Monash University ECPS Events Podcast

Collaborations in Music Conference: Graeme Smith

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:30:00 +1000

5th June 2009

Singers and Songwriters in Australian Country Music

According to sociologist Howard Becker music is best seen as the result of “what of a lot of people have done jointly”. Yet at the same time, the figure of the autonomous singer-songwriter is seen as an ideal creative agent in popular music. It has been noted that Country music and its antecedent genres, through such figures as Jimmie Rodgers, established many of the features of the performance role of the singer-songwriter as the authentic, autobiographically informed projection of self-in-music. At the same time, in country music in particular, collaborative authorship, (“co-writes”) and non-performing songwriters are still prominent in the genre, in comparison with other popular music genres. In Australian country music performers frequently negotiate relationships between singer songwriter, while creating the performance persona projected in the song. These collaborations may sometimes be disguised or accommodated against an ideal of ideal authorship, but are always treated as potentially relevant to the authenticity of utterance of the song. This paper will examine a number of relationships between country performers, producer and songwriters, including Lee Kernaghan, Garth Porter, Shane Nicholson, Kasey Chambers and Troy Cassar Daley to establish a typology of collaboration in the genre. It will be argued that collaboration and its accommodation to creative ideals of creativity is a central feature of the construction of the performing subject within this genre.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Helen O'Shea

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:00:00 +1000

5th June 2009

Sean O Riada and Ceoltoiri Chualann: The collaboration that changed the sound of Irish music

In 1960, modernist Irish composer Sean O Riada gathered together a group of largely traditional musicians and singers, initially to provide music for a play. It was a turning point for the composer, for the musicians and for Irish traditional music. Contrary to the convention of unison playing, O Riada’s arrangements of Irish tunes had the musicians performing solo or in varying combinations, sometimes using harmonies. Soon the ensemble, Ceoltoiri Chualann, developed a repertoire for concerts, radio performances and recordings that were immensely popular among Irish art-music audiences. Within three years, members of the group had formed The Chieftains, which became the most popular and enduring of Irish music performance groups and which are still recording and touring the world. O Riada, on the other hand, retreated from Dublin and from the art-music world to immerse himself in rural life and traditional music. This paper explores the collaboration between these musicians from the art-music and traditional-music worlds and their mutual influence, arguing that the sound of Irish traditional music changed from this point, with a new performance practice and a new aesthetic, and illustrating the ways in which the musicians’ collaboration changed from musical director and guest performers to an intensely innovative creativity.

Helen O’Shea is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She is the author of a critical study of Irish music, The Making of Irish Traditional Music (Cork University Press, 2008).

Collaborations in Music Conference: Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:30:00 +1000

5th June 2009

Wrocking Collaboration: Wizard Rock and the Work of J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter is the series that launched a thousand wizard rock bands. This may be a slight exaggeration, but no other series of books has ever resulted in a genre of music. Wizard rock bands produce music, including rock, punk and folk, based on storylines and characters from the Harry Potter novels. Most of the bands have names drawn from the novels, including Harry & the Potters, The Remus Lupin and The Moaning Myrtles. Harry & the Potters on their website explain how wizard rock not only celebrates fandom and engages metafictionally with the narratives, but challenges the music industry:

”Imagine if Harry Potter quit the quidditch team and started a punk rock band. Take that one step further and imagine that he stole a time-turner and decided to start that band with himself from a different point in time. Imagine that band could exist without compromising themselves. Imagine that they are able to operate completely independently, without managers, booking agents, recording budgets, publicists, record labels, or anything aside from a sense of enthusiasm and a desire to have fun. Hello. We are Harry and the Potters“. [harryandthepotters.com]

Drawing particularly on Henry Jenkins’ fan cultures work and the latest thinking on new media, the paper will examine collaborations between wizard rock bands and the Harry Potter fan community, the evolution of wizard rock from folk into an ‘outer-industry’ phenomenon embracing new media, and the unusual relationship between the bands and J.K. Rowling’s original series, with its implications for creative ownership.

Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario teaches fairy tale, children’s and fantasy literature at Monash University. She has published on topics including fairy tale, Harry Potter, musical theatre and children's literature.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Stuart Grant

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:10:00 +1000

5th June 2009

Feeling The Flow

In funk, it’s called being in the groove, in jazz it’s in the pocket. When musicians play together, listen together in attentive grace, particularly in improvisation, they are moved by an invisible flow of mutually experienced shaped silence; an intercorporeal contoured time-flow to which they belong, and to which they must submit in order to make a meaningful contribution to the music. The individual audible musical events struck by the musicians emerge as markers or symptoms pointing to and communicating the existence of the flow, making it available to the listener to experience in their own body, but those specific events are by no means necessary to the flow for its existence. The singular musical events: the notes, the phrases, the beats, the tones, the keys, the melodies, are all arbitrary attestations bearing witness to and shaping the flow, but an infinite number of other events might be played to reinforce, vary, state and shape the flow in an infinite number of ways without disturbing the musicians’ and the listeners’ attentive bodily submission to the flow. The flow is the essence of music: the relational structure which gives the individual notes of a melody its coherence as a melody, the propulsion which moves bodies, the elaborate contour of the deep dramatic and expressive structure of the symphony. And the flow is silent. The silent essence at the core of music. Music is shaped silence. In its sharedness, through the flow, it bears witness to the birth of shared time. The mutual embodied experience of pure diachrony. The flow.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Becky Shepherd

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:35:00 +1000

5th June 2009

Collaboratively Crafting the Recorded Soundscape

The collaboration between the artist of popular music and the studio recordist is a relationship that is integral to the development of recorded sound as artistry, however there are different degrees within which this collaboration operates. The original role of the studio producer as A&R man for example, involved the collaboration between a recording artist and a producer that was predominately based on administration, finances and logistics. Alternately, the producer as autonomous orchestrator involves the governance of the producer over the entire recording process, from the early stages of pre-production and arrangement, to the tracking and mixing process. Finally there is the role of the producer as collaborator, or techno-musical advisor. In this context the producer works closely alongside the recording artist throughout the production process as a means of realising an appropriate recorded sonic aesthetic. In this paper I will examine the last of these examples and highlight how the creative collaboration between the recording artist and the studio producer is the most common mode of operation for the production of contemporary rock music, despite such collaborations often remaining unacknowledged in album linear notes and album promotions . I will focus on two contemporary examples of this collaborative relationship, and examine the extent to which the production process is conceptualised as recorded sound by the artists/performer, but is realised via the techno-musical crafting of the song, the arrangement and the track, by the producer in the recording studio. I argue therefore that the collaborative role between the studio producer and the artist/performer, works like a conduit of ideas, whereby the producer facilitates the sonic vision of the recording artist, via his/her techno-musicality within the recording studio environment. I will examine the successfully collaborative relationship between producer Steve Albini, and American indie artists Low. I will demonstrate how Albini’s preference for live tracking and distant microphone techniques directly complements, captures and crafts the sonic aesthetic of close harmonies, cyclical melodic lines, and the raw intimacy of the sound of the ‘room’ in Low’s first LP, Things We Lost In The Fire (2001). Secondly, I will briefly demonstrate how Canadian producer Peter Moore , realised a similar, intimate, lo-fi live ambience to the recording of American country/folk rock artists The Cowboy Junkies second LP The Trinity Session (1988). I will argue that both these albums and the collaborative role of the studio producer and the recording artist, continues to influence the live, intimate lo-fi recording techniques that characterise the recorded sound of successful contemporary alternative country artists such as Gillian Welch, and My Morning Jacket. These types of collaborations demonstrate two examples of the valorisation of the studio producer as a facilitator of the recording process, and more importantly as an orchestator of an artists’ recorded sonic aesthetic.

Becky Shepherd is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. She has just completed her PhD, which focused on retrospective rock and analog sound production. Her main areas of research interest include studio production, retrospectivity in contemporary popular music, and issues of authenticity and nostalgia and the canon of popular music.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Geoff King

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:00:00 +1000

5th June 2009

When the music’s over: Collaboration gone wrong

In those genres of popular music where the ‘group’ has a central role, collaboration is, of course, at the heart of the group process. This is something difficult to maintain in a constructive manner when many forces are interacting: the personal, the creative and the industrial. So, what happens when the relationships within such collaborative units go wrong? What is the outcome for the individual musicians and the remaining members? Using the three fields (the personal, the creative, the industrial) this paper will examine the factors that led to the end of some successful collaborations drawing on interviews with a number of Melbourne musicians.

Geoff King is a lecturer in the school of applied communication at RMIT university. He is currently researching a radio/oral history project on Melbourne ‘roots’ music and its crossovers. Amongst other activities, he is chair of the board of community radio station 3RRR FM.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Peter Doyle

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:30:00 +1000

5th June 2009

‘Working for the man’: figuring the artist-producer (or artist-agent, artist-manager, artist-entrepreneur, artist-hustler) relationship

It is a commonplace of popular music studies that records are manufactured things, that the sonic ‘production’ itself is worthy of attention, that producers matter, and that in the larger history of popular music recording, producers not infrequently matter more than artists. But despite that, the stories of producers, managers, entrepreneurs, engineers (often overlapping categories in the pre-rock age) remain largely untold. Over the past couple of decades many quality biographies of musicians — most typically ‘unsung heroes’ from outside the pop mainstream — have appeared, and so too various scholarly and popular histories of fringe scenes and subcultures. Yet such hugely important figures as Jack Kapp, Ralph Peer, Milt Gabler, John Hammond – each of whom had decisive influence on the emergence of twentieth century popular music ‘genres’, and each of whom worked in both the mainstream and on its hipper fringes – remain little known and written about. In this paper I wish to identify some of the narrative default settings which have been used to characterise the relationship between the creative artist and his/her first point of contact with ‘the business’ – be it producer, engineer, manager, agent etc. Descriptions of the artist-producer relationship, I will argue, typically invoke a set of deep and enduring narrative tropes — mythic, archetypal, folkloric, literary and pulp – and these almost unfailingly operate to the detriment of the producer. One near constant has been the valorisation of the artist as romantic, often tragic, indeed, as sacrificial figure, and with it a concomitant tendency to typify the producer/mentor/facilitator/’suit’ figure as venal, mendacious exploiter, and as unrepentant corrupter of artistic purity. The pop biopic, itself closely aligned to such forms as the boxing film, has further served to lock in those settings. Other representational strands co-exist with these: with the coming in the 1950s of what Keir Keightley has called ‘record consciousness’, for example, the producer was cast, again largely by default, in the role of the scientist or technician (buttoned-up and colourless, in horn-rimmed glasses, white dust coat), which as corollary, cast the studio as a kind of laboratory (maybe like the ones in the newsreels, where they handle microbes, or radioactive isotopes, or make atom bombs, or experiment on human brains). Which in turn simultaneously opened the door to ‘producer as auteur’ as it did to the trope of producer as mad-scientist, deranged megalomaniac.

Peter Doyle’s books include Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960, City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs, 1912-1948 and Crooks Like Us (forthcoming, 2009). He lectures in writing and media studies at Macquarie University.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Peter Murphy

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:15:00 +1000

4th June 2009

‘I and I’: Collaboration and the Double Act of Musical Creation

Collaboration is essential to all music creation. This is true, paradoxically, even of acts of solo creation. This is so because creation of all kinds is propelled by the phenomenon of doubling. Creation is not singular, nor is it is multiple, but rather it is binary. It is a function of twinning, pairing, and doubling. This is evident in creative personalities. The composer, orchestrator and producer—each one is an “I”, an ego. The Romantic theory of creation rested on the ego alone. Romantic creation was the effect of lonely geniuses, but in truth, creation is an effect of lonely geniuses together. The interaction of “I” and “I” adds a soulful dimension to the work of the ego. It guards against the egomania and ego anxiety that otherwise destroys creative work. The strange looping that occurs between two egos, “I” and “I”, is a precondition of effective creativity. Sometimes the strange looping between “I” and “I” occurs within a single self. The music of Bob Dylan is a case in point. But equally important are the duos that create together. Twentieth-century music is inconceivable without the partnerships of Jagger and Richards, Plant and Page, Stravinsky and Balanchine, Cage and Cunningham, Warwick and David, Sinatra and Riddle, Reed and Cale, and Davis and Evans. The strange looping that occurs between two egos, “I” and “I”, is a precondition of the possibility of creativity because all creation is double. The creative mind mirrors the structure of creation. The composer and performer Ray Davies, of the pop group The Kinks, observed in 2009, looking back on one of his best-known songs Waterloo Sunset (1967), that the song “has the counterpoint that I loved as kid, a tune that goes up and down, like snakes and ladders—sad, but you know it is going to explode into something good” (Uncut, January 2009, p. 58). What it is that makes music in particular, and art in general, interesting are these kinds of double structures. Doubling represented by counterpoint, harmony, rhythmic contrast and the like give music its aesthetic quality. Creative co-authoring or co-production mirrors this. It echoes something deeper about the nature of creation, the fact that the act of creation is always a double act. The Pre-Socratics, the Greek philosophers, were the first to systematically describe the fact that creation invariably involved a union of opposites. They were also aware of how antagonistic it was. That same union of opposites we find in Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger (1996)—its weird symmetry: The singer’s melody line in the song ascends, while the guitarist’s chord progression descends. More snakes and ladders: the aesthetic effect of the song is uncanny. Uncanny is another word for haunting. I can’t get it out of my mind; I can’t forget it because it interpolates a strange loop of contrariness. But this contrariness is not just structural. It also mirrors the fraught musical partnership of the Gallagher brothers—which in turn echoes Ray Davies’s lacerated musical partnership with his brother Dave. Collaborative tension and musical differences are the flip-side of the aesthetic snakes and ladders, a condition of its possibility. The gorgeous counterpoint of Brian Wilson’s God Only Knows (1966) was the inverse image of The Beach Boy’s internal antipathies. The great Australian demotic hymn, Throw Your Arms Around Me (1985), spirals up out of the equally spectacular warring of the Hunters and Collectors. No creation without strife, as the Pre-Socratics said.

Peter Murphy is co-author with Simon Marginson and Michael Peters of Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (Peter Lang, 2009). Two further volumes in this series are in preparation: Global Creation and Imagination. Murphy’s other recent books include Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism with David Roberts (Continuum, 2004) and Civic Justice: From Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2001).

Collaborations in Music Conference: John Scannell

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:45:00 +1000

4th June 2009

When Presupposition Impedes on Praxis: Lessons Learned from James Brown

James Brown’s artistic legacy commands a level of respect reserved for few other popular music artists. Yet his compositional approach was often just as peculiar as it was prescient, and as this paper argues, the inherent radicality of Brown’s funk style is testament to the creative unorthodoxy fostered by the “untrained” musician. Such musical “naivety”, whilst a boon to creative experimentation, would stand in stark contrast to the more orthodox schooling of Brown’s band-leaders, such as Nat Jones, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis and Fred Wesley, all of whom were required to translate the boss’ esoteric grunts and groans into musical notation, and all of whom were not only under-appreciated by Brown, but often uncredited for their work. This paper will explore some of the tensions that arose between Brown and his musical collaborators over these relative approaches to compositional praxis. In particular I will focus on how Brown’s relative lack of technical ability was anathema to his “trained” collaborators, all of whom despised their boss’ apparent musical “illiteracy”, yet applauded his capacity for promoting the necessary synthesis of the disparate and often incongruous musical ideas that were so vital to the development of one of the most groundbreaking bodies of work in popular music history.

John Scannell is a lecturer in the Department of Media and the Department of Contemporary Music Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His PhD thesis, “James Brown: Apprehending a Minor Temporality”, foregrounds relationship between musical expression and existential temporality. His work is currently being developed into a book due for publication in late 2009.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Margaret Kartomi

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:00:00 +1000

4th June 2009

The Collaborative War-time Composition of ‘Gending Sriwijaya’

Created by a team of pro-revolutionary artists in war-time South Sumatra in 1945, the song-dance ‘Gending Sriwijaya’ was first performed as an ironic joke at the expense of the Japanese invaders, who were led to believe that its text about the glorious Sriwijaya-Palembang kingdom (7th to 11th centuries CE) was in line with the Japanese ideology of ‘Asians for Asians’. Japanese-employed Palembang journalist and underground nationalist activist - Nungtjik - led the team, asking Dahlan Mahibat to compose the music, Ibu Delima to choreograph the dance, and film/theatre singer/actor Hadji Gung to present its first performance at a function on 4 August 1945, following some pro-Japanese speeches by leaders of the Japanese puppet organisation, the All-Sumatra Advisory Council. Politically, the creative partnership worked because it could surreptitiously promote the Indonesian revolutionary struggle while appearing to work for the enemy. Artistically, the team members built on each others’ cues. The lyricist chose to extol the glories of Sriwijaya to inspire confidence in the revolutionary struggle; the composer matched it with a melody that was playable on the gamelan of the former Palembang sultanate (1690-1873) and the rural gongchime ensembles; the choreographer’s version of the rural female tanggai (long finger-nail) dance with mudra-style movements suggested the Sriwijaya period; and the item’s first singer chose to croon the song with a popular Malay-style band,which in turn led to tanjidor, pop, rock, dangdut and other bands all over Indonesia developing their arrangements of the song.

Margaret Kartomi is Professor of Music in the School of Music-Conservatorium at Monash University. Her most recent book, 'Musical Journeys in Sumatra, is forthcoming with the University of Illinois Press.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Catherine Ingram

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:45:00 +1000

4th June 2009

Dor ga dao (Singing our own songs): How kam village singers negotiate creative and collaborative possibilities in the performance of Kam songs

In contemporary China, creativity and collaboration involving Kam minority villagers, professional musicians (both Kam and non-Kam) and state officials has enabled Kam songs to be performed by Kam singers in increasingly varied staged performance contexts. These performances feature Kam songs derived from or based upon various traditional genres. They include small staged song performances in Kam tourist villages, local performances for visiting reporters and officials, performances in high-profile singing competitions and massed choral performances of 10,000 singers that are broadcast on national television. Such performances confer economic, cultural and symbolic capital upon the Kam villagers who participate, and also have financial and political benefits for the various state actors who are involved. They arise through the negotiation of traditional music, “traditional” and “contemporary” forms of artistic creativity, and a structure of collaboration that is directly framed by the political situation. This paper draws upon some twenty months’ musical ethnographic research in rural Kam areas (during 2004-2008) to examine the kinds of creative and collaborative possibilities accessible to Kam village singers in their staged song performances, and how these are negotiated. It concludes by illustrating how the creativity and collaboration that has become permissible in staged performances is indirectly providing important enrichment of village singing traditions.

Catherine Ingram is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, in the Department of Ethnomusicology and the Melbourne Asia Institute. Her research concerns the contemporary significance of the unique Kam “big song” genre, and is based upon more than twenty months’ fieldwork in Kam villages in southwestern China. She has been invited to participate in a wide range of Kam song performances, and has also lectured on various aspects of musical ethnographic research, Chinese music, and minority performing arts in China.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Jane Hammond and Helen Noonan

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:15:00 +1000

4th June 2009

Creating the Chamber Opera Voicing Emily: Successful Collaborations in Music Theatre

Voicing Emily: The Life and Art of Emily Dickinson is a new Australian music theatre work unfolding the life and art of Emily Dickinson. It is scored for three sopranos, guitar, cello and piano, with text drawn from poems and letters by the American poet and mystic. Voicing Emily was premiered at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in November 2007. John Slavin, opera critic for Melbourne’s newspaper, The Age, described Voicing Emily as “a work of ravishing beauty and rare artistic distinction.” After attending a performance, Dickinson scholar Dr Joan Kirkby wrote her appreciation: “I can't say enough wonderful things about Voicing Emily”. Dr. Kirkby includes detailed reference to the production in the forthcoming book The International Reception of Emily Dickinson. Voicing Emily was devised by performer and producer Helen Noonan (co-creator of the seminal Australian music theatre work Recital) and was brought into existence in collaboration with composer Jane Hammond, who was also the musical director for the project. Other composer/collaborators were involved in the musical setting of several individual poems (Greg Mason and Eddie Perfect) with Jane Hammond the musical overseer. The collaborative creative process for this work was multi-layered and not restricted to music and words – the video artist/set designer James Verdon, and director David Myles had crucial creative input as the project progressed. Throughout the process communication was amicable, business-like, respectful, warm and clear. Using examples from Voicing Emily, Helen Noonan and Jane Hammond examine aspects of an artistically successful collaboration.

Helen Noonan is a performing artist whose career in opera and music theatre features self-devised and collaboratively devised new works such as “Recital”, co-written with Douglas Horton for ChamberMade Opera; and “Voicing Emily” - poetry and letters of Emily Dickinson, set to music by Jane Hammond, Greg Mason and Eddie Perfect. Helen was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2003 to allow for research and collaboration in UK, US and Italy on three music theatre projects. She is currently enrolled in PhD studies at the Conservatorium of Music in Hobart examining the development of the libretto in 20th century monodrama and chamber opera.

Jane Hammond maintains an active career as a conductor, pianist and composer. Jane has composed original music for mainstream and community theatre, film, and the concert stage for many ensembles and companies including the Victoria State Opera, Opera Australia, and the Melbourne International Festival. Her works have been performed throughout Australia and internationally. She holds a Master of Arts (Research) in Music Composition from Monash University and is now undertaking PhD studies with a focus on contemporary opera and experimental music theatre.

Collaborations in Music Conference: Janine Burke

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:30:00 +1000

4th June 2009

Being Geniuses Together: What Yoko Ono Taught John Lennon

Dr Janine Burke

The dynamics of Ono and Lennon’s creative partnership have been obscured by the couple’s celebrity status, by public prejudice against Ono as well as by Lennon’s dominant and enduring reputation. This paper explores the music and performance works, enacted by the couple during their 14 year collaboration, that were often conceptually and politically generated by Ono. The confluence of Ono’s avant-guardism with Lennon’s popularism/popularity created an innovative aesthetics of political action that emphasised pacifism and feminism.

Dr Janine Burke, who holds a Monash Fellowship jointly in PSI and ECPS, is the author of sixteen books of art history, biography and fiction. Her books include Australian Women artists, 1840-1940 (Greenhouse, 1980) and Field of Vision: A Decade of Change, Women’s Art in the Seventies (Viking, 1990). In 1987, she won the Victorian Premier’s Award for fiction for her novel Second Sight (Greenhouse, 1986). Her next novel, Company of Images (Greenhouse, 1989) was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award and the Miles Franklin Award. The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Arts Collection (Knopf, 2006) was shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Award for non-fiction. She curated “Sigmund Freud’s Collection: An Archaeology of the Mind” for Monash University Museum of Art in 2007. Her new book, Source: Nature’s Healing Role in Art and Writing, will be published in October 2009.

Negotiating the Sacred V: John Bradley

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:00:00 +1000

15 August 2008

‘The things we dare to presume’ Family, identity and country

John Bradley

The intervention into Indigenous communities has drawn Australia’s gaze to northern Australia. Indigenous communities have been portrayed as lacking in social capital, human values; they are seen to be violent and dysfunctional places while through silence the rest of Australia is seen to be functional. This presentation seeks to explore some life from within one particular community in the south west Gulf of Carpentaria and present another view of what communities are doing, where despite adversity and the lack of Governmental ears in regard to what may ‘needed’, issues of identity and what the sacred may be in 2008 are still important issues that are worth constant engagement.

Biographical note

John Bradley is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University. The majority of his research has been undertaken in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria with particular emphasis on the marine and island environments of the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands, the country of the Yanyuwa people. Much of this work has dealt with the value of intangible heritage and how it can be utilised in regard to joint protection of both biological species and heritage sites. My most important contributions to this field has been in regard to ethno-biology, Indigenous language maintenance, land and sea rights and documenting Indigenous knowledge. His recent work has involved working with the Yanyuwa people in the storyboarding of 400 kilometres of song lines and 30 other major texts with a view to animation. He is also a member of a UNESCO panel that is concerned with the future of Indigenous knowledge in the 21st century.

Note (1): This presentation was preceded by the viewing of the Manankurra songline video. Please download and view it before listening to the podcast (MPEG-4 video).

Note (2): This is an Enhanced Podcast that includes a slideshow with the audio. See this page for more information about enhanced podcasts and compatibility. If you are unable to play the enhanced version, an MP3 file without the slideshow is also available below.

Negotiating the Sacred V: Chandran Kukathas

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:00:00 +1000

15 August 2008

Do children have interests?

Chandran Kukathas

It is widely held that children have interests that deserve protection, by the law, by the state, and by international conventions. But before we can consider the merits of different measures to protect children it is important to ask whether or not children do indeed have interests and, if they do, what these might be. In this paper I suggest that children do not have interests and therefore that, whatever protections they require must have some other basis than that of attending to their interests. I also suggest that they have many fewer claims to protection than is sometimes asserted.

Biographical note

Chandran Kukathas is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He previously taught at the University of Utah, and was also for many years taught political theory at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He is the author of Hayek and Modern Liberalism (OUP 1989) and The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (OUP 2003). He has also published widely on such topics as multiculturalism, immigration, freedom, equality, and global justice.

Negotiating the Sacred V: Siobhan McHugh

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:30:00 +1000

15 August 2008

Marrying out: Catholic/Protestant unions in Australia 1920s-70s

Siobhan McHugh

For over 150 years, until post-war migration diluted the mix, Australia was polarised between the majority Anglo Protestant Establishment and a minority Irish Catholic underclass. Religious differences reflected social and political tensions derived from colonial days and exacerbated by organisations like Freemasons, the Orange Lodge and Catholic secret societies. A self-imposed religious apartheid often saw Catholics go to Catholic schools, socialise in Catholic groups and work in traditional Catholic areas like the public service. Protestants likewise mingled mostly with their own, as a 1930s brochure, The Protestant’s Guide to Shopping in Rockhampton, hilariously demonstrates. Following the 1908 Ne Temere papal decree, religious and family protocols strongly discouraged inter-faith marriages – yet a quarter of Australian Catholics continued to marry ‘out’ until the late 1960s (Mol 1970). Such ‘mixed marriages’ often caused deep family divisions, from disinheritance to social exclusion. Children brought up in such marriages sometimes suffered a confused identity, not fully accepted by either ‘side’. The sectarian attitudes of the period no longer apply to Catholics and Protestants in Australia, but parallels can be drawn with post 9/11 attitudes towards Muslims – the new ‘Other’.

This paper is based on 42 oral histories of participants in a mixed marriage, children reared in one, or Protestant and Catholic clerics. The research will be the basis for a Doctorate in Creative Arts.

Negotiating the Sacred V: Lori Beaman

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:30:00 +1000

14 August 2008

Religious diversity and family matters: Polygamy and the limits of the law

Lori G. Beaman

Polygamy has been the topic of much debate and controversy in Canada and the United States in the past year, often making the news with dramatic events involving alleged child and woman abuse, police raids, and the deliberate ‘flaunting’ of illegal activities. How can we make sense of this seeming sudden attention to a family form that has existed relatively quietly for at least a century in communities across Canada and the United States?

Lori G. Beaman holds a Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada at the University of Ottawa. Trained in sociology, law and philosophy, she brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her central research focus which is religious freedom and its regulation. Her books include Defining Harm: Religious Freedom and the Limits of the Law, _Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press (2008); _Religion and Canadian Society: Traditions, Transitions and Innovations, Toronto: Scholar’s Press (2006) and Religion, Globalization and Culture, edited with Peter Beyer, Leiden: Brill Academic Press (2007). She presents her work regularly at international conferences, and has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including Nova Religio, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Church and State.

Negotiating the Sacred V: Gary Bouma

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:30:00 +1000

14 August 2008

Religion and governing the family

Gary D. Bouma

All religions have images and ideals of the human family. These images and ideals range widely and are in no small part informed by social and cultural factors. For example, polygamy is more likely to emerge in societies with a high mortality rate among young males. Once in place, these images and ideals are likely to be given religious sanction – ‘God wants(ed) it thus’. A religiously plural society like Australia is likely to experience contestation between different religious groups as they seek to use the state to enforce their religiously sanctioned images and ideals. This is evident in the current debates about gay marriage and polygamy, the earlier debate about re-marriage of divorced persons, and debates about other aspects of family life from contraception and abortion to the provision of facilities suitable to couples in their senescence. In all of this it is the temptation, or in the case of some – e.g. Calvinists, Catholics and Wahabbi Muslims – the perceived requirement to use the state to impose on others the views of some poses a threat to the smooth functioning of democracy in a religiously plural society. There may also be situations where secularists impose their images and ideals upon others using the state.

Gary D. Bouma is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations – Asia Pacific at Monash University and Chair of Board of Directors for The Parliament of the World’s Religions 2009. He is Associate Priest in the Anglican Parish of St John’s East Malvern. His research in the sociology of religion examines the management of religious diversity in plural multicultural societies, postmodernity as a context for doing theology, religion and terror, inter-cultural communication, religion and public policy, women and religious minorities, and gender factors in clergy careers. Recent books include: Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press) and _Democracy in Islam _(Routledge) which he has written with Sayed Khatab.

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ECPS Research Seminar: Professor Michael Taussig

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:00:00 +1000

School of English, Communication and Performance Studies Inaugural Interdisciplinary Research Seminar

15 July 2008

“I Swear I Saw That”: A talk on the act of giving witness

Professor Michael Taussig (Columbia University)

This talk gathers together different disciplinary interests across literature, performance, visual media and communication. It concerns drawings in fieldwork notebooks (Taussig’s own), the relation of text to image, drawing, and the act of giving witness.

Michael Taussig is a distinguished anthropologist and cultural theorist, best known for his engagement with Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. His highly innovative writing pays primary attention to textual construction as a form of analysis in itself, involving a mixture of ethnography, story-telling, meta-ethnography, performance and theory.

Taussig has spent over ten years cumulatively doing fieldwork in Colombia, Putumayo, and Venezuela. His work has investigated the history of African slavery, abolition in Western Colombia, popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism, the sociology of malnutrition, the impact of colonialism on shamanism and folk healing, the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, especially shamanic healing, the making, talking, and writing of terror, mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state fetishism and secrecy.

Currently a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, he has been a faculty member at distinguished universities around the world, including professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He has been guest lecturer, visiting professor, and keynote speaker at distinguished centres of learning around the world. In addition, Taussig has published numerous articles, written and publicly performed two scripts, and has been awarded many honours, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. His most recent book is Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2006). Other Representative Publications: The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993); The Magic of the State (1997); Defacement (1997); Law in a Lawless Land (2003); My Cocaine Museum (2004).

Music, Culture and Society: Michael Bull

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:45:21 +1100

6th March 2008

Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism: iPod Culture and Recognition

Michael Bull (Sussex)

In this lecture I argue that iPod culture represents the antithesis of the ideal of the cosmopolitan citizen inscribed in Western culture, that cosmopolitanism increasingly resides in the content of users iPods. That users increasingly turn away from the complexities and contingencies of urban everyday life. iPod culture signifies the development of a new listening self that calibrates the personal use of sound to the desire of the user – iPod culture represents a culture in which individuals increasingly micro-manage their experience. The lecture will discuss the social ramifications of what I refer to as a hyper-post-fordist appropriation of social space.

Michael Bull is Reader in Media and Film at the University of Sussex and has written widely on sound, music and technology. He is the author of Sounding Out the City. Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Berg 2000), Sound Moves:iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge 2007) and is co-editor of The Auditory Culture Reader (Berg 2003). He is also the founding editor of The Senses and Society Journal published by Berg. He was until recently a consultant to Portalplayer, California and is a core member of New Trends Forum, a European Thinktank funded by Bankinter, Spain.

This paper was recorded at the Music, Culture and Society conference on the 6th March 2008.

Public Lecture: Professor Agnes Heller

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +1000

April 3rd 2008

The Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of Artworks?

Professor Agnes Heller

Both “autonomy ” and “dignity” are moral concepts. The moral category “autonomy” is traditionally applied to art, and understood sometimes dogmatically, like by Adorno. Yet it never becomes clear what is autonomous: Art as such? The sphere of Art? Or the single artwork? This paper suggests substituting the normative word “dignity” for the heavily evaluative term “ autonomy”. In the case of the ‘dignity of man’ the norm of dignity prohibits using man as mere means - so it is in the case of works of art. They can serve as means, yet they need always also be treated as ends in themselves. The concept “dignity” of art will be illuminated - not illustrated – by examples of contemporary works.

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About Professor Agnes Heller - ECPS Distinguished Visitor

A Welcome to Dr Janine Burke

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1100

March 19th 2008

ECPS Welcomes Dr Janine Burke

The School of ECPS is delighted to welcome Dr Janine Burke as a new Monash Fellow (co-located in the Centre for Women’s Studies in the School of Political and Social Inquiry). Janine is a renowned independent scholar, and author of many books of art criticism including Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1995) and Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002). Janine recently convened the successful Inside the mind of Freud Exhibition. Her fellowship work will focus on artistic collaborations and will involve exhibitions locally and internationally.

The Dean of Arts, Professor Rae Frances, welcomed Janine on behalf of the Arts Faculty at an event at the MUMA Gallery. Dr Burke gave a short presentation on her fellowship plans titled “Geniuses Together: Exploring Creative Partnerships”.

ECPS Conference: Jeffrey Alexander

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:32:32 +1100

19th December 2007

Performance and Cultural Pragmatics in Social Action

Jeffrey Alexander (Yale)

Jeffrey Alexander presents an overview of his current work on the role of performance and cultural pragmatics in social action. He leads a discussion about the fruitful interaction of contemporary cultural sociology and performance studies—and the place of dramaturgy, narrative, audience and performance in social inquiry.

Jeffrey Alexander is the author of The Civil Sphere (2006), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004 co-author), The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Neofunctionalism and After (1998), Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason (1995), Structure and Meaning: Relinking Classical Sociology (1989), Action and Its Environments: Towards a New Synthesis (1988), Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two, Columbia University Press (1987), Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1982-83).

Today, Alexander is leading a team of researchers at Yale University dedicated to developing a ‘strong program in cultural sociology’. A preliminary version of Alexander’s work on social performance can be found in the volume he recently edited with Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge, 2006).

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The Greeks Conference: Louis Ruprecht

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:15:44 +1100

May 3rd 2007

Modern shrines to an ancient muse: a religious history of the modern public art museum

Associate Professor Louis Ruprecht Jr. (Georgia State)

Louis Ruprecht is author of Was Greek Thought Religious? On the Use and Abuse of Hellenism, From Rome to Romanticism (Palgrave, 2002), Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value (SUNY, 1999), Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism and the Myth of Decadence (SUNY, 1996), Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve (Continuum, 1994).