Musicology - Staff

Chair/Lecturer
Lewis Cornwell, BMus(Hons)

Reader
Richard Toop, BA(Mus) Hull

Associate Professor
Peter McCallum, DSCM BMus(Hons) Dunelm MMus LondPhD

Senior Lecturer
Kathleen Nelson, BMus(Hons) MMus PhD Adel

Lecturers
Alan Maddox, BA(Hons) PhD
Neal Peres Da Costa (Harpsichord), DipEarlyMus Guildhall MMus City Uni London PhD Leeds BMus(Hons)
Christopher Coady, BA (Magna Cum Laude) SkidmoreCollNY

Honorary Research Associate
Deborah Priest, LMusA LTCL BMus(Hons)

Part-time Staff
Rachel Campbell, BMus(Hons)
Scott Davie, BMus MMus(Perf)
Angharad Davis, BMus(Hons), LMusA
Megan Evans, BMus
Karen Lemon, DalCert DalLic CMU BMusEd(Hons) PhD Syd
Stephen Loy, LMusA AMusA DipABRSM BMus(Hons) PhD Syd
Anna Maslowiec, BMus(Hons)
Laura McDonald,BMus(Hons) PGradCert Moscow Cons LMusA
Peter McNamara, BMus(Hons) MMus
Brett Mullins, BMus
Jason Noble, BMus(Hons) LMusA
Damien Ricketson, BMus PGradCert RoyalConsHague PhD
Carl Schmidt, MMus(Perf) RoyalConsHague BMus(Hons) DipMus AIM LMusA AMusA

Chair/Lecturer

Lewis Cornwell, BMus(Hons)

Lewis Cornwell lectures in harmony and analysis at the Sydney
Conservatorium of Music, where he is Chair of Musicology. He is an experienced theory teacher and composer with research interests in the area of new music for traditional Japanese instruments.

A graduate of the University of Sydney, he studied composition in the Department of Music with Peter Sculthorpe. He began tutoring in Harmony in 1982, both in the Music Department and at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, gaining a full-time position at the Conservatorium in 1989, serving as Chair of Musicology from 2002-2004 and Associate Dean (ICT/eLearning) from 2004-2006.

Cornwell was a founding member of the composers' collective Music Performed and served a term as its administrator, helping to organise workshops of New Music for young composers. His works have been included in concerts given by the ISCM, the Mused Ensemble and the Seymour Group.

His interest in studying and composing New Music for traditional Japanese instruments has led to performances of his works in Japan and Europe. In January 1997, Interweave, for shô and guitar, received its first performance at the 18th Festival and Conference of the Asian Composers' League, in Manila. Lewis was a co-organiser of the Takemitsu Symposium and Tribute Concert, which was held at the University of Sydney in February, 1998. As an oboist, he plays in local orchestras and chamber ensembles, and assists with their administration.

Reader

Richard Toop, BA(Mus) Hull

Richard Toop is a Reader in Musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His principal area of research is late 20th century modernism, and particularly the music of Stockhausen and Ferneyhough. Since 2002 he has lectured at the annual Stockhausen Courses in Kürten and he is currently writing a monograph on German composer Walter Zimmermann.

Toop’s work has appeared in many major international journals, including Perspectives of New Music, The Musical Quarterly, Contrechamps, Contemporary Music Review, Musicae Scientiae and the Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik. His monograph on Gyorgy Ligeti was published by Phaidon Press (London) in 1999. He has also contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Opera and the revised New Grove (including entries on Ferneyhough and Stockhausen), as well as providing a chapter for the Cambridge History of 20th Century Music (2004). His lectures at the 2002 Kürten Stockhausen Courses were published in 2005 by Stockhausen-Verlag, which also plans to publish his lectures from subsequent years.

Toop studied at Hull University (England), where his teachers included the Gabrieli/Monteverdi specialist Denis Arnold; he graduated in 1967. From 1973-74 he was teaching assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Staatliche Hochschule fuer Musik in Cologne. In 1975 he joined the staff of the Sydney Conservatorium, acting as Head of Department (now Chair of Unit) from 1980-1995. He was appointed Reader in 1995.

Senior Lecturer

Kathleen Nelson, BMus(Hons) MMus PhD Adel

Dr Kathleen Nelson is a Senior Lecturer in Musicology with a range of responsibilities including coordination of postgraduate musicology studies, coordination and teaching for the undergraduate Musicology specialisation, and postgraduate research supervision in a variety of fields. Having begun her tertiary studies with an honours degree in performance on the oboe, she moved to musicology for her postgraduate work.

Kathleen’s current research is focussed upon liturgical mansucript studies, especially medieval sources of Spanish origin and notated in Aquitanian notation. Recent work and publications also investigate manuscripts held in Sydney and dating from as early as the eleventh century and as late as the sixteenth century and coming from different parts of Europe. In 2006 Kathleen became a core member of the research cluster “Cathedral, Court, City and Cloister: Western Music and its Sources 1100-1750” sponsored by the ARC Network for Early European Research (NEER). She is also a member of the International Musicological Society study group devoted to chant studies “Cantus Planus”. Another research direction has taken Kathleen into Australian music history and her work in the area include articles relating to the ABC in Australian musical life as well as supervision of research theses in the field.

A complete listing of her publications can be found here.

Lecturers

Alan Maddox BA (Hons), PhD, University of Sydney

Alan Maddox teaches music history and historical performance practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His primary research area is rhetoric and performance practice in Italian vocal music of the 17th and 18th centuries and he also studies the music of the colonial period in Australia, particularly the work of Isaac Nathan and music in the 19th century penal settlement on Norfolk Island. Dr. Maddox also co-ordinates the Conservatorium’s undergraduate Aural Perception (ear training) program.

Maddox performed as a professional singer for ten years, appearing with Opera Australia and freelancing in Europe and Australia before devoting himself primarily to the study of musicology in 1999. Since then he has made regular presentations at Australian and international musicology conferences including the 2003 conference of the Wolfenbüttler Arbeitskreis für Barockforschung (Wolfenbüttel, Germany) and the 2004 Symposium of the International Musicological Society (IMS), held in Melbourne, and the 2007 congress of the IMS in Zürich, Switzerland.

A respected music writer and public lecturer, Maddox also writes
program notes and gives pre-concert talks for the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and for Musica Viva. His on-stage commentaries have become an integral part of the Australian Brandenburg Ensemble’s innovative baroque chamber music concerts.

Neal Peres Da Costa (Harpsichord), DipEarlyMus Guildhall MMus City Uni

Dr. Neal Peres Da Costa specialises in performance on historical keyboard instruments of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. He lectures at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in the Musicology and Keyboard units and is Chair of the Early Music Unit. His current research activities include converting his PhD into a monograph for publication, giving papers at national and international conferences, and recent creative research output in the form of a CD recording with Richard Tognetti and Daniel Yeadon of J.S. Bach's Sonatas for violin and obbligato keyboard were released on the ABC Classics label.

After graduating from the University of Sydney with first class honours B.Mus., Peres Da Costa attained a Postgraduate Diploma in Early Music from the Guildhall School of Music and a Master in Music Performance from the City University in London. In 2002, he attained a PhD from the University of Leeds, where he researched performing practices in late 19th-century piano playing with particular reference to early recordings.

Dr. Peres Da Costa joined the faculty at the Conservatorium as a full time member in 2005, after spending many years as Professor of Fortepiano at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he was also a Lecturer in Performance Practice. He also held the post of Lecturer in 19th-Century Performing Practice for of the Masters Degree at Trinity College in London. In 2000 Peres Da Costa was Artist in Residence at Bretton Hall College at the University of Leeds.

Peres Da Costa was co-founder of Florilegium, an internationally renowned period instrument ensemble with which he performed around the world and made many award-winning recordings. He has also performed with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia Australis, Orchestra of the Antipodes, Pinchgut Opera, and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra.

Christopher Coady, BA (Magna Cum Laude) SkidmoreCollNY

Christopher Coady teaches primarily in the aural skills arena of the musicology program at the Sydney Conservatorium. Before his current position, Coady taught aural skills at the University of New South Wales and tutored in the Media department at Macquarie University. His research interests include the critical reception of extended jazz compositions from the 1950s and pedagogical applications of research in music cognition. Coady has presented his research at both national and international musicology conferences, including the Leeds International Jazz Conference in 2006. He served on the National Executive of the Musicological Society of Australia from 2006 – 2008.

Coady received his bachelor-of-arts degree in 2002 from Skidmore College, located in Saratoga Springs, New York. He has recently submitted his PhD thesis, entitled Duke Ellington, John Lewis and the Myths of Third Stream Music, at the University of New South Wales.

Honorary Research Associate

Deborah Priest LMusA LTCL BMus(Hons)

Deborah Priest is an Honorary Research Associate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music currently working on a study of the reception and context of Debussy’s music during his lifetime. She specialises in early 20th Century French music, with particular interest in literary and social contexts.

After graduating from the University of Sydney with honours in both music (performance) and French language and literature, Priest pursued a career as a pianist while also teaching at the University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and the Sydney Conservatorium. Her piano repertoire was eclectic, with an emphasis on French and contemporary music, and for thirteen years she gave two-piano recitals with composer Nigel Butterley.

In the 1990s, Deborah turned to musicological research and since then she has published widely in both French and English. Louis Laloy (1874-1944) on Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky (Ashgate Publishing, 1999) met with critical success and a French-language edition of that book, Debussy, Ravel et Stravinski: textes de Louis Laloy (1874-1944) was published in 2007 by L’Harmattan in Paris. Priest’s research has also uncovered some little-known documents relating to the life and work of Claude Debussy, and she has presented this work in the journal Cahiers Debussy (Paris). She is also currently engaged in a study of the reception and contexts of Debussy’s music during his lifetime, to be entitled Les Debussystes à Paris, 1902-1914.