Research

We regularly present our research in a wide range of international settings, networking with experts and professionals from all around the world. We are committed to supporting innovative research and collaboration that extends the boundaries of musical knowledge and opens up new areas of creative practice.

• INTRADA: the School's most ambitious project currently is the establishment of a research centre devoted to 18th and 19th century music. INTRADA is a timely response to the need for further research of 'the big three' (Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven), and to bring to life the vast wealth of music written by the contemporaries of these great classical composers. The mix of professional expertise in research, performance, publishing and recording amongst School staff gives us the opportunity to create a research centre unlike any other in the world. Staff working in the field include:
  
  • Dr Allan Badley, who is highly regarded internationally for his work on major contemporaries of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and has published several hundred important editions, and had his work featured on nearly 50 CDs.
  • Associate Professor Uwe Grodd, who is world-renowned as an outstanding flautist and conductor as a result of an exceptional series of recordings of rare 18th and early 19th century works. His current project is to perform and record Mozart’s last six symphonies arranged for a chamber quartet of flute, violin, cello and piano by his most famous student, Johann Nepomuk Hummel.  Uwe will be using his own editions made from early 19th century copies and will be the flautist in this ensemble. 
  • Associate Professor Dean Sutcliffe, who is amongst the most influential figures in 18th century scholarship today. His areas of specialisation include the concept of sociability in eighteenth-century music; the life and works of Haydn; and expression in eighteenth-century slow movements.
  • Dr Nancy November, who specialises in the music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries (aesthetics, analysis, reception); and performance history, theory and practice. She has recently received Marsden funding for her research project "Beethoven’s Middle-Period String Quartets in Context: Ideology, Performance, Reception", in which she will examine the "strikingly varied reception" the middle-period string quartets have received in their 200-year history.
    Read more about Dr November's research
     
• Electroacoustic Music (EAM): Lecturer John Coulter is a composer/researcher with special interests in octophonic electroacoustic music (EAM), EAM with moving images, and interactive installation. John's work was featured at the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2011 (ACMC), along with that of several other prominent local and international composers and music researchers.
  Read more about ACMC
• Musicians' health: Senior Lecturer Rae de Lisle specialises in musicians’ health, with a particular interest in the treatment and prevention of focal dystonia. Her work has received international recognition and she has been approached to work with pianists in London, Turkey and Australia.   She is also researching international trends in technical training in preparation for a book on the biomechanics of piano technique and injury prevention.
• Socio-linguistics and voice science: Dr Te Oti Rakena is currently undertaking a project called "The Loss of the Pacific Quality: the Colonised Māori Voice", which brings together information from the area of socio-linguistics and from the voice science area, in particular the singing pedagogy literature. The project is interested in the voice practices and qualities of the wider South Pacific community and investigating the loss of the aesthetic value of some of these vocal qualities. The object of the project is to inform and reconnect Māori with the purpose of performance practice at a vocal function level,and discuss why they have been replaced by more western-derived aesthetic choices.
  Read more about Dr Te Oti Rakena's research
• Improvisational practice: Lecturer Ron Samsom is exploring improvisational practice in the performance of collaborative musical works.
• Contemporary New Zealand music: Associate Professor Uwe Grodd is currently involved in a research project on music by New Zealander Jenny McLeod. Uwe has collaborated with the composer over the past year and conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington in July for the world premier recording of three revised or newly orchestrated works. The recording included the Rock Concerto for piano and large orchestra with pianist Professor Eugene Albulescu (Lehigh University, USA) and The Emperor and the Nightingale for narrator and orchestra, featuring Helen Medlyn as narrator.
• Music, culture and criticism in the belle époque: Senior Lecturer Davinia Caddy is working on a variety of topics related to music in Paris during the period known as the belle époque (roughly 1890–1914).  These topics include: music and dance; music and the early sciences of the mind; opera and singing; musical time and musical “work”.
• Composition is the focus of Dr Leonie Holmes' research,  with a secondary area in pedagogy, in particular the teaching of composition, musicianship and creative music. Recent compositions include "Frond", for orchestra, performed by the NZSO at the Asia Pacific Festival 2007 and appearing on the CD Passing, Atoll/Move Records 2010; "Ancient Rhythms", selected for inclusion in the NZSO/SOUNZ readings May 2010; "Is there anybody in there?", for Ben Hoadley’s New Zealand Music for Woodwind concerts in 2010, "Fragment for String Quartet" for the Jade Quartet 2007; "The Fourth Station", for the Stations of the Cross Exhibition, Gus Fisher Gallery, Kenneth Meyers Centre, Easter 2008; and "The Journey", for massed choir and symphony orchestra commissioned for the formal opening of the TelstraClear Pacific Events Centre Genesis Theatre, Manukau City.
• Connecting Pedagogies: Viral video and music learning: Dr David Lines is working to establish a group of researchers, practitioners and academics interested in the pedagogical relevance of music, sound and multimedia contexts online.