Dr O’Dwyer has just finished a paper titled: “The Fold: Musical Monads, and Baroque Assemblages” to be published later this year in Symbolism: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Critical Aesthetics, edited by Natasha Lushetich. The research is the culmination of his activities thus far surrounding “The Fold” - a collaborative composing project that has been staged in Singapore and Cologne involving musicians from disparate cultural and stylistic backgrounds. The Fold as a project is a musical manifestation of conceptual trajectories found in Deleuze’ book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Moreover, he is currently developing Deleuze’s concept of Psychic Geometry also found in the same book, for a chapter to be published by Routledge based around the theme of ‘embodiment’. This is an initiative by Dr Stephanie Burridge and involves various other members of staff from the Faculty of Performing Arts at LASALLE. He has recently been commissioned by Bloomsbury Publishing to compile a submission for their online Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, describing the history of Jazz in Singapore. Dr O’Dwyer is currently developing the preliminary work on an anthology dedicated to Walter Thompson’s soundpainting, a multidisciplinary sign language for live composition that has been practised throughout the world since the 1970s. His hopes for this book are to have chapters by the leading practitioners of the art-form reflect on their practice and the impact that soundpainting has had on their work and their communities. In addition, he continues to present papers at conferences, just recently at the conference by the Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Network titled: “Jazz Education in the Lion City: Building a Jazz programme in Singapore, a bridge too far?” He will also be delivering a keynote address at ARCADE the 3rd International Symposium on Art, Craft and Design 2019, presented by Silpakorn University in Thailand titled: “soundpainting: a pathway to enable interdisciplinary practice, creativity, and for building better societies”.
Cover image: The Fold, Koln Project. Courtesy of the Artist.