Category: Composition
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The Paul Grabowsky Sibelius Education Kit (from 2006)
There’s a funny story about this one. Sibelius 5 had lots of cool things to show off. A new audio engine, the Ideas Hub, support for VST and AU plug-ins, a new view in Panorama, super-easy cues and much, much more. Here in Australia Sibelius went all out and commissioned a work from composer Paul…
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Sibelius 7 Music Notation Essentials (Book, no longer in print).
Because this book is no longer in print, I have made the resources and tutorial videos (which are still quite relevant to the current version of Sibelius) available here! There are plenty of second hand copies of the book available if you need one. Sibelius 7 Music Notation Essentials was the only official, Avid-endorsed course for…
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Αγάπη (Agapi) and other kinds of love (Music Theatre/Hip-Hop/Intercultural Art)
Premiered at the National Museum of Australia, April 2022 Concert blurb: Experience Agapi & Other Kinds of Love by renowned Greek-Australian poet and rapper Luka Lesson. Accompanied by cinematic scores and hip-hop numbers composed by Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s James Humberstone, this soulful performance will ignite your heart. Agapi & Other Kinds of Love tells the story of…
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Luka Lesson X James Humberstone, locked down 20-21
Luka and I had been working on Odysseus since 2016, but it became clear that our massive orchestral-choral-Hip-Hop-cinematic theatrical work wasn’t going to premiere through the pandemic, so we got to work remotely, through the lockdowns, on three orchestrated video-poems, written and performed by Luka, with music by me. There’s a strong theme of Social…
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Drum Programming Minus One, and The Patented Humberstone Four-Finger Technique (Text Book Chapters)
I wrote two chapters for a wonderful new music education textbook, The Music Technology Cookbook, edited by Adam Patrick Bell. The book itself has 56 chapters, some as single activities for learning music with technology, and others linked ideas to create term-long projects with your students. My chapter Drum Programming Minus One is a play on the idea…
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Empathy in the time of division (viola & electronics)
JamesHumbers · Empathy in a time of division My submission for the 2020 “Art Has To Be Contagious” installation in Tübingen, Germany, Empathy in a time of division is for electronics with solo viola and delay. [See art-has-to-be-contagious.com for more.] Live viola performed by the wonderful Connor Malanos. Please contact me if you’d like to…
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Music Zettel S2E3 – Songwriting, composing, & creativity
In the third Zettel of the week, I take you through a number of songwriting, composition, and other zany creative projects that our pre-service music teachers have produced in response to my Tech in Music Education course. Music included in this episode is by Kyra McMorrow, Matt O’Brien, Katrina Wu, and Emily Turner. If you’re…
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Seeking Innovation as Exploration of Aesthetic (Book Chapter)
My chapter in the new book Creative Research in Music, edited by my colleagues Anna Reid, Jeanell Carrigan, and Neal Peres Da Costa, accounts for the creative research process for my 2015 release Noise Husbandry, an electro-acoustic installation at the Australian National Maritime Museum on Sydney’s Darling Harbour, performed by Ensemble Offspring. Abstract This chapter presents a…
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Music Zettel Ep. 8 – A load of Pollak
We’ve just had three wonderful days with our Maker-in-Residence, Linsey Pollak! In this episode, I reflect on the learning that went on, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Good, and we hear from my students who were involved in the residency at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. If you’d like to hear more music from…
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Music Zettel Ep. 6 – The Creative Music Movement
This episode features a “flipped learning” video that I made for Key Approaches in Music Education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the first year course that I mentioned in episode 2. For those wondering what “flipped learning” means, it’s when you take a part of a class that you’ve traditionally chalked-and-talked, and “flip” it…
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Music Zettel Ep. 5 – Tech skills & industry collaboration
This week we are giving away dozens of free resources for music education and technology! I’ll be reflecting on the first 5 weeks of my Sydney Conservatorium course “Technology in Music Education”, which culminated in a media creation session with brilliant pianist Lolita Emmanuel in which the students were the film and sound crew. I…
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Music Zettel Ep. 3 – Orff formula arrangements
This week’s episode is drawn from my first two lectures this semester in Composition in Music Education. We look at some of my own Orff-style arrangements and original compositions and discuss how these can be both a pedagogical and compositional model for teaching and learning. The resources I mentioned in this episode include: My Train’s…
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Remixular bells
In this unit of work you will examine how Mike Oldfield built the opening of his seminal progressive rock work Tubular Bells. By following each step as instructed below, you will rebuild the work yourself, remix it, and then compose a new piece based on the original. Simply follow the process outlined as follows. Listening Learn…
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Orff and aural learning-inspired arrangements by Sydney Conservatorium students
Every year at the Sydney Conservatorium I get to take one of my favourite courses, Composition in Music Education. The first task, after reviewing a number of creative music pedagogies, is to create a “mixed-bag” arrangement (one that will work for any combination of instruments at all) with aural learning elements. Actually, I talk about the…
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The Weight of Light (Song Cycle)
Australia’s participation in the war in Afghanistan is the nation’s longest ever military involvement. What happens when an Australian soldier, who is carrying a dark secret, is forced to confront the full force of the family that he left behind? Nigel Featherstone A song cycle commissioned by the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium of Music with The…
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Beat programming to iMovie on iPads
I’m teaching at the Sydney University Wingara Mura Bunga Barabugu summer camp for young indigenous Australian songwriters this week … today doing a workshop on drum programming on iPad apps, then sending to iMovie to use as TV show opening credits music … I made this cheat sheet that I thought I’d share for anyone…
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On Hip-hOpera, the Glitter Gang, Humberrants, and becoming Senior in 2017
You’ve probably noticed that my blogging rate has somewhat spiked in the past couple of days. As 2016 creaked to its end, and I realised that it was less than 11 months since I was in Oxford giving my TEDx talk, I was rather astonished to think about everything that happened this year in my…
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Piano, vibes etc. pedalling workflow in Sibelius
I’m in the middle of composing a large work for orchestra and choir at the moment, and as I was setting up my pedalling notation shortcut for the first time in Sibelius 7.5 it suddenly occurred to me that this may be a workflow that others haven’t thought of. I can remember back in the days…
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Live jamming Ableton-style, with iPads & USB MIDI controllers
I posted an obscure photo last week showing set-up for a lecture I gave the following morning. I’m interested to know if anyone else has tried anything like this in music education, because it seems like a big technological uphill to get there (tho “there” is quite geekishly cool). I’m thinking I might write at length…
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Songwriting in GarageBand with Musical Cryptography
I developed several units of work to go with my composition Passion for Symphonic Winds, and this electronic version has nothing to do with that work except that that’s where the interest in hiding messages in music began. Since I found it interesting, I thought my students would, and they’ve had a lot of success playing around…
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#SCMtech educational iBooks go live – download them free!
Last week my Sydney Conservatorium of Music Technology in Music Education (#SCMtech) students handed in their main project, worth 50% of the course marks. It’s an interactive iBook, designed for elementary or middle school music education, but also you’ll find they’ve shared equivalent resources to be printed or burned onto CD for schools that don’t have iBooks…
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Website updates, SoundCloud integration and a free online Sibelius course. Yes, free.
Long time no blog – but that’s what happens when you take a new job! Since March I’ve been working at the Sydney Conservatorium as a full time lecturer in Music Education. I’m loving it, and I’m exhausted. This blog post is mostly to draw your attention to the many changes I’ve made at my…
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Music to Infinity – free education kit
Beginning this week, I’m off on the road with Ensemble Offspring for premiere performances of my Cycles and Circles in addition to a whole host of other contemporary (Australian) pieces including: Bree van Reyk – Duet with Blindfold Graham Fitkin – Cusp John Lely – Distance Learning Joanna Baillie – On and Off Matthew Shlomowitz – Hi…
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The Speaking Piano
I’ve just completed my fourth commission of the year, and I’m especially proud of this one. I’m going to blog only briefly on what it’s about, because you can learn everything by going to the website www.composerhome.com/piano anyway, but I thought I might also share a little of the process of making it here, because it has…
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Resources for Drone & Chant, first lecture
In our lecture, we have sung through the Drone & Chant: Next, download this GarageBand file to improvise your own melody over the drone in A natural minor.
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Stage 5 Film Project
I feel compelled to write about a unit of work just completed with a very talented stage 5 class despite the fact that I’m aware it wasn’t quite perfect. The reason for this is because it had so many good points that you can’t guarantee when you set out: self-motivated students, community and collaboration, a…
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Tutorial notes week 7 – and resources from the lecture
In the tutorial this week we created our own Wiki on the topic of music technology for education. After discussing how the structure of our Wiki would work, I demonstrated setting up the first few levels, and created a page on the Korg iElectribe for iPad. I then asked you each to create a page…
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Step-sequencing for primary school?
Last week in my second MTeach lecture I talked about a progression of software to match the progression of compositional skills. So perhaps we might start composing in GarageBand or Acid by juxtaposing loops to learn about texture, tone colour and stucture, and then progress to improvising over the top in a sequencer like Logic,…
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New composition tutorial series: Developing an idea with Sibelius 6
This series of videos, then, shows the student how to use the plug-ins. But it does a little more than that. It provides context by looking first at how Beethoven, the master of development, transforms ideas in the first subject of the first movement of his third symphony…
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Soundhouse conference, alongside AMAC 2009
As I write I’m just on the way back from the Soundhouse conference which took place at the Australian Music Association Conference 2009. For those who don’t know, the Soundhouse Association is an international not-for-profit alliance of institutions with an interest in music technology and education. Soundhouses are in schools, colleges, museums, theatres and other…
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MLC’s Australian Music Day timeline website
Composer Damian Barbeler and web development company Firefly Interactive have combined to create an amazing new website to support MLC School’s Australian Music Day 2009. MLC School, where I am composer-in-residence along with Damian and Director of Composition Dr Paul Stanhope, has a great tradition of supporting Australian contemporary music not only through its three…
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Teaching composition and the affect of technology
At the moment I’m really enjoying reading (and commenting on!) another composer’s blog. The composer in question is Kenneth Froelich and his blog is at http://electricsemiquaver.blogspot.com/. I think the topic of Froelich’s blog, how to compose with notation software like Sibelius and Finale, and what pitfalls to avoid, is a really important one. It’s also…
James Humberstone 