School of Humanities and Communication Arts Student Research Program 2015 Project Lists

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1 School of Humanities and Communication Arts Student Research Program 2015 Project Lists Project 10: Reassessing what we call music: investigating undergraduate music student response to avant-garde music of the 1960s-early 70s (Lockwood s Piano Burning)... 2 Project 11: Teasing apart different contact languages: Patterns of lenition in Aboriginal English... 4 Project Lists 1 of 5

2 Project 10: Reassessing what we call music: investigating undergraduate music student response to avant-garde music of the 1960s-early 70s (Lockwood s Piano Burning) Supervisor(s): Dr Diana Blom Supervisor(s) contact information: d.blom@westernsydney.edu.au Project description This research project explores the response of students to a performance of Annea Lockwood s Piano Burning (1968) given at night in October 2014 on Kingswood campus. The performance was videoed and is available online. The piece, a classic from the late 1960s avant-garde repertoire, requires the preparation and burning of a prepared upright piano. One of several pieces involving discarded upright pianos, it was written by Lockwood as part of Piano Transplants, and composed in response to the sight of discarded pianos on the banks of the Thames River. A performance of Piano Burning raises issues of what is music, artistic merit, what is art, notions of authenticity, music and fire, and the roles of the composer and the performer. This is the third time I have been involved in a performance of Piano Burning on the Western Sydney University Penrith campus, two of which were instigated by music students in response to a first year lecture I give in music performance. This lecture introduces students to avantgarde music of the 1960s-early 1970s, a period when pianos were buried, burnt, fed hay, and when 4.33 of silence constituted a music performance; when scores looked like visual art works; and when the intersection between musician and artist was blurred Yoko Ono, John Cage. Impetus for the research project has come from a performance of Piano Burning in 2014, funded by Western Sydney University Campus Life. An instigating student and I realised the performance, and unlike most other piano performances, Western Sydney University security, technical, capital works, campus vice-provost and Western Sydney University Connect personnel plus the Cumberland Rural Fire Service were involved. This reflected the strong community participation and enthusiastic audience response to the piece and raises issues of the role of the audience in avant-garde music of the late 1960s. While the research is not part of a larger funded project, it intersects with Back to the future: a role for 1960s improvisatory scores in the 21 st century tertiary music program, research being undertaken by Diana Blom, Brendan Smyly and John Encarnacao, the three performance academics in the B. Music program. Smyly introduces first year music performance students to improvisatory frame scores which, from data gathered via a questionnaire, is a new concept to most of the cohort, and raises for them the blurring of roles between composer and performer. Piano Burning raises similar questions. The proposed project, therefore, seeks one or more music students who experienced the 2014 performance and who are interested in investigating the learning and new knowledge which comes from taking part in this piece. As facilitating teacher/performer I will also give my educational views on why this piece is introduced to students. In doing so the project explores the nexus between teaching aims and learning outcomes of student. Project Lists 2 of 5

3 Project Aims To investigate the nexus between teaching aims and learning outcomes of students in relation to avant-garde music of the 1960s-early 1970s; To investigate how Piano Burning is music, and how it is a performance; To investigate issues of authenticity, fire and music and the roles of composer, performer and audience. Project Methods The project will draw information from: Practice-led questioning drawn from the student and teacher s experience with live performance of the work; Observation of the audience via the video documenting the performance and from remembered experience of the 2014 performance; A review of literature on: music of this period and why it bloomed in the 1960s-70s; on authenticity; performer/composer roles; music and fire associations; and what constitutes music. Opportunity for Skill Development Engaging in practice-led and observation research, plus video analysis; Writing a literature review; Structuring and writing a music education paper; There are two possible publication outcomes for the paper: o Inclusion in a book on music performance at Western Sydney University being proposed this year to a publisher by John Encarnacao and Diana Blom. Western Sydney University music performance has a profile different from the conservatorium performance model, and the book explores the approaches. The chapter would be co-authored; OR o a co-authored paper for submission to a music education journal (probably the Australian Journal of Music Education), focused on student/teacher views of the work and its performance; The student/s will be encouraged to present the findings from the project at a music education or musicology conference; Extension/expansion of the topic is very possible for honours/hdr study. Students are required to have the following skills/meet the following prerequisite(s) to apply Students have to have the following skill set: Have experienced the 2014 performance of Piano Burning and therefore be at 2 nd or 3 rd year level; Have good writing and critical analysis skills. Project Lists 3 of 5

4 Project 11: Teasing apart different contact languages: Patterns of lenition in Aboriginal English Supervisor(s): Dr Robert Mailhammer Supervisor(s) contact information: Project description This project aims at detecting and ascertaining the influence of Australian Indigenous languages on a local variety of Indigenous English spoken on Croker Island, NT in the area of phonetics/phonology. The goal is to compare patterns of lenition of intervocalic stops between a local variety of Aboriginal English and local Indigenous languages to se whether these features are transferred in the contact process, and if lenition patterns from different contact languages are carried over into Aboriginal English as well. Previous work gives reason to hypothesise that phonetic realisations of sounds in Australian contact languages, such as Roper River Kriol, exhibit features that are consistent with influence from Indigenous substrate language (Baker et al. 2014). For instance, voicing contrasts in stops may be realised differently or be absent completely, depending also on the availability of such distinctions in the Indigenous contact languages. This project aims to test and develop predictions based on Baker et al for Croker Island Aboriginal English, a contact variety of English spoken on Croker Island. Specifically it will be tested whether speakers of an Indigenous language with a productive pattern of intervocalic stop lenition, as e.g. in Iwaidja, Mawng and Amurdak, show similar patterns of lenition in their variety of Aboriginal English, and whether speakers of languages with different patterns, such as Kunwinjku, carry over these patterns of lenition in their variety of English. This will first of all establish whether patterns of lenition are transferred in the contact process and if so, whether the specific patterns are transferred and in what way. The main method to measure the degree of lenition in Aborigicnal English will be determining the manner of articulation of intervocalic stops and voicing to see whether stops have become fricatives, approximants or whether they have been deleted altogether. The data for this project will come from an ARC-funded Discovery Project led by the primary supervisor, which investigates grammatical influence of Indigenous languages on Aboriginal English. It will complement the more grammatically-oriented perspective of Discovery Project and give important insights in the fragmented situation of language contact in a multilingual community. This project will enhance our understanding of how Indigenous languages have shaped English spoken by Indigenous Australians, by uncovering the continuities from the vanishing Indigenous languages and the traces they have left behind. Aboriginal English is used as a feature of identification for Aboriginal people despite being looked down upon by language policymakers and normative policy planners. Linguistically, it will also inform our view of contact linguistics, as it will deepen our understanding of transfer phenomena in complex language contact in a fine-grained phonetic study. Project Lists 4 of 5

5 Project Aims Measure manner of articulation, duration and voicing (and hence the degree of lenition) in stops of a sample taken from a corpus of Aboriginal English, Iwaidja and Kunwinjku collected within the Discovery Project The indigenous grammar of Aboriginal English. Compare measurements and patterns to identify matches across languages (and compare against a non-aboriginal English variety, e.g. from the AusTalk corpus) Project Methods Measurements will be carried out using adequate software, e.g. Praat. Data will be entered into a database and then statistically compared. The student will be engaged in this process on all levels, i.e. learn to determine the manner of articulation, duration and voicing, data sampling and analysis. Opportunity for Skill Development It is anticipated that the following skills will be developed in the project. Analytical skills: phonetic analysis, statistical analysis; literature research on the contact linguistics for the interpretation, time management and project management skills, independent research and working skills; communication and academic writing. Students are required to have the following skills/meet the following prerequisite(s) to apply At least 2 nd year with some phonetic knowledge (e.g. completed unit Sound of Language ) Project Lists 5 of 5