School of Communication Arts

10 demographic changes were having a deleterious effect on such places nationally. The analysis and discussion in the study aims to facilitate better understanding of the way people connect to music-making places and practices, and, in turn, lead to more intelligently designed cultural spaces that offer open and enthusiastic participation by diverse groups in our society. I also hope the study leads to greater interest and support for community based music-making practices by relevant institutions and authorities.

he had been thinking and writing about "The Origin of the Work of Art" for over a year, (Krell 1993, pg 140) expanding his treatise in an effort to discover what takes place when humans make 'art'. In the same year, in Washington D.C. another young man, Herman Blount, was studying music (Feather and Gitler 1999), turning 21 and taking his first steps in a career that would re-define the boundaries of his chosen 'art' practice. This paper details a journey with the music practice of Herman Blount (a.k.a. Sun Ra) and sets his maverick approach to music making against Heidegger's idea of "setting up of a world and setting forth of earth" . Underpinning this journey is an idea of a shift in the understanding of Ra's music. Has Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Research Arkestra moved Heidegger's 'earth' to Saturn, and does the struggle continue between Ra's 'world' and its new cosmic home?

In today's globalized world, where elements of artistic expression are often forced to compete as a commodity in order to remain viable, regional and national identity in art is prized. Ironically, however, the means of developing and perpetuating this artistic identity are not always readily apparent. The future of the bassoon in Australia is challenged by this dynamic, as well as by other difficulties. Classical music itself is, today, often poorly understood, despite the fact that many individuals and organizations are endeavoring to rehabilitate and preserve it. The bassoon, moreover, is often considered an endangered instrument, with a dearth of new repertoire, a relative absence of pieces that truly make use of the instrument's prodigious range, and occasional negative stereotyping of the instrument as the 'clown' of the orchestra. Nevertheless, Australian composers are still writing repertoire for the bassoon.

This paper discusses a survey of Australian repertoire for solo bassoon, bassoon and piano and bassoon with one other instrument, outlining composer, date, origin, level of difficulty, style, and publisher. Important trends emerge as a result of the survey. These include periods of interest and non-interest in writing for the bassoon; a distinction between pieces written for solo bassoon and bassoon with piano; style preferences (neo-romantic); and levels of difficulty which are well served and not well served. The evidence of a modest resurgence in interest in the bassoon convinces me that there is indeed a niche to be filled based upon the elements currently missing from Australian bassoon repertoire.

This project attempts to assess and predict the future of the bassoon in Australia. This must be contextualised within the future of classical music in general. Classical music has a long history, its antecedents stemming from the liturgical and secular music of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The Classical and Romantic periods Challenges/Features: accents on offbeats and broad dynamic ranges. Other: available for other solo instruments including clarinet, oboe, flute and saxophone.

Suicide is surrounded by stigma and silence, leaving individuals and communities in a wasteland of ignorance about how to prevent it or how to properly support the bereaved. I know. As one of the bereft, I've experienced the destruction silence can reap. I've also witnessed the healing that breaking the silence can bring. So when I was asked to record the stories of those bereaved by suicide as the first stage in challenging community stigma and creating an audio based community of support for the bereft, I leapt at the chance, even as my mother worried. But does my own experience help or hinder the interview process? Do I disclose, and if so, what and when? Is suicide bereavement really the same? Is breaking the silence everyone's cure? Is there a community to create after all? And what has being on both sides of the interview divide taught me about my 'mainstream' oral history practice and the wisdom of 'ordinary' people? This article is a reflective exploration of professional practice.

Australian women's 1983 contribution to the autonomous international women's peace movement that emerged in the Cold War is remembered by non-locals as a transformative feminist event, which created bonds of political and personal intimacy amongst diverse groups of Australian women. Local recollection, participant and non-participant alike, ranges from cautious praise for the protest organisation to scathing disbelief that anyone could be proud to be part of the 'mob rule' of those 'disgusting women', as the protesters are still called. How did these connections and disconnections come to be? This paper finds explanation in the camp's geographical location, which catapulted participants into that highly contested and still largely uncharted region, where the politics of race and gender, pan-Aboriginal political and culturally located Indigenous identities do and do not meet. Radical difference, at the heart of the protest's connections, also explains its dialogic discontinuities, which produced a polarity of conflicting regional assessments about the protest's political power. This disabled the creation of a functionally coherent racially gendered political theory able to deal with the real politic in Australia's centre, to the detriment of Australian political thought, alternative and mainstream alike.

Development of tuberculosis infection in a renal transplant patient is infrequent in Spain, although the prevalence is higher than in the general population. These patients usually receive calcineurin inhibitors as the main component of their immunosuppressive treatment. The metabolism of these drugs, whether cyclosporine or tacrolimus, involves cytochrome P-450 3A. Rifampin, a widely used agent in the treatment of tuberculosis, is also an important inducer of cytochrome P-450 3A metabolism and has the capacity to decrease serum levels of the calcineurin inhibitors. This metabolic interaction makes pharmacologic management of tuberculosis-infected transplant patients more complex and can result in a higher risk of acute rejection caused by decreased levels of the immunosuppressant in the blood. The authors present a case of a renal transplant patient with a soft tissue infection caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis who was treated with rifabutin instead of rifampin, with excellent results in terms of graft survival and overall survival. The use of rifabutin allowed the authors to achieve better control of circulating immunosuppressant levels and a lower probability of acute graft rejection. Am J Kidney Dis 44:E59-E63.

One-to-one music lessons are a common and effective way of learning a musical instrument. This investigation into one-to-one music teaching at the secondary school level explores the teaching of musical expression by two instrumental music teachers of brass and strings. The lessons of the two teachers with two students each were video recorded over a six-week period. This data were transcribed, coded and content analyzed. The results showed that the teachers used a variety of strategies to teach musical expression and the teacher’s choice of approach seems less important than ensuring that the student has a good understanding of the approach. Furthermore, the traditional strategies for teaching musical expression may benefit from the inclusion of approaches designed to enable young students to begin to create personal meaning in their music making. Teachers, therefore, might consider reading research findings on creative learning and devise strategies for its application in their music studios.

Instrumental music teachers generally work in professional isolation in an environment where there is little or no communication between staff and little access to professional development. Whereas instrumental teachers are highly trained and experienced as performers, they rarely have had any training as teachers and the isolated nature of their profession means that they infrequently have opportunities to see how others teach. This study investigates a four-week discussion and collaboration between ten experienced instrumental music teachers utilising an online discussion platform. The study aimed to firstly, determine issues of significance to experienced teachers who are teaching high school aged students and to explore the similarities and differences between this teaching cohort and the findings of research into instrumental teachers operating at a tertiary level. Secondly, it aimed to ascertain whether an asynchronous online forum could become an effective medium for shared reflection and group problem solving. Results suggested that experienced teachers of high school aged students are concerned with matters involving student retention such as inspiring students, strategising practice and making the repertoire for the instrument relevant to students who have no previous exposure to this. The asynchronous online forum allowed peer scaffolding of knowledge as the discourse moved from a sharing of experiences to more significant negotiations of meaning with only minimal focusing of the issues by the researcher.

Studio music teachers in Australia are generally accomplished musicians who are self taught teachers and the solitary nature of the profession means that opportunities for peer discussion/collaboration are difficult to attain. This paper investigates a seven month collaboration between forty-nine studio music teachers using an online asynchronous discussion forum. This online forum represents part of a larger study that included an earlier forum (stage 1), twenty interviews and a focus group. The purpose of this online component was to analyse the contents of this forum to determine the key musical/pedagogical issues for its participants and to ascertain whether the forum was an effective medium for reflective collaboration based on the posting patterns of the participants. Although the forum questions received a large number of responses (200), results suggested that participants were scared to share with each other, based on the lack of discussion on the forum coupled with the high rate of non-participating observers (lurkers).

Due to a lack of mandatory formal studio-teaching accreditation, instrumental teachers in Australia are generally highly skilled musicians who learn to teach from experience. This situation makes it important to investigate the kinds of experiences that go into the creation of experts in order to build a picture of expertise in instrumental teaching. As experts rely on a repertoire of innate skills and practices, reconstructing the reasoning behind pedagogical decisions can be challenging. This article, therefore, finds the four phases of musical development fundamental to the Orff-Schulwerk pedagogy - exploration, imitation, improvisation and creation – to provide a useful frame through which to examine the teaching of eight expert Australian instrumental teachers. Findings showed the experts to integrate distinct learning styles and methods to create a holistic approach that had developed over time into an overarching philosophy that informed every aspect of their teaching. The exploration, imitation, improvisation and creation stages came together to form a creative pedagogy which clearly scaffolded the development of a personal and artistic ‘voice’ in the students.

Web-based social networking technologies have been shown to effectively facilitate interactions between learners who are separated by distance however instrumental music teachers have been slow to adopt these tools. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to investigate the use of an asynchronous online forum among 39 studio music teachers over a seven-month period. In doing so, it sought information on how an asynchronous web-based discussion platform could assist shared reflection and problem-solving for teachers discussing their teaching.

The study also sought to determine whether such a medium might be a viable means by which studio teachers could develop their practice through informal and collaborative means. A case study approach was used with data collected through online discussion transcripts and email correspondence between the participants and researcher. Findings suggested that participants offered real-world strategies born from concrete experience as initial responses to pedagogical questions. The subsequent reflection and discussion on these initial responses allowed participants to build these strategies into a broader framework of community and culture creating personal meaning for both teacher and student.

Studio music teachers in Australia are generally highly skilled musicians who learn to teach from experience due to a lack of formal accreditation opportunities for music teachers working in a one-to-one or studio context (Gaunt, 2009). Research continues to raise concerns with informal pedagogical learning because it can mean that standards of teaching " across and even within institutions may be erratic " (Carey & Grant, 2015, p. 63). There has, however, been relatively little research to date that investigates what informal learning experiences entail and how expertise is acquired in this context. This situation makes it important to investigate the kinds of experiences that go into the creation of an expert studio music teacher and to discover the lessons learnt along the way. This study aims to describe the teaching concerns of 22 instrumental teachers of successive life stages by analysing their differences according to three levels of teaching experience. Data included in-depth and semi-structured interviews as well as a focus group discussion collected from novice, experienced and expert teacher groups. The study saw three distinct profiles of teacher experience and, in contrast to previous research, saw a student-centred and creative approach taken by both the novice and expert groups. The novice group focused on creative practices such as composition with an overarching philosophy that learning must be fun whereas the experienced group focused on building efficient and broadly transferable systems to build effective technique. The expert group was the least generalizable. However, this group's individually distinct approaches were designed to unite both a student-centred and creative approach with a systematic and technique building approach and these two prongs informed a distinctly individual teaching philosophy. The acquisition of expertise for participants at all levels of experience depended on reflecting on heightened experiences that involved an element of risk serving as a trigger for transformative learning. Conclusions drawn have implications for the studio teaching profession because they highlight the ways that teachers acquire expertise informally by way of reflection on experience and deep and surface approaches to a variety of learning situations.

This paper presents the findings of a study delving into the use of tablets, smart phones and laptops in creating ePortfolios for a 2nd year Bachelor of Music performance unit. This project investigates the devices used to video student rehearsals or performances, the ways that the devices were used, and the reasons that students selected their device of choice. Of the devices used, the iPad was chosen by a majority of students (29 out of 40 participants) because it was easy to use although some students found its storage limiting. Students also used their laptops, often to sync data from iPad to laptop which made the use of apps that worked across multiple platforms essential. iPhones, android phones and iPods were also used. The ways the students used these devices was much broader than anticipated and fell into five categories: notetaking and organization, social media and sharing, research and practice, recording and editing and music creation. Results indicated that, rather than only recording their performance at the end of semester, the devices were a pivotal part of the rehearsal process from the beginning and influenced the ways in which students created a performance.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role that networks play in the composition process of electronic music production. The networks that are referred to here are not limited to interpersonal networks but rather draw on Callon's discussion of techno-economic networks. Callon's description of techno-economic networks will be explored in relation to electronic music composition, with the network being described as the interplay of people, programs and sounds/samples. In acknowledging the interplay between these three types of actors and intermediaries a range of policy opportunities will be discussed. The paper suggests that policy instruments that promote the interactions within these techno-economic networks can lead to positive outcomes for individual participants, the field and policy agencies. Parrallels between reverse engineering and technology assimilation that fuelled the development of newly industrialised economies, such as Korea and the spread and flow of cracked and pirated software in music composition will also be discussed. The paper seeks to contribute to better understandings of mechanisms to support new media development.

Thumtronics Ltd. is a new Australian company. Its innovations -including the Thummer, a new electronic musical instrument -may create an opportunity for Australia to seize the leadership of music-related global industries such as musical instrument design, music education, song writing, music recording, sheet music publishing, and live performance. Together, these industries are worth over $50 billion per annum. This paper (1) takes at face value the claims made by others regarding the Thummer (i.e., that it is more expressive, is easier to learn, and opens new musical frontiers),