Biography - David Brookes

David took “the long, winding, scenic path”, to composition after a career firstly as a cinema projectionist, then serving over twenty years as a musician in some of the premier bands of the Australian Army, and eventually becoming established as a saxophone teacher in Adelaide, South Australia. He has studied composition with David Harris at both the Flinders Street School of Music and the Elder School of Music. He has also completed an Advanced Diploma of Music (performance) on saxophone at the Flinders Street School of Music.

He is a founding member of The Adelaide Institute Connection saxophone quartet that performed at the 12th World Saxophone Congress in Montreal, Canada in 2000, and the Australasian Clarinet And Saxophone Convention in Brisbane in 2002, as well as performances at the Adelaide Fringe in 2000 and 2002. An essential part of each performance by this group is the playing of music by Australian Composers.

In 2002 his composition Pentaque was judged the joint winner of the Australian Composers Competition at the Darwin International Guitar Festival and has been subsequently recorded and broadcast by ABC FM Radio. He wrote the music for the 2002 Carclew Youth Arts Production The Jihad Crusade (text by Glen R Johns, a Music/Theatre Work which examines the war against terrorism). Saxophonist Rouslan Babajanov, Amicus String Quartet, pianist Paris Downes, cellist Zoë Barry, the Darwin Guitar Quartet, Adelaide Institute Connection Saxophone Quartet, and The David Brookes Collective, have performed his compositions.

David teaches saxophone at Prince Alfred College, Concordia College, Walford Anglican Girls School, Marryatville High School, and his own private studio. He has found it to be a most rewarding and satisfying vocation. He also derives a great deal of pleasure from organising and sponsoring saxophone concerts in Adelaide, striving to raise the public profile of this instrument, as well as trying to make saxophone playing fun for all his students regardless of their age or ambition.

Musical Influences

David’s earliest musical influences included pop tunes by the likes of Johnny Ray, Doris Day etc, featured on the records played by his older siblings. As a teenager he experienced the excitement of the clarion-call to a new generation by the “Awop-Bop-a-Loo-Mop Alop Bam Boom” in Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, and the arrival of Elvis Presley’s Heart Break Hotel and Hound Dog, along with the other Rock n Roll hits that followed in a deluge, demolishing the popular music structure of the day. Other formative musical experiences occurred during his training years as a cinema projectionist in one of the ‘picture palaces’ of the day. Extended seasons of Hollywood blockbusters at the cinema exposed him to the film score music of composers such as Miklós Rósa, David Raskin, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Maurice Jarre, Lalo Schifrin, John Barry and Howard Shore. Of course music/film interaction has also included music from baroque to atonal by many of the great composers, and it was through the medium of narrative films that David was first introduced to their works.

He credits the outstanding music educator Diana Harris, and his composition teacher David Harris, for providing the profound experience of discovering the music of the 20th century avant-garde. Subsequently he extended his interests to the music of Steve Reich, John Adams, and other composers whose style has evolved from their early experiments with minimalism. These composers plus American Folk Music (Rock n Roll) still influence his current compositional style.