Roger Dean (musician)


Roger Thornton Dean is a British-Australian musician, academic, biochemist and cognitive scientist.
He is married to poet, writer, musician and academic Hazel Anne Smith, and was educated in the UK at the Crypt School, Gloucester, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Formerly, he was the foundation Director of the Heart Research Institute, Sydney, and then the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra. From 2007 onwards he is a research professor of sonic communication at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University.

Music

Dean is a composer, improviser and performer. He studied the piano, and double bass with Eugene Cruft and was principal bass in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. As bassist, he performed solo at Wigmore Hall in London at age 15. Dean has worked with ensembles including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Berliner Band, London Sinfonietta, Music Projects/London, Spectrum and many other contemporary music ensembles in London prior his departure to Australia in 1988. In Australia, Dean has played with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Sydney Alpha Ensemble. He has premiered and recorded works for solo double bass and many have been written for him.
As keyboardist, Dean has been an accompanist for trumpeter John Wallace and violinist Hazel Smith, and performed around the world in Smith's ensemble Sonant. He has also accompanied and performed with Marion Montgomery and Sue Tomes and her former ensemble Domus. As jazz keyboards player, Dean worked with Graham Collier Music, a leading European jazz group.
In Australia, Dean has played keyboards with the Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Watt, and the British tenor Gerald English. He has been active within the What is Music? festivals, playing piano and computers. He has also played vibraphone with Collier, and recorded on the instrument on the album Lysis Plus.
Dean formed the British group LYSIS in 1970, and it became austraLYSIS in 1990 in Australia. LYSIS always presented both improvised and composed music, and operated within jazz and free improvisation as well as contemporary classical music circles. LYSIS and austraLYSIS have continuously evolved, including presenting multimedia and electronic work. Currently austraLYSIS is primarily a creative ensemble which also presents electroacoustic work of others.
Dean's music has been presented live and broadcast around the world. His largest commission to date, SonoPetal, was from the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He has also written for Peter Jenkin, Rob Nairn, Chaconne Brass, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, the Wallace Collection, and for the Kinetic Energy Theatre Company in Sydney. With Hazel Smith, he has created many text and sound works, including Poet without Language, Nuraghic Echoes, The Erotics of Gossip, and The Afterlives of Betsy Scott, all commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He has produced real-time and performative algorithmic works involving interaction between sound and image components.
Dean's work appears on more than 50 commercial recordings on labels such as Audio Research Editions, Discus, Mosaic Records, Soma Quality Recordings, Future Music Records ; Jade Music, Rufus and Tall Poppies Records ; and Crayon, Cuneiform Records, and Frog Peak Music. He has worked with many improvisers, including Derek Bailey, Ashley Brown, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, Barry Guy, the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, Ted Curson, Terje Rypdal, John Surman, Tomasz Stańko, and Ken Wheeler. Dean has also worked with contemporary composers such as Mauricio Kagel, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Dean has written and edited several musicological books about jazz, improvisation, and electroacoustic music, his most recent being Sounds from the Corner: Australian Jazz on CD ; and the Oxford Handbook of Computer Music.

Academia

Dean is also a research academic, previously mainly in biochemistry, and since 2007 solely in musicology and music cognition. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University in England and gained his PhD there in biochemistry. Dean has higher doctorates in biology and in music, a former fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Dean received an Australian Centenary Medal in 2003.
In biochemistry, he worked at University College London, at the Clinical Research Centre of the Medical Research Council, and at Brunel University, where he became a full professor in 1984. He then migrated to Australia to become the foundation director of the autonomous Heart Research Institute, in Sydney, and took Australian citizenship in 1992. From 2002 to 2007 Dean was the Vice–Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra, Australia, and in 2007 he returned to full-time research as Professor of Sonic Communication at the MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, studying music cognition and computational analysis and modelling of music, and computational creativity. He also has ongoing collaboration in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London.
Dean has more than 280 substantive publications in biochemistry, and more than 100 in music research. From 2005 to 2008 he was a member of the board of the Australian Music Centre. Dean has also been a member of several other boards, including the editorial boards of the Biochemical Journal, Clinical Science, Free Radical Biology and Medicine, Redox Report, Critical Studies in Improvisation, inflect and soundsRite.

Books on biological science

With Graham Collier
With LYSIS/austraLYSIS/the austraLYSIS Electroband
Music performed by others
Electroacoustic pieces
  • Silent Nuraghi on Assembly
  • Fissuring Silence on Network Vol 1
  • Dust on The Chris Mann Project
  • The Peace of Molonglo: A Place of Thunder on Unfenced
Multimedia
  • Wordstuffs commissioned by the Australian Film Commission
  • Walking the Faultlines on Cyberquilt
  • Numerous online and installation works including :
  • with Hazel Smith and Will Luers : Film of Sound, Hypnagogia, motions, novelling
  • with Keith Armstrong and collaborators : Finitude ; Long Time, No See ; Inter-State
As pianist in other contexts
  • Arc of Light by Ian Shanahan
  • In music by Robert Iolini on iolini
As bassist'