Allan Marett

Prior to his retirement in 2007, Emeritus Professor Allan Marett was Professor of Musicology at the University of Sydney and before that, Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong. He currently holds a fractional appointment as Professor of Ethnomusicology at Charles Darwin University and is Director of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia, an initiative that aims to record and document the highly endangered traditions of Australian Indigenous music and dance.

His book, Songs, Dreamings and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia won the 2006 Stanner Award and the CD Rak Badjalarr: Wangga Songs by Bobby Lane, Northern Australia which he co-authored with Linda Barwick and Lysbeth Ford, won a Northern Territory Indigenous music award. Together with Linda Barwick and others he has edited a number of anthologies of writing on Australian Indigenous Music and endangered cultures, including The Essence of Singing and the Substance of Song: Recent Responses to the Aboriginal Performing Arts and Other Essays in Honour of Catherine Ellis (1995), Researchers, Communities, Institutions, Sound Recordings (2003) and Studies in Aboriginal Song: A Special Issue of Australian Aboriginal Studies (2007). His current research focuses on the classical song traditions of Western Arnhem Land as well as the music and culture of the Daly Region, where he has worked for more than 20 years. Together with Linda Barwick and Lysbeth Ford he is completing a new book on wangga entitled Wangga Songs of Northwest Australia: Recordings, song-texts and translations in their historical and ethnographic contexts.

Marett is also active in the field of Sino-Japanese music history. Since the 1970s he has been a member of the Cambridge-based Tang Music project, which has produced the series Music from the Tang Court, now in its seventh volume. In 2008 he was appointed an Honorary Professor at the Shanghai Conservatorium of Music, where he periodically teaches graduate courses on Sino-Japanese music sources. Marett is a past president of the Musicological Society of Australia and past vice-president of the International Council for Traditional Music.