Australian Music Centre: 2006).
In 1990, Boyd became the first Australian and the first woman to be appointed Professor of Music at the University of Sydney. Prior to that Boyd was the Foundation Head of the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong from 1981–90 and taught at the University of Sussex from 1972–77.
Professor Boyd’s music is published by Faber Music in London and the University of York Music Press. Two solo CDs of her music are Meditations on a Chinese Character (ABC Classics, 1997) and Crossing a Bridge of Dreams (Tall Poppies, 2000). Her most recently commissioned works include Gate of Water for the ‘Kammer Ensemble’; Angry Earth, a concerto for shakuhachi (Riley Lee) and the Sydney Youth Orchestra and Ex Deo Lux for the 2007 SSO Fellows.
Professor Boyd was honoured with an AM in the Order of Australia in 1996 and an HonDUniv from York for her services to composition and music education in 2003. In 2005 she received the Distinguished Services to Australian Music Award at the APRA-AMC Classical Music Awards ceremony.
Senior Lecturer
Michael Smetanin, BMus PhD
Chair of the Composition and Music Technology unit, composer Michael Smetanin is one of the most distinctive figures in Australian music today.
During the early 1980s Smetanin travelled to Holland to study for three years with the composer Louis Andriessen. There he composed The Ladder of Escape (1984) for Harry Sparnaay’s Het Basklarienetten Kollektief — it premiered at the 1984 Salzburg Aspekete Festival in Austria.
Smetanin has been involved not only in the composition of chamber and orchestral music but also in theatre and opera. His largest works are the chamber operas The Burrow and Gauguin and the 2000 Adelaide Festival premiere of the music for the epic eight-hour long play The Ecstatic Bible by English playwright Howard Barker. The Piano Concerto entitled Mysterium Cosmographicum was premiered by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and was awarded Best New Australian work at the 2006 APRA/AMC Music Awards. More recently his large chamber orchestra work Microgrphia was premiered in Amsterdam by the Schoenberg ensemble conducted by Reinbert De Leeuw. Smetanin is slated to begin work on a large music-theatre project with the Dutch ensemble Orkest de Volharding in late 2007.
Lecturers
Ivan Zavada, MMus(ElectroacousticComp) Montreal PhD Sydney
Ivan Zavada is a composer, multimedia programmer and designer who lectures in computer music composition and electroacoustic theory at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His research focus is on the interactive relationship between image and sound within the realm of electroacoustic music. He is currently developing a computer application to represent and generate melodic motifs in three dimensions based on their geometric properties.
Zavada creates innovative multi-sensorial events that incorporate sophisticated audiovisual techniques to express artistic individuality in the digital era. The work InEx premiered in Beijing at the 2006 Musicacoustica Festival and is an example of the vast creative potential available through new mediums of artistic expression. This real-time performance for voice, computer and visual interpretation is based on a blending approach of traditional and urban connotations.
In general, Zavada’s work questions the conceptual nature of music by examining the relationship between concrete sounds on fixed recorded medium and visual elements of abstraction rendered in computer graphics. The combination of sound and image in multiple layers challenges the medium’s representational paradigm with the use of modern technology and makes electroacoustic composition and multimedia applications particularly interesting and significant today.
Zavada studied electroacoustic composition at the University of Montreal. He has also composed a number of soundtracks for documentaries and feature films. He is also an accomplished violinist who has performed and recorded with various music ensembles in Canada and the United States.
Damien Ricketson, BMus PGradCertRoyalConsHague, PhD
Damien Ricketson
Much of Ricketson’s music explores the poetics of incomplete knowledge. Through open forms and unconventional modes of notation, many of Ricketson’s works are themselves incomplete requiring high levels of creative evaluation from the performer. The metaphor of incomplete knowledge is also manifest in frequent references to unfinished works or forgotten musical traditions. Other research interests include microtonality and tactile approaches to composition where musical structures are generated from the physical movement patterns of the performer.
After completing a Bachelor of Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Ricketson studied composition with the renowned Dutch composer Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and completed IRCAM’s elite computer-music course at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He attained a Doctor of Philosophy from the Sydney Conservatorium where he is currently Lecturer in Composition and Contemporary Music Studies.
Ricketson is the founder and Co-Artistic Director of Ensemble Offspring, a unique Sydney-based arts company dedicated to innovative new music. Much of Ricketson’s music has been written for Ensemble Offspring and received critical recognition through their performances. His works have also been performed by many national and international soloists, ensembles and orchestras including: MusikFabrik (Germany), Ensemble Plus Minus (UK/Belgium), Crash Ensemble (Ireland), 175 East & Stroma (New Zealand), the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, the Grainger Quartet and Continuum Sax.
Ricketson’s works have received awards including the 2008 NSW State Award ‘Best Composition by an Australian Composer’ for his string quartet So We Begin Afresh and the International Lady Panufnik Prize (Poland) for Chinese Whisper. Commissions have included the Warsaw Autumn, the Transit Festival (Belgium), Symphony Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Ian Potter Foundation. Most recently, Ricketson completed Fractured Again, a major multimedia production premiered in the 2010 Sydney Festival featuring musical instruments made of glass.
Further information:
http://www.curiousnoise.com and
http://www.ensembleoffspring.org.au/
Part-time Staff
Brad Gill, PHD Syd
Brad Gill (b. 1976) began serious musical studies in early high school with a focus on xylophone and percussion, later developing an interest in composition which he explored while a student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (from which he has an Honours degree and Ph.D.) and University of Western Australia. During this time he developed an interest in non-Western music, undertaking study in Javanese Gamelan and Tabla, as well as studying jazz vibraphone in addition to composition studies, resulting in a broad musicality and highly individual and compositional style.
He has been active in many areas related to composition in Australia, ranging from performing, conducting and concert organization in addition to composing. He has been involved in music education for a number of years, teaching composition, analysis and performance related subjects at the Sydney Conservatorium since 2000, as well as teaching courses at the University of Newcastle, Australian International Conservatorium of Music and various high schools in Sydney.
Brad has written for a wide range of music ensembles, ranging from symphony orchestra to solo piano, but has also had a focus on music featuring percussion, as well as expanding the creative range of brass and wind band music through the creation of original work for these media. Compositionally, Brad’s main focus is on experimentation with rhythmic and formal/structural elements, and microtonal harmony stemming from musical exploration of the harmonic series, and applying developments in atonal theory.
Brad’s music has been composed for and performed by a range of ensembles and soloists, including the Song Company, Ensemble Offspring, members of Elision, Claire Edwards and Ensemble ‘Verocious’, the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra under Roger Smalley, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Australian Piano Quartet, pianists Kerry Yong, Michael Kieran-Harvey Roxanne Della-Bosca, British conductor Barry Webb, and the Sydney Conservatorium Percussion Ensemble. A number of works have been recorded for broadcast by the ABC, and the brief ‘Healing the Heart’ was recorded and released on CD as part of the charity CD ‘The Interior Horizon’.
Non-musical interests include modern literature, philosophy and bushwalking, all of which inform his creative work.