Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

This issue of the resonate journal re-approaches some of the music composed by Australians in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Although these years are often acknowledged as important for establishing contemporary understandings of Australian new music, they are under-represented in writings about more recent Australian music of this kind. What scholarship exists tends towards the biographical.

There are also startlingly few commercial recordings of new music from this era. Indeed, if there is one question that prompted the theme of this issue of the resonate journal, then it is this: how is it that one can find endless references to Nigel Butterley’s In the Head the Fire as ‘the composition that won the 1966 Italia Prize ahead of Luciano Berio’s Laborintus II’, and yet listening to the piece requires a record player and a long-out-of-print LP?

In the Head the Fire is but one work in a catalogue of distinguished music that Butterley composed during this period; Butterley is one composer amongst many whose works are worthy of studying afresh. Even those composers who we think we know well are often deserving of renewed interest. Reconsidering long-held assumptions about the interpretations of key compositions is more than a rewarding pastime, for it is vital in making old works relevant. Exploring perspectives present in works reveals much about the makeup of more recent music, and it facilitates deeper understandings of current cultural concerns. Gathering together the articles herein reflects preoccupations of their authors, since it articulates some of the ways in which music from this period is important now.

There are also some personal reasons for this particular span of time: when I was a young concert-goer in Sydney, Matthew Hindson, Paul Stanhope, Ian Shanahan – and a host of others born in the final years of the 1960s – were established voices. They taught me at Sydney University. I am interested in the music of their teachers, and in the impact it continues to make. I am curious about the connections that exist between the composers of their era and those born more recently. I am keen to understand better why some compositions that were essential to notions of ‘Australian Music’ in the 1960s are no longer in favour and in many cases not performed, while others have proved more enduring. Why is it that many of the aspects of this music that I find most engaging have fallen out of currency, put aside as though worthless artefacts when at the time they seemed (and seem to me now) so valuable?

The articles herein point towards a passion for the music of this era and explore its continuing significance to contemporary practice. In some cases they provide new ways of approaching old understandings. In other cases they prompt new questions for future debate.

James Humberstone considers the legacy of David Ahern. Although almost never performed, Ahern’s extraordinary ability to connect with other composers to form the music he wrote resonates strongly with Humberstone’s own music. The gravity of considering Ahern’s music is summarised in Humberstone’s statement that: ‘the conclusions he drew and the aesthetic he refined for Australian culture lie like paths trodden only once’. As Humberstone points out, in most other countries the legacy of someone like Ahern would have been explored many times over by now.

Cultural cringe in Australia is an issue explored by Nicholas Vines who rehabilitates it as a powerful metaphor for exploring current arguments. In writing about the Australian traditions and genealogies with which his own music connects, Vines looks back to Peter Sculthorpe’s Sun Musics and its expression of Sculthorpe’s views of Australia’s place in the musical world as a source of critical optimism for new ways of working. In this regard, Vines argues for a greater acknowledgment of the achievements of this music, particularly for the way that it incorporates, as a sign of respect, musics from various Asian cultures.

Natalie Williams brings to this issue of resonate the voice of a recently expatriated Australian composer, writing that ‘I now have a much more refined awareness of what it means to be an Australian composer’. She comments on some of the reasons for composers of her generation, and of generations past, to move away from Australia to seek ‘the best training’ and international careers.

The significant momentum that contemporary classical music was gathering in Australia during these decades in question is one thing that draws Williams to study this music. Concern for Australian identity was a major concern for many composers at this point, and Williams is fascinated by the predominant aesthetic explorations in style and technique.

Andrew Robbie focuses on the mid-1970s and the rhetoric which surrounds this period of Australian new music. He argues that ‘dominant narratives’ not only marginalise composers, but that they also become a ‘powerful distortion of how we view the history of Australian music’. Robbie re-details the story of Edwards’s music, providing meticulous lucidity where phantasies of transformation have reigned.

Elliott Gyger recontextualises some of the debates surrounding the music of Nigel Butterley within a more direct discourse of a composer’s response to musical heritages. His article articulates some of the most exciting aspects of Butterley’s music alongside a discussion of various issues that may have resulted in its rare performance.

For Kate Moore understanding her music heritage is crucial for understanding her own creative practice: it provides a point of departure. Now based in the Netherlands, she gives a context for her music which demonstrates the diversity of her musical world and her continuing engagement with earlier composers.

Current discourses surrounding Don Banks are increasingly fleshing the details of his significance to contemporary Australian music. Stefanie Rauch provides a European perspective on his music, with her research focussing on his part in the legacy of Arnold Schoenberg. This approach connects Banks with various traditions, operating within and beyond the centres of his residence in Australia and Britain, with which he engaged through studies with Mátyás Seiber, Luigi Dallapiccola and Luigi Nono; their acknowledgement is useful for understanding some aspects of his music.

Another prominent Australian composer who lives in the United Kingdom is David Lumsdaine. For Peter Wiegold, who studied with Lumsdaine at the University of Durham in the early ‘70s, Lumsdaine’s legacy is an important one. Wiegold’s hugely successful career has been built on music that combines improvisation with notated composition, and, while his use of improvisation is markedly different from the way Lumsdaine makes use of it in his early works, there is a lineage that strongly connects these two composers.

My article returns to the piece that first prompted my interest in Lumsdaine’s music, Kelly Ground, in connection with a slightly later composition Flights. Considered as a pair, they raise questions about the connections of serialism and improvisation in the 1960s. More widely, they relate to Lumsdaine’s articulation of an idiosyncratic musical language within a community where stylistic allegiances were well known and vitally important.

Studying Lumsdaine’s music reminds me frequently of some of the first issues of Sounds Australian that I read, wherein occurred heated debates surrounding modernism and postmodernism. Given that it is 20-odd years since these debates of the ‘80s, it is pertinent to re-examine the music that led to these discussions. Rather than marginalising those involved, or avoiding the arguments raised, this issue of resonate moves on from many of those earlier debates by reconsidering from new perspectives some of the music that was entangled in those arguments.

What comes through clearly in this issue of resonate is that the composers who strove to ‘articulate idiosyncratic musical languages’ considered this an act of generosity rather than of arrogance. What this collection demonstrates is that the apparent difficulties of the musical materials from this period continue to provide fertile ground for new composition.

An immediacy underlies these discussions: it is vital to investigate the music of these decades while composers, performers, and audience members from the time are still alive. The firebrand composers from the 1960s are now in their seventh decade.