Wednesday 20 May 2015

Clive Moorhead





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


"Weaver of dreams"


EXPERIENCE














Lecturer in Film and Television Composition

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
 –  (2 years) Brisbane Area, 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 Musician

Self Employed
 –  (25 years) Australia
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.

. Performed with Ashley Lewis Ensemble at various corporate events in Brisbane, Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast culminating in the professional CD recording Into My Life.

. 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 performance

South Brisbane Institute of TAFE
 –  (2 years) Brisbane Area, Australia
. 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 Music

Redlands Community College
 –  (less than a year) Brisbane Area, Australia
. 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 Course

Queensland Conservatorium Of Music
 –  (6 years) Brisbane Area, Australia
. 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 Music

Ipswich Grammar School
 –  (1 year) Brisbane Area, Australia
. 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.

EDUCATION















The 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 Technology

Bachelor 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 Board

Diploma in Pianoforte, Classical Piano

Highest level of training in professional Piano performance covering all the major periods of music.






Eulogy for Clive

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:
email: qja@live.com.au 
mob: 0400 743 128