Professor Allan Marett (Department of Music)

Professor Allan Marett is a leading scholar in the field of Australian Aboriginal music and Japanese music, and the author of a forthcoming book on the subject: Wangga: The Enactment of Ancestral Precedent in Australian Aboriginal Song and Dance, based on fieldwork undertaken from 1986 to 2001.

More recently Professor Marett has become involved in the digital preservation of endangered music, working with local community members to establish and maintain sound archives in two Aboriginal communities, Belyuen and Wadeye. In collaboration with the Yothu Yindi Foundation, he is currently developing a National Recording Project for Indigenous Music, which aims to preserve the music both for local communities and as part of the national heritage. Since 2002, he has collaborated with senior Aboriginal intellectuals, Mandawuy Yunupingu and Marcia Langton, in convening the annual Garma Symposium on Indigenous Performance, which has focused on issues relating to the recording and preservation of Indigenous music.

Professor Marett is a founding member of the cross-university consortium that in 2003 established the ARC-funded PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) digitisation and archiving facility at Sydney University. He is currently the National Representative for Australia in the International Council for Traditional Music and is a past President of the Musicological Society of Australia.

Professor Marett's other major impact has been as a scholar in the field of Sino-Japanese music history, examining the survival of Japanese traditions to the present day. For several decades Professor Marett was a member of the Cambridge-based Tang Music project which has published the series, Music from the Tang Court (now in its seventh volume). This work has revolutionised the study of both Japanese and Chinese musical history, and overturned the notion that Japanese court music, gagaku, represents an unchanged legacy from Tang-period (618-907) China. There is now growing acceptance in both China and Japan that gagaku represents a tradition that was by and large reinvented in the nineteenth century.