University of Otago

The ‘Dunedin Sound’ of the 1980s is a phenomenon known throughout the world. But what does Dunedin musicmaking sound like in the 21st century?

Dunedin Soundings features writing from musicians, composers and scholar/practitioners. They discuss genres as diverse as brass band, opera, classical, Indonesian gamelan, jazz, rock and more, the intricacies of the composition and lyricwriting processes, digital remixing, and scoring for film and TV.

Together, they reveal the ways in which these supposedly separate music fields have the potential to inform and stimulate each other.

POETRY FINALIST

The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap
Michael Harlow
Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869404307
RRP $24.99

Poetry, Harlow writes, is when words sing. In his remarkable new collection words do sing; they also shout and whisper, riddle and recur, express and evade. The book begins with a springtime shout of green, ends with an invisible reader, and along the way wanders ‘all about the world’. And at the centre is a tram conductor, ‘inside a story that dreams / him’.