Newsletter – December 2024
Dear guild members
Seasons greetings! I hope everyone has made it through this busy season well, with some special musical moments along the way. This newsletter outlines some of our recent guild activities.
Fellow committee member Crystal and I recently had a meeting with the Director of QLD Conservatorium Professor Bernard Lanskey to discuss changes in the Bachelor of Music degree, including collaborative piano opportunities and training of undergraduate students. The meeting on the whole was beneficial and some of the degree changes should allow more collaborative opportunities for piano students within the tertiary degrees. The guild also offered to continue the annual prize to support emerging collaborative pianists as well as exploring ways to work with the Conservatorium re professional development and new memberships.
Congratulations to Reuben Tsang who is the QLD Conservatorium AGQ prize winner for 2024. No doubt many have heard of Reuben’s achievements to date and the guild is proud to add the AGQ prize to this list of achievements. Professor Lanskey noted that the AGQ annual prize was a unique opportunity for departments at the Conservatorium to come together to choose a suitable winner for the prize.
In other news, we are continuing to extend our networks and create important professional relationships to help remind our colleagues of the importance of collaborative piano. The Australian Guild of Collaborative Pianists (AGCP https://www.agcp.au) continues to meet and is looking at possible national advocacy as well as discussing issues faced by collaborative pianists with the International Keyboard Collaborative Arts Society (IKCAS https://ikcas.org) in the US. We will continue to circulate AGCP minutes with guild members but if anyone wants to join the monthly meetings, they are most welcome to attend. For those who have written articles about accompanying, the AGCP is looking for more content to upload to their website. Please contact David Miller if you have something suitable to offer at david.miller@sydney.edu.au.
We have also given our support to the QLD Music Education Advocacy Collective to help unite advocacy actions needed to ensure that QLD primary students receive weekly music education (which should feed into numbers studying music in later years) and to represent our members who work in schools, whose jobs are impacted by the consistency or lack of consistency of music education.
This year, the guild’s activities finished with a lovely dinner out at Gala Thai in West End and I’ve attached a photo of the wonderful colleagues who were able to attend this event.
Looking ahead, we are planning a variety of social and professional events for the guild for 2025. If anyone has any suggestions they would like to see implemented, please let me know during this planning phase.
I hope this season brings joy, reflection, celebration, refreshment and special times with loved ones.
See you in 2025!
All the best
Rachel
Dr Rachel Hocking, President AGQ
