The inaugural OUR MUSIC festival in 2012 was the first time the Sydney Conservatorium of Music had hosted an Indigenous music event solely for the musical collaborations of its students and Indigenous musicians of Sydney and Western N.S.W. Partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people were created at this event. OUR MUSIC opened the doors of one of Australia’s elite music schools to Indigenous music students, inviting them to play their music. Many staff members of the Conservatorium assisted in producing OUR MUSIC ’12. Julia Torpey–Hurst473 and her faculty
Deepening Histories of Place at the Australian National University, produced a website of the performances of OUR MUSIC 2012. Ms Torpey–Hurst’s interviews with the performers are also documented in the website
The objectives and processes of my research were put into practice in OUR MUSIC. I played and evaluated the sound of the Stuart piano in a wide range of Australian Indigenous music styles. I interacted artistically with approximately thirty-five Indigenous performers, using the Stuart piano sounds in the rehearsals and performances of their music. Certainly from my perspective, through all the interaction, the Stuart sound was becoming ‘the’ piano sound of cross-cultural Australian music.
Producing OUR MUSIC has enabled me to conduct my research of the new piano sound in the community. At various times I realised I was being an observer, observing a rehearsal, or the painting session, or simply a discussion I wasn’t part of. Noticing these interactions occurring without my direct input, confirmed to me that the participant’s singular interactions with the ideas and materials of the project was only one part of the creative process, that it was really the interactions of person to person that formed the building blocks towards a creative outcome. I was fortunate to observe ‘change’ occurring in how an artistic research idea, for instance a re-composition of a historic Indigenous chant, was being transformed through person to person interactions. The composed sound is interpreted by a collective of interactions and changed into something new purely through engaged activity. In many ways this is what happens at every ensemble music rehearsal and performance, peoples’ perspective of the entity they are working with and within changes. Musicians remember particular rehearsals and performances over many years, when ‘something special’ occurred. In this instance of OUR MUSIC an unexpected collective synchronicity with the materials and the participants transformed the intended objective into another dimension, producing a creative outcome of a surprisingly high quality.
473Julia Torpey | PhD Candidate | School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Faculty of Arts,The University of Sydney, visiting scholar Australian National University | School of History Coombs Building | The Australian National University | Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
