From mid 2009 until August 2019, Professor Gary McPherson was Director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne. He still holds the Ormond professorship in music which is the oldest endowed chair at the University of Melbourne. Gary is one of the most distinguished and important people internationally in music education. He has been President of the International Society for Music Education. Before arriving in Melbourne in 2009, he worked at the UNSW and held professorships in Hong Kong and then the USA.
Gary has produced an amazing fifteen volumes for Oxford University Press, perhaps the most important book publisher in the world. The most recent of these is titled “The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance”. It has some 16 hundred pages, in two volumes (too many pages for one book), covering virtually every imaginable skill in performing music, including many that most of us have never conceived of.
Gary has agreed to join the Symphony for Life board. SFLF and the programs will greatly benefit from the wealth of experience and insight Gary brings to the program, and the design of research needed to tell us how well we teach and how well our students learn. We will have some questions to ask you, our students and their parents.
Dr Richard Letts AM, Deputy Chairperson, Symphony for Life Foundation and Chair of Program Committee