Before and After Corroboree: The Music of John Antill

David Symons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134801039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

John Antill (1904-1986) was one of the foremost composers of Australia's post-colonial period. Although a relatively prolific and much esteemed composer in Australia, Antill's wider reputation is sustained chiefly by his famous ballet Corroboree - a work which was perceived to bring an authentic Australian musical style before both a national and international audience for the first time. Through Sir Eugene Goossens' championship, the work was heard by enthusiastic audiences in Australia, Britain, Europe and the USA, and was, for many years, the best-known work of any Australian-born and resident composer. Indeed it has remained, for both Australian and overseas audiences, an Australian musical icon. David Symons traces Antill's development as a composer from his early, pre-Corroboree works, which display a late Romantic to post-impressionist style, through an analysis of the virile, dissonant, primitivist idiom of his magnum opus, to an examination of his later output of theatrical, orchestral and vocal/choral works. The book provides comprehensive and valuable insight into Antill's musical output, at the same time focussing on more detailed analyses of his major works which have reached public performances and/or recordings. In this way the book not only presents a developmental picture of Antill's works, but also demonstrates why they have made him one of Australia's most prominent musical creators of the post-colonial period.

Chapter 1
Before Corroboree

Background

John Antill’s creative career spans much of Australia’s post-colonial period and just beyond, beginning with his youthful experiments during the years of World War 1 and culminating in his last output of note at the end of the 1960s. As noted in the Introduction, the post-colonial period comprised the years from Federation to approximately 1960, and saw the emergence of Australia’s earliest composers of truly musical rather than primarily historical interest. These included Antill’s immediate forebears and contemporaries.

The first generation of post-colonial composers included the English immigrants G.W.L. Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) and Fritz Hart (1874–1949), the Australian-born and resident Alfred Hill (1870–1960) and the expatriate Percy Grainger (1882–1961), who nevertheless fiercely declared his ‘Australian-ness’ throughout his career. While Marshall-Hall’s and Hill’s musical antecedents were largely nineteenth-century Germanic (Hill’s study in Leipzig in the 1880s leading to a strongly conservative bias, whereas Marshall-Hall’s musical language owed more to the ‘progressive’ styles of Wagner and Strauss), both Hart’s and Grainger’s musical heritage (notwithstanding Grainger’s often wide-ranging and adventurous compositional experiments) was basically rooted in British music of the early twentieth century, including, most notably, a style commonly referred to as ‘English pastoralism’. This ‘pastoral’ idiom was prevalent in the work of many English composers from the World War 1 years to roughly the end of the 1920s – composers such as Vaughan Williams, Holst, Delius, Bax, Ireland, Bridge and many others – and comprised an essentially lyrical style, with its roots variously in English folk-song modality as well as post-impressionist harmonies, making use of triadic extensions such as seventh and ninth chords often in parallel or other non-functional sequences, and also incorporating some chromatic dissonance. This idiom resonated strongly in the music of many Australian composers throughout much of the post-colonial period.

Antill’s immediate contemporaries of the next generation included the Australian-born and resident Mirrie Hill (1889–1986), Roy Agnew (1891–1944), Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984), Clive Douglas (1903–1977), Robert Hughes (1912–2007), Raymond Hanson (1913–1976), Miriam Hyde (1913–2005) and Dorian Le Gallienne (1915–1963), and the expatriates Arthur Benjamin (1893–1960) and Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–1990). The chief cultural and stylistic heritage of these composers was also mainly English. Like that of their English contemporaries, the music of these composers betrayed some survivals of post-Romantic and English pastoral styles, but also (especially among the more ‘progressive’ composers) incorporated more cosmopolitan influences from the early twentieth century (especially French and Russian), as well as elements of neo-classicism and the influence of such composers as Bartók, Hindemith and Stravinsky. As in the case of all but a few English contemporaries, more radical compositional models, including the atonality and twelve-note technique of the ‘Schoenberg School’, were eschewed until well after World War 2.¹ In Australia, it was not till the 1950s (occasionally), and especially after 1960, that the influence of more modernist and indeed ‘avant-garde’ styles were to become dominant. This has led to a popular critical conception that Australian music of the post-colonial period was overwhelmingly outdated and derivative – a view which has for a long time been uncritically accepted, but which has been redressed to some extent in light of more recent studies of Australian music of this period.

A final link with English models may be found in the work of those Australian composers of the period (including Antill) who aspired to the creation of a national identity in their music. The music of the English ‘folk-song’ and ‘pastoral’ composers was frequently programmatic or descriptive in character, and the subjects depicted contained a strong portrayal of landscape or the ‘spirit of place’ (perhaps to a somewhat greater extent than found in the music of other national ‘schools’). Examples include Holst’s Egdon Heath, Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsodies, Bax’s Tintagel and November Woods and Ireland’s Mai-Dun and The Forgotten Rite. Among Australian composers, this may be found not only in similarly programmatic or descriptive works such as Hart’s The Bush (1923), Alfred Hill’s ‘Australia’ Symphony (1951), Mirrie Hill’s ‘Arnhem Land’ Symphony (1954) and Douglas’s tone poems Carwoola (1940), Wongadilla (1954) and his ‘Namatjira’ Symphony (1956); but also, during the later post-colonial period, in a spate of theatrical works – especially ballets (including of course Antill’s Corroboree) – on both Australian Aboriginal legends and post-settlement ‘bush’ subjects. The notion of ‘Australianism’ in music (and also literature) – and Antill’s engagement with this – will be taken up more fully in Chapter 2, including the role of the evocation of Aboriginal culture in making a meaningful spiritual link with the Australian landscape. As a postscript to this discussion, it is perhaps noteworthy that, following the most aggressive period of avant-garde modernism in Australian music during the 1960s, the role of landscape or environment and its ‘spirituality’ as subjects for musical compositions has blossomed again during the ‘postmodern’ period since about 1970, where the influence in particular of the music of Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014) has been a continuing and definitive factor.

Turning now to Antill’s own work overall, perhaps its major and most notable feature is his considerable production of works for the theatre. Further, his work in this area can be seen to fall into two distinct phases. In the pre-Corroboree period his preoccupation was with opera, while his later output, from around the time of Corroboree or just prior, concentrated on ballet. This will be discussed further in due course. Although Antill makes no comment, in any published sources or in any unpublished statements to be found among the Antill Papers (see below), regarding his awareness of contemporary developments in Australian operatic or ballet composition during his early years, it is noteworthy, first, that his initial engagement with opera (as a teenager) coincided with a period of significant opera production by Australian composers – in particular Alfred Hill (who was to become Antill’s chief compositional mentor later), Marshall-Hall and Hart. These and other composers produced, during the first few decades of the twentieth century, a significant number of operas which were performed by local, especially Conservatorium, opera groups in Melbourne and Sydney. In addition, Hill and Hart were instrumental in the formation of the brief and abortive Australian Opera League in 1914, whose aim was specifically the fostering of opera by Australian composers. It is perhaps worth remarking here that this early twentieth-century upsurge in Australian opera composition came at the end of a considerably rich culture of Australian opera performances, especially in Melbourne and Sydney during and since the colonial period by both Australian (notably the Lyster and later Williamson companies) and touring companies, which provided regular seasons of the standard opera repertoire. These included many nineteenth-century operas that achieved performances in Australia not many years after their European premières. However, until the sudden early-twentieth-century efflorescence of Australian opera productions, fully professional (or semi-professional) performances of operas by Australian composers were sparse, but included some early successes such as Isaac Nathan’s (1792–1864) Don John of Austria (1841) and Stephen Hale Marsh’s (1805–1888) The Gentleman in Black (c. 1847, but premièred as a Lyster production in 1861). Less significant productions (mostly privately sponsored) occurred during the later decades of the colonial period.² In the inter-war years (1918–1939) this significant opera ‘culture’ declined considerably with the advent of broadcasting in Australia (1923); and especially, following its creation in 1932, the establishment during the 1930s by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (now Corporation) (ABC) of permanent symphony orchestras in all states and the introduction of regular subscription concerts.

Like opera, ballet performances in Australia can be traced back to the early colonial period with the visits of various touring ballet troupes throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also often under the aegis of the Lyster and Williamson companies. The advent of the famous tours by Pavlova in the late 1920s inspired the formation of the first Australian ballet company, directed by Louise Lightfoot and Mischa Burlakov.³ This small company (with which, as will be seen later, Antill had some contact in the early 1930s) commissioned the earliest ballet scores by Australian composers.⁴ A further inspiration for Australian ballet production was afforded by the tours, from 1936–1940, of De Basil’s troupe formed from the remnants of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and the subsequent immigration of various members of his company, and later of refugee ballet dancers from Nazi Germany in the years of World War 2. Detailed accounts of the remarkably sudden emergence of ballet scores by Australian composers from the late 1930s onward may be found in studies by Edward Pask and Joel Crotty.⁵ Antill could hardly have been unaware of these developments, which could well have stimulated him to the composition of a major ballet score. His work on Corroboree seems to have occupied him from about 1936 to 1944 and, remarkably, this major project appears, on available evidence, to represent his first serious engagement with the medium of ballet. This issue will be discussed in detail later. Now, however, Antill’s early development must be examined from a chronological perspective in order to gain as clear a view as possible of the evolution of his musical style in the years leading up to his magnum opus. In particular this will show a style that began as late Romantic and evolved through the ‘English pastoral’ style, with very few glimpses during this period of the more dissonant idiom of Corroboree.

In tracing this development, the following sources have together provided some basic perspectives. The first, Dean and Carell’s biography, draws upon reminiscences reported to them by both the composer and his family. Here Antill’s reported reminiscences are of course those recalled from near the end of his life and – as was mentioned in the Introduction and will be shown later in this chapter – are not always accurate. A much earlier source, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Introduction: A Creative Career in Two Stages Defined by an Australian Music Icon
• 1 Before Corroboree
• 2 Corroboree – The Turning Point
• Interlude: Antill After Corroboree: An Overview
• 3 After Corroboree (1) – Theatre Works
• 4 After Corroboree (2) – Orchestral Works
• 5 After Corroboree (3) – Choral and Vocal Works
• Epilogue: John Antill as a ‘One Work Composer’?
• Appendix 1: List of Original Compositions by John Antill
• Appendix 2: Corroboree: Antill’s Original Choreographic Outline
• Appendix 3: Select Bibliography
• Index