Research Strengths at the Conservatorium of Music

Research at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music includes creative work in performance and composition and music-related scholarship in the fields of western musicology, ethnomusicology, music education and experimental research in music performance and production.

The Sydney Conservatorium of Music is also co-host to the research centre - PARADISEC.

Performance

At the Sydney Conservatorium of Music performance as research emphasizes the values of creativity, originality and intellectual integrity as it manifests itself in performance. Musical performance work is undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge in the context of the arts. Members of the SCM Performance faculty maintain highly active and international profiles in all speciality areas of performance including solo, chamber music, orchestral, and all vocal arts. Research focus covers a wide range of performance, recording, performance practice and analysis of eras from Early Music through to Jazz and all genres of contemporary music from Australia or abroad, pedagogical methods and teaching repertoire, historical development and repertoire, style and technique as well as technological understanding and development of instruments and performers’ physical and intellectual involvement.

The Sydney Conservatorium offers excellent support for performance students including state-of-the-art performance venues with cutting edge technology and research laboratories. Performance students undertaking research at the doctoral, masters or undergraduate level are encouraged to explore traditional as well as innovative avenues of study that inspire them, confident that the large performance faculty includes Australia’s best known performing musicians in every area and can provide expert guidance for research topics.

Musicology

At the postgraduate level, students can undertake a PhD in musicology or a Master of Music (Musicology). Current and recent students work in a wide range of areas from early music and performance practice topics to 19th- and 20th-century topics of art music, as well as Australian music history, and contemporary popular music studies. Musicology staff conduct research in areas ranging from medieval chant to the latest works of Stockhausen and other contemporary composers to the analysis of current popular music genres, and demonstrate diverse interests including ethnomusicology studies, compositional process, musical analysis, sketch studies, manuscript studies, and performance practice. Their research is published in books and journals, and they are participants in musicological conferences and seminars both nationally and internationally.

Staff and senior students also contribute to the broader musicological arena including reviews in newspapers and online publications, pre-concert talks and public lectures or workshops, program notes and CD liner notes, as well as radio broadcasts.

Music Education

The Music Education unit offers postgraduate training relating to many types of music teaching and learning. The unit concentrates on creativity as the area through which music is taught and learnt and places cultural diversity at the centre of its pedagogy, informed by specialist knowledge of the music of South-East Asia, Melanesia, and indigenous Australians. Research in the Music Education unit is interdisciplinary in nature, combining the methodologies of education with those informed by ethnomusicological, sociological, psychological, historical, and cultural studies influences. Topics undertaken by research students in this Unit reflect the broad view of Music Education adopted at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. This is one which presents Music Education as the study of music teaching and learning from a range of perspectives in all the contexts where it occurs – from early childhood, through various levels of school and university systems, to studio teaching, community music activity, popular music, use of music in therapy, and music in notated and non-notated traditions.

Members of the unit also bring expertise in wider educational fields, such as gifted education, educational psychology, social foundations of education, e-learning and behaviour management for adolescents. The work of music education staff is widely published in books and major international journals in music education, ethnomusicology, music psychology, popular music and cultural studies.

Composition

The Composition and Music Technology Unit makes an important contribution to the Sydney Conservatorium’s research profile. Its research is largely based in creative work such as the composition of chamber music, orchestral music, opera and music theatre as well as electronic and electro-acoustic music . This research is often supported by the production of more traditional research publications normally associated with the development of the creative work.

The postgraduate programme allows the student to specialise in the compositional areas of most interest to them and all students find ample opportunities for the performance of their new works. Our staff represents a substantial cross-section of the most talented and internationally recognised Australian composers.

PARADISEC

PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital sources in Endangered Cultures) is a cross-institutional, cross-faculty interdisciplinary facility directed by Dr Linda Barwick. Established in 2003 by the University of Sydney (SCM and Faculty of Arts) in partnership with the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University, PARADISEC has emerged as a national and international leader in the digital archiving and management of cultural resources. Its mission is to preserve and make accessible Australian researchers' field recordings of endangered languages and musics of the Asia-Pacific region. Its 18 Chief Investigators are in Linguistics, Music and Anthropology and it is funded by the Australian Research Council.

Closely linked to PARADISEC is the National Recording Project for Indigenous Music an initiative between the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the Yothu Yindi Foundation and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Led by Professor Allan Marett, Dr Mandawuy Yunupingu and Professor Marcia Langton, the mission of the National Recording Project is to systematically record and document the unique and endangered performance traditions of Indigenous Australia. Through this process, it will assist in the development of local knowledge centres and other digital archives as primary repositories for locally recorded and documented materials, and a secure national repository in which copies of all data generated can be archived.