Montreal

Nice place, if a little cold, wet and snowing. Reminds me a little of New Zealand/ Queenstown in many ways . . . Spent some time with the folks at McGill's Schulich School of Music.

Old music school

New music school

Dean, Don McLean showed me through some of the recording studios:

API Console

Mutimedia room and soundstage

I also met with Sean Ferguson, a composer and Director of CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology). They house six, what they term 'research axes', and each of which have dedicated labs and resources.

Must fly, (literally). Now on to Leeds and dreadful weather, I believe. Still, looking forward to catching up with friends at Sixth Annual Art of Record Production Conference.

Lowell & New York

Traveling once more, and a very good experience and entry into the US via San Francisco. Nice people, if still very busy and slightly confusing . . .
Now completed the first leg of the tour, first to Lowell MA - beautiful little town north of Cambridge and Boston.
Caught up with the good folks of UMass Lowell Music and their wonderful hospitality. They run some terrific degree programs in music education, sound recording technology, music business and performance. Many thanks to Alex Ruthmann and John Shirley:

[A great night out at Boston's Lennox Hotel, w/ an amazing glass of 'The Balvenie']

Then on to New York to catch up with Nora Farrell (now teaching part of the year in our Bachelor of Music Technology program) and Bill Duckworth who's also now supervising some of our QCRC PhD candidates. Thanks for a delicious Thanksgivings Day dinner (that's pumpkin pie, clementines and roasted chestnuts . .!)
Or, as they also call it here – Turkey Day! Pics from the spectacular Macey's Thanksgivings Day Parade:

Flying out today, onward and upward to Montreal & McGill University's Schulich School of Music. Looking forward to it.

Overseas Itinerary Nov-Dec 2010

Just about to hop on a flight for the US. Very much looking forward to seeing old friends again, making new ones, and of course engaging in the various events.

21 Nov – 23 Nov
UMass Lowell, Massachusetts. www.uml.edu/College/arts_sciences/music. MOU follow-up, curriculum review. Prof Wil Moylan, Dr Alex Ruthmann, Dr Alan Williams

24 Nov – 27 Nov
New York. HDR supervision development, music technology history, practice-led research, and Thanksgiving Day. Monroe Street Music, Prof Bill Duckworth, Nora Farrell, Steve Newcomb, Prof Susan-Schmidt Horning.

27 Nov – 1 Dec
Montreal, McGill University www.mcgill.ca/music PentaCon benchmarking, collaboration.
Prof Don McLean. CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology). www.cirmmt.mcgill.ca

2 Dec – 5 Dec
UK, Leeds Metropolitan. www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/index2.htm
Presenting paper on 'Remixing modernism' at the 6th International Art of Record Production Conference. www.artofrecordproduction.com/content/view/233/127.

5 Dec – 8 Dec
UK, Manchester. Royal Northern College of Music. www.rncm.ac.uk Research: www.rncm.ac.uk/content/blogsection/8/52/
Staff seminars, HDR development. Prof Jonty Stockdale, Professor Richard Wistreich, Dr Jane Ginsborg.

8 Dec – 11 Dec
London & Guildford, Kingston University. fass.kingston.ac.uk/schools/performance/music
Seminars, practice-led music research. Dr Frank Millward.

No doubt will blog more and send pics over the following weeks.

soundspace

Another new venture, this time with intercultural musicians, improvisation and a surround sound PA system from industry partners, Acoustic Technologies.

We had an interesting, fun gig recently at the Queensland Conservatorium courtyard (in the centre of the building) here in Brisbane on 3 Nov. 2010. Speakers and artists semi-obscured around the mini-rainforest here.

More about the soundspace concept, scores and pictures available at www29.griffith.edu.au/soundspace.

New music - a six month retrospective

Lots of playing and jamming of the last six moths. Hope some might enjoy the work, but be a little warned - much is this is strictly improvisation, warts and all. A few have been edited a little to simply shorten, a couple of others have some Apple loops dropped in here and there. Still, the sounds are interesting . .


New pages, the last six months and MP3s available at www29.griffith.edu.au/imersd/draper/music

Many thanks to collaborators: Bob Peele (drums), John Stefulj (wind and percussion), Bart Stenhouse (bass and guitar), Frank Millward (keys), Peter Walters (bass).

The Story So Far

I’m a baby boomer who grew up in Brisbane the 50s and 60s. Fresh out of school as a 18 year old guitarist, I bypassed university and joined a rock band, promptly heading off to Melbourne to find fame and fortune. Good times, cold weather, Lygon Street, Aussie Crawl, Skyhooks, Countdown, shared band houses and life in pubs and on the road.

c. 1974 – somewhat naive, but ready for the road

L-to-R: me (guitar), Tony Mockridge (vocals),

Harry Curtis (bass, sadly now passed away), Bob Peel (drums).

We never quite cracked the ‘big time’, whatever that really means in the common ‘stardom-or-bust’ vernacular. Perhaps this was to do with my attitude about money and pay-scales – somehow those record company deals never seemed to quite add up. In any case, I became increasingly interested in the idea of more strings to my bow (what they seem to be calling ‘portfolio careers’ these days) and there was no way to avoid the fact that this was based on an arsenal of high level skills.

I subsequently relocated to Sydney in the late 70s, feeling the needing a change of scene and better musical chops. Jazz fusion was emerging at the time and Sydney had a burgeoning jazz scene together with a Conservatorium of some note that offered programs led by some of the jazz stars of the time. I auditioned and enrolled, trouble was, I didn’t like it and I didn’t like what they taught. Academic content and delivery seemed to be quite disconnected to working, but moreover, the jazz was way too ‘straight’ for my liking, delivered by who I then thought of as ‘old guys’. So, I found private tuition from a number of gigging rock guys with huge chops, dropped out of the Con and for the next five years or so, practiced and played harder than I even had before in my life.

c. 1980s – some festival, somewhere

I moved back to Brisbane in the early 80s to take up a number of great recording and touring offers. This was also time of the birth of the PC, MIDI (the musical Instrument digital interface), the CD and digital sound. I jumped right in, using my experience and love of recording studios to build a facility in Brisbane, probably one of the first, affordable ‘Home studios’ here. This used emerging technologies to synchronise software and microphone recording to produce a lot of original music in the next decade or so.

c. 1987 - the first studio in a spare bedroom

It was this trajectory that first bought me to deliver an invited masterclass on film music and recording technology at the Queensland Conservatorium in 1998. The ‘technology’ moniker stuck, and I somehow became to default ‘music tech’ guy because of my work with computers primarily, but my rock, R&B, and jazz music never really got much of a look-in at a mostly traditional conservatoire at that time. Still. I loved the teaching – and the challenge of being part of a team to bring the conservatoire into the 21st century.

During the 90s, I subsequently designed and convened a range of music technology-related undergraduate, postgraduate degree programs and specializations. I also built a number of recording studios (including the staff research space IMERSD [Intermedia, Music Education & Research Design], networked facilities and computer labs.

The 2004 launch of the IMERSD recording complex.

L-to-R: Griffith Vice-Chancellor Prof Ian O’Connor, [then] Qld Govt Arts & Education Minister, Anna Bligh [now Premier of Queensland]; Mr Robyn James (CEO, Pacific Film & Television Corp.); Mr Mike Lake (Exec. VP, Warners Village Roadshow)

The design of online, variously termed ‘flexible’ or ‘blended’ learning has been a feature research interest throughout my university career. I also had to build and establish academic cred., and in 2000 I completed a Doctor of Education (EdD) entitled New Learning: The Challenge of Flexible Delivery in Higher Education. Drawing on this work, and influenced by new millennia ‘web 2.0’, I subsequently developed podcasting platforms via Radio IMERSD and our role in Griffith iTunes-U.

Given my positive EdD experiences, I also lobbied for the creation of a professional doctorate-by research in music. In 2005, QCGU introduced the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA), these days bursting at seams with doctoral candidates researching aspects of their music.

Somewhat quizzically though, I sometimes reflect on the fact that while here and elsewhere in the arts higher education sector, we develop and assist some outstanding people to attaint their doctoral qualification though multi-exegetical thesis that incorporate creative products – it is much more problematic for academics to continue and be recognised for their own similar creative works. (see earlier 12 May 2010 blog entry, Monograph).

And this brings the story up to the present day: Since taking on the QCGU Deputy Director (Research) portfolio in 2009, this has most certainly allowed me considerable scope for refection(!) Steering an academic team and assuming responsibility for all QCGU RHD candidates in partnership with GGRS has provided me with a substantial ‘birds-eye view’ of complex viewpoints that I now deal with on a day-to-day basis.

This has allowed me to build on my past experience and to respond to the challenges of scaling, modifying, and/or refining my thinking. But also now, in terms of thinking about a research sabbatical (ASP, or Academic Studies Program as call it in Australia), something which I haven’t had the opportunity to engage with to date. I wonder if I can bring the musical past, the academic career and the future together in such a way that makes sense, that still serves my students and faculty well, but also allows me to rebuild some of my past music-making? A bit scary really – I have really ‘lived’ musicking for 15 years or so – that is, like a sports person needing the regular physical engagement: practicing, rehearsing, performing, composing.

We shall see. Next, I need to think about the instruments.

Monograph

It all began when in my 2009 university performance evaluation rounds, a senior colleague suggested that it might be time for me to think about a ‘monograph’, (I guess considered de rigeur for someone who is a professor in the university ecology). That usually means,

. . . In order to gain respect within the academic community and tenure at a major university, an academic must publish monographs over the course of his or her life. These scholarly treatises provide evidence that the academic is carrying out research in the field and analyzing already published information. A monograph usually brings new light to the subject, and it may contain breakthrough research. It also further refines the academic specialty of the author, and establishes the author as an authority on the topic. [Wisegeek]

. . . It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself. An author may therefore declare his own work to be a monograph by intent, or a reader or critic might define a given text as a monograph for the purpose of analysis. Normally it is used for a work intended to be a complete and detailed exposition of a substantial subject at a level more advanced than that of a textbook. [Wikipedia]

However, like many ‘artists in the academy’, I once did very different professional work before joining the university later in life, transitioning from what they now call a ‘portfolio career’ in music. That is, freelancing around musical performance genres, recording sessions, teaching and composition /production commissions. It was this background that invited my first masterclass in film sound track work at an Australian music conservatorium, later to be augmented by the teaching of classes and eventually a tenured position in 1996.

After working for some 25 years in a often cut-throat industry, I was quickly taken by higher education, the idea of ‘knowledge transfer’, and the new young musicians eager to learn.

Also similar to many of my contemporaries, I found myself drifting further and further away from practicing musicianship, simply because of academic demands – the PhD, grants, administration, strategic planning, email work flow, etc. Odd too, in the light of so much talk and gathering of ‘research equivalent outputs’ right across the university sector in Australia – From the so-called Strand Report, Research in the Creative Arts of 1998, to failed Cat J & H research collections, to the Howard government’s Research Quality Framework (RQF), to the now first Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) collection in 2010 (mirroring the UK’s RAE rankings, in place for many years now).

Despite these initiatives and chasing the idea of ‘practice-based research’, many academic artists struggle to keep up the chops and/or significant ‘alternate’ research outputs (artworks, new music, films etc), given the high teaching and administration demands of the variously ever-interconnected, ‘flexible’, policy-driven, compliance-oriented, document-oriented modern university life. Perhaps easier for some (like myself) to produce and count journal articles and conference papers – in writing, and/or immerse myself in collaborations producing albums for academic colleagues. [See my publications].

Not that I’m complaining. To the contrary, working in the university sector over the last 15 years has also taught me a lot about reflection, analysis and research; about challenging my assumptions and intellect. Here then, again recalling my colleague’s suggestion to ‘think about a monograph’, I want to consider more about the shape for such an undertaking:

mon·o·graph   [mon-uh-graf, -grahf] –noun
1. a treatise on a particular subject, as a biographical study or study of the works of one artist.
2. a highly detailed and thoroughly documented study or paper written about a limited area of a subject or field of inquiry: scholarly monographs on medieval pigments.
3. an account of a single thing or class of things, as of a species of organism.
[Dictionary.com]

I want to flesh out some of what is emerging as a plan for the next 18 months or so. But broadly, as way to fuse and re-examine my music in the light of the intervening 15 years of experience, and to think about the project in terms of a range of practice-led research products, one end point being the production of an original album of music entitled Monograph.

Next blog entry, I think I should back up a little and give a little run-down on The Story so Far, which bought me to this point.

Winter in Manhattan . .

Back at work in sunny Brisbane now . . after spending some snow time in Manhattan late Jan /Feb.

We loved the snow, being so rare in Australia. Problem is, a good thing can go a little too far sometimes: turns out we got snowed in – what the New Yorkers are calling the 'Blizzard of 2010" - they made celebratory hats and everything! Took us another five days to get a flight out, and got home just in time for those start of year 'working retreats' . . .

However, the extra days did allow me time to argue with myself some more, and finally relent to pick up a gorgeous private stock PRS 513 from the amazing people at Rudy's Soho (ask for Marco if you're there).

Back at the Queensland Conservatorium in Australia, we're now bustling the new year arrival of hundreds of new students. The research higher degree cohort is just growing exponentially - wonderful people with great ideas, in Masters, M.Phil, PhD and our Doctor of Musical Arts. Much new staff work also planned for our research centre, a couple of new albums out, and a new podcast series called 'Behind the Music'.

From the promo:

Behind the Music presents intimate insights from leading musicians into what happens ‘behind the scenes’ as they prepare their art. In music performance, technology, composition, education and research, creative activities are often a response to musical questions arising directly from their artistic practice. These presentations offer a valuable opportunity to reveal a range of creative processes as artists share their personal approaches to such issues.

http://www29.griffith.edu.au/rss/imersd_podcasts.xml

Enjoy.

Colbert at the Grammys

Check it out . . .

digital arts conference season

Lots of travel and interesting events over the last couple of weeks. I visited the very spooky Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney) for a PhD seminar.

Once a mental institution, now houses academic artists and designers (!) - very beautiful historic building, wonderful artwork and artists, but I'm positive its haunted. 'Nuff said.

Back to Brisbane next, to present a paper 'Authority 3.0' at the fourth annual international CreateWorld 2009 conference on Brisbane's beautiful South Bank.

A great turn out again, with artists from all over the country, from New Zealand and the US. This time, with a new AUC CreateWorld blogsite and well as CreateWorld09 on Twitter.

On the Tuesday (1 Dec), one of the CreateWorld keynotes featured an iChat hook-up to New York with Bill Duckworth and Nora Farrell, talking about their latest Sonic Babylon project and new iPhone app:

Right after the CreateWorld conference, I flew back to Sydney again on 4 Dec to present at the ICoMCS2 conference (that's the second International Conference on Music Communication Science), at the University of New South Wales.

My paper was about a recent album recording project 'Foreign objects & the art of interpretation'. Overall, the conference presented fascinating interdisciplinary collection of people, from psychology, music, education and science.

Xmas soon. Best wishes to everyone for the holiday season.

A Glorious Dawn

A lovely piece from colorpulsemusic.com: A musical tribute to Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking: 'A Glorious Dawn - Cosmos remixed'. Almost all samples and footage are taken from Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Stephen Hawking's Universe series.

Lyrics:

[Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has it's own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we've waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting