Composer, teacher, publisher

I write music with a keen appreciation of the needs of students and teachers, having taught piano, theory, voice and composition since the 1980s.

My small output includes works for full orchestra, string quartet, clarinet, piano, percussion quartet (for the Australian group Synergy), oboe, voice, harp, and brass. From 1979 to 1990 I studied composition with Roger Smalley and John Exton at the University of Western Australia.

The Jones family was living in the Perth suburb of Kewdale when I was born in 1961, the third of four children. In 1966 my father, the well-known and prolific writer John Joseph Jones, took the family to live on a bush property he had stumbled upon in the hills to the east of Perth, in the locality of Hovea. On that property and with the assistance of many diverse groups of volunteers he constructed the Parkerville Amphitheatre, which the family operated until his death in 2000.

My father was born in London but always described himself as Welsh. On my mother's side I'm a fifth generation Western Australian, descended from 1842 Australind settlers Jesse and Jane Gardiner. I've probably got over a thousand relatives living in WA to the south of Perth.

In 1989 I founded The Perth Discovery Choir (PDC) to give adults the opportunity to get involved in music, and conducted it for its first 5 years. In 2001 I founded and conducted another choir called Girls, Guys & Others: the GGO Quire, which had many intersex and transgender singers.

In 1994 I began Hovea Music Press, as a hobby with a friend. Over about twelve years we published musical scores by eight other Australian composers, including some of the leading names such as Nigel Butterley, Roger Smalley and John Peterson. HMP also published quality works by top Australian poets such as Jack Davis, Andrew Lansdown, Shane McCauley and my father, John Joseph Jones. Note: HMP is not currently operating.

In 1995 I was the Teacher-in-Charge of music at Swanbourne Senior High School.

For many years from the late 1990s I was heavily involved in volunteer community work, especially with advocacy and support groups for intersex, transgender and transsexual people such as TransWest: The Transgender Association of WA, and the International Foundation for Androgynous Studies (IFAS).

In 2004 a seven-minute pre-recorded profile of my life as an androgyne was shown on the ABC's George Negus Tonight (GNT) television programme. The broadcast featured me playing my own Androgyne Adagio piano solo which I composed at the age of 16.

I'm an Associate Composer with the Australian Music Centre and have produced several sets of educational piano music. A one-page work, The Greedy Row-Snake, sold thousands of copies when it was included in the AMEB's Series 12 exam books in 1990. This and other works have also been published by Currency Press, one of Australia's largest sheet music publishers.

In recent years I have reduced my private teaching load and now look forward to giving perhaps ten or fifteen lessons per week, rather than the 36 I used to give. If you would like to be one of those fifteen, please phone or email me--it's not competative, I've never auditioned students so it's just 'first come, first served.'

I live in Morley, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia.

Mix Margaret Jones

© Hovea Music Press 1996 & M D Jones 2010

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