Wizards of Oz
Whether drawing on its Indigenous roots, magnificent landscapes or terrifying natural disasters, Australia’s composers past and present often look to their own country for inspiration, says Angus Mcpherson
The varied and colourful landscape of Australian classical music is explored by Angus Mcpherson
Brett Dean’s Fire Music crackles fiercely in the concert hall, replete with the sound of hissing smoke. Musicians are spaced around the audience, who are hemmed in by a claustrophobic musical heat haze and smouldering lower brass.
While climate change spurred the fires at the beginning of 2020 to unprecedented ferocity, fire has always been a feature of the Australian landscape – Dean wrote Fire Music after the devastating ‘Black Saturday’ fires of 2009.
The composer – whose latest opera, Hamlet,
‘‘
Sculthorpe’s evocations of the natural world created an iconic sound that would affect generations to come’’
premiered at Glyndebourne and is due at the Met in the 2021/22 season – is certainly not the first Australian to draw on his country’s landscape in his music, nor is he the first to experiment with the physical space of the concert hall.
Just as Australian painters captured a different sense of light to their European counterparts, it might be possible to hear a unique sense of space in the work of Australian composers. While Percy Grainger (1882-1961) is better known for his intimate depictions of English gardens, it’s no surprise that, hailing from a country of
vast landscapes, Grainger should experiment with players positioned at different distances in his epic ‘imaginary ballet’ The Warriors, written almost a century before Fire Music. It’s something of an anomaly, however, as Grainger is more famous for his miniatures – collections and arrangements of folk songs – and for his sexual appetites. The artefacts of the former (his wax cylinder recordings) and the latter (a variety of whips and other paraphernalia) are on display in a museum devoted to his life in Melbourne.
With Australia’s music industry still in its infancy, many composers writing in the middle of the 20th century found more success overseas than at home. Peggy Glanville-hicks, for instance, trained in London with Vaughan Williams among others, building a career as a composer in the US (where she wrote Sinfonia da Pacifica, and her Etruscan Concerto for pianist Carlo Busotti) before moving to Greece. She composed several works inspired by the Mediterranean, like her opera Sappho, which was supposed to star Maria Callas, but was never performed during the composer’s lifetime.
Malcolm Williamson – best known for his piano concertos and operatic treatment of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana – made his career in Britain, where he was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music in 1975. He ascribed the Australian influence on his music to ‘the sort of brashness that makes Australians go through life pushing doors marked “pull”’. Nevertheless, he wrote music for his native country including his Eighth Symphony, The Dawn is at Hand, setting text by Australian Indigenous poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal.
A national sound?
While Williamson made his career in London, his contemporary Peter Sculthorpe, born in Tasmania in 1929, stayed home to establish an Australian sound, drawing on the country’s landscapes, the music of its neighbours in the Asia-pacific region and, later in his career, elements of Indigenous music. Sculthorpe’s
Sun Music I paints a searing musical landscape, while the second work in that series, Ketjak, evokes Balinese dance music. Named one of Australia’s 100 ‘Living Treasures’, few composers have had the extensive influence on Australian music that Sculthorpe has, and his evocations of the natural world in works like Earth Cry or Kakadu created an iconic sound that would affect generations to come. In the final decade of his life, Sculthorpe worked extensively with didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton (a composer in his own right), whose career in the classical music world took off in 2004 with the world premiere of Sculthorpe’s distinctive Requiem.
Threads which typify Sculthorpe’s style weave through the work of many composers who followed. The music of Ross Edwards – who worked as an assistant to Sculthorpe
– draws deeply on Australia’s natural world in elemental, rhythmic works like his Oboe Concerto, which earned soloist Diana Doherty the moniker ‘The Dancing Oboist’ because of its use of choreographed movement. Edwards’s fascinations with ritual, dance and spirituality play out vividly in his recent Frog and Star Cycle double concerto, written for saxophonist Amy Dickson and percussionist Colin Currie.
Several composers have continued Sculthorpe’s exploration of sounds from Australia’s Asian neighbours. Anne Boyd, for instance, cites the ancient court music of Japan as a seminal influence, with her exquisite Goldfish Through Summer Rain for flute and piano a beautiful example. Her student Lachlan Skipworth’s studies of the Shakuhachi, a Japanese end-blown bamboo flute, have given rise to works like his monumental Breath of Thunder, which places the instrument alongside other Japanese instruments and a full orchestra.
Composers who have come to Australia from overseas have brought elements of their own
musical cultures with them, such as Beijing-born composer Julian Yu, who settled in Australia in 1985 and whose credits span Ensemble Intercontemporain to the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. His Willow and Wattle brings together the erhu and the jinghu – two Chinese instruments – with Western music in a work full of Australian and Chinese references. Yu’s work also includes piano arrangements of Chinese folk songs and 126 variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.
Australia’s beloved Elena Kats-chernin was born in Tashkent in the Soviet Union (now Uzbekistan) and is perhaps Australia’s most frequently commissioned composer. Her vast output spans the piano piece Russian Rag, which featured prominently in the 2009 stop-motion animated film Mary and Max, to Deep Sea Dreaming, commissioned for the Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2000. She has written works from string quartets to a concerto for eight double basses and the score for her most recent opera, about the life of Australian artist Brett Whiteley, has been widely praised. Her greatest hit, however, was her ballet score for Meryl Tankard’s Wild Swans, particularly the delightful Eliza’s Aria, which has become ubiquitous in Australia and has appeared in a well-known advertisement for a bank.
Australian origins
Over the course of the 20th century and beyond, another feature of Australian music has been the use of elements of Indigenous music in the works of non-indigenous composers seeking to imbue their music with an ‘authentic’ Australian sound. The practice is coming under increasing scrutiny, however, particularly when such works are programmed in place of music by Indigenous Australian composers. ‘Indigenous culture is not folk culture,’ wrote Dr Christopher Sainsbury, an Indigenous composer and academic. ‘It’s not a resource for public use. There have been many excursions by composers into Indigenous culture: some have been overreaching while engaging with Indigenous people; others have made more
“lite” appropriations. At times, some have done so effectively, disempowering Indigenous composers. This has occurred for many decades.’
Sainsbury and William Barton are among many Indigenous composers who have made their mark on the classical music world in Australia. Deborah Cheetham, a composer, soprano and Yorta Yorta woman, established Short Black Opera and penned Pecan Summer, which she described as ‘a contemporary opera for Indigenous Australians, a story for all Australians’. The opera, for which Cheetham wrote the music and libretto, is based on the events of the 1939 Cummeragunja walk-off, which saw hundreds of Yorta Yorta people leave their homes to escape the harsh conditions of the Cummeragunja Mission. The opera has been performed across Australia, including at the Sydney Opera House in 2017. Cheetham’s large-scale cantata Eumeralla: A War Requiem for Peace commemorates the Eumeralla Resistance War – a bloody conflict between Indigenous people and colonial settlers in South Western Victoria from 1840-63 – and is sung in the dialects of the Gunditjmara people.
Award-winning composer David Page is a descendant of the Nunkul people and the Munaldjali clan of the Yugambeh tribe from South East Queensland. He has written extensively for Bangarra Dance Theatre, where he was music director, also composing music for The Australian Ballet, as well as for film and television. Rising star violinist, dancer and composer Eric Avery, a Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangirr artist, performed his music with Yo-yo Ma when the star cellist made his Australian debut last year.
Natural talent
While Australian music is more wide-ranging than ever before, composers today are still finding inspiration in the natural world. Dutch-australian composer Kate Moore conjures the cicadas’ song in her recent string quartet Cicadidae, Liza Lim’s
Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus evokes fish in an endangered Australian coral reef, and The Night Parrot by Jessica Wells celebrates the rediscovery of an elusive bird long thought extinct. Andrew Ford’s Scenes from Streeton for wind quintet and recorded voices celebrates the Victorian bush and mourns its destruction at the hands of humans. It was written for the tenth birthday of Melbourne Recital Centre, which opened on the same day as the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009.
Nigel Westlake has found considerable success with his film scores, including those for the
Babe films, and was awarded the Paul Lowin Orchestral Prize in 2019 for his Spirit of the Wild oboe concerto, written for Diana Doherty and inspired by the Tasmanian wilderness.
The idea that there is a single Australian sound doesn’t bear out when you look at the sheer variety of music being composed by Australian composers today. Carl Vine, whose piano music in particular has brought him international recognition, writes music of rhythmic, even intensely mathematical complexity, which nonetheless results in a soaring lyricism.
The choral work of Sally Whitwell, who enjoys a career as a pianist specialising in the works of minimalist composers, favours tunefulness and humour. Cat Hope’s music for her Decibel Ensemble explores the sonic opportunities afforded by integrating graphic notation with software solutions, in the form of the specially designed Decibel Scoreplayer app, while Matthew Hindson’s work has long explored the integration of electronic dance music into contemporary art music. He paints the modern domestic environment with elements of techno music in his virtuosic House Music f lute concerto, the third movement of which has been reimagined for clarinet and piano to create Lounge Music, which references popular easy listening music of the 1960s.
This variety also plays out in composers’ choice of non-musical inspiration. Plenty, like Dean, have drawn on Shakespeare, such as Melody Eötvös’s Ruler of the Hive for orchestra and narrator, while Australian novelists have also inspired great works: Peter Carey’s writing spawned operas by Brett Dean (Bliss) and Elliott Gyger (Oscar and Lucinda), and Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss inspired an opera by Richard Meale. Iain Grandage’s percussion concerto Dances with Devils draws on the Australian Gothic literary tradition of the 19th century, while Liza Lim’s fourth opera, Tree of Codes, takes American writer Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed book/sculptural artwork of the same name as its primary source material.
As an ancient land of many nations and languages, whose history in the last few centuries has been shaped by colonisation and immigration, it’s no surprise that the ‘Australian sound’, if indeed there is one, should be characterised by incredible variety. That said, few composers have been able to resist the allure of the country’s natural landscapes, from the beauty of its pristine rainforests to the harshness of its droughts and bushfires.