Book Launch: Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia

Friday 15 November, 1.00-1.30pm

Professor Sarah Collins FAHA will launch the Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia edited by Dr Amanda Harris FAHA and Professor Clint Bracknell FAHA.

About the book:

Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia, edited by Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell

As a companion to ‘music in Australia’, rather than ‘Australian music’, this book acknowledges the complexity and contestation inherent in the term ‘Australia’, whilst placing the music of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at its very heart. This companion emphasizes a diversity of musical experiences in the breadth of musical practice that flows though Australia, including Indigenous song, art music, children’s music, jazz, country, popular music forms and music that blurs genre boundaries. Organised in four themed sections, the chapters present the latest research alongside perspectives of current creative artists to explore communities of practice and music’s ongoing entanglements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural practices, the influence of places near and far, of continuity, tradition, adaptation, and change. In the final chapter, we pick up where these chapters have taken us, asking what is next for music in Australia for the future.

About the editors:

Amanda Harris is an ARC Future Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Unit of digital archive PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures). Amanda is a musicologist and cultural historian interested in hearing the voices of those often excluded from conventional music histories. Her current work focuses on histories of musical encounter in Australia’s Oceanic location and colonial history. She approaches this work through collaborative research into present and past musical cultures. Amanda’s monograph Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-70, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2020 was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australian History. The book Music, Dance and the Archive, co-edited with Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy, was published by Sydney University Press in 2022 and won the Mander Jones Award for the publication making the greatest contribution to the archives profession in Australia. Amanda’s current research is supported by ARC funding for three projects: the Future Fellowship Resonant histories of musical encounter in Australia (FT220100115), a collaborative Discovery Project Hearing the music of early NSW 1788-1860 (DP210101511), and a Linkage, Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) Project Modularised cultural heritage archives – future-proofing PARADISEC (LE220100010).

Clint Bracknell is Professor of Music at the University of Western Australia, Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and a Chief Investigator of current Australian Research Council funded projects. Grounded in his Indigenous Noongar region of Western Australia’s south, Bracknell leads a program of research investigating connections between Indigenous language and song revitalisation, performance, communication technologies, and ecological crisis. He also publishes more broadly on popular music in Australia and is frequently commissioned to compose music for Australian theatre and arts festivals. Bracknell recently co-translated and composed for the award-winning mainstage adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the endangered Noongar language (Hecate 2020). He also co-translated, co-produced, and voiced a leading role in the Noongar-dubbed 1970s Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury Noongar Daa (2021). Both productions were firsts for languages of Australia and continue to generate international interest. Bracknell was awarded the 2021 ECU Vice Chancellor’s Research Engagement Award and the 2020 John Barrett Award for Australian Studies. He presented the 2019 Australian Academy of the Humanities Hancock Lecture.

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