Every now and then a musician comes along with such an individual take on things that you can’t continue your own path without exploring theirs for a while. For myself, this has occurred more than once with the music of Ren Walters (a Melbourne based improviser), Ralph Towner and J.S. Bach, to name but a…
Sounds
More recent tracks available HERE. Excerpt from a live gig at Bar 303 in Melbourne with an original project ORACLE. The composition is Journey by rail. This is from my 2011 Masters degree recital titled OCEANUS (with Phil Bywater – tenor sax; Dale Lindrea – bass).
Communication: the best and worst thing so learn to do it well
When approached to play a gig recently, I found myself in a situation where I was filling in for someone who had broken his arm. The gig was a few weeks away when I got the initial call so I had time to learn the material, although the first rehearsal was only a few days…
Musicology: A tale of two chapters…
This post is from an essay I wrote in 2011 relating chapters from two different books. Here it is unedited. I’ve chosen the final chapter from Rose Rosengard Subotnik’s Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music titled The Challenge of Contemporary Music and the first chapter from Lydia Goehr’s The Quest for Voice: Music,…
Book review: Flow – The psychology of optimal experience
This book review was done during my studies for a Masters in Music Performance in Sep 2011. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness.[1] The question raised in this book is this: when do people feel most…
Check, check, 1, 2…
Well, this is how it starts. My initial intention with this blog is to offer my experience of some of the books I read, music I listen to and general experiences I have. Your joys increase and tragedies diminish in proportion to the number of people with whom you share them as the old adage…
