Our Capturing Voices Project is a way to celebrate the remarkable stories, perspectives, and contributions of eminent music educators.
Lorraine Milne in Conversation with Dr Ros McMillian
An interview with Lorraine Milne, ASME Patron, by Dr Ros McMillian, ASME Honorary life Member was held on the 18th September 2022 at the ASME Afternoon event held at the Kent Hotel Upstairs.
Click here to download the Audio of Lorraine Milne in Conversation with Ros McMillian.
ASME Honorary Life Members 2022
Honorary Life Memberships to were presented to Dr Jane Southcott, Mandy Stefanakis & Michael Travers at An ASME Afternoon.
Michael Travers
Audio of Mick Traver’s acceptance speech – September 18, 2022
Michael has made a significant contribution to music education in Australia. Not only is he an engaging classroom teacher, he is also a workshop leader and composer, his compositions always involving an extraordinarily diverse cohort of performers and audiences.
Michael’s creations include several musicals written specially for his school, St Matthew’s Primary in Fawkner North, and whose students represent over two dozen nationalities. Every student is involved in the musicals which are staged every two years and that also utilise the skills of the staff, including the classroom teachers. They include ‘Antarctica’, with its focus on ecological awareness and ‘The Visitor’, where a strange visitor is encouraged to learn the F-6 History curriculum through drama and song. Michael’s most widely acknowledged school musical is ‘An Act of Parliament’ which was performed in the Queen’s Hall in Victoria’s Parliament House and that also included musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Police in Schools Program. His best-known composition is the song The Last Anzac, which was premiered in 2005 at the ANZAC Day AFL match commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing.
Michael’s contribution to ASME has been significant. In 2007 he was awarded both the Herald-Sun’s Victorian Primary Teacher of the Year and an ASME National Award for Excellence in Music Education. As a consequence he was invited to attend an ASME meeting that year and to join the Council. In the 15 years since then he has held the positions of Chair, Secretary and Treasurer and has been the force behind the Chapter’s focus on creative music-making in schools.
Mandy Stefanakis
Audio of Mary Stefanakis’ acceptance speech – September 18, 2022
Mandy Stefanakis has a long record of service to music education in Australia. She has been head of music at both primary and secondary schools and taught generalist and specialist teacher trainees at Melbourne and Deakin Universities. Her teaching experience was captured in her set of highly engaging school music texts, Turn it Up!, published by McGraw-Hill. In these she demonstrated her spectacularly wide knowledge of a range of musical styles, an attribute that is reflected in her many original compositions for school ensembles as well as piano and orchestral music.
Of particular importance has been Mandy’s contribution to arts curriculum initiatives, including VCAA (the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority), Musica Viva in Schools and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. She is an honorary life member and former president of aMuse, a member of the Advisory Council of the Music Trust and deputy editor of Australia’s foremost online music publication LoudMouth.
Mandy has conducted extensive interviews with musicians and filmmakers for the National Film and Sound Archive and recently submitted her PhD, which investigated the concept of ‘composer self’. Through interviews with 15 Australian composers, who write in a range of musical genres, they were asked to identify two of the pieces they felt particularly represented their selves. From these works and the spoken words of the composers, she found that all had a distinctive personal aesthetic or ‘sound print’ within their oeuvre. Her research notes the importance of a personal musical voice in creative music-making, something about which she is passionate, particularly in school music-making.
Jane Southcott
Audio Jane Southcot’s acceptance speech – September 18, 2023
Jane is a professor in the Education Faculty at Monash University. Her major research is the history of music education, not only that of Australia but also of America and Europe. She is the ‘go-to’ person for any query on when things happened, who initiated what, and where you would find information regarding music education.
Of particular importance for Australian music education has been her supervision of post-graduate students. Jane has supervised more than fifty successful PhDs and currently has over a dozen more students undertaking this degree – an achievement that has rarely been matched by any other Australian academic. A former PhD student noted that Jane invests as much enthusiasm and support in her novice researchers as she does in her PhD candidates and that supervision sessions were always highly constructive and enjoyable. For this ex-student Jane’s most notable attribute was her versatility, shown in the way she could take on a breadth of subjects and become an expert in those fields, in addition to her own areas of research. She was, to quote, “simply fabulous”.
Jane’s contribution to music education has been more than just her academic work, however. She has been a member of ASME for 50 years, including Chair of the South Australian Chapter for several years, and she has presented at many State and National Conferences. She is also a long-standing member of ANZARME (the Australian and New Zealand Association for Research in Music Education) and is its current President. As if this was not enough to keep her busy, Jane is also the Co-editor of ISME’s International Journal of Music Education.