1. John Stanley Body was a New Zealand composer, ethnomusicologist, photographer, teacher, and arts producer.
28 Facts About Jack Body
1. 2.
Jack Body was born 7 October 1944 in Te Aroha, a town in the North Island farming district of the Waikato.
3.
Jack Body's first composing efforts as a child were re-composing his prescribed Royal Schools exercises and performing them at end-of-year piano recitals in the local church hall.
4.
Jack Body attended secondary school as a boarder at King's College, Auckland.
5.
At that time composition was not offered as a course of study at an undergraduate level; nevertheless, Jack Body composed prolifically during his undergraduate years.
6.
Jack Body completed his MMus, along with an additional teaching degree, in 1967.
7.
In 1967, while president of the New Zealand Chapter of ISCM, Jack Body organised a festival called Aucklanders and the Arts in the University of Auckland Student Union Building.
8.
On his return to New Zealand, Jack Body took up a teaching position at Tawa College in Wellington, but resigned after one year to focus on freelance composition projects.
9.
Jack Body travelled to Bali and Java for four months in 1974, after which the Akademi Musik Indonesia in Yogyakarta, invited him to return in 1976 as a guest lecturer.
10.
Jack Body remained on the composition faculty of Victoria University until his retirement in 2009.
11.
Jack Body lived out the rest of his life in Wellington, amidst countless travels overseas.
12.
Many of Jack Body's works are scored for both Western and non-Western instruments such as gamelan, sheng, and gangsa.
13.
Whenever possible, Jack Body used field recordings he himself had made, and used the original music in its entirety.
14.
Rather than marking the occasion with a celebration of televised communication, Jack Body intended for the work, which featured a video reel, to critique television's sanitization of global events, trauma, and suffering.
15.
Jack Body wrote the theme music for television drama The Longest Winter, New Zealand's first Maori language TV drama Uenuku, and New Zealand's first soap opera, Close to Home.
16.
Jack Body co-wrote with John Gibson the soundtrack to another Ward film, Rain of the Children.
17.
Jack Body was an active art photographer, though untrained, whose unconventional work was shown in several New Zealand galleries.
18.
In late 1974 Jack Body assisted ethnomusicologist Allan Thomas in bringing from Cirebon, West Java to New Zealand the country's first set of gamelan.
19.
Jack Body later managed the Victoria University Gamelan Padhang Moncar for many years, during which time he commissioned several new works for the gamelan orchestra.
20.
Also while on the composition faculty at Victoria University, Jack Body established a residency inviting musicians from regions in South-East Asia to work closely with the university's performers and composers.
21.
The year 2000 saw the 25th anniversary of Gamelan in New Zealand; to mark the occasion, Jack Body co-organised BEAT, an international gamelan festival with over 100 international participants.
22.
Jack Body was an advocate for New Zealand music and composers.
23.
In 1975, Jack Body released a three-LP set of New Zealand electroacoustic music, New Zealand Electronic Music, realised in the electronic music studios of Victoria University.
24.
In 1981, at Douglas Lilburn's behest, Jack Body re-activated the then-dormant Wai-te-ata Music Press, a publisher of New Zealand musical scores which Lilburn had founded.
25.
Jack Body was editor of Wai-te-ata Music Press from 1981 to 2013, during which time the press became the largest publisher of New Zealand music.
26.
Jack Body founded the Nelson Composers' Workshop in 1982, an ongoing annual gathering of young, emerging and established New Zealand composers where new works are performed and critiqued.
27.
Jack Body promoted New Zealand music in the international sphere, serving for many years on the executive committee of the Asian Composers' League.
28.
In 2011, Jack Body embarked on a project to commission new works from New Zealand and Chinese composers for the traditional Chinese instruments of the Forbidden City Orchestra, working jointly with the New Zealand String Quartet.