Musicology - Staff

Chair/Associate Professor
Kathleen Nelson BMus MMus PhD Adelaide

Deputy Chair/Lecturer
Lewis Cornwell BMus

Lecturers
David Larkin BMus MLitt UniCollDublin PhD Cambridge
Alan Maddox BA PhD

Associate Lecturer
Rachel Campbell, BMus
Christopher Coady BA (Magna Cum Laude) SkidmoreCollNY PhD UNSW

Part-time Staff
Tristan Coelho, BMus Sydney MMus RCM
Joanna Drimatis, BMusEd UWA GradDipPerf ANU MMus UT Austin PhD Adelaide
Marcus Hartstein, BA(Mus) MMus PhD
Anthony Linden Jones, BE UNSW BMus Sydney
Megan Lang, BMus Adelaide GradDipEd UNE MMus Sydney
Karen Lemon, DalCert DalLic CMU BMusEd PhD Sydney
Anna Maslowiec, BMus PhD Sydney
Peter McNamara, BMus MMus
Brett Mullins, BMus
Jason Noble, BMus LMusA
Peter Smith, BMus
Joseph Toltz, BA Sydney CCPE ANU BMus PhD Sydney
Carolyn Watson, BMusEd Sydney AdvDip(Kodály) Budapest LMusA LTCL
Shaojing Zhang Cai, BMusSt

Honorary Reader
Richard Toop, BA(Mus) Hull

Honorary Associate
Graeme Skinner BMus Melb PhD Sydney

Chair / Associate Professor

Kathleen Nelson, BMus MMus PhD Adelaide
Dr Kathleen Nelson is a Senior Lecturer in Musicology with a range of responsibilities including coordination of postgraduate musicology studies, coordination and teaching for the undergraduate Musicology specialisation, and postgraduate research supervision in a variety of fields. Having begun her tertiary studies with an honours degree in performance on the oboe, she moved to musicology for her postgraduate work.

Kathleen’s current research is focussed upon liturgical mansucript studies, especially medieval sources of Spanish origin and notated in Aquitanian notation. Recent work and publications also investigate manuscripts held in Sydney and dating from as early as the eleventh century and as late as the sixteenth century and coming from different parts of Europe. In 2006 Kathleen became a core member of the research cluster “Cathedral, Court, City and Cloister: Western Music and its Sources 1100-1750” sponsored by the ARC Network for Early European Research (NEER). She is also a member of the International Musicological Society study group devoted to chant studies “Cantus Planus”. Another research direction has taken Kathleen into Australian music history and her work in the area include articles relating to the ABC in Australian musical life as well as supervision of research theses in the field.

A complete listing of her publications can be found here.

Deputy Chair / Lecturer

Lewis Cornwell, BMus
Lewis Cornwell lectures in harmony and analysis at the Sydney
Conservatorium of Music, where he is Chair of Musicology. He is an experienced theory teacher and composer with research interests in the area of new music for traditional Japanese instruments.

A graduate of the University of Sydney, he studied composition in the Department of Music with Peter Sculthorpe. He began tutoring in Harmony in 1982, both in the Music Department and at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, gaining a full-time position at the Conservatorium in 1989, serving as Chair of Musicology from 2002-2004 and Associate Dean (ICT/eLearning) from 2004-2006.

Cornwell was a founding member of the composers' collective Music Performed and served a term as its administrator, helping to organise workshops of New Music for young composers. His works have been included in concerts given by the ISCM, the Mused Ensemble and the Seymour Group.

His interest in studying and composing New Music for traditional Japanese instruments has led to performances of his works in Japan and Europe. In January 1997, Interweave, for shô and guitar, received its first performance at the 18th Festival and Conference of the Asian Composers' League, in Manila. Lewis was a co-organiser of the Takemitsu Symposium and Tribute Concert, which was held at the University of Sydney in February, 1998. As an oboist, he plays in local orchestras and chamber ensembles, and assists with their administration.

Lecturers

David Larkin, BMus MLitt UniCollDublin PhD Cambridge
David Larkin teaches courses in musicology and music analysis at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, having joined the staff of the University of Sydney in January 2010. His research interests centre on the music and aesthetics of Richard Strauss, Wagner and Liszt, the symphonic poem and issues such as originality, influence and compositional psychology. He is currently working on a study of how self-declared ‘advanced’ composers in the long nineteenth century related to their audiences, tracing the development of the avant-garde mindset. He is the author of several journal articles and book chapters, and his work has appeared in The Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters and Nineteenth-Century Music Review. He has given guest lectures in North America, Britain and Ireland, and in 2007, he was a co-organiser of the first conference in Britain devoted to the music of Richard Strauss, which took place at Magdalen College, Oxford.

His music education began back in Dublin at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he studied piano, violin and organ. After graduating from University College Dublin in 1999 with a first-class honours B.Mus degree, he undertook an M.Litt degree there, which was awarded with distinction for a thesis exploring the musical and personal connections between Liszt and Wagner. In 2007, he gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge for a dissertation entitled ‘Reshaping the Liszt-Wagner Legacy: Intertextual Dynamics in Strauss’s Tone Poems.’

Larkin has taught at a number of Irish Universities and at the University of Cambridge, and in 2006-7 he was appointed to the position of co-ordinator of academic studies for the new doctoral programme at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Most recently, he spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow attached to the School of Music, University College Dublin sponsored by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Alan Maddox BA, PhD, Sydney
Alan Maddox teaches music history and historical performance practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His primary research area is rhetoric and performance practice in Italian vocal music of the 17th and 18th centuries and he also studies the music of the colonial period in Australia, particularly the work of Isaac Nathan and music in the 19th century penal settlement on Norfolk Island. Dr. Maddox also co-ordinates the Conservatorium’s undergraduate Aural Perception (ear training) program.

Maddox performed as a professional singer for ten years, appearing with Opera Australia and freelancing in Europe and Australia before devoting himself primarily to the study of musicology in 1999. Since then he has made regular presentations at Australian and international musicology conferences including the 2003 conference of the Wolfenbüttler Arbeitskreis für Barockforschung (Wolfenbüttel, Germany) and the 2004 Symposium of the International Musicological Society (IMS), held in Melbourne, and the 2007 congress of the IMS in Zürich, Switzerland.

A respected music writer and public lecturer, Maddox also writes
program notes and gives pre-concert talks for the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and for Musica Viva. His on-stage commentaries have become an integral part of the Australian Brandenburg Ensemble’s innovative baroque chamber music concerts.

Associate Lecturers

Rachel Campbell, BMus
Rachel Campbell has been an Associate Lecturer in Musicology since 2008, and currently teaches twentieth and twenty-first century music history and Australian music. She is currently working on a project looking at Australian national identity and landscape representation in Peter Sculthorpe’s music from the 1950s and 1960s. Her previous research was concerned with British high-modernist composers, particularly Richard Barrett.

She has also written Grove entries, interviewed numerous local and international composers and written for new music ensembles including Ensemble Offspring and ELISION. Her research interests centre around twentieth and twenty-first century cultural history, landscape music and aesthetics.

Christopher Coady, BA (Magna Cum Laude) SkidmoreCollNY PhD UNSW
Dr Christopher Coady, Associate Lecturer in Musicology, coordinates the aural perception program at the Sydney Conservatorium and teaches the elective African-American Music Inquiry. Coady received his PhD from the University of New South Wales in 2011 for the thesis entitled AfroModernist Compositional Strategies in Selected works by John Lewis: 1952-1962. He has seen his early work on Lewis appear in the journal Jazzforschung/Jazz Research and is currently working on an interpretation of 1950s film noir scores composed by both Lewis and jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Recent postgraduate research topics supervised by Coady include an assessment of non-Western philosophy’s impact on contemporary saxophone repertoire and the effect of early saxophone pedagogical material on the promotion of the instrument.

In addition to his teaching and research at the Conservatorium, Coady serves as co-editor-in-chief of the Sydney Undergraduate Journal of Musicology, as a member of the Engaged Enquiry Scholars Network and as a member of the First Year Experience Working Group. Between 2006 and 2008 he served as a member of the National Executive for the Musicological Society of Australia.