Associate ProfessorJames Humberstone

FRSA, PhD (UNSW), MTeach (UWS), MMus (Sydney), BMus Hons (Exon)

James Humberstone's output is influenced by his research background in experimental music, his interest in composing for children and community ensembles, and his experience in the music technology profession. His research is published as creative NTRO (non-traditional research outputs - compositions) and as traditional research in the fields of musicology, music education, and technology.

Born in London, Humberstone migrated to Australia in 1997 after completing a degree in composition at the University of Exeter. His honours thesis was on the music of Howard Skempton, with whom Humberstone studied briefly after graduating. Humberstone has often cited Skempton as his greatest influence.

Background: Non-traditional research outputs

Humberstone undertook further studies with Anne Boyd at the University of Sydney (MMus), and with John Peterson and Andrew Schultz at the University of New South Wales (PhD). Over the first decade of this century his focus changed from the exploration of minimalist and experimentalist structures (for example Chance: Chants (2002), Requiem (2002, 2006) to composing for children.

Composer-in-Residence at MLC School in Sydney from 2002 to 2013, and often invited to residences at other schools around Australia and the world, Humberstone has had a great number of opportunities to develop his voice while writing within the limitations imposed when composing for children. He scaffolds extensive repertoire (for example his children's opera Kiravanu (2008) or Symphony of the Child (2009)) with sound pedagogy and learning resources. In 2013 Humberstone became a full time lecturer in Music Education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and in 2016 was promoted to Senior Lecturer. In 2017 Humberstone was Program Leader of Music Education.

More recently Humberstone began to combine his aesthetic interest - pairing back music to its essences and involving the performer in the act of interpretation through open forms - with his educational experience in a number of works: The Speaking Piano (2012) combined a children's book, eBook, webapp and simple piano repertoire with concert music commissioned by the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium and premiered by Michael Kieran Harvey; whileCycles and Circles(2012) was a commission for Ensemble Offspring's Music to Infinity tour and included a downloadable education kit.

Since joining faculty at the Sydney conservatorium in 2013, Humberstone has enjoyed a series of high-profile commissions, including Campanella (2013) which was commissioned and premiered by Synergy Percussion, Noise Husbandry (2015) an electro-acoustic installation onboard a destroyer and sumarine at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Odysseus: Live (2016) a cross arts collaboration in cinema, spoken word poetry, hip hop, with score for orchestra and choir and most recently The Weight of Light (2018), a new song cycle with libretto by Nigel Featherstone, commissioned by the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium with production by The Street theatre, Canberra.

Background: Traditional research outputs

The connections between Humberstone's compositional outputs and his musicological research are self-evident. Having written about and studied with Howard Skempton, Humberstone focused on Sydney's most equivalent figure, the enigmatic David Ahern, in a series of articles, his masters thesis, and the resulting ABC Radio Series, produced by Andrew Mclennan, Down for the count. Episodes in the life of David Ahern.

Humberstone's PhD broadened his research interests alongside his compositional interests, investigating Malcolm Williamson's Cassations, a series of mini-operas for musically-untrained children. Humberstone's analysis lead to the development of a series of computer programs to analyse Pitch Proximity and Pitch Reversal (Schellenberg, E. G., Adachi, M., Purdy, K. T., & McKinnon, M. C., 2002), and later collaboration with Dr Carolyn Philpott from the University of Tasmania.

From 1999 to 2008 James Humberstone enjoyed a career developing from Technical Support to Director of Education and Applications at Sibelius (Australia). This period overlapped his school teaching career, and Humberstone became known as a leading practitioner in technology-infused composition, and creativity more broadly. In recent years Humberstone's practice has informed new directions in research, first through a series of publications (2014, 2015, 2017) that established a philosophical and theoretical position on the subject of technology in music education and the place of music in 21st century education; and more recently by establishing a research team to investigate the approach to literature and new thinking by the international music education cohort around Humberstone's Coursera MOOC (called The Place of Music in 21st Education) (Humberstone, Zhao, & Liu, 2020).