Mix Margaret Dylan Jones

See Credo & SHORTER BIOGRAHIES of me,
written in the third person.

Many of my early piano compositions were for educational use. I wrote them with a keen appreciation of the needs of students and teachers having taught piano, theory, and voice since the 1980s.

My student works included music for full orchestra, string quartet, clarinet, piano, percussion quartet (for the Australian group Synergy), oboe, voice, harp, and brass.

For five years between 1979 and 1990 I studied composition at the University of Western Australia, mostly with Roger Smalley (who worked for and studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen) and very briefly with John Exton (a former student of Luigi Dallapiccola).

As part of my Bachelor of Music degree I also studied orchestration for two years with Sir Frank Callaway, obtaining an 'A' both times. For a couple of years I had piano lessons with Brian Michell.

The Jones family was living in the Perth suburb of Kewdale when I was born in 1961, the third of four children. In 1966 my father, the respected and prolific writer John Joseph Jones, took the family to live on a bush property he had stumbled upon in the hills to the east of Perth, in the locality of Hovea. On that property and with the assistance of many diverse groups of volunteers he constructed the Parkerville Amphitheatre, which the family operated until his death in 2000. See the amphitheatre link for details of an 87 minute documentary about the venue released in 2015 featuring interviews with my father, myself, other family members and many others.

My father was born in London but always described himself as Welsh. On my mother's side I'm a fifth generation Western Australian, descended from 1842 Australind settlers Jesse and Jane Gardiner. I probably have over a thousand relatives living in WA to the south of Perth.

In 1989 I founded The Perth Discovery Choir (PDC) to give adults the opportunity to get involved in music, and conducted it for its first 5 years. In 2001 I founded and conducted another choir called Girls, Guys & Others: the GGO Quire, which ran for one year and had many intersex and transgender singers.

In 1994 I began Hovea Music Press as a hobby with Jean Argyle, my partner of eight years. Over about twelve years HMP published musical scores by eight other Australian composers including some of the leading names such as Nigel Butterley, Roger Smalley, Stephen Benfall and John Peterson. HMP also published quality works by top Australian poets such as Jack Davis, Andrew Lansdown, Shane McCauley and my father, John Joseph Jones. In July 2015 I resumed publishing under the HMP banner.

For one school year in 1995 I was the Teacher-in-Charge of music at Swanbourne Senior High School.

From the late 1990s I was heavily involved for many years in volunteer community work, especially with advocacy and support groups for intersex, transgender and transsexual people, such as TransWest: The Transgender Association of WA, and the International Foundation for Androgynous Studies (IFAS). See watgtsis-history-western-australia.html

In 2002 (or possibly earlier) I began using the honorific title Mx or Mix (meaning mixture and pronounced 'mix') after hearing that an intersex person in Victoria (Australia) had been using it. (In May 2015 the Oxford Dictionary online version included this title for the first time.)

In 2004 a seven-minute profile of my life as an androgyne was shown on the ABC's George Negus Tonight (GNT) television programme. The broadcast featured me playing my own Androgyne Prophecy piano solo which I composed at the age of 16. See the transcript on the ABC's site.

For just over five years 2004 to 2010 I drove taxis in a great variety of ways, initially in Perth and then for four years in Karratha (in the Pilbara region 1500 km north of Perth). Which isn't strictly musical but it fills in a big gap!

I'm an Associate Composer with the Australian Music Centre and have produced several sets of educational piano music. A one-page work, The Greedy Row-Snake, sold thousands of copies when it was included in the AMEB's Series 12 exam books in 1990. This and other works have also been published by Currency Press, one of Australia's largest sheet music publishers. Prayer of the Swinging Mantis is in the current (2015) AMEB syllabus for for preliminary grade. See my works in print.

Since May 2011 I've been living as a house sitter in the Perth hills or foothills, in the Shire of Mundaring or in the Midland or Gidgegannup areas, Western Australia.

© Hovea Music Press 1996 &  Mix Margaret D. Jones 2015

See Credo & SHORTER BIOGRAHIES of me,
written in the third person.