John Encarnacao

MELBOURNES BY THE DOZEN Four rock albums and the evocation of place

John Encarncao provides a poetic examination of music and place in Australia, in reflecting on very specific personal experiences of music that have drawn him a mental map of Melbourne. He is interested in the personal aspects of the construction of place, and shows how personal histories associated with age, experience, and locale affect the process. Encarnacao reinforces how personal and selective these constructions actually are. This in turn reinforces the importance of music in constructing personal histories and understandings of the world, but perhaps questions and plays with the validity of drawing clear conclusions about sound and place.

Assessing Music Performance Process and Outcome Through a Rubric: Ways and Means

The subject of this research is the assessment of music performance process and outcome. It asks questions about what the fairest methods might be, and compares various modes of thinking around this challenge. How can assessors go beyond subjective impressions of worth, allied to their own experience and training, and how can desired outcomes be made as clear as possible to students? One approach to making these judgements more objective is the adoption of descriptive rubrics of criteria and standards of performance. While this method is chosen for fairness and clarity it may or may not suit all disciplines in which it is applied. This chapter offers a survey of alternative approaches and a preliminary discussion of the assessment rubric as a model for assessing creative performative outcomes in three music performance and sound technology subjects. Discussion focuses on three academics (who designed and use the rubrics) in relation to: (i) our thinking behind the design of three assessment rubrics; and (ii) our experiences using these rubrics. We conclude by drawing together our experiences with findings from literature on the topic to list positive and negative aspects of the assessment rubric, including issues of pedagogy, assessment levels, justification of the result, marking, student learning and practicalities, plus thoughts for the future.

What does jazz group assessment offer the undergraduate music environment

With the growth of popular music studies in universities, research is focusing on assessment of popular music performance, particularly rock and jazz, and therefore group music-making. This paper investigates a second-year undergraduate cohort studying jazz performance, asked to choose criteria for selfand peer assessment, and asks: what does jazz group assessment offer to thinking about tertiary assessment in general; and what does jazz group assessment offer to thinking on group assessment? It finds the rehearsal process, recognition of soft skills, and student participation in assessment criteria important, with popular music requiring the questioning of default positions inherited from the assessment of classical music.