Associate Professor Helen English

About me - creative ageing

I am a musician, educator and researcher. I am passionate about access to music for all and for access across our lifespans. In the past four years as a recipient of an ARC Early Career Fellowship (DECRA) for "creative ageing through transformative engagement with music", I looked at older music participants' perceptions of transformation through active music making. I am interested in the mechanisms and practices that make engagement with musical activities transformative as well as  the barriers to positive experiences through music making. To make music communities more findable, I documented where musical activities for older adults are nationally in Australia through an interactive map which is here

During the ARC fellowship I worked with different music communities in Australia and the UK through a series of case studies. These case studies were in Maitland, New South Wales; Lake Macquarie and North Sydney, New South Wales; Hobart, Tasmania, and Central Victoria. The UK study was in London and Hertfordshire in collaboration with Prof. Rosie Perkins, Centre for Performance Science, Royal College of Music, London.

From 2020 I led  a creative ageing research program with Professor Frini Karayanidis and Dr Michelle Kelly from the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Newcastle. The group which now includes Dr Sharon Savage, a neuropsychologist, ran a series of songwriting courses for older adults, leading to a Dementia Australia grant in 2022. For this grant, an artmaking program was added to the songwriting program to compare the cognitive, wellbeing and brain health effects of the courses and to investigate best practice in the programs' designs. In 2024 I was funded by the Primary Health Network as a partnership with Maitland Regional Art Gallery to investigate the benefits and barriers to participation in their program Conversations, Art and Dementia. 

In 2024 a UK medical networking grant allowed the formation of a group of UK, US and Australian researchers to host a symposium in London and initiate a research collaboration. The group which includes Khalid Ali, Brighton Medical School; Robert Abrams, Weill, Cornell; Jennifer MacRitchie, University of Sheffield, and Justin Christensen, MARCS Institute, UWS, is currently working on a scoping review to map research using digital and AI enabled creative activities to foster social connectedness in residential aged care. 

Recently I convened symposia on Creativity, Art and Ageing (2024) and AI and ageing (2025), both for the Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG). In 2025 I also co-edited a special feature on creativity, art and ageing for the Australasian Journal of Ageing with Dr Tricia King. 

here

Music and young people

My passion for access to music extends to young people. I have been involved in outreach to schools in low socio-economic communities in NSW and Victoria since 2012 when I was awarded a Commonwealth Government Higher Education Partnerships and Participation Program (HEPPP) grant for BMUS Music Literacy. In 2015 I was successful in a HEPPP National Priorities Pool grant applied for through the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Excellence of Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE). The HEPPP grant, ‘Building Aspirations in the Creative and Performing Arts,’ allowed the development and implementation of an innovative project that empowered school students to develop skills in creative thinking, project design and its realisation. A short promotional DVD for the project can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/146851875.  A follow-up project undertaken with Dr Matt Lumb and funded by CEEHE is now published in the Journal of Widening Participation.

I am currently leading a bird opera project, a collaboration between PURAI (Centre for Indigenous Knowledge) and University of Newcastle music staff. This highly innovative project is designed to explore the benefit of creativity in music and language acquisition on the health and wellbeing of Primary school aged children, including First Nations students. The bird opera is a community opera that builds on the creativity of young people. A preparatory workshop in 2025 saw 120 students participated in a range of activities including singing, dance, rhythm workshops, puppetry and song writing

Further career details

My first career was as a professional musician and music educator in the UK. As a performer, I specialised in opera, accompaniment and new music. In the 1990s I worked with the Garden Venture at the Royal Opera House, creating and performing new work. With Music for Life, I performed in prisons and at secure hospital units. As a music educator I toured with Opera 80, working in low socio-economic schools and with adults with disability. These experiences were foundational for my later career as an academic.

My PhD (awarded 2016) was recognised with a musicology award from the National Council of Women and is published in the Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain book series with Routledge (2020). In the PhD I developed a theoretical framework of Music and World-Building which I now apply to research into colonial musical cultures; creative ageing and music and wellbeing. The common thread is a passion to discover how the transformative effects of music are a resource for world-building, including wellbeing; lifelong learning and empowerment.I have published extensively on colonial music-making, with a focus on the music of coalminers who migrated to the Newcastle and Hunter Valley coalfields. My PhD topic was Music as a Resource for World-Building in Newcastle and its Townships, 1869-1879. The thesis investigated what music afforded Newcastle settler communities in world-building through its effects on body, mind and emotions. Publications include an invited article on singing, identity and social connections in colonial Newcastle by the Journal of Australian Colonial Studies (2017); a chapter ‘Migrant Musicians and their impact in the emerging music making of the Hunter Valley, 1840-1880,’ in Diversity in Australia’s Music, (2017) a volume dedicated to the late Roger Covell, who wrote the seminal text Australia’s Music in 1967. A review by Julia Szuster notes that ‘English’s close examination of these two very distinct cultures and the musicians who worked in them underpins her perceptive judgement that they played a valuable role in the formative days of community building’ (2018).

In 2017 I applied successfully for a small grant from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) and was made an Associate Investigator (CHE). The grant allowed me to research a new area of music-making in colonial Newcastle and its region. This was published as an article in 2019 (Musicology Australia) and formed a chapter of a monograph, Music and World-Building in the Colonial City, published in 2020 by Routledge. 

Research Expertise

Creative ageing: access to music; music and dementia; music and transformation

Music and communities: Music and World-Building; Colonial Music; Nineteenth-Century Music; Music sociology  

Teaching Expertise
Australian Music, Musicology, Music and Health, Music Theory
Administrative Expertise
Program Convenor, Software expertise: Word, Excel, Publisher, Finale, Sibelius. Auditions, enrollments, orientation, credits, mentoring, completions

Collaborations
Creative ageing research project with Prof Rosie Perkins, Royal College of Music, London

Ongoing collaborations with Prof. Jane W. Davidson, University of Melbourne

Social connectedness research with Prof Khalid Ali, Brighton and Sussex Medical School; Dr Jennifer MacRitchie, University of Sheffield and Justin Christensen, MARCS WSU.