Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses

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    New mirrors for people like us: A qualitative inquiry exploring identity and shared solidarity with six Indonesian young autistic women in collaborative online music sessions
    Subiantoro, Monica ( 2023-10)
    This PhD research project explores the participation of six Indonesian young autistic women in an online music group. Within the 12 weeks of co-designed online sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic, these women exchanged music and life stories together. They analogised this experience to gazing into a metaphorical mirror where they could collectively explore their identity and share solidarity. While autism is often depicted as a ‘hidden disability’, this project revealed other aspects underneath this notion, including autistic people’s ‘hidden strengths’ (articulating their thoughts and desires), ‘hidden needs’ (wellbeing and mental health), and ‘hidden use of music’ (their use of music in everyday lives).
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    Musical Care: Exploring a person-centered caregiver singing protocol in dementia care in South Africa
    Stuart-Röhm, Karyn Lesley ( 2023-10)
    This thesis includes three studies which aimed to explore the role of a formal caregiver-led singing training protocol in the delivery of person-centered care for people living with dementia, and how this might support caregivers in South Africa. A systematic mixed studies review was conducted to examine literature relating to formal caregiver training in live music for use in one-on-one caring contexts. Nine English, peer-reviewed studies adhered to the inclusion criteria. Integration of thematic analysis and narrative synthesis findings indicated that training caregivers in live music applied during care situations may contribute to significant reductions in dementia symptoms, resistiveness, and elicit mutual experiences of wellbeing and relationship between formal caregivers and residents. This benefitted person-centered care by supporting communication, easing care, and capacitating caregivers to meet the needs of people with dementia. Findings encouraged caregiver training but illustrated gaps in training component details and the lack of music therapists’ involvement. The action research qualitative study aimed to co-design and refine a person-centered caregiver singing (PCCS) protocol. PCCS is defined as singing in a manner that employs various prosodic and empathic musical elements to aid communication and promote feelings of connection, safety, validation and that aims to enhance the delivery of person-centered care. Ten caregivers from two care homes participated in four iterative cycles of: ‘workshop, interview, and amendment;’ an observation phase; and one-on-one interviews. This process culminated in the final version of the PCCS workshop. Thematic analysis findings suggested that PCCS was a helpful, relevant and easy-to-implement resource for caregivers. The Person-Centered Caregiver Singing Model illustrated the interplay between benefits to caregiver capabilities (including self-efficacy); mutual wellbeing; relational mutuality and reciprocity; the environment; and positive caregiving experience. PCCS implementation was not always successful due to residents’ unpredictable moods and caregivers’ perception of their own music skills. The sharing of music therapy-informed skills contribute to the caregivers’ safe and effective application of attuned singing, which may help them better attune to and meet residents’ needs. The third study was a mixed methods study exploring caregivers’ experiences and acceptability of the PCCS protocol. Forty-one formal caregivers from seven care homes attended one PCCS workshop and completed a questionnaire containing a Likert scale and space for written reflections. Findings were integrated inductively using seven components of acceptability. These illustrated the caregivers’ positive caregiving experiences and enhanced capabilities, improvements in residents’ observed wellbeing, empathic connections, and extension of PCCS benefits beyond the one-one-one care situation. Implementation challenges included limited song repertoire and residents’ unpredictability. Nonetheless, PCCS was considered useful, effective, and highly acceptable. Overarching findings suggest that person-centered caregiver singing is a helpful, relevant, highly acceptable resource that may contribute to caregivers’ delivery of person-centered care. PCCS may promote positive aspects of caregiving and highlights the value of caregivers’ own personhood as essential to quality care provision. Findings affirm the significance of inter-disciplinary skills-sharing by music therapists and support the application of PCCS within care homes in South Africa and similar contexts. Recommendations include booster workshops to support appropriate and sustainable application and the inclusion of family members and other staff in PCCS training. Further research could offer insight into cost-effectiveness of PCCS, test PCCS in similar and other contexts, further develop the PCCS questionnaire, and explore outcomes relating to caregiver self-efficacy and PCCS with family caregivers.
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    “With music, you feel it more”: A narrative inquiry into an online music therapy project for adults living with mental health challenges related to adverse life experiences
    Hillman, Kirsten ( 2023-09)
    This thesis sought to explore the experiences of adults living with mental health challenges related to adverse life experiences who participated in an online community music therapy program. Previous research into music therapy and psychological trauma in adults has largely focussed on the perspectives of music therapists (Landis-Shack et al., 2017; Stewart, 2010; Sutton, 2002). This project takes an up an expanded definition of trauma that privileges participant self-identification over trauma-based diagnoses to attend to the lived perspectives of participants. Three interconnected studies, two qualitative meta-syntheses and a narrative inquiry project, comprise the thesis. The first study presents a critical interpretive synthesis, exploring recently published music therapy literature looking at music therapy and mental health challenges related to psychological trauma in adults. This study primarily highlighted the underrepresentation of participant perspectives in the literature, and the privileging of clinical discourses of trauma. The second literature synthesis further explored the presence of participant voice in extant music therapy literature related to adult mental health and trauma through a qualitative ethnographic meta-synthesis. Its findings illuminated a number of strengths-based recovery outcomes congruent with previous research into participant perspectives of recovery-oriented music therapy in mental health (McCaffrey, 2018; Solli et al., 2013; Solli & Rolvsjord, 2015), as well as some experiences more specific to the context of trauma-related mental health challenges. The third study yielded the central findings of the thesis. This study was a narrative inquiry into the experiences of participants in an online community music therapy project for adults who identify as living with mental health challenges related to adverse life experiences. Five adults were recruited via community and community mental health channels across Naarm/ Melbourne. An online group was co-facilitated with a mental health peer worker for five sessions, after which the format of the project altered in response to feedback and participation decisions from participants. After a seven-week group process, three participants chose to continue with individual music therapy sessions within the data collection period. Narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Kim, 2015), a methodology centred around narrating stories of experience, was chosen to pursue the data analysis and presentation of findings. Five narratives are thus presented as the results of the thesis in Chapter Six. An additional dialogical narrative reflecting on the experience of co-facilitation between the mental health peer worker and myself, is presented in Chapter Five. The presentation of individual narratives is interspersed with theoretical discussion in Chapter Six, and further exploration of resonant, or shared threads of narrative experience in the second discussion chapter, Chapter Seven. Practice implications are then discussed, exploring differentiated music-centred experiences, considering the need for different levels of engagement, and developing approaches towards collaborative approaches to working alongside with people with lived experience. I then explore the alignment of narrative therapy approaches with anti-oppressive theoretical approaches that may bring a critical lens to exploring adverse experiences. I finish with a model expanding the notion of a musical asylum (DeNora, 2016) toward an assemblage of interconnected musical opportunities within a musical recovery community.
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    Music composition: the expression of potential musical experience through notation and performer collaboration
    Martin, Caerwen Beth ( 2023-03)
    folio of original compositions for solo instruments and ensembles. The accompanying dissertation explores notational innovation, process versus intuition, and close composer-performer collaboration. The project offers new insights on the embedding, both overt and covert, of traumatic personal experience and difficult subject matter in musical composition.
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    Practices in contemporary flamenco guitar: a creative journey
    Mapstone, Gerard Robert ( 2023-05)
    This PhD investigates creative practices in contemporary flamenco guitar performance. The PhD comprises two parts: a performance portfolio (70%) and a dissertation (30%). The performance portfolio includes 190 minutes of live and studio recordings, comprised of original works, and arrangements of solo and group pieces. The dissertation draws on my own journey into the artistic field of flamenco, and it reflects on creative practices involved in the formation of my contemporary flamenco guitar style. This PhD argues that creativity and forming one’s own style are the key aspirations of gaining access to the artistic field of flamenco, an art form that is widely considered as both traditional and forward learning. This study outlines my process of style formation on the flamenco guitar - one that is steeped in the aural tradition - by focusing on practices of emulation, and the distillation of various structures within flamenco. Engagement with the aesthetic codes and practices of flamenco voice and dance are integral to this process, as is the transcription of recordings. These processes underscore my generation of new flamenco music on the guitar.
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    Prepared Strings and Interwoven Scales: Exploring New Materials for Timbre and Pitch in Music Composition
    Ball, Eugene Clinton ( 2023-05)
    In musical contexts the term ‘prepared’ refers to the addition of non-musical objects to musical instruments to alter their timbral characteristics. This practice was famously employed by composer John Cage, most notably in his works for prepared piano. In my work as an improvising trumpeter, I have explored techniques by which the trumpet can, in the Cagian sense, be prepared. In doing so, I observed that the sounds that resulted from preparing the trumpet seemed to ‘lead’ the improvisation, suggesting novel pathways and tangents. More recently, I began to wonder how preparations might be employed in orchestral contexts and how the new timbres available to prepared orchestral instruments could influence my composition process. This practice-centred research is born of this wondering: it explores the development of a set of techniques of preparation for orchestral string instruments and considers their implementation and influence in the compositional process. Additionally, this project involved the unexpected discovery and refinement of a pattern of pitch organization that emerged through the compositional activity on which this research is based. As such, the output of this research consists of two new sets of materials for music composition: a collection of techniques by which instruments of the orchestral string family can be prepared; and a catalogue of what I term, ‘interwoven bi-scales of expanding interval’. These materials form the basis of a sixty-minute folio of compositions for string ensembles that demonstrates the creative possibilities of the materials. This dissertation provides a critical commentary on the development of these sets of materials and the compositions that comprise the folio. A contextual framework for the research is established, founded on the principles of emergence, divergence, reflexivity, and chaos. The practice of preparing instruments for composition is then explored from an historic point of view and an artistic audit presents an overview of extant compositions for ensembles of prepared strings. Following this, the origins and development of each set of materials (the techniques of preparation, and the interwoven bi-scales of expanding interval) are outlined, and analyses of a representative sample of pieces from the folio are presented. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the successes and challenges of the project, and recommendations for further research.
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    Liminaire: Performance Contexts and Cultural Dynamics of the Saxophone in Australia, 1853–1938
    Chapman, Ross Daniel ( 2023-06)
    This project explores the largely untold first eighty-five years of the saxophone in Australia. For a unique Australian context it examines, and ultimately challenges, the long- and widely-held view that the instrument was solely a product and expression of popular or ‘lowbrow’ musical culture; instead, it argues that the saxophone’s character in Australia between 1853 and 1938 was enduringly cosmopolitan, stylistically diverse across the cultural strata, and a mirror to evolving notions of Australian identity. A five-chapter dissertation, weighted at 80%, details the saxophone’s Australian efflorescence in a variety of performance contexts from the goldrush to the cusp of the Second World War. A number of landmark performers and performances are established, including the headline discovery that the instrument debuted in Australia before being first heard in the United States. Drawing on categories established by John Whiteoak, this study incorporates ‘approved’ musical settings that were seen to reinforce social cohesion, such as the concert stage and the bandstand, and ‘anonymous’ settings, including the commercially-oriented domains of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and jazz. Notions of liminality are employed to explain and contextualise the saxophone’s marginal, and yet still remarkably potent, place in musical and wider cultural and social life over this time. This argument is built on research into a wide range of primary sources, including historical newspaper and journal articles, sheet music, sound recordings, silent and sound film, and interviews with notable Australian musicians. An accompanying audio-visual folio, weighted at 20%, features 33 minutes of new recordings for saxophone ensemble, saxophone and piano, and concert band in march and art music transcription forms.
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    An exploration of people with dementia and their family care partners’ experiences of shared home-based music
    McMahon, Katherine Jean Meredith ( 2023-06)
    This dissertation describes an emergent project exploring how people living with dementia and their family care partners experience shared musical activities. With an increasing number of people with dementia residing in the community, family members play a key role in providing support for daily living as family care partners. There is, therefore, a recognised need to support the wellbeing of both people living with dementia and their family care partners. Music interventions uniquely support mood, memory and communication for people with dementia. However, little is known about how sharing music might support people with dementia and their family care partners as dyads. This thesis sought to address this gap through two qualitative studies: a thematic synthesis of the literature and a hermeneutic phenomenological study. This research was situated within a larger study examining a 12-week home-based music intervention (HOMESIDE), where I played dual roles as a researcher and music therapist. The thematic synthesis was conducted first to inform later stages of the research. My thematic synthesis explored how dyads experience shared musical activities across a range of contexts, including community settings, residential aged care, and the home. An analysis of 13 qualitative studies found that shared musical activities supported the individual and collective wellbeing of dyads through fostering connection. The findings informed the development of the Contextual Connection Model of Health Musicking for People Living with Dementia and Their Family Care Partners. This model captured the relationship between dyads’ contexts, their experiences of sharing music, and their wellbeing. In my second study, I conducted a hermeneutic phenomenological exploration of the shared musical experiences of six dyads participating in HOMESIDE. I recruited dyads I had worked with as a music therapist to utilise the rapport we had developed. Data was collected through music-based interviews to capture dyads’ musical and non-verbal experiences in the moment. Additional data was collected from the HOMESIDE study including dyads’ intervention diaries and semi-structured interviews. To explore and build on the Contextual Connection Model, this data was analysed using an abductive and relational-centred approach to hermeneutic phenomenological analysis. Through this analysis, I developed fifteen themes to capture dyads’ experiences of shared home-based musicking. These fifteen themes were organised into three global themes: 1) Experiences were shaped by complex influences; 2) A connected musical ecosystem; and 3) Music was a resource for wellbeing. These findings added depth, nuance and novelty to the Contextual Connection Model, leading to the development of the Revised Contextual Connection Model of Musicking for People Living with Dementia and Their Family Care Partners. This revised model conceptualises dyads’ experiences of musicking as cyclical and ecological, with nuanced outcomes including supported wellbeing, changed relationships to music, and challenging experiences. This study also provided insights into dyads’ process of learning to use music as a resource. This thesis provides theoretical and practical insights into dyads’ experiences of sharing music in the home and broader contexts. My research highlights the complexity of dyads’ shared musical experiences, and the central role of connection through musicking in supporting their wellbeing. It also locates the unique role of music therapy within the evolving landscape of music in dementia care. These understandings may support future development and refinement of therapeutic music interventions for dyads.
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    The Expressive Potential of the Interpretive Edition: A Practice-Led Analysis of the Editions of Beethoven Piano Sonatas by Hans von Bülow and Sigmund Lebert, Donald Francis Tovey and Harold Craxton, Artur Schnabel, and Claudio Arrau
    Hooke, Joshua ( 2023-05)
    This practice-led project asserts the value of the often-overlooked interpretive edition as an indispensable tool for performers, encouraging them to consider numerous approaches to interpreting a piece of music. The thesis portion of the project will begin with the suggestion that overly textualist readings of urtext scores have limited the potential for creating interpretively exploratory performances. With a focus on selected piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven – in particular his sonata in A flat, Op. 110 – this thesis will contend that great performers play a key role in forging much of the meaning surrounding this music and its place in concert repertoire. A practice-led analysis of selected editions will be used to illustrate this. This will offer a framework to encourage performers to look at the interpretive editions of the great musicians who have gone before them. These are the musicians who gave this music much of its popular meaning, who have faced the same artistic and technical challenges, and presented their various ideas and solutions in these scores.
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    Seeking the “dirty-beautiful”: An investigation into a compositional practice informed by shadows, impermanence and ambiguity
    Cheney, Lisa Jessie ( 2022-12)
    This creative-based research comprises a folio of original compositions, totalling two hours of music, and a written exegesis of 25,000 words. The portfolio explores the developing influence of a “dirty-beautiful” aesthetic, reflecting both a poetic worldview and preferences that shape a compositional language and sound world. Parallels are drawn with the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi and seeking beauty in the unusual, perishable, blurred or dimly lit shadow. A preference for creating dualities in order to dissolve them to reach a space in-between is established, particularly through an exploration of themes of lightness and darkness. Choices concerning register, timbre, activity and stasis, harmony and texture are situated on a continuum, building the foundations of this personal compositional style. The folio of compositions includes orchestral works, a flute concerto and four chamber works, plus a staged musical work for young audiences. A framework for reading music for wabi-sabi qualities is established and underpins the conceptually based qualities for writing music that I term “dirty-beautiful”. These qualities are paralleled most clearly in the music of Kaija Saariaho and Toru Takemitsu. Notions on how vulnerability might inform musical ideas and composition are also explored through both textural, sonic forms and personal experience relating to identity, gender and the notion of giving voice through in-depth analysis of many folio works. The accompanying folio of music compositions was composed between late 2014 and early 2019. It presents Arcane for symphony orchestra (2014-15); No Distant Place for piano, clarinet and violin (2015); Everything is Illuminated for violin, viola, cello, double bass, piano, percussion and harp (2016 rev. 2018); When We Speak for solo cello and fixed electroacoustic track (2016 rev. 2017-18); Strange Charisma for solo prepared harp (2019 rev. 2021); Flute Concerto (2017); excerpts from The Owl and the Pussycat, an opera for young audiences (2017–18) and Penumbral Shadow for chamber orchestra (2018–19). I arrive at a point where I am able to question and evaluate what writing music means to me as a composer.