UWA School of Music

The UWA School of Music is part of the Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education at the University of Western Australia. It is located at the North-East corner of the Crawley campus and teaches predominately Classical music, with focus in the undergraduate curriculum on performance, as well as overall strength in musicology, composition and ethnomusicology. In 2016, UWA entered the top 100 "Performing Arts" institutions in the world, and in 2017 the School improved the ranking to number 33 in the world, according to the QS World University Rankings.

The school started life as part of the education faculty under the foundation Professor Sir Frank Callaway. It was the fourth Australian university to establish courses in music (after Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney). The first graduates to include a significant study of music in their degrees were two Music Education students in 1957. This followed shortly thereafter with the appointment of Frank Callaway as the foundation professor, concurrently with the establishment of the department of music in 1959.

First graduates followed in 1960 (one being the noted composer Jennifer Fowler) with a BA in Music, and the first graduates from the Bachelor of Music degree emerged in 1965. The first students to graduate with post-graduate qualifications emerged in 1971, and the late seventies saw the beginning of the Bachelor of Music Education - the department now having come full circle from its roots.

In 1991, the Department of Music became a School in its own right, as part of the change of structure across the university that reduced the number of faculties.

The School of Music has several notable members of staff in the fields of Musicology, Performance and Composition such as Dr. David Symons, Dr. Chris Tonkin, Dr. Suzie Wijsman, Graeme Gilling, Shaun Lee Chen (who also serves as concertmaster for the Australian Brandenberg Orchestra),James Ledger (Composition) and Dr. Nicholas Bannan. In January 2012, Professor Alan Lourens was appointed Head of the School of Music. Appointments since 2013 have included Ashley William Smith as Head of Woodwinds and Contemporary Performance, Louise Devenish as Head of Percussion, Andrew Foote as Head of Voice, and Dr Cecilia Sun in Musicology.

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