Arts Music Research

National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia
ARC-Funded Multi-Organisation Consortium
(Chief Investigators)
Allan Marett, Linda Barwick, (University of Sydney) Aaron Corn , Marcia Langton (University of Melbourne)
(Partner Investigators)
Mandawuy Yunupingu, Witiyana Marika, Alan James (Yothu Yindi Foundation)

This project aims to develop appropriate models to assist the Yothu Yindi Foundation (YYF) in establishing and facilitating the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia (NRPIPA). The Yothu Yindi Foundation is an Aboriginal Corporation that was established by Yolngu leaders from the Gove Peninsula in NE Arnhem Land to raise new recognition and support for Indigenous intellectual traditions and cultural initiatives both locally and Australia-wide. The overarching aim of this initiative with regard to collection is to establish a methodology whereby Indigenous recorders and documenters, working both independently and in collaboration with academics and industry specialists, are able to record and document important and endangered performance traditions. With regard to sustainability and access, its aim is to ensure that the material collected can continue to be available to authorised users through appropriate local and national repositories. Finally, this initiative aims to assist YYF in developing a training program for young Indigenous researchers who wish to participate in the recording, documentation and local management of these collected materials. The NRPIPA was launched by Partner Investigator Dr Mandawuy Yunupingu of YYF at the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture in August 2004, and commenced in 2005 with two pilot studies.
See: the Garma Festival Statement on Indigenous Performance

Research Partners: Yothu Yindi Foundation, The University of Melbourne, AIATSIS, Northern Territory Library, The National Library, APRA/AMCOS

Preserving Australia's Endangered Heritage: Murrinhpatha Song at Wadeye
Australian Research Council Discovery-Project
(Chief Investigators)
Allan Marett (SCM), Michael Walsh, Lysbeth Ford (Linguistics, University of Sydney), Nicholas Reid (Linguistics, University of New England), Linda Barwick (Senior Research Fellow)

This project will produce authoritative, thorough and archivally-sound musicological and linguistic documentation of one of Australia's most vibrant indigenous song traditions: the public dance songs of the Murrinhpatha people at Wadeye, NT. Work is being undertaken with traditional owners to document three song genres, Djanba, Wurltjirri and Malgarrin, in the light of their historical and contemporary inter-relationships with other local genres. More broadly, this project assesses these bodies of songs as endangered cultural heritage of national and international significance, and will develop and apply appropriate electronic media interfaces to ensure their long term conservation and accessibility for both the Wadeye community and others.
Research Partners: Wadeye Knowledge Centre, The University of New England.

The Western Arnhem Land Song Project
Classical song traditions of contemporary Western Arnhem Land in their Multilingual Context
funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (UK)


The classical song traditions of Western Arnhem Land are amongst the foremost examples of verbal art in the nine endangered languages of the region, but few people are now competent to perform or comment on them. Typically performed in multi-lingual social contexts, song texts demonstrate unusual linguistic features such as mixtures of languages and a high proportion of esoteric and intimate vocabulary. The project team will collect, transcribe, translate and analyse songs by contemporary performers, and where relevant repatriate and document archival recordings, making the research results available to communities via a network of local digital repositories.

Participants include:

Linda Barwick (University of Sydney) - musicologist; Allan Marett (University of Sydney) - musicologist; Nicholas Evans (University of Melbourne) - linguist; Murray Garde (University of Melbourne) - linguistic anthropologist; Bruce Birch (University of Melbourne) - linguist; Isabel Bickerdike (University of Melbourne) - postgraduate student, linguistics and musicology; James McElvenny and Tom Honeyman (University of Sydney) - research support.

Transformations from Renaissance to Baroque: The Cultural and Musical Significance of Giovanni Gabrieli
Australian Research Council Discovery–Project

Professor Richard Charteris (Chief Investigator)

Giovanni Gabrieli was a major composer at the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque. His polychoral music is glorious and his innovations in musical form and style gave rise to major developments in the seventeenth century and beyond. This project entails a detailed study of Gabrieli and his music in the extraordinarily rich environment of Venice, and a comprehensive library search for lost compositions that will lead to new understandings and international performances of his music.

Transcription for Harpsichord of Johann Sebastian Bach's
Six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin without bass

Assoc Professor Winsome Evans

An unusual composition and performance research-project has now been completed by Winsome Evans, Associate Professor of Music. The first of two areas of this project is an edition of approximately 150 pages of music: namely transcriptions for harpsichord of Johann Sebastian Bach's Six Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin without bass, with all repeated sections ornamented and embellished in the style of related transcriptions and solo keyboard music by Bach.
The second area is the performance of these transcriptions on two, 80 minute CDs by Winsome Evans on a harpsichord which is a copy of a late 18th century German harpsichord of Christian Zell by the Melbourne maker Alastait McAllister.
The style of the transcriptions is based on a detailed study of Bach's transcriptions for solo or concerto-ing harpsichord of his own works (viz. the Brandenburg Concertos), as well as works by contemporary composers such as Benedetto Marcello, Antonio Vivaldi, Johannes Ernst and Georg Telemann.

Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures(PARADISEC)
ARC-Funded Multi-University Consortium

Linda Barwick (Director)
Allan Marett (Chief Investigator)

Australia lies within a region of great linguistic and cultural diversity. More than 2000 of the world's 6000 different languages are spoken in Australia, the South Pacific Islands (including some 900 languages in New Guinea alone) and South-East Asia. Over the next century, this number is likely to drop to a few hundred. The majority of these 2000 languages and their associated cultural expressions, such as music, are very poorly documented. Even in those languages that have begun to be documented, many of the most developed cultural expressions such as the dense and highly allusive languages used in song have never been studied. The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) offers a facility for digital conservation and access for endangered materials from the Pacific region (defined broadly to include Oceania and East Asia). Our research group has developed models to ensure that the archive can provide access to interested communities, and conforms with emerging international standards for digital archiving. We have established a framework for accessioning, cataloguing and digitising audio, text and visual material, and preserving digital copies. The primary focus of this process is the safe preservation of material that would otherwise be lost such as rare field tapes from the 1950s and 1960s. PARADISEC is supported by the Australian Research Council, Grangenet, the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing National Facility, Australian National University Internet Futures and the University of Sydney, and is a participant in the Open Language Archives Consortium (OLAC) and a foundation member of the international umbrella organisation the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN), of which Barwick is President.

Community Radio and Public Culture in Australia: Popular Music, Political Discourse and Participatory Media
The University of Sydney

Charles Fairchild (Chief Investigator)

This project examines the ways in which program presenters at community radio stations in Sydney and Canberra think about the work they do within the context of participatory media institutions. I have been talking to station staff, music presenters and those responsible for political programming at several stations in these two cities. I have also been examining the often difficult relationships between these radio stations and the Australian Commonwealth. The goal of the project is to come to a better understanding of how volunteers and unpaid staff complete the myriad tasks required of them and how this knowledge can be translated into better management of the community radio sector generally. I also intend to highlight the public good open media provide to a democracy with the most highly concentrated commercial media sectors in the world.

Yiwarruj, Yinyman, Radbiyi Ida Mali: Iwaidja and Other Endangered Languages of the Cobourg Peninsula, Australia, in their Cultural Context
Volkswagen Documentation of Endangered Languages Grant

Linda Barwick (Associate Investigator)

Led by Professor Nick Evans (Linguistics, University of Melbourne) and Prof. Hans-Juergen Sasse (Universitaet zu Koln), this project documents, in as complete a cultural context as possible, the Iwaidja language of the Cobourg Peninsula, NT. With only 200 speakers, Iwaidja is increasing threatened by English, while other languages of the region, Marrgu, Ilgar/Garig, Amurdak and Manangkari, are spoken by only one or two people each. This project spans the disciplines of linguistics, ethnomusicology, material culture/archaeology and social anthropology, and will culminate in a comprehensive, searchable and browsable sound and video archive with Iwaidja transcriptions and subtitles alongside English translations, a Iwaidja dictionary of some 5000 words, detailed phonetic analyses, and supplementary materials on other languages of the region. On this project, Dr Barwick is responsible for the documentation and analysis of recorded song materials. Songs composed in nearly every language spoken of the Cobourg Peninsula continue to be performed even when the languages themselves are no longer spoken. In 2005, the project CD, Jurtbirrk lovesongs from North Western Arnhem Land, won awards for best traditional album and best album design at the NT Indigenous Music Awards.

Research Partners: The University of Melbourne, Universitaet zu Koln, Mamaruni School