Briony Luttrell

This research explores the barriers to entry and the challenges and frustrations for Australian First Nations music producers. The proliferation of software-based technology in the recording studio sector resulted in notions of technological democracy. However, this democratization is often contested for not including women and various marginalized and minority groups. Through an Indigenous-led music production workshop project, the research team conducted daily yarning sessions at the conclusion of each day. The findings found many challenges and frustrations for the participants and mentors in the program as they attempted to participate in the recording sector including access to suitable housing and infrastructure, agency and cultural safety in recording studios, ongoing discrimination in the music industry, and lateral violence and jealousy around perceived success. This project seeks to understand these barriers and look toward approaches to improve education, diversity, equity, inclusion and participation for First Nations music producers.

Our Flag Means Death (2022) is a television series set in the Golden Age of Piracy, premiering in March 2022 to critical acclaim and unprecedented audience engagement. It can be argued that this show is a deliberate romantic queer reading of historical facts. In this article we reflect on the social function of storytelling and audience labour within the historical and cultural contexts of fictional queer screen representations. We theorise queer reading as a practice of learning to recognize, identify and create patterns of semiotic resources, Intertextual Thematic Formations (Lemke 1995a, 1995b). This practice is a reaction to a history of being erased or relegated to subtext in fictional media, exacerbated by broader cultural and political contexts that criminalise, censor, and de-humanize LGBTQIA+ bodies and lives. We also make the case for queer reading being a particular form of audience labour, in that readers are asked to ‘do extra work’ to see queer bodies and communities in texts. This is especially important in cases where identities and communities are regularly symbolically annihilated, and those individuals are repeatedly required to perform that extra labour to “see themselves”. The popularity of Our Flag Means Death made it clear that this show resonated with both members of the LGBTQIA+ community and wider audiences. Season One is a unique case study where we explore how character, narrative, queerbaiting and coding are used to achieve a low/easy labour environment for a vulnerable viewer and how this is an act of care and empathy.   

This paper examines Western music education through Kenneth Burke's dramatism, revealing how traditional pedagogical practices function as symbolic actions perpetuating cultural hierarchies and conservative ideologies. We argue that institutionalised music education employs rhetorical mechanisms conflating scientistic and dramatistic approaches to music, particularly through repertoire selection and error correction. These mechanisms position certain works as inherently “correct” while othering alternatives, maintaining cultural supremacy that privileges Western Common Practice traditions and potentially limiting students’ creative development and contemporary career opportunities. We demonstrate how institutions tacitly deploy these mechanisms, creating self-perpetuating musical conservatism that disconnects students from industrial practices and innovation. In response, we propose the Shared Music Vocabulary (SMV) as an alternative framework acknowledging music education as rhetorical symbolic action entangled with social, political, and cultural identities. This approach prioritises intellectual property generation and embraces multiple disciplines simultaneously, offering more inclusive and industrially relevant music education.

In this article we reflect on our experiences as practitioners and educators leading an annual devising collaboration between Music and Theatre at the University of the Sunshine Coast, that results in a new one-hour long production. We discuss the complexities of devising, in particular how do we navigate the balance of wellbeing with encouraging students to work outside of their comfort zones in a devised theatre process full of uncertainty? In response to pedagogy and devising scholarship, and themes that emerged from our four case studies we propose a new approach, the Creative Collaboration SeeSaw. Our aim in writing this article is to articulate our experiences of being director, musical director, and teachers as we navigate with our cohorts the tensions between care, comfort, discomfort, learning and safety in a collaborative devising process full of doubt and the unknown.

In this paper, we explore the synthesis of two PhD projects that address a gap in knowledge between industry songwriting practice and theorisations of songwriting. These projects explore patterns in modern songwriting through the contrasting lenses of cultural semantics and narratology. Both project methodologies involve large-scale corpus analysis and creative practice as proof of concept tested in industry. In synthesising these ideas, we present a multimodal narrative approach to songwriting that uses the concept of shared musical vocabularies to unify and extend existing models of praxis. We frame our argument with the assertion that songwriting is storytelling, storytelling is meaning making, and thus models for understanding and developing songwriting practice explore song narratives by recognising every component of song as semiotic resource. We demonstrate the efficacy of Multimodal Narrative Songwriting by applying it to the creation and analysis of a major label song release. 

In this article we explore a collaborative interdisciplinary Theatre and Music production as part of two undergraduate courses at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, during COVID-19. Tertiary intuitions all over the world are currently being forced to adapt in radical response to the pandemic. The specific conditions of the authors’ experience prompted this collaboration where both teaching and learning occurred in an unstable, unpredictable and unprecedented environment. Experiences during the semester and the outcomes of the project were rich, multifaceted, and exceeded expectations. This included several weeks of intensive collaborative rehearsal and creative development, university-facing performances, and a public-facing performance at a NightQuarter event which had over 4,500 attendees. This article unpacks the ideas of Project-Based Learning (Bell 2010) and interdisciplinary collaboration, in order to understand the impact on teaching and learning and the potential of this model.

In this paper, we explore a pragmatic approach to tertiary music education. We propose that the conflation of tool, technique, and technology (Graham 2017: 19-20) has led to a situation where dominant music education models too often focus on teaching what you use to make music with rather than how you make it or why, and as a result are dependent on privilege and access. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique situation in which to test these ideas due to the enforced disruption to established ways of teaching and learning, in particular the radical pivot to online- only delivery. We explore our experiences of rethinking tool-based tertiary music education in this context and focus on our MacGyver (1985-1992) approach to music making and communicating information. We argue for the potential of a pragmatic approach in music education as one that follows music industry practice of an economy of availability and takes a step towards addressing inequities and the socialising of music making.

In this paper, we present a synthesis of Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of identification and Jay Lemke's social semiotics to frame Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles as a unique point in the phylogenesis of recorded popular music. We emphasise the social semiotic functioning of string arrangements as styles, with style also being understood in the manner of Burke, and style names and definitions being drawn from a corpus analysis of string arrangements for popular music. We argue that, through a rhetoric of style, Eleanor Rigby made canonical claims against rock's cultural counterpart, classical music. We demonstrate the working of the rhetoric and its political implications in the context of the counter-cultural forces active during the mid-1960s.