In the second half of the twentieth century, Australia's composers and musicians and other artists have become a source of national pride at home and they have a strong identity overseas. Australian indigenous art is very distinctive. Aboriginal dreamtime paintings are well known, and the sound of the didgeridoo, Australia's best-known indigenous musical instrument, fascinates musicians and listeners everywhere.
My work has been mainly with the non-indigenous musical culture, the "art music" or "concert music" tradition in Australia, which is much like the concert tradition in North America, that is, basically Western European - Germanic, Italian, French, and British. (Australia is perhaps more British in its musical consciousness than is the United States, maybe even more than Canada.) Australia in the 1990s is known for its world-class symphony orchestras, opera, ballet, string quartets and other chamber music ensembles, singers, pianists, and other instrumentalists of all kinds. Australian music scores and compact discs (CDs) are beginning to be available in North America, though they are not nearly as plentiful as North American materials are in Australian shops. While Australians probably know more about our music and musicians than we know about theirs, still the second half of the twentieth century has seen the international recognition of many Australian composers of concert music - Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale, Anne Boyd, Barry Conyngham, Betty Beath, Ross Edwards, Vincent Plush, to name only a few.
The American music historian Barbara Tischler, in her book An American Music: The Search for an American Musical Identity (1986), has shown how American composers in the 1920s found audiences and critical recognition not by becoming more self-consciously Americanist and shunning European models but rather by becoming more involved with European modern music. Much of this can be said of Australian composers in the 1960s. A recognizably Australian music emerged as Australians, for a variety of reasons, were participating in international trends to an unprecedented extent. At the same time, because of the country's history, location, geography, and other factors, the rise of Australian music is not wholly explainable in terms of European or American music history.
My interest in Australian concert music is as a musicologist, a music historian. I have focused on two composers, first, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, an Australian who made her career mainly in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, and became a U.S. citizen, and, secondly, Peter Sculthorpe, an Australian composer who stayed home. The difference in their careers is significant. Whereas earlier in this century, Australian composers like Glanville-Hicks, and like Percy Grainger before her, felt they must leave Australia to develop their careers properly, composers beginning with Sculthorpe's generation have been able to flourish in Australia. Sculthorpe came to prominence in the mid-1960s and 1970s; now 65 years old he is probably Australia's most prominent composer.
In 1987 I began preparing a book about Peggy Glanville-Hicks for a Greenwood Press series on internationally known composers of this century. She was born in Melbourne in 1912, and left in about 1932 to study in London. For the next forty years she returned to Australia only to visit. She had a fa-scinating career in New York, composing, organizing concerts of new music, writing for the New York Herald Tribune and for magazines and journals. In the 1960s she began to spend most of her time in Greece, away from the New York "rat race", but the Greek islands turned out to be too remote for a city person. In the 1970s some Australian friends persuaded her to move to Sydney, and there she retired; she died in 1990 at age 77. Over the past twenty years she has been "discovered" by the Australians and reclaimed as one of their own.
She rarely talked about being Australian, which I find a bit odd, as national identity is a major ingredient of most composers' artistic identity, not to mention personal identity. Her Australianism mainly revealed itself in her feeling very much at home in America, a "New World" country like Australia, she often said. Peter Sculthorpe, by contrast, strongly identifies many aspects of his music as Australian. Although Glanville-Hicks and Sculthorpe didn't meet and become great friends (and near neighbours) until the 1970s, when he had already established his own style and she had stopped composing, I find that their music and their attitudes are similar, and distinctive, in several respects - which might be attributable to their both being Australian.
Both felt that as New World artists they should re-examine the European tradition of their training, discard what seemed inappropriate to the New World, and formulate a new style, a new aesthetic. (Composers in the United States did much the same thing, but earlier, in the 1920s and 1930s.) Both turned to older, ancient musics. Glanville-Hicks, a world traveler, created a kind of "international" style through her study of European traditions and trends, and of ancient, pre-European musical traditions, such as Hindu (Indian) classical music and Greek music.
The first example I will play is the beginning of her Etruscan Concerto for piano and chamber orchestra, which she wrote in 1954. The title refers to ancient Etruscan civilisation on the Italian peninsula as evoked in the writings of D. H. Lawrence; she composed the concerto for an Italian pianist in New York. This example is typical of Glanville-Hicks's style in that it is very melodic and rhythmic (this is in 7-4 meter). She introduces the melody in xylophone and other percussion, and then we hear the solo piano; there are countermelodies by oboe and other solo winds, which create a kind of non-European, maybe even "pre-European" flavor. This performance is by Keith Jarrett, piano, with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, on a recent CD (MusicMasters Classics, 1992).
The second example is from Glanville-Hicks's setting of "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," a slightly surrealistic poem in 13 brief stanzas written in 1923 by the American poet Wallace Stevens. The elusive blackbird is a symbol of mystery through which a hidden world is glimpsed. This performance is by Cheryl Jonsson, an Australian soprano, and Otto Freudenthal, a Swedish pianist, on a very recent Swedish CD.
Song no. 8 reads:
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
In the music we hear noble, solemn chords in the piano, with runs and trills - a slightly middle-Eastern or "Asian" ornamentation.
Song no. 9 is even shorter, about half a minute. The text reads:
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles
We hear the piano flying around, in whirling circles; the voice half-speaks and half-sings, in the style of the Viennese expressionists in the 1920s and 1930s - a European style which, though it was part of the composer's training, was not something she cared to adopt completely.
In 1990 I began another Greenwood Press book, this on Peter Sculthorpe. Like Glanville-Hicks, he discarded some aspects of recent European traditions in favor of older, Asian classical traditions, especially those of Indonesia, Australia's neighbor, and Japan. While his music often suggests a mysterious, unknown universe, Sculthorpe has always made an effort to write timely, contemporary music that is understood by as many listeners as possible, in keeping with the democratic Australian tradition. He often invokes the image of the lonely European-Australian on a vast, strange, largely flat continent, as pictured by Australian painters such as Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale. He is attracted to Australian Aboriginal song, by which Aborigines document every feature of the landscape, flora and fauna. In his own music he adopts and transforms Aboriginal melodic shapes and structures, believing them to be in some sense essentially Australian.
I'll play part of an Australian Aboriginal song, "Gunborg" which was originally recorded by Professor Elkin and issued by EMI Australia in 1956 on an album titled "Arnhem Land: Authentic Australian Aboriginal Songs and Dances." The first sound is the pulsating didjeridoo, the long, hollowed-out tree branch that is blown into. The melody is in the shape that Europeans like Professor Elkin have categorized as a "tumbling strain" - a line that descends again and again. We hear didjeridoo and rhythm sticks, men singing, and hand clapping.
The next example is Aboriginal rock, by one of the leading Australian groups Yothu Yindi. First, we hear sort of heated-up, speeded-up didjeridoo, with singing, then rock drummer and guitars enter. This is from the song "Treaty" on the group's 1992 album (from Mushroom Records) recorded in studios in Sydney and Melbourne. It sounds a little more familiar because of the Western tuning, the slightly Western voice quality. There is a straightfoward, descending melody (not really "tumbling" here).
The song says,
Words are much cheaper than our priceless land - Promises can disappear just like writing on the sand.
This land was never given up - This land was never bought and sold - The planting of the Union Jack - Never changed our law at all - Now two rivers run their course - Separated for so long - I'm dreaming of a brighter day -When the waters will be one.
And then this middle part of the song begins with
[Aboriginal text; whoops - then chanting] Promises - disappear -Priceless land - Destiny - Treaty Yeh, Treaty Now - [then the main tune] -Well I heard it on the radio
As you probably know, the didgeridoo has entered North American music, too. In the absence of a tree log, didgeridoos are made from large plastic pipes, from vacuum cleaner hoses, and the like, for that deep, resonant, pulsating sound.
The next example is from Sculthorpe's String Quartet No. 11 - Jabiru Dreaming (1991) which is part of a group of works the composer named after areas in and around Kakadu National Park. The works use the same melodies, which he calls his "Kakadu songlines," using the term "songlines" to suggest the Aboriginal tradition of associating song melodies with geographical features, as paths of the ancestors, or "lines." This excerpt is from a tape which has not yet released commercially, made by the Kronos Quartet, based in San Francisco, which often includes this work in their programs.
Sculthorpe often tells interviewers that Australia is the only place left in the world in which one can honestly write straightforward, happy music - free of all that romantic European Angst. Here is the same melody we just heard, sounding even happier (and quite Indonesian) played on marimbas and vibraphone. This is from his 1989 Sun Song for percussion, played by Synergy Percussion, an extremely popular Sydney ensemble of four percussionists. The excerpt starts with a gong roll and then the melody. The piece has just been released on an Australian CD as part of a work called From Jabiru Dreaming.
In this final example, from the orchestral piece Kakadu, the same melody appears briefly between statements of the piece's main melody, which is also derived from Aboriginal song. The piece was composed for the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado in 1988, the Australian bicentenary year. The composer wanted Americans to know that Kakadu, the setting for the "Crocodile Dundee" movies, is really a special, magical place, and a sacred place to the Aborigines. This performance is by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Stuart Challender on an Australian CD (ABC PolyGram, 1990) which is finally available in this country.
This example is towards the end of the 15-minute piece. First we hear low brass, with triumphant brass chords as accents; bongo drums keep a steady beat. Then we hear the descending melody, first in trombones, then horn. With this melody, listen for the sound of masses of birds the string players are producing. This version of the melody is totally different in expression from the string quartet version or the marimba version: it is serious, triumphant, and monumental like the rocky escarpments of Kakadu Park.
This is a small sampling of what's happening in Australian music. Composers, like other artists, continue to explore what it means to be Australian. And what they discover seems to have meaning and significance in Australia and in the world beyond.
Boulder, Colorado
15 March 1995