Centre of Research Excellence in performance and creativity

The Sydney Conservatorium is fortunate to have so many brilliant performers and researchers as students and on staff. It is seeking to establish a Centre of Research Excellence specialising in integrating The Con’s two areas of excellence, performance and research, by bringing together and backing musicologists to set new standards in the academic study of music.

The research centre will respond to the needs of cultural industries in Australia and follow the Australian government’s desire to develop research-based funding mechanisms.

I. Structure of Research Centre

A. Centre objectives

• To develop the agenda for funding research in the creative arts and thereby to respond to the Australian federal government’s shift in higher education funding to differentiate teaching from research.
• To develop strategies for practice-based research that reflect and respond to the needs of Australia’s important creative industries, while firmly putting Australian practice-based research on the international map.
• To establish a fully integrated centre for research on creativity within the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, designed to pull together all facets of musical endeavour by bringing together nationally and internationally acclaimed scholars, composers and performers in a set of projects that have practice-based research at their core.
• To undertake specific and major research projects of essential relevance to the cultural life of Sydney, NSW, Australia, and the world.
• To stimulate public debate on cultural diversity through a unique integration of academic and performance outputs.

B. Staffing (based on an initial 5 projects)

II. Strategic alignment with SCM's priorities

The SCM has in recent years seen a rapid increase in the reporting of research outputs in performance and composition (including curating festivals and other large-scale performance events). These have spearheaded our efforts to develop our research profile. Since 2005, while the total staff research outputs in traditional, primarily print-based formats – books, journals, conference proceedings – have remained constant, the number of creative outputs we have reported annually has risen from zero to several hundred items.

Australia is developing a Higher Education strategy that separates teaching and research funding. While the established DEST scheme for reporting research has only collected data in traditional output formats, this was challenged in 2010 with the new ERA (Excellence in Research Australia) scheme; ERA evaluates creative outputs alongside print-based outputs. It is, then, vital to the SCM’s future to develop the framework for ensuring that creative recorded outputs constitute ‘research’. The Centre of Excellence will allow the SCM to ensure that staff and higher degree students are given the tools and the ability to develop both their teaching and research activities.

III. Integration with SCM units

The intention of the Centre of Excellence is to create a fully integrated platform in which staff and postgraduate students working in performance, composition and musicology (including, as appropriate, ethnomusicology, music education, and music technology) will interact in the development of innovative but grounded research, applying new developments in performance and composition practice informed by clear and academically rigorous parameters. To enable this, the Centre of Excellence will focus its activities on:

• a discrete set of projects, and
• building a national and international network of performers, composers and musicologists working in the broad field of practice-based research.

IV. Impact and relevance

The creative industries employ a significant proportion of the Australian population and contribute a significant amount to the economy, impacting on the cultural life of Australia and contributing extensively to Australia’s international profile.

The SCM, as one of the major conservatoria in Australia, and with a strong international reputation, can and should lead the way in responding to the government’s funding initiatives and in fusing together activities in the creative arts and more traditional scholarship. The SCM sits at the hub of performance and composition activity in Sydney, attracting the attention of a broad public through its high-profile activities. In 2010, the SCM has hosted some 685 public activities including the ISCM World Music Days, academic conferences in music education and on East Asian music. The on-going ‘101 Compositions’ project also illustrates that the SCM is positioned at the centre of creative activity.

The Centre of Excellence will allow the SCM to align the research of both staff and students in a way that brings together traditional print formats with recordings of performance and news compositions. It will take a leading role in positioning Australia’s research activity in the creative arts both in Australia and beyond.