Australian Music and Modernism, 1960-1975

Michael Hooper

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501348198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Drawing on newly available archival material, key works, and correspondence of the era, Australian Music and Modernism defines "Australian Music" as an idea that emerged through the lens of the modernist discourse of the 1960s and 70s. At the same time that the new "Australian Music" was distinctive of the nation, it was also thoroughly connected to practices from Europe and shaped by a new engagement with the music of Southeast Asia. This book examines the intersection of nationalism and modernism at this formative time. During the early stages of "Australian Music" there was disagreement about what the idea itself ought to represent and, indeed, whether the idea ought to apply at all. Michael Hooper considers various perspectives offered by such composers as Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale, and Nigel Butterley and analyzes some of the era's significant works to articulate a complex understanding of "Australian Music" at its inception.

1

The Formation of an Academic Discourse of Australian Music

Australia is said to have no history and to be lucky in this. But, in fact, Australia is embedded in its history like a fly in amber.¹

The problem with ‘Australian Music’ today is that the term is almost never contested. The Australian Music Centre, for example, ‘fulfills its aims by directly representing Australian composers and sound artists’,² without openly questioning the word ‘Australian’. To be eligible for funding from the Australia Council for the Arts a musician must be an ‘Australian citizen or an Australian permanent resident’,³ and the organization’s Corporate Plan is to support ‘new Australian work’,⁴ and to invest in ‘Australian arts’.⁵ Neither the Corporate Plan nor the Australia Council Act (2013)⁶ includes serious discussion about what the term ‘Australian’ means. Secondary-school students have had ‘Music of the last 25 years (Australian focus)’⁷ as a mandatory topic in one state, and ‘analysis of ways in which Australian performers have interpreted a variety of works by Australian composers/songwriters that have been created after 1910’ in another.⁸ Against such institutional consistency it is difficult for alternative narratives to exist.

The current uniformity was much less the case in the 1960s, partly because few national organizations for the arts in Australia existed, and partly because composers were busy working to forge new international connections. The 1970s was a time when the ties to Britain were supposed to have ended, a delayed reaction to a series of shifts in the relationship between the two nations that had begun with the Federation of Australia in 1901. But the 1960s and 1970s continued to be characterized by a close engagement with Britain by Australian-born and -based composers. This was a time when ‘Australian Music’ was highly political, and when a small number of high-profile composers were jostling for primacy.

Many of the prominent composers of the 1960s and 1970s who considered themselves ‘Australian’ had spent at least some time in the UK. Many had studied there, and some were permanently based there (and some remain so). The correspondence from the time is not characterized by an antagonism towards Britain and British music,⁹ and instead it reveals productive collaborations, successful enterprise and close friendships. Indeed, looking at the years between 1960 and 1975, one struggles to detect any ‘move away’ from Britain, and there is little questioning of British compositional practice. Even Richard Meale, for whom the United States, Spain, France and Japan were important places, and on whom the impact of British music is fairly slight, nevertheless had major performances, significant commissions and publishing contracts in London, all of which were crucial for his career. Nigel Butterley remains a proud Anglophile. Peter Sculthorpe’s String Quartet Music, which made a significant statement about his engagement with Asian music, was premiered at the Wigmore Hall, and is published by Faber Music of London. Don Banks founded a significant portion of Australia’s national infrastructure on his experience working with British organizations. Alison Bauld, Anne Boyd, Ross Edwards and Martin Wesley-Smith all studied at the University of York (and did so at the same time).¹⁰ They may have described their time there in terms of ‘Australian Music’ in a way that would not have applied to either Banks or Lumsdaine in London twenty years earlier, but they all found ways of contributing to the British scene; Bauld still lives in Britain, and Boyd followed her time at York with a lectureship at Sussex before becoming the founding head of the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong. There was at the time an easy relationship between the prominent composers working in Australia and those working in Britain. Exchanges were readily established. Funding was available to enable the movement of music between locations. Little of the contemporary discourse captures this remarkably fruitful international attitude.

Compared to the UK, Australia’s infrastructure for new music in the 1960s was more centralized, revolving around academic institutions and the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). Butterley and Meale both began their compositional careers through the connections and resources that the ABC afforded them as producers. In 1969 Meale joined the faculty in Adelaide, by which time Peter Sculthorpe, Eric Gross, John Exton and Keith Humble held academic positions. This change is crucial for the formation of ‘Australian Music’. The rapid expansion in academic positions that took place makes the short period between 1960 and 1975 particularly important.

Australian Music and Musicology

The appointment of composers coincided with the establishment of musicology in Australia,¹¹ and that establishment would be decisive in terms of the dominant ways in which music in Australia has come to be discussed. In 1948 Donald Peart moved from Britain to take up a position as the founding Professor of Music at the University of Sydney, but it was not until 1963 that the Musicological Society of Australia was established. The society published Australia’s first scholarly music journal, Musicology Australia, with three issues in the 1960s that contained articles such as: ‘The Didjeridu of the Australian Aborigine: A Unique Development of a Common Musical Instrument?’, by Trevor Jones; ‘Military Music in the Colony of New South Wales, 1788–1850’, by Peter Richardson; ‘Alfonso Ferrabosco and the Lyra Viol’, by Donald Peart; and ‘The New Troubadours: Reflections on Pop and Modern Folk Music’, by Wilfrid Mellers.

In 1965 Andrew McCredie was appointed Senior Research Fellow in Musicology at Adelaide University and in 1966 he initiated the journal Miscellanea Musicologica: Adelaide Studies in Musicology. Its early issues also mix ethnomusicology with canonical (and not so canonical) work. For example, the first issue included: ‘The Organ Works of Max Reger’, by John Wesley Barker; ‘Sources of English Song: A Survey 1620–1660’, by Ian Spink (who at the time was deputy head of the Music Department at Sydney University); ‘Symbolic and Descriptive Text Settings in the Works of Pierre de la Rue’, by Marianne Rosenberg; ‘Christoph Graupner as Opera Composer’, by McCredie; and ‘Peter Maxwell Davies: The Shepherds’ Calendar’, by Peart. Also typical of the time is that the only significant analysis amongst these was that of Aboriginal music, undertaken by Catherine Ellis in ‘Aboriginal Songs of South Australia’.

By 1967 musicology had been established in Perth, and the university began producing its Studies in Music journal, as well as the Australian Journal of Music Education, both edited by Frank Callaway. Studies in Music’s first issue published an overview of ‘Musical Scholarship in the Twentieth Century’ by Gerald Abraham, alongside articles by Basil Deane (on Beethoven), Trevor Jones (on the didjeridu), Peter Platt (on Dering) and David Tunley (on the eighteenth-century French cantata). It also included editions of scores by Dering and Bernier, and a forum including John Exton, who argued, inter alia, for composition as research, and H. E. Hallam, who argued against ‘originality’. Its outlook, then, was a similar mix of Aboriginal music and canonical Europeans. None of the members of its advisory panel were Australian, though the editorial board comprised the heads of music departments in Australia. Its stated aim was to ‘assist the study of both established and contemporary musical styles’, an aim which was borne out in the subsequent volumes.

In 1969 the University of Sydney started Music Now, a journal focussed on new music. Peart wrote the introductory editorial, which argued that: ‘The cultivation of the music of the past, interesting and valuable as it is, must take second place to the creation of music by composers now alive – and preferably not only alive but “alive and kicking”’.¹² The journal was also focussed on Australian composition, giving a voice to some of its young composers:

In Australia we are just beginning. We have a distinct advantage over countries dominated by long tradition. We may respect the past but should not be obsessed by it.¹³

In Peart’s argument, composition in Australia was new, young and international. Peart provided a list of the significant events that connect local and international movements:

The visit to Australia in 1961 of Stravinsky – the legendary figure who seems just about to pass into the Pantheon of great composers – did an enormous amount of good. Here he was, no mere name on a gramophone record label, actually conducting in the Sydney Town Hall! Even more significant was the visit in 1965 and 1966 of Peter Maxwell Davies, the English composer – speaking our language! – and only just over thirty years of age. Also a fine performer, teacher and lecturer, Maxwell Davies was a tremendous inspiration to us and really started something. One thing we shall be doing in this journal is to follow up his ideas.

The editorial concluded with a benediction:

May music constantly thrive among us, and be renewed, and give refreshment, and food for pleasure and thought!

The contrast between Peart’s rejection of the past and his deification of Stravinsky and Davies removes those composers from their particular politics. Free from local histories they are able, by virtue of their recognition of Australia’s existence, to bring Australia into modernism’s international arena. Peart’s article on Meale in Music Now was introduced with a sentence that positions Peart as a mediator, whose function was similar to that of to Stravinsky or Davies: ‘His [Peart’s] work as an activator and catalyst in stimulating and encouraging young and serious native musicians has been a direct influence in the emergence of composers such as Richard Meale, Peter Sculthorpe and Nigel Butterley.’¹⁴ (Davies’s second visit to Australia, for a six-month residency teaching composition at Adelaide University in 1966, was more successful both for Davies¹⁵ and for his leadership in Adelaide, which was particularly significant for Ross Edwards, who studied with him there, and later also in London.¹⁶)

Composition and musicology about Australian Music are indissoluble at that time, with much of the musicology about Australian composers being written either by composers, or by scholars keen to see Australian composition flourish. The consequence of the rise in musicology and the appointment of composers as academics is that Australian Music has always been tied to universities. With the academic discourse of Australian Music often written by scholars with little expertise in new music, which was especially the case in the 1960s and 1970s, there was little writing that demonstrated the differences between ideas expressed musically, and those expressed in the programme notes written by composers, even where the two forms of expression disagree. Nevertheless, the academic discourses that were written were also new and exploratory, and the published articles are rarely of conservative academicism. The expansion of academia during the period also brought composers into more stable and influential employment, and by the end of the 1970s their personal narratives were dominating academic discourses about their music.

This chapter therefore argues for the development of the discourse of Australian Music by giving weight to the academic sources published at the time.¹⁷ These sources are more carefully penned than other forms of writing, and they are more likely to tackle specific musical problems when they are relevant. Newspapers such as The Age simply did not publish musically analytical writing, and so it remains difficult to assess the relevance of musical details to the writers publishing in its pages. In focussing on the academic scholarship about Australian Music, the chapter avoids the platitudinous writing that was being published in the Australian press at the time. The academic publishers were not against technical detail on principle, and so the quantity of technical writing they produced is indicative of the mode of engagement of their writers, rather than their publishing policy. The academic sources were also more influential to writers after 1975, due to their accessibility on library shelves at a time when accessing old newspaper reviews was difficult and time-consuming.

Australian Music and Modernism

If ‘Australian’ is one half of the problem, then the other half is ‘modernism’. The two make little sense together in 1960, and after 1975 it is clear that their combination is untenable as a description of a mainstream movement. Many of the composers who rose to prominence between those dates did so as progressive, internationally minded, technically exploratory voices. They took advantage of cheaper and quicker travel to diminish the differences that resulted from geographical ‘isolation’, and they formed organizations to support new music. The term ‘modernism’ is still, unlike ‘Australian’, highly contested, which makes it as precarious – and therefore as useful – as ever. It is perhaps here that the most significant disjunctions in scholarship occur. Britain has seen an expansion in scholarship working with the modernist music that has been written since the late nineteenth century, and although some of these studies have focussed on music from a particular period, the conceptual significance of modernism is further reaching. British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, edited by Matthew Riley¹⁸ and Harper-Scott’s Edward Elgar, Modernist¹⁹ in particular reassess the impact of modernism in music previously considered conservative, and both focus on circumscribed sites in which modernism can be foregrounded. Harper-Scott’s The Quilting Points of Modernism is more ambitious, arguing from a position where: ‘No sane person would claim that Walton is a modernist, so that is of course exactly what I propose to do: he is a privileged coign of vantage from which to view the totality of responses to the Event.’²⁰ The argument relies on the ‘radical contention […] that the definition of modernism must encompass all music of the twentieth century’.²¹ His book sets a stage on which Walton is considered as a ‘reactive modernist’ to revolutionize discourses about modernist music. The argument works for Walton, since ‘Every political possibility that presented itself for reflection or action on Walton’s part was thus fundamentally determined by the communism-Event’,²² but it is less clear what this argument would mean for an analysis of a composer living in Australia, in which the communist–capitalist antagonism was much less present, in par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Examples
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Australian Music Now
• 1. The Formation of an Academic Discourse of Australian Music
• 2. Infrastructure for New Music, Serial Technique and Don Banks’s String Quartet (1975)
• 3. Richard Meale I: Sydney
• 4. Nigel Butterley: Australian Music and Britain
• 5. Peter Sculthorpe: Australian Music and Nationalism
• 6. Richard Meale II: Adelaide
• 7. Landscapes in Painting and Literature: Lumsdaine and Sculthorpe
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint