Editorial: Musical Entanglements and Artistic Research in Australia
DOI: 10.32063/1200
Christopher Coady
Christopher Coady is Associate Dean (Research Education) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He is an historical musicologist and jazz specialist. His scholarly works include the monograph John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and a range of articles on historic and contemporary jazz practice, music research training, and transnational music history. His sole authored and co-authored work has appeared in the British Journal of Music Education, Jazz Research Journal, American Music, Jazz and Culture, and the Musical Quarterly.
Photo Credit: Geoff Wood
Amanda Harris
Amanda Harris is an Australian Research Council 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.
Photo Credit: Nicola Bailey
Nicole Cherry
Nicole Cherry is a Juilliard-trained violinist and scholar and serves as Assistant Professor of Violin and Director of Performance Projects at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research and creative activity center on the recovery and reinterpretation of marginalized musical histories, with a particular focus on Afro-European violinist George Bridgetower. She is the founder of ForgewithGeorge, a commissioning and performance initiative through which she has premiered nearly three dozen new works across North America and Europe with recent appearances including performances at Bridgetower’s alma mater, Trinity College at Cambridge University. Dr. Cherry is co-editor of the first critical edition of Bridgetower’s compositions for A-R Editions. Her ongoing work integrates scholarship, pedagogy, and performance, and continues to expand through international concerts, recordings, and a forthcoming biopic, contributing to a broader reimagining of classical music’s cultural narratives.
Photo Credit: Brandon Fletcher
Neal Peres Da Costa
Neal Peres Da Costa is Associate Dean (Research) and Professor of Historical Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is a world-recognised performing scholar of historical keyboards. His monograph Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (Oxford University Press, 2012) is considered a ‘go-to’ text, and he is known for the co-edited performance editions of Brahms chamber music (Bärenreiter Verlag, 2015/16), an Australian Recording Industry Award (2008) and several research-based recordings. Neal is lead chief investigator on three Australian Research Council Discovery Projects. He performs regularly with leading Australian music industry partners and is Artistic Advisor to the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra.
Photo Credit: University of Sydney
Music and Practice, Volume 12: Special Issue 2025
Editorial Team:
Dr Christopher Coady, Associate Professor in Musicology, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney
Dr Amanda Harris, Principal Research Fellow, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney
Dr Nicole Cherry, Assistant Professor of Violin, The University of Texas at San Antonio
Professor Neal Peres Da Costa, Professor of Historical Performance, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney
During the Age of Enlightenment, European thinkers conceptualised the continent now known as Australia as a vast Antipodes—a place that was Europe’s geographical and aesthetic opposite. In this Special Issue, prompted by the possibilities our geographical location evokes, we examine a range of artistic practices in Australia shaped by intercultural and transnational encounter. The music of Australia’s First Peoples, the European art and folk musics that arrived with colonization, and the musical practices of non-European migrants are each rooted in specific technical skills, aesthetic knowledge, and cultural intention. These anchors help define musical traditions and articulate cultural distinctiveness across the landscape of music in Australia. Yet history has charged these practices in other ways as well. As they have sounded alongside each other, they have raised questions about aesthetic and cultural hierarchies, fidelity to tradition, and the possibility of new kinds of musical work. Complicating this situation further is the way musical practice in Australia has routinely drawn energy from and contributed to international networks of practice in which Australia has taken up various positions as a colonial outpost of European music, a hub of new music innovation, and home of the world’s oldest living culture.
The co-authored introductory article to this Special Issue, “Listening from/to the Antipodes: how place and time inform performance in Australia”, works through these entanglements to establish a context for the accounts of artistic research activity that unfold across five subsequent research articles. While the intent of this Special Issue is to illuminate the particular dynamics of artistic research practice in Australia, contributing authors have each chosen to weave their discussions of Australian entanglements into broader themes at play in the field, including the reimagination of historically informed performance practices, new theorisations of interdisciplinary collaboration, and new methods of Indigenous song revitalisation. The result is a collection of articles that showcases both the locality and international dimensions of artistic research in Australia alongside our central argument that understanding the way musical practices have been historically charged is fundamental to grappling with how they might be meaningfully deployed in the present.
We are pleased to deliver this Special Issue for readers of Music & Practice. The editorial team is grateful for the guidance of Professor Erlend Hovland and the Music & Practice board throughout the development of this project, the generous reports provided by commissioned peer-reviewers, copyediting support provided by Laura Macy, and final preparation of articles support provided by Dr Christina Kobb.