- VALE Clive Moorhead
- 12 January 2019
- R.I.P.
- The world has lost an awesome musical talent.
- Hear some of Clive's performances:
- "Exactly like you"
EXPERIENCELecturer in Film and Television CompositionUniversity of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
. Arranging popular music - harmony, orchestration and composition
. Computer arranging skills - MIDI scoring . Music In Film And Television - history of various composer’s approaches in the development of genres . Skills in composing original music cues and main title scores - arrangement and orchestration . Documentary production and approaches. Professional Touring MusicianSelf Employed
Performed with many Australian and international professional artists in a wide variety of musical genres including:
Queensland Symphony Orchestra, James and John Morrison, Ashley Lewis, Kaye Payne, Marcia Hines, Bev Harrell, Johnny Nicole, Don Burrows, Johnny Young and the Young Talent Team, George Golla, Plas Johnson, Mundell Lowe, Bob Barnard, Darryl Sommers, Wilbur Wilde, Simon Gallaher, Ted Vining, Mileham Hayes, Ritchie Cole, Red Hollaway, Andy Stewart, Wickety Wak, Doug Parkinson, Peta Lowe, Gerhardt Mallon, Ricky May, Dave Colton, Ed Gaston, Gil Asky, Emily Remler, Juanda, Sue Cruickshank, Wiley Reed and many others.
Some of the Concerts Clive performed in include:
. Premier’s Gala Concert (QPAC) with Q.S.O.
. University Of Queensland, School Of Music
. Queensland Conservatorium Of Music
. Sir Michael Tippet Festival
. Expo ’88 French Concert with The Queensland Theatre Orchestra
. Tour of Thursday Island for a cultural exchange music concert tour
. Queensland Theatre Organ Society
. Gold Coast Theatre Organ Society
. Gold Coast Jazz Festivals
. Dingo Creek Jazz Festival
. Sunshine Coast Jazz Action Society
. Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork, Ireland
Work Clive performed for the Queensland Film Commission:
. Six documentaries and short films - composed, arranged and produced original scores using computer music technology
. Composition and creation of original music scores for David Avery, producer of children’s stories and CDs.
. Regular solo piano performances (six nights per week) at Michael’s Restaurant, Riverside Centre, Brisbane. Repertoire of over 5,000 pieces from Broadway shows, stage musicals, classical music compositions and popular tunes.
Lecturer in Music Arranging and performanceSouth Brisbane Institute of TAFE
. Lectured in harmony and arranging popular music
. Organized student bands and solo artist performances . Arranged performers to produce MTV/media clips . Multiskilling for employment alternatives . Ear training . Computer music skills . Recording and production skills Director Of MusicRedlands Community College
. Delivered B.S.S.S. secondary music curriculum
. Taught music technology to enable students to arrange their own compositions and songs . Organized student musicians and songs to correlate with the film and television department to produce film clips. Director Of Jazz Studies CourseQueensland Conservatorium Of Music
. Initially invited to commence this course after study and experience in U.S.A.
. Lectured in arranging, orchestration, harmony and writing skills, piano performance skills as well as improvisation in all areas. . Was directly responsible for organizing course delivery, auditions and evaluation. . Organized many regular guest musicians from U.S.A. to compliment the educational benefits of the course to students. . Successfully directed the Conservatorium Big Band at outside professional engagements as well as in conservatorium concerts. . Organized many smaller ensembles throughout the course in outside engagements and for performances at concerts. . Introduced organ as a serious study performance instrument. . Increased dramatically the depth and variety of jazz and big band scores and study material to the Conservatorium Library. . Integrated the jazz studies program with tutors/students in all areas of study. Director Of MusicIpswich Grammar School
. Taught B.S.S.S. classroom music curriculum through years 8 - 12.
. Directed/conducted the Concert Band, Jazz Big Band and school choirs. . Inaugurated new String Ensemble. . Introduced organ as a serious study instrument. . Composed and produced original school musical - Visions. . Included girls from I.G.G.S. into various school ensembles and the school stage musical. . Provided accompaniment for several students at numerous music festivals and Eisteddfods. . Included students at professional music performances. . Provided music for various cultural occasions at the school. . Prepared and staged regular student concerts at the school. EDUCATIONThe Dick Grove School Of Music, Inc.Diploma of Contemporary Composing and Arranging Program, Composing and Arranging Program
Review and standardization of music notation terms, review of modern harmony prerequisites, study of chord families, rhythmic notation, jazz phrasing and syncopation.
Melodic phrasing for horns, writing bass parts, chord substitution and fixing lead sheets/sheet music, writing drum parts, orchestration and transposition of trumpets, alto saxophones, composition of motifs, creating introductions and endings, orchestration of guitar and piano, music preparation, melodic development of motifs, two-part writing, orchestration and transposition of tenor saxophone, shape concept of voicings and application to arranging. Three-part writing, orchestration of the tenor trombone, four part writing, orchestration of the saxophone section, saxophone voicings, melodic substitution, passing chords, voice leading, melodic embellishments, introduction of 5-part voicings. More 5-part voicings applied to the saxophone section, brass section, trombone soli and ensemble voicings, blues harmonization and application. Queensland Conservatorium of Music/Queensland University of TechnologyBachelor of Arts In Music, Music Education
• Core courses in music performance, musicianship and musicology.
• Coordination of specialist music streams from Music Creative Practice, Music Inquiry, Sonic Arts and Music Pedagogy. • Extensive training in ensemble skills and professional practices. • Major sequences in Education including core courses, electives and placements. Australian Music Examinations BoardDiploma in Pianoforte, Classical Piano
Highest level of training in professional Piano performance covering all the major periods of music.
Delivered by Paul Byrne at Clive's funeral service 23 January 2019
1. Clive
was born in Rockhampton on 11 May 1955.
2. His
father, Robert and mother, Pearl, had two sons – Alan and Clive – Clive being
the younger.
3. Clive
did his primary schooling at Frenchville State School and secondary schooling
at North Rockhampton State High School.
4. He
learnt music from a talented local piano player & teacher – Tody Lennon - who not only taught piano but taught his
students to understand the music.
5. Just
as with the nuns - who were the opposition - teaching the Catholic kids down
the road in those days, with Tody, it would not be unusual to cop a slap across
the wrists or a whack on the back for playing a wrong note.
6. However,
Tody released upon Australia a veritable small army of highly accomplished
pianists who went on to do some wonderful things across the entire country.
But, by the time Clive was 20, no-one ever challenged the undeniable truth that
the stand out of them all was Clive.
7. Clive
& Alan inherited musical ability from their mother & grandmother - both
of whom were pianists.
8. I
first met Clive a couple of weeks after I had turned 15. Though he was to work
for a number of the music suppliers in Clive was working for Thomas Organs at
the Northside Plaza.
9. Thomas
Organs was pushing a new line of organ where, not only did the note names light
up when you pressed the keys, but each of the twelve notes lit up with a
different colour. To this day I still
can’t for the life of me work out what on earth Thomas Organs was trying
to do with that light system; however I digress.
10.The
amusing part of the story was watching Clive deal with customers. People of all
shapes and sizes and backgrounds would come in – town folk and country folk
alike - wanting to see for themselves one of these newfangled electric organ thingamajigs.
Well, it didn’t matter what the customer was interested in hearing – be it Lara’s Theme from Dr Zhivago or Summer
Samba in the style of Walter Wanderley or The Pub with No Beer or something from the Al Jolson Song Book. (A
bit later, I will tell you how he was able to do that.)
11.Clive
made those organs talk and in the space of about 10 minutes flat he converted
them from a top end luxury item to a
household essential where the customer would refuse to leave the store without
a signed contract promising delivery that week. It is true though, that the
vast majority of those customers were never,
ever, again going to hear their organ sound the way it did in the store
when Clive was demonstrating it.
12.There
was only one way to sound like Clive. First you needed to be born with a
prodigious talent and secondly, you needed to have both the discipline and
intellect to put in tens of thousands of hours perfecting the art.
13.Clive
worked for Palings Music in Rockhampton and for Greens Brothers Music in both
Rockhampton & Townsville.
14.
Palings and Green Brothers along
with a store owned and operated by Joey Delanlande’s father were epicentres of
musical meetings and exchange, servicing a town with far more than its fair
share of talented musicians – from whose
number I hastily exclude myself.
15.In
his early years Clive was an accomplished alto saxophonist and played at
literally hundreds of country dances with his brother, Alan, in Alan’s old time
band consisting of Piano, Sax and Drums. Old time was still very popular with
the demographic of the day back then and even when the band transitioned to
being pop band as well, with Clive playing organ and Alan’s wife, Jenny, singing,
the ratio of old time to pop music was still, more often than not, 60/40 in
favour of old time.
16.Now why would I burden the
listener here with such a pedestrian statistic?
Well, the answer is this: Clive’s seemingly limitless repertoire was not
limitless by accident. Whereas he was playing all the current pop songs of the
day he was also was thoroughly versed in the standards and evergreens – dating
back to the 1920s, 30s and 40s - from his many years of playing those songs
with Alan’s Old Time Band. He had all of that background along with his
encylopeadic jazz repertoire, born of his life-long love affair with jazz
music.
17.And
so you see it was no accident that when those customers at the organ store I
mentioned a moment ago, requested any tune; Clive could play it for them.
18.Further,
he not only had that comprehensive repertoire down pat; but it was down
photographically. Though a competent reader of music, it was the exception, not
the rule, to see Clive reading music to aide his brilliant execution of any
piece he was playing.
19.Alan
& Jenny used to have parties at their house with live music being the order
of the day and Clive would always be the star when he was around. He never said
“no” to a request and he never said “no” to the variety of home cooked food prepared
by Jenny. Some canny invitees to those parties observed this exchange and
worked out quickly that you could get Clive to play piano or organ at a home
party for a very competitive price indeed if there was buffet dinner thrown in.
And further, by inviting a few extra musos one would often see the soiree turn
into a masterclass of superb musical performance that one might expect to hear
at a posh hotel, pool party in Miami Florida or somewhere like that.
20.I
was lucky enough to have been invited into Alan and Clive’s band at the end of
1973 and to play with them for a little over two years. And whereas I learnt so
much from them, I am truly, deeply sorry I had to put Alan and Jenny and Clive
through so much musical pain while I was acquiring that knowledge and gaining
that experience. I was well out of my depth in the drummer’s chair in that
group and that fact only compounds my gratitude to my three fellow long-suffering
band members of yesteryear.
21.In
late 1976 Clive had set his sights on applying to study at the Queensland
Conservatorium of Music. Also, at that time he was about to sit an AMEB exam in
one of the higher grades. The actual grade eludes me however, one had to sit
for it in front of a panel at the Conservatorium in Brisbane.
22.And
so Clive came down to Brisbane for a couple of days and stayed with my family, by
then, living in Brisbane. On the day of the exam he did several hours practice.
My mother, who herself had been offered a scholarship to the Conservatorium in
her heyday, took me aside to say that she was concerned that Clive was making
more than an acceptable amount of mistakes during the practice session and that
he might be sitting the exam prematurely. I quietly assured my mother that
Clive was as smart as a whip and that he was not sitting at the piano simply to
go over the parts that he already knew backwards. Rather, he was ironing out
the creases in the 3% of the examination repertoire that would have challenged even
the most accomplished of pianists.
23.When
Clive returned from the exam, of course I enquired as to how it all went. He
had a grin from ear to ear reporting that all went very well. He said that when
receiving praises from the examiners, he enquired as to the protocols and requirements
for undertaking the Bachelor of Arts degree in music on which he had his heart
set. He received a reply from one of the examiners that one has to audition for
a position, and that his performance during the examination had been his
audition, and that the audition had been successful. (I’m still not quite sure as to whether the greater part of Clive’s joy
was born of the successful performance that day; or whether it was born of the
fact that he had managed to wiggle his way out of a hell of a lot of
application paperwork – the latter of which was definitely not one of Clive’s stronger points. More about that
in a moment.)
24.Clive
moved to Brisbane where he undertook that degree from 1977 to 1980 inclusive.
25.Fortuitously,
the house next to our family home in Brisbane came up for rent in the weeks
before Clive moved to Brisbane and so with Clive renting that place, it
represented something of a convenience and a comfort for him where he was close
to my family – to whom he was so well known by then – while he was starting out
in a new town.
26.As
fate would have it, a few days after Clive arrived in Brisbane, I went back to
Rockhampton for three years to do an Arts degree. A big reason for my looking
forward to coming back home to Brisbane for holidays now and then was to catch
up with Clive and hear him play.
27.At
the Conservatorium course, Clive’s instruments were piano and saxophone.
28.He
was required though to study a 3rd instrument & he selected
singing as this option. Alan & Jenny
always found this most amusing as Clive’s talent was always with the keyboard
& not singing. They thought that when he sang he sounded like a distressed
farm animal.
29.All
the while, between 1975 and 1980, Clive completed his Diploma In Pianoforte,
Classical Piano with AMEB. That is, while studying his degree he was also
doing all the AMEB exams.
30.After
graduating from the Con, Clive secured a teaching position at Ipswich Grammar
School. And despite whatever you may have
heard about this achievement, Clive is to be given only minimal credit; if any.
I’ll tell you why: I was back in Brisbane by this stage and through some stroke
of luck I secured a teaching job at Ipswich Grammar School.
31.Clive, still the family next
door neighbour, seemed impressed I had landed a job in a market where there was
a serious oversupply of teachers that year. I told Clive that there was also a job
advertised at that school for a Music Master position and that he should apply
for it. Heaven forbid that Clive should
ever buy a newspaper and read the positions vacant section himself!
32.At that time Clive was working
between 7 and 8 times a week and had not (and
indeed never did) take any courses in time management. And, as I’ve already
mentioned, paperwork was never his forte.
Mindful that Clive was never going to make the time to prepare that job application,
I applied on Clive’s behalf for the Music Master position at Ipswich Grammar.
The only thing Clive did for that exercise was to sign the covering letter.
33.Clive got that job.
34.And
so we both worked at the same school for a year.
35.It
did take a physical toll on him working full time as a Music Master at a
Grammar School and then several nights a week at some of the best music playing
venues in Brisbane at the time.
36.After
a couple of years Clive left Ipswich Grammar School to head to ground zero for popular music – The
United States of America – to undertake further music studies.
37.In
1982 and 1983 he studied Arranging and Composing at the Dick Grove School of
Music, in Los Angeles, where he graduated with a Diploma of Contemporary Composing & Arranging.
38.While
in LA, Clive was invited to many people’s homes to play their monstrous “Theatre
Organs” as a lot of these people could not play the theatre organ
themselves. As if having piano, organ, saxophone and voice – no hang on;
I’ll cross out that bit about voice – Clive had become a masterful exponent of
theatre organs. To do so, one had to be a skilled player, a technically savvy
person with rocket fast reflexes and a masterful performer in that showy world
of theatre organ performance - something in which Clive first became interested
and involved about 1977. At the time,
theatre organ, quite simply, was the closest one musician alone could get to
sounding like a full orchestra; and Clive was a natural at it.
39.Now having already mentioned
that Clive was invited to many people’s homes to play their “theatre organ”
because most of them could not play the theatre organ themselves, I think it is
fitting at this point in the proceedings to give a moment’s reflection upon
those folk in Rockhampton who still have their Thomas Organs where the notes
lit up with different colours. A lot of those people still could not play
their organs either.
40.In
1984 Clive returned to Brisbane and secured a position at the Queensland
Conservatorium of Music as the Director of the Jazz Studies Course. He held
that position for 6 years and so many musicians owe their skill base and
professional standing to Clive from these years.
41.In
1991 he was employed as the Director of Music at Redlands Community College.
42.From
1992 to 1994 he was the lecturer In Music Arranging &
Performance at South Brisbane TAFE.
43.From
1984 to 2009 he performed with many Australian and overseas artists in a wide
variety of music genres and settings. Two of our leading lights with whom he
worked were James Morrison and Don Burrows.
44.On
the first such occasion, Don Burrows was playing with a bass player, a drummer and
a guitarist at a venue which escapes me. A person trusted by Mr Burrows
recommended that they get Clive up to play two or three pieces with them. Don
Burrows, always interested in prodigious, new, jazz talent obliged and they
took the dust cover off the old piano for Clive. Keeping it simple, there were
to be three standards played, one in C, one in F and one in G – the three
easiest keys for piano.
45.At
the end of the performance Don Burrows was clearly overwhelmed by the artistry
and ability he had heard from Clive during that set; and he made that fact
known to one and all. The audience loved it too. What they didn’t know was
this: That poor old, unloved, piano had succumbed to the Queensland climate - as
the vast majority of pianos do - and it had dropped a semitone across the
entire keyboard. And so instead of the pieces being in C, F and G, Clive had to
play them in C#, F# and G#. From a pianist’s point of view that is going from the
easiest keys to the most difficult keys in one fell swoop. I
have tried to think of an analogy for the non-musicians here today: It would be
like your tour guide suddenly saying: “You know how we going to go to Surfer’s
Paradise and then Noosa and then the Great Barrier Reef? Well, now, instead, we
are going to a war zone in Syria, then to down to the South Pole in an open
boat for a change of climate, whereafter we are going to visit hell.”
46.Clive
moved to Nambour for a short time, back to Brisbane and then finally settled in
Caboolture where he was embraced by many people in various walks of life and a
variety of musical settings.
47.From
2010 to 2012 Clive lectured in Film and Television Composition at the
University of Queensland.
48.All
of those plumb lecturing roles, all that tuition, all of those musicians whose
talent Clive nurtured!
49.Unbeknown
to many, during those years and indeed subsequently, Clive has fought a valiant
battle with many health problems - the full extent of which unfolded only recently
at the time of his last operation.
50.He
had been in ICU at the Royal Brisbane Hospital for 8 weeks
where he was the beneficiary of exceptional care by the ICU staff to whom Alan
and Jenny express their profound gratitude.
51.Eight
weeks in intensive care is unheard of and speaks for itself as to the extent of
Clive’s failing health. Clive fought really hard but in the end his body just
could not take any more and shut down on the morning of Saturday 12/01/19.
52.Clive
was a kind, good-hearted and gentle person who could not say “No”.
53.He
was an exceptional musician and many people here might never expect to
encounter the likes of him again; and that compliment is compounded by the fact
of the presence of so many first class musicians here today.
54.Alan
and Jenny would like to thank all of the people who were a part of Clive’s life
and maintained friendships with him to the end. They would also like to express
their gratitude for your presence today, your love and support and for your
many expressions of sympathy.
55.Clive
is one of those special, deserving people about whom we truly can say, the
world is richer place because he was in it. Necessarily, it is now a poorer
place because we have lost him. However, because of the wealth he brought to each
of our lives we shall not forget him.
56.Rest
in Peace dear Clive.
With thanks to Alan Moorhead for the provision of Clive's historical details and stories.
For more information about Clive Moorhead visit:
Queensland Jazz Archive website
email: qja@live.com.au
mob: 0400 743 128
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