John McCaughey is a conductor and composer in Melbourne. He studied German and musicology at the University of Melbourne and composition with Wolfgang Hufschmidt and organ with Gerd Zacher at the Folkwang-Hochschule Essen. Since 1978 he has been musical director of the Astra Chamber Music Society in Melbourne, at times together with other conductors; its concerts centre on the Astra Choir, whose programmes combine choral music with instruments, theatre, dance, film, performance and electroacoustic media, and Astra commissions new Australian works. He taught for many years in the former Department of Music at La Trobe University and at the University of Melbourne, the Victorian College of the Arts and the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen. In 2000 he received the Australian Music Centre’s National and Victorian Awards for Outstanding Contribution to Australian Music. On the Cybele album ex machina Vol. 4 – The Seventies (2001) he is represented with “Manche Lucias und Desdemonas …” (1974/75), created in the studio of the Folkwang-Hochschule on quarter-inch tape, mostly from recordings of workshops, seminars and a lecture by the singer Carla Henius during her guest professorship; the material was cut and partly transformed with a VCS-3 synthesizer. The theatre version written for it, with a live solo part for Carla Henius, was never staged.
John McCaughey
Composer / Conductor
