Department of Creative Arts and Communication

We partner with regional conservatoria and music schools enabling our undergraduate music students to have the unique opportunity to study fully online and receive face-to-face music vocal or instrumental tuition. Activities include participation in large and small ensembles, master classes and workshops with world-class special guest musicians, accompanying and/or conducting work, and concerts and public performances.

We are expanding our network, and currently have partnerships with:

• New England Conservatorium of Music (NECOM)
• Tamworth Regional Conservatorium of Music
• Central Coast Conservatorium of Music.

Music industry technology

AVID is an industry leader in media technologies. Our partnership with AVID provides technology support and a licence to deliver industry accredited certificates in the major technologies in the music industry. The partnership increases opportunities for our students by offering industry certificates as a value-add to UNE study and enables UNE to embed exclusive learning partner content into the music technology units at UNE to enrich them.

We currently have three AVID certified educators on staff and are able to deliver Protools and Sibelius training.

Digital research support

We partner with digital research services provider Intersect Australia Pty Ltd to support research excellence, training and collaboration in our department.

UNE Theatre Studies has established partnerships with several vocational performing arts institutions across Australia, offering students from these institutions the opportunity to articulate their prior studies into a university degree.

We also foster partnerships with a number of research and industry organisations, including:

• The AustLit Australian Drama Archive – Australia’s largest digital archive of Australian plays from the early 20th century to the 1960s, developed between UNE and the University of Queensland. The archive includes digitised play manuscripts from Dixson Library’s Campbell Howard Collection.
• Australasian Drama Studies – the peak organisation for theatre research in Australia. Board member: Dr Julie Shearer
• Playlab Theatre – a new writing theatre company and publisher.

Our musicologists work across a number of highly specialised areas, with a particularly unique strength in medieval and early modern music; our researchers and students study the composers, unique music structures and techniques, and work to rediscover the compositions at risk of being lost in history, but that have played a pivotal role in the development of music as we know it.

Our research projects in this area include:

• The Art and Science of Canon in the Music of Early 17th-Century Rome

Using innovative digital tools, this project investigates the cultivation of musical canons by early 17th-century Roman composers and assess how the spirit of experimentation in these compositions relates to contemporary scientific thought.

Computational tools have allowed our researchers to identify compositional choices in musical canon. The research investigates how creative forces arising from early 17th-century scientific thought motivated these choices. The project advances a historical and aesthetic understanding of this repertoire, and reshapes current narratives about the musical priorities of this period. It improves understanding of the relationship between advances in the sciences, arts and music in the early 17th century.

Researcher: Dr Jason Stoessel (alongside Dr Denis Collins, University of Queensland)

• Canonic techniques and musical change, c.1330–c.1530

This project has made a substantive and original contribution to the history of compositional practice, through a thorough exploration and documentation of the many innovative and experimental 'canonical' music composition techniques in Europe from 1330 to 1530.

Utilising innovative computational tools, this research has revealed the specific techniques that composers employed to create different kinds of musical canons – early multipart music – over 200 years of unprecedented musical innovation. More than 2,000 canonical works from the period have been compiled and are publicly available in a comprehensive database to benefit research, composition and education.

Overall, the project has been able to demonstrate the fundamental role played by canonic techniques in broader sociocultural functions and uses of music.

Researcher: Dr Jason Stoessel (alongside Dr Denis Collins, University of Queensland)

Regrowth

This research will help share the realities of drought, climate change and life in regional Australia through a new funded music project, 'Regrowth'.

Combining an environmental soundscape of the New England region, a live recorder performance and the diverse stories of locals who have been impacted by the region's longest drought on record into 2020, this ambitious project will provoke thought and awareness about drought and climate change, and about people and issues in regional Australia.

The project will involve live performances and encourage social media engagement, to ensure the stories and experience reach and resonate with a broad audience.

'Regrowth' is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.’

Researcher: Dr Alana Blackburn in collaboration with composer Ros Bandt

We believe passionately in theatre’s ability to investigate and illuminate the most pressing issues of our time, through creating dynamic and embodied experiences that reveal the world anew.

Our program’s established online presence situates our teaching and research at an exciting nexus between the live and the digital, and between the rigour of academic scholarship and the vibrancy of contemporary theatre practice.

One of the strengths of our research and creative strengths is exploring the interaction between people, culture and the environment in innovative ways. Our recent successes include:

• The Tiniest Thing - a posthuman drama that, overall, explores human identity and agency in the face of technological acceleration and ecological disaster. This eco-family drama about the politics of perception the consequences of denial asks: Do we always choose what we want to believe? This play, by Dr Richard Jordan, won the 2020 Best New Play Award at the Australian Theatre Festival - NYC in 2020.
• Rockpocalypse - is an exciting exploration of place, belonging, and sustainability. The play revolves around an unlikely team of present-day Rockhampton locals who are drawn into a role-playing game of a dystopian future. Written by Jess Lamb for a UNE master's project, and published by PlayLab Theatre in 2020.
• way back when - re-imagines the colonisation of Tasmania as a Gothic revenge drama, bringing a compelling new perspective to Indigenous resilience in the face of colonisation. Written by master's student Dylan van den Berg, awarded the 2020 Griffin Award and ear-marked for future production.

We are conducting an innovative series of music workshops across the New England region for high school students to spark their imagination and inspire curiosity about a future in the arts.

These workshops feature international guest artists, appearing online, allowing students to learn from an industry professional while having the opportunity to create their own beats and tracks using digital technologies.

The workshops are helping to raise awareness of pathways to university and the opportunities that exist for students considering turning their passion for the arts into sustainable careers.

This project is funded by the Commonwealth Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP).

Project leader: Dr Donna Hewitt

Our writing discipline staff are working with the New England Writers Centre to develop best practice online workshop models to support the region's budding fiction and non-fiction writers. These workshops will ensure the collective expertise of the centre's membership is more widely available and easily accessible. They will help support the region's writers by providing more easy access to talks, activities, advice and mentoring from well-established authors.

The centre is currently chaired by prolific and well-loved author of children's books, young adult and adult fiction, Dr Sophie Masson AM.

Researchers: Dr Ariella Van Luyn, alongside Dr Beck Wise (University of Queensland)