The music I've become very passionate about over the last decade is that of 18th and 19th-century Scotland and Australia. In 2018 I completed a Research Master's degree at the University of Melbourne, creating a series of recitals and writing a thesis entitled "Sweet Sounds and Good Taste: Italian Influences on Modality in the Music of Eighteenth-Century Scotland".
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I am currently a staff member and a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne, studying the historically informed performance practices of Scottish-Australian music manuscripts of the 19th and early 20thC. I'm focused on three collections in particular: the Laing Collection (Tasmania), the Findlay Collection (Upper Murray, Victoria), and the Baillie Collection (Rockhampton/ Sydney).
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I was the recipient of the 2019 National Folk Fellowship offered through the National Library of Australia and the National Folk Festival. The recording of the fellowship research was made into an ABC Classics album with Evergreen Ensemble entitled 'One Hundred Days Away'. Also in 2019 I co-produced a second ABC Classics album of Scottish-Australian music, 'Curious Caledonians', featuring Evergreen Ensemble, Neal Peres da Costa, Daniel Yeadon, and members of Concerto Caledonia from Glasgow, Scotland. I recorded three albums in 2022 showcasing my PhD repertoire, all to be released in 2023: Wintergarden Fantasias (ABC Classics), Your Loving Father, and The Bell Birds of Scotland.
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2022 John Hodgson Scholarship, Uni. Melb.
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2022 Miegunyah Project Award recipient
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2022 Macgeorge Travelling Scholarship
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2022 Folk Fellowship Showcase Curator
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2020 Academic Assistantship, Uni. Melb.
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2020 Co-director Baroque Winter Academy, Uni. Melb.
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2019 National Folk Fellowship
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2018 Faculty Small Grant recipient, Uni. Melb.
Edited by Rosemary Richards and Julja Szuster, with contributions from Julja Szuster, Rosemary Richards, Shane Lestideau, Kirstine Moffat, Clare Gleeson, Heather Blasdale Clarke, Elizabeth Nichol, Matthew Stephens, Aline Scott-Maxwell and John Whiteoak. 2022.
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Music-lovers from Australia and New Zealand have collected and bound sheet music and handwritten music since the earliest years of settlement. In these nine essays, the authors discuss music and dance collections found in libraries, historic houses, archives and homes, explaining what these cherished artefacts reveal about the owners, their emotional life and their musical practice. Beautifully illustrated, and with suggestions for how these collections might be further explored or disseminated, this is a landmark book in the history of music in private life.
