Patricia Brown Obituary, Death – Over the course of her time at UNSW, Patricia has led over 1400 students, staff members, and singers from the wider UNSW community in performances of some of the most important choral compositions in the western canon. Patricia has performed in a large number of opera productions and has worked twice with UNSW’s Australia Ensemble. She has also held the position of Chorus Director for over fifty different works performed by UNSW Opera. Patricia created concert videos, operas, choral and instrumental programs, commissioned new works, undertook swathes of research projects, and taught hundreds of students alongside her husband and collaborator, Roger Covell. In addition to her work as a researcher and educator, she was a musician who could sing, conduct, play, and even dance.
Patricia Brown, a musicologist at UNSW and the director of choral activities there, passed away yesterday afternoon, and our thoughts and prayers go out to her family and friends. Dr. Patricia Brown brought a lot of vitality and competence to her role as director of the choirs at UNSW for 28 years. She was a member of the faculty in the Department of Music and served as the impetus for the department’s thriving choral program.
In 2017, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW recognized Patricia’s significant contributions to the university’s musical life by bestowing upon her an Honorary Fellowship in recognition of her work in the field. Patricia has enormous energy, a deep love of birds and birdsong, the Australian outback, as well as music and the history of its various genres, and she was a musician. She spent her entire life listening to and composing music, and as a result, all of our lives are better off for it.