Broadway hitmen [1st keyboard]

1st Keyboard in the orchestra for Broadway Hitmen, performed 18-21 October 2018 at Clarence Street Theatre, Hamilton, New Zealand, featuring professional singers and musicians from Hamilton and New Zealand. The show was positively received by audiences; review is attached

Into the darkness: Bruce Springsteen’s musical representations of the night

Into the darkness: Bruce Springsteen’s musical representations of the night Paper presented at the New Zealand Musicological Society Conference, 30 November - 2 December 2018, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ. This paper addressed representations of the night, as a lyrical trope, in the songs of Bruce Springsteen. In doing so, I argue that Springsteen validates the life experiences of those to and for whom he sings, as well as connects himself with a long-standing Western artistic tradition

Convenor of creative practice at/and the In-Betweens Research Symposium, Wintec, 1 July 2021.

Creative practitioners within a tertiary education context may identify a number of strands of in-betweens in their existence. For some, this takes the form of multi-, inter-, or trans-disciplinary practices: producing work that fuses and utilises different media to articulate a singular meaning; or exploring how different forms of knowledge can be used to solve a common problem. In other instances, the in-between may be result of cross- and multi-cultural creative dialogue: how different artistic traditions and cultural practices can be brought into a fruitful embrace; or how one locates a space, metaphorical or literal, between different cultural identities. We might also reflect on our dual roles as creative practitioners and educators – how do our experiences in each area of life relationally inform and shape the other? Or, alternatively, what experiences should be informing the other? How does artistic practice relate to best teaching practice? On a final and related point, there is the ever- pressing role that Te Pūkenga – not only as an educational institution but as an educational framework – might play in influencing creative practice and how those skills and knowledge are taught and researched. What are the different regional artistic voices within Aotearoa? What do they look and sound like? And how might they operate within a national context? While we should not be so presumptuous to think that answers to these questions will necessarily materialise today, it is hoped that there may be room for contemplation and discussion at the very least. Moreover, we hope that the sharing of perspectives, methodologies, and projects in these realms may spark interest and connections amongst participants, with a view of developing further collaborations, extending artistic work, and demonstrating the need for creative arts research within our sector and society at this time

Innuendo and the Late Style of Queen

Conference paper given at the joint New Zealand Musicological Society and Musicological Society of Australia Conference, 8-10 December 2017, in Auckland. This paper addresses the final album recorded by British rock band Queen, Innuendo (1991), before Freddie Mercury's death, and places it in the context of the aesthetic category of "late style". Further details about the paper can be viewed in the attached abstract

Stylistic play and humour in musical theatre

Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Australasian annual conference, Waikato Institute of Technology, 3-5 December 2018. This paper explored the role pastiche plays in creating humor in contemporary musical theater using a range of examples from shows such as Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, and School of Rock

Freddie Mercury and Expressions of Vocal Authenticity

Conference paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (Australia-NZ) Conference, 4-6 December 2017, in Wellington. This paper explores the different vocal techniques of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and how these techniques relate to notions of authenticity in rock music discourse. For further details on the paper, see the attached abstract

The last five years [musical director and pianist]

Performance of The Last Five Years, composed by Jason Robert Brown, directed by Jason Wade, in the Modernist Garden at the Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival, 15-17 February 2018. My role was Musical Director and Pianist for the ensemble. The two cast roles were performed by Nick Wilkinson and Courteney Mayall

Mum's kitchen: Scoring loss in a contemporary New Zealand musical

This paper functions in part as an exegesis of a recently premiered New Zealand musical, Mum’s Kitchen, which was collaboratively written and composed by a team of four creatives (Nick Braae, composer-lyricist; Kyle Chuen, librettist; Jeremy Mayall, orchestrator; David Sidwell, composer). The show centres around three brothers who return to their family farm after their Mum passes away, and they must settle the estate, while processing their various states of grief for their childhood home and family. Mum’s Kitchen treads relatively familiar New Zealand theatrical ground, then, in terms of exploring themes of masculinity, emotional performance, and familial communication. The question of a distinct New Zealand musical language is one that has occupied writers for many years, and this becomes even more pressing in an idiom (musical theatre) that has such a limited tradition in this country (di Somma, 2016) – in other words, how to write musical theatre songs to tell a distinctly New Zealand story when such a musical language (arguably) does not exist? While the musical was not created to answer this question, the creative responses of the two primary composers (Braae and Sidwell) provides some answers to this question, which, in turn, is revealing of how style and compositional choices are perceived to function in a musical. Taking its cue from Murphy (2014), this paper analyses the songs in Mum’s Kitchen that directly addresses themes of loss and nostalgia. I suggest that despite the different composers on the project, there is a unified set of strategies as to how loss is “scored” into the songs: use of “anachronistic” styles (such as the country waltz) to evoke a past era, and a collection of contemporary harmonic devices (open chord voicings, harmonic ambiguity) that evoke emptiness and uncertainty

Mum’s Kitchen: Scoring Loss in a Contemporary New Zealand Musical. Paper presented at Creative Practice at/and the In-Betweens Research Symposium, Wintec, 1 July 2021

This paper functions in part as an exegesis of a recently premiered New Zealand musical, Mum’s Kitchen, which was collaboratively written and composed by a team of four creatives. The show centres around three brothers who return to their family farm after their Mum passes away, and they must settle the estate, while processing their various states of grief for their childhood home and family. Mum’s Kitchen treads relatively familiar New Zealand theatrical ground, then, in terms of exploring themes of masculinity, emotional performance, and familial communication. The question of a distinct New Zealand musical language is one that has occupied writers for many years, and this becomes even more pressing in an idiom (musical theatre) that has such a limited tradition in this country (di Somma, 2016) – in other words, how to write musical theatre songs to tell a distinctly New Zealand story when such a musical language (arguably) does not exist? While the musical was not created to answer this question, the creative responses of the two primary composers provides some answers to this question, which, in turn, is revealing of how style and compositional choices are perceived to function in a musical. Taking its cue from Murphy (2014), this paper analyses the songs in Mum’s Kitchen that directly addresses themes of loss and nostalgia. I suggest that despite the different composers on the project, there is a unified set of strategies as to how loss is “scored” into the songs: use of “anachronistic” styles (such as the country waltz) to evoke a past era, and a collection of contemporary harmonic devices (open chord voicings, harmonic ambiguity) that evoke emptiness and uncertainty

Keynote address for Mercurial Rhapsodies: Tribute to Queen

The documents provides my answers as part of the facilitated address/panel discussion at Mercurial Rhapsodies: Tribute to Queen, led by Marie Berginiat in St Etienne, France, October 2016