“I didn’t plan to take up an academic career. My only plan was to work on things I was passionate about,” says Professor Sally-Jane Norman, newly appointed Director of Victoria University of Wellington’s New Zealand School of Music (Te Kōkī).

After completing a Masters Degree in French at Canterbury University, Sally-Jane left New Zealand in the seventies to study at the Université de Paris III, gaining a Doctorat de 3e cycle (PhD) and Doctorat d'État. Since then she has accumulated an impressive list of career achievements. Sally-Jane is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts, Beijing, and the Peking University National Centre for Research into Intercultural Communication of Arts. She has served as artistic co-director of the Studio for Electronic Music (Amsterdam), is a European Sound Studies Association member, European Research Council expert, and sits on academic advisory boards in Korea, Australia, Canada, and several European countries.

In the United Kingdom, Sally-Jane was the Director of Newcastle University's award-winning interdisciplinary Culture Lab. As Professor of Performance Technologies at the University of Sussex, she founded the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, endowing the campus with cutting edge, inter-disciplinary performance facilities. Sally Jane contributed to the creation of a Master of Arts in Music and Sonic Media at the University of Sussex and has led Digital Performance research at Sussex Humanities Lab, where she is a founding Co-Director. She has been an external examiner and guest lecturer in music and performance programmes throughout Europe and North America.

Sally-Jane said her career journey “by no means mapped out a standard academic career.” Founding a research lab, and setting up a creative arts centre, Sally-Jane was heavily involved in project management and lobbying for funds. These projects she says “were missions most academics would not or could not take on, because they demand different kinds of engagement with professional sectors and communities beyond the institutions. If I’d had a clear plan and an orthodox trajectory, my most rewarding activities probably would never have happened!”

Based in Europe for several decades, Sally-Jane has remained connected to New Zealand’s creative sector, and said she has repeatedly come across New Zealand artists and performers while abroad. “New Zealand voices are astonishingly, if sometimes discreetly, present in the international creative sector…New Zealand artists are respected for distinctive work anchored in a wealth of contrasting traditions and practices. It’s exhilarating to go to a sold-out Lemi Ponifasio performance in Edinburgh or Paris, and hear the audience marvel at sound that draws on Hirini Melbourne’s and Richard Nunn’s Taonga Puoro research. Or to run into a renowned UK film composer who recently worked alongside Victoria alumna Louisa Nicklin at an international Shanghai Conservatory workshop. There is lots of evidence of the New Zealand creative sector overseas, because it’s active and highly reputed.”

Returning home after all of these years, Sally-Jane said she feels excited about the opportunity of leveraging her international networks and experience to contribute to New Zealand cultural and research activities. “The New Zealand School of Music is Te Kōkī, the dawn chorus, and is acquiring new resonance in our thriving cultural capital. As part of our development, I look forward to helping amplify this richly diversified chorus.”

“I'm delighted that Rob Thorne, anthropologist and composer whose Taonga Puoro skills link Maori conventions and modern experimentation, is Te Kōkī's musician in residence this year. Also that Wellington will host the prestigious International Viola Congress in September, and that in December NZSM will "mix pop and politics" with Massey at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference. NZSM is key to Victoria University's creative strategy, and events like these testify to its potential to develop distinctive musicalities of Aotearoa and the Asia Pacific region, while building on its strong European heritage.”

Growing up in Titahi Bay, Sally-Jane said music was always an important part of her family life. She recalls sing alongs around the piano as a regular activity, and climbing to the top of Whitireia with her brother Alan to hold up harmonicas for the wind to play. “These days one might say we were engaging in acoustic ecology but we were just enjoying ourselves and the sounds.” She recalled a treasured memory of gathering around the record player to listen to a recording of Smoke gets in your eyes, made by her father, who was on a scholarship in America for six months. “It was a special moment, hearing my father play the piano for my mother from across the Pacific, through this strange, fragile black object and apparatus.”

When asked about her preferred musical genres, Sally-Jane responded, “All types. That sounds like too easy an answer, but it's true. I follow contemporary music and sound art developments, and at the same time find the emergence of polyphony, and the challenging of established tonal constructs, artistically and historically fascinating. Beyond West European traditions, I'm interested in practices that engage differently with rhythm, pitch, and timbre. Resources now available online convey radically different approaches that are enriching today's music cultures. Something Jack Body tapped into very early, with his insistence on double transcription - making "exotic" sources playable for Western musicians. Such sources are a vital counterweight to savagely homogenising globalisation. I particularly enjoy listening to music by students, who can be insightful guides to the sounds of today and tomorrow.”

Reflecting on her career to date, Sally-Jane said she is most proud of persevering, often in trying circumstances, in pushing for artistic expression in society. “Its irreplaceable cultural importance, and its longstanding, sometimes problematic links to technologies, need to be defended. Critical energies of the arts can cut through the traps of glib multicultural or cultural industries rhetoric. I often feel like a privileged witness of people working within or beyond institutions who decide to tackle and communicate as art, the ideas they consider most urgently meaningful.”

For others considering a similar career path, she warns not look for ‘similar careers.’ “There's no such thing, we're all different. Follow your passions and your convictions. You'll always end up compromising to some degree, so never make compromise a starting point.”

Sally-Jane beings her new position at the School of Music on July 3.