Roger Thornton Dean is a British-Australian musician, academic, biochemist and cognitive scientist.
He is married to poet, writer, musician and academic Hazel Anne Smith.

Music

Dean is a composer, improviser (piano, computers) and performer. He studied the piano, and double bass with Eugene Cruft and was Principal Bass in the National Youth Orchestra (UK). As bassist, he performed solo at the Wigmore Hall at the age of 15. He has worked with ensembles including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Berliner Band, London Sinfonietta, Music Projects/London, Spectrum and many other contemporary music ensembles in London prior his departure to Australia in 1988; and in Australia with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Sydney Alpha Ensemble. He has premiered and recorded works for solo double bass and many have been written for him.

As keyboardist he has been accompanist for the trumpeter John Wallace and the violinist Hazel Smith, and performed around the world in her ensemble Sonant. He has also accompanied and performed with many others from Marian Montgomery (vocalist) to Sue Tomes (piano) and her former ensemble Domus. As jazz keyboards player he has worked since 1974 with Graham Collier Music, a leading European jazz group. In Australia he has played keyboards with the Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Watt, and the tenor Gerald English. He has been active within the What is Music? festivals, playing piano and computers. He has also played vibraphone with Collier, and recorded on the instrument on the album Lysis Plus.

He formed the British group LYSIS in 1970, and it became austraLYSIS in 1990 in Australia. LYSIS always presented both improvised and composed music, and operated within jazz and free improvisation as well as contemporary classical music circles. LYSIS and austraLYSIS have continuously evolved, including presenting multimedia and electronic work. Currently austraLYSIS is primarily a creative ensemble which also presents electroacoustic work of others.

Dean’s music has been presented live and broadcast around the world. His largest commission to date, SonoPetal, was from the Australian Chamber Orchestra. He has also written for Peter Jenkin, Rob Nairn, Chaconne Brass, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, the Wallace Collection, and for Kinetic Energy Theatre Company. With Hazel Smith, he has created many text and sound works, including Poet without Language, Nuraghic Echoes, The Erotics of Gossip, and The Afterlives of Betsy Scott, all commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His scores are available through the Australian Music Centre, RedHouse Editions, La Trobe University Press, and in several books. Some work is for CD–rom, (e.g. Walking the Faultlines, released by the International Computer Music Association (2001), and for the web (e.g. Wordstuffs, Intertwingling, and Prosethetic Memories). He has produced real-time and performative algorithmic works involving interaction between sound and image components (soundAFFECTS, Time The Magician and many other works).

Dean’s work appears on more than 50 commercial recordings on labels such as Audio Research Editions, Discus, Mosaic, Soma, Future Music Records (FMR) (UK); Jade, Rufus and Tall Poppies (Australia); and Crayon, Cuneiform, and Frog Peak (US). He has worked with many improvisers, including Derek Bailey, Ashley Brown, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, Barry Guy, the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, Ted Curson, Terje Rypdal, John Surman, Tomas Stanko, Ken Wheeler, and in association with many contemporary composers such as Kagel, Penderecki and Stockhausen.

Dean has written and edited several musicological books about jazz, improvisation, and electroacoustic music, his most recent being Sounds from the Corner: Australian Jazz on CD (Australian Music Centre, 2005); and the Oxford Handbook of Computer Music (Oxford University Press, 2009; Editor).

Academia

Dean is also a research academic, previously mainly in biochemistry, and since 2007 solely in musicology and music cognition. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge (BA, 1970) and gained his PhD there in biochemistry (1973). He has higher doctorates in biology (DSc 1984) and in music (DLitt 2002) from Brunel University, UK. He is a former Fellow of the Institute of Biology (UK; resigned 2006), a fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (FAICD), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (FAHA). He received an Australian Centenary Medal in 2003.

In biochemistry, he worked at University College London, at the Clinical Research Centre of the Medical Research Council UK, and at Brunel, where he became a full professor in 1984. He then migrated to Australia to become the foundation director of the autonomous Heart Research Institute, Sydney (1988–2002), and took Australian citizenship (1992). From 2002-2007 he was the Vice–Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra, Australia, and in 2007 he returned to full time research as Professor of Sonic Communication at the MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney

University of Western Sydney

The University of Western Sydney, also known as UWS, is a multi-campus university in the Greater Western region of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia...

, studying music cognition and computational analysis and modelling of music.

Dean has more than 280 substantive publications in biochemistry, and around 100 in music research. From 2005-2008 he was a member of the board of the Australian Music Centre (and the Chair from 2007-8). He has also been a member of several other boards including the editorial boards of the Biochemical Journal, Clinical Science, Free Radical Biology and Medicine, Redox Report, Critical Studies in Improvisation, inflect and soundsRite.

Another version of his biography :de:Roger T. Dean is on the German language part of Wikipedia.

Books on Biological Science

• Dean, R.T. (1977) Lysosomes, Institute of Biology Series, Edward Arnold, London (pp. 90).
• Dean, R.T. (1978) Cellular Degradative Processes, Chapman & Hall, London (pp. 120).
• Davies, M., and Dean, R.T. (1997) Radical mediated protein oxidation: from chemistry to medicine, Oxford University Press (pp. 443).
• Dingle, J.T., and Dean, R.T. eds. (1975) Lysosomes in Biology and Pathology, Vol.4, Elsevier, Amsterdam (pp. 614).
• Dingle, J.T., and Dean, R.T. eds. (1976) Lysosomes in Biology and Pathology, Vol.5, Elsevier, Amsterdam (pp. 404).
• Dingle, J.T., Dean, R.T., and Sly, W. eds. (1984) Lysosomes in Biology and Pathology, Vol.7, Elsevier, Amsterdam (pp. 479).
• Dean, R.T., and Jessup, W. eds. (1985) Mononuclear Phagocytes: Physiology and Pathology, Elsevier, Amsterdam (pp. 426).
• Dean, R.T., and Stahl, P.D. eds. (1985) Developments in Cell Biology: Secretory Processes, Butterworths, London (pp. 234).
• Dean, R.T., and Kelly, D.T. eds. (2000) Atherosclerosis: Gene expression, cell interactions and oxidation, Oxford University Press, Oxford (pp. 450).

Books on Music

• R.T. Dean (1989) Creative Improvisation : Jazz, Contemporary Music and Beyond. Open University Press, UK/US (pp. 136).
• R.T. Dean (1991) New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music since 1960, Open University Press, UK/US (pp. 230)
• H.A. Smith and R.T. Dean (1997) Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts since 1945, Harwood Academic (pp. 334).
• R.T. Dean (2003) Hyperimprovisation : Computer Interactive Sound Improvisation, A-R Editions, Madison, WI , US (pp. 203).
• R.T. Dean (2005) Sounds from the Corner: Australian Contemporary Jazz on CD since 1973, Australian Music Centre, Sydney (pp. 193).
• H. Smith and R.T. Dean (eds) (2009) Practice–led Research: Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh University Press (pp. 278)
• R.T. Dean (ed) (2009) The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music. Oxford University Press (pp. 595).

With Graham Collier

• Midnight Blue (1975)
• New Conditions (1976)
• Symphony of Scorpions (1977)
• The Day of the Dead (1978)
• Something British (1985)
• The Third Colour (1998)
• Live at Middleheim, with Workpoints (2005)
• Hoarded Dreams (2007)
• Directing 14 Jackson Pollocks (2009)

With LYSIS/austraLYSIS/the austraLYSIS Electroband

• Lysis Live (1976)
• Cycles (1977)
• The Solo Trumpet 1966-1976 (1978)
• Dualyses (1978)
• Lysis Plus (1979)
• Superimpositions (1980)
• The Wings of the Whale (1987)
• Moving the Landscapes (1992)
• Windows in Time (1994)
• Poet Without Language (written with Hazel Smith) (1994)
• The Debris of All Certainties on Arc of Light (1994)
• The Next Room (1995)
• Nuraghic Echoes (written with Hazel Smith) (1996)
• Present Tense (1997)
• Lysis Lives: Resounding in the Mirror (2000)
• The Sinking of Rainbow Warrior, with the Song Company (2000)
• Acouslytic (2001)
• Sonic Stones (2006)
• Ubasuteyama on Music of the Spirit (2008)

Dean’s Music Performed by Others

• It gets complicated on Australian Piano Miniatures (1994)
• Blues Multiple on A Day in the Life of the Clarinet (1996)
• Flying on We are not Alone (2001)

Electroacoustic (prerecorded) pieces

• Silent Nuraghi on Assembly (1995)
• Fissuring Silence on Network Vol 1 (1995)
• Dust on The Chris Mann Project (1996)
• The Peace of Molonglo: A Place of Thunder on Unfenced (2008)

As pianist in other contexts

• Arc of Light by Ian Shanahan (Jade CD, 2001)
• In music by Robert Iolini on iolini (2001)

As bassist

• See several recordings by LYSIS/austraLYSIS
• Milhaud String Quintet, Dreams of Jacob with Sonant (KNEW CD 1987)
• Xenakis Epei with Spectrum (Wergo 1991)

External links

• Roger Dean’s own music website at austraLYSIS, includes links to many open access works for listening/viewing http://www.australysis.com
• Biography and materials at the Australian Music Centre
• Faculty pages at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney http://marcs.uws.edu.au/?q=people/professor-roger-dean