Meet the ComposHER: Jodie Blackshaw

Jodie Blackshaw is an Australian composer and advocates for diversity. She started her connections with music by learning the clarinet in the school band when she was young and, from that on, she became an educator and a musician.

She is an extremely dedicated teacher and in her profession "my ultimate goal was to foster self-esteem and love of self through music".

Learn more about her and her awesome work in the Meet the ComposHer of this week!

At the age of 15 I knew I wanted to make music my life, but it wasn’t until I was 18 that I decided to pursue composition. I was recently in the house where I grew up, and discovered so many little sketches on manuscript paper – they were throughout all of my old school books. I had forgotten how much I was always musical scribbling ideas down, so perhaps I had always been a composer, just didn’t realise it until a little later.

Larry Sitsky. Larry was my undergraduate composition teacher and he teaches composition from a very romantic perspective. Larry never once asked me to “write in the style of”, instead, he was able to draw out my own compositional voice through a series of personal, musical explorations. I will be forever grateful for his approach.

I have found myself to be a female, Australian wind band composer. THIS is my greatest challenge. I am alienated in my own country for writing for wind band, and I am often alienated in wind band circles because of my gender and my nationality. I also offer a unique voice to the wind band genre and don’t follow all of the “expected” orchestration “rules”. I also stem from a different pedagogical works approach when writing works for children, which is not the mainstream. In many ways, every aspect of my composing life is a challenge, but what do we live for?

I am a ‘colour-first’ composer. That is, I conceive music in clouds of tone colour before anything else. To unearth these colours and transform them into musical ideas, I create drawings and mind-maps. From here, these are transformed into harmonies and melodic fragments.