SENSE OF PLACE DEVELOPS INTO AN AUSTRALIAN VOICE, 1920’s- 1970’s 

By the 1920s Australian musicians had the ability to receive nearly all their musical training in Australia. Staying in Australia helped to create a connection to place for composers, allowing them to incorporate some of the unique influences in and around Australia. Between the 1920s and 1970s, the musical society in Australia began to expand and open more quickly through the work of composers Henry Tate (1873-1926), Margaret Sutherland (1897-1984), John Antill (1904-1986), and Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014). The beginning of these organizations, the Australian Broadcasting Company in 1932, the founding of the Jindyworobak Club in 1937, and the opening of the Sydney Opera House also helped to promote the Australian arts culture and strong national identity. 

Composers 

In 1924, Henry Tate wrote, 

In Australia, where we await the advent of a school of composers who will succeed in producing music which will be recognizable as national in the sense that the composers of Italy, France, Germany, and Russia are recognised, the rapid rise of Russian music to the highest eminence should arouse keen interest and attention.1

And nearly forty years later Roger Covell stated, 

The search for a musical identity is not simply an expression of crude nationalism; it is also eloquent of a desire to find means of musical expression that are both personal and international at the same time as they are unmistakable and, in the best senses, provincial.2 

The conclusion to be drawn from both of these statements is that as of 1924, when Henry Tate wrote this statement, and until Covell’s comment in 1969, Australia was still lacking its own national tradition. Tate proposed that the first great work of art that could be classified as clearly Australian would then open the flood gates to the establishment of a national sound.3 

Henry Tate, born 1873 in Melbourne and died 1926 in South Yarra, was one of the first students to attend the Conservatorium of Music in Melbourne in 1895. He was a student of Marshall Hall while studying composition. Though he may not have built his career on his composing abilities, Tate’s contribution to Australian music as a musicologist and music critic is undeniable. 

Tate was convinced that the way for Australian music to become more than a reproduction of European music was to draw upon the sounds and resources that make Australia unique. He believed Aboriginal music and natural sounds, particularly bird and insect sounds, were two of the keys to the development of an Australian sound. “In the pamphlet, Australian Musical Resources (1917), he wrote: ‘Contrapuntal methods seem in accord with the mystery of the bush with its hidden past … Effort to incorporate our bird calls … in contrapuntal combinations of all degrees of intricacy should reap a rich reward’.”4 Tate then went on to write his most famous book entitled Australian Musical Possibilities, published in 1924. In this book, Tate reiterates his view that the Australian musical future lay in the sights and sounds of the Australian Outback, “Australians may in like manner seek at least part of their inspiration in the surface leads or our bird calls,” and “In the songs and dances of the aborigines there may be peculiarities of scale (modal) construction that will yield new and distinctive harmony.”5 As for specific characteristics, Tate pointed out that in Aboriginal songs “the singularly affecting characteristic of a lingering repetition of the lower key note is a notable trait in these types of aboriginal music.”6 

Tate wrote Dawn in 1922, though it was not premiered until 1926 by the University of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Dawn: An Australian Rhapsody for Full Orchestra was reviewed thusly, “the actual thematic material of DAWN is derived from the sounds of a real dawn in the bush,” and, “an intellectual reverie which attempts to express itself by means of a musical transformation of the sounds of an actual dawn in the Australian bush.”7 The piano solo Morning in the Gully makes extensive use of the bird calls that Tate had transcribed. Much like Bartok, Messian, and several others, Tate spent several years collecting bird calls and Aboriginal songs into a catalogue of more than one hundred examples and included several of them in his earlier publication, Australian Musical Resources (1917). 

The Australian Thrush is one such example of Tate composing with the bird calls he collected. The piano plays the bird call while the vocalist sings about a bird singing. While most of Tate’s music was not popular it does represent the combination of the popular parlor song and the sense of place he was trying to establish. Tate’s use of the bird calls was a more literal use rather than the distilled referential use that Edwards employs in his icons. 

Example 8. Henry Tate’s The Australian Thrush, mms. 1-10. 

Margaret Sutherland, 1896-1984, was Australia’s first successful female composer and received her earliest musical education from two of her aunts, Jessie and Julia. She went on to study piano and composition from Mona McBurney and was so successful that in her audition for the Melbourne Conservatorium she performed two of her own compositions and was offered multiple scholarships to attend. However, she did not complete her musical studies at the Conservatorium due to McBurney being fired. Sutherland decided to continue her studies privately and never returned to formal study. In 1923 she traveled to England and took private composition lessons from Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953) and performed as a pianist all across England. Bax was famously quoted as stating Sutherland’s Sonata for Violin and Piano is “the best work I know by a woman.”8 Bax even helped to get the work published with Lyre Bird Edition. After returning to Australia in 1925, Sutherland held a number of different teaching positions and ultimately returned to the Melbourne Conservatorium to teach until 1938. 

Example 9. Margaret Sutherland’s Violin Sonata, Second Movement, mms. 1-9. 

Sutherland enjoyed a certain amount of attention as a female musician due to her immense ability at the piano, similar to Clara Schumann before her, and was able to parlay that into a political activist role advocating for women musicians. “She contended that female composers had a different sensibility and aesthetic priorities from male composers, but that their contribution was no less important.”9 While the majority of her music would be categorized as chamber music, which was the typical domain of women composers and performers, she did delve into the larger genres. Around the time of the founding of the ABC, Sutherland began to write larger symphonic works to help support and promote the newly established state symphony orchestras that existed throughout Australia.10 While most of her music was not intentionally labeled Australian, she managed to help develop an Australian sound purely through the means of being an innovative native Australian composer. She worked almost exclusively in Australia and therefore eschewed the predominant European influences of the time. 

For much of her life Margaret Sutherland has been in the vanguard of composers who, in spite of the cultural youth and isolation of their country, came to terms with some of the main musical currents of the first half of this century. At a time when the transplanted European musical culture seemed in danger of stagnation, theirs was an uphill task that required not only real creative gifts, but courage, persistence and determination as well. All three Margaret Sutherland possessed in full measure.11 

The next composer to help further the establishment of an Australian sound was John Antill (1904-1986) began his career as a train designer. While he was working for the railroad he began composing operas and ultimately left the railroad to take organ lessons, first privately and then at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music. Soon after entering school, he began conducting, playing violin and bass clarinet in the orchestra, and singing in the university choir. After finishing school Antill became involved in the short-lived Williamson Imperial Grand Opera in Sydney. However, it was Antill’s work with the ABC that held the most influence.12

Antill began working for the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) in one capacity or another in 1936. Initially as the assistant to the federal music editor and later working his way up to music editor for the entire ABC from 1950-1969. It was through his work at the ABC that Antill, “was responsible for selecting compositions, and for encouraging Australian composers and promoting their work.”13 While he accepted a few commissions from the ABC for his own compositions he never used his position at the ABC in any inappropriate or unfair way. And, even though he helped to encourage and promote Australian composers, Antill still retained his conservative leanings when it came to programming. Therefore, this created a bit of a dichotomy between his interest in new music and, “contributing to Australia’s isolation from contemporary musical developments overseas.”14 

 

John Antill’s most famous composition, Corroboree (1946), is also considered the first and most important work to truly be identified as Australian.15 Antill embraced the notion of incorporating Aboriginal culture into Western classical music to create a unique compositional voice. Corroborree, written in 1946, was “originally […] an orchestral suite, but he also envisaged its performance as a ballet based on the theme of tribal initiation.”16 Often compared to Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, Corroborree is, “rhythmically vigorous and vital, and emphasises not melodic interest and motivic development, but atmosphere and colour, so that the piece can still be regarded as ‘a remote yet sincere homage to Aboriginal culture’.”17 

The work [Corroborree] is primarily isometric and isorhythmic, the use of ‘clapping sticks’ adding to the apparent authenticity of the metric and rhythmic structure. The melodic patterns too, which are mostly pentatonic, suggest something of the nature of Aboriginal music in the tumbling descents. The drone-like ostinato are punctuated by orchestral shrieks and bird calls, another authentic note.18

The clapping sticks, or claves, demonstrates another link between the Australian composers discussed, Hill’s Symphony No 1, Antill’s Corroborree, and Edwards Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra. All three of these works use the claves prominently to indicate new sections in the music and provide energy to a sparse orchestral texture. 

Example 10. John Antill’s Corroborree, Welcome Ceremony, mms.1-18. 

The term corroborree is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as an Australian Aboriginal dance ceremony that may take the form of a sacred ritual or an informal gathering.19 This is yet another parallel between Stravinsky and Antill’s compositions. However, Antill’s work was premiered not as the full ballet but as a four part suite conducted by Antill himself and performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in a non-public performance in 1946. However, shortly thereafter Sir Eugene Goossens, the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, took the suite on tour throughout Australia to help raise funds to send Antill to England where he could, “study orchestral and balance techniques with the British Broadcasting Company.”20 

 

[A] composer responsible for a brilliant restatement of Australian Aboriginal culture in Western terms, and the first to inform a broad public that Australian composers did exist. 

All these labels possess some truth, but no single one can hope to embrace the composer’s total achievement. Corroborree is undoubtedly the work which brought his name to an Australian and overseas public. It seemed at the time to be a musical catalyst releasing new forces and possibilities in relation to a recognizably Australian school of composition, to the extent that contemporary Australian music can be claimed to date from this score.21 

Even with the success of Corroboree, Antill still managed to stay relatively out of the spotlight working mostly behind the scenes at the ABC. His later compositions never achieved the same level of popularity that he was able to achieve with Corroborree. In addition, it is important to keep in mind that his major influences outside of Aboriginal culture were Stravinsky, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and Holst; composers who were already considered an older generation when Antill was writing.22 After all, La Sacre du Printemps was premiered forty-two years prior to Antill writing Corroborree.

The concept of Australianism in music in the twentieth century cannot be discussed without eventually coming to Peter Sculthorpe. Sculthorpe, born in 1929 in Tasmania and died in 2014 in Sydney, became the leading voice in Australian music by the early 1950s with his Sonatina for Piano (1954) and Irkanda I for violin alone (1955). Sculthorpe, like so many of the composers previously mentioned, decided that a way to create a unique Australian voice was to draw heavily upon the natural resources that Henry Tate suggested at the beginning of the twentieth century, “almost all his works are influenced by the social climate and physical characteristics of Australia. Furthermore, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island music, and the gamelan music of Indonesia, have been significant influences upon his musical language.”23 Having received his music education from Launceston Church Grammar School, University of Melbourne, and Wadham College (Oxford) in England, he quickly became an instructor in 1964 at the University of Sydney.24 It is through his teaching in Sydney that he has influenced a whole generation of composers who are currently active, including Ross Edwards. 

Sculthorpe commented on his music: “to think, then, in terms of what is appropriate…to Australia. This quickly led me to our indigenous music, a music that has grown from, is a part of our landscape. Thus, as a young composer, and a composer is concerned with sound, I began to wonder about the kind of sounds that might be appropriate.”25 The word irkanda in Australian Aborigine means a remote and lonely place.26 The use of this term as the title for what would become a series of Irkanda pieces not only highlights how Sculthorpe was influenced by Aboriginal culture but also literally describes the music. The use of Aborigine words and phrases is yet another choice Edwards and Sculthorpe share. 

The Irkanda series is mostly dominated by an austere soundscape with a sense of vastness that allows for not only drones but substantial periods of silence.27 Also, Sculthorpe created a list of compositional elements that he tried to incorporate in his music to maintain and promote an Australian-ness. 

i) monotonous repetition of a fundamental measure (as defined in Aboriginal music by the didjeridu): 

ii) clapping stick rhythms; 

iii) distinct vocal phrases (rather than purely instrumental effects in his predominantly instrumental music); and 

iv) the use of a constant tonal centre.28 

Example 11. Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda I, mms. 1-18. 

By following these self-imposed rules Sculthorpe was able to create a very distinct, personal sound, that many of his students emulated. He also identified the markers in his music, on a broader level, that helped him to create his Australianism, 

i) a connection with Aboriginal culture;

ii) programmatic associations;

iii) exploitation of instrumental colour;

iv) distinctive intervals of minor seconds and thirds, in melodic constructions usually descending; the vertical minor second is often inverted or transposed an octave to give major sevenths and minor ninths;

v) symmetrical melodic shapes and phrase patterns; and 

vi) large-scale repetition of material, with small-detail additions and subtractions29 

Peter Sculthorpe may be the most important Australian composer of the mid-twentieth century, due to both his compositional output and his influence on the next generation of composers. 

While the composer is admittedly a product of his environment, Sculthorpe has perhaps defined the national complexion of Australian music with his personal style, rather than allowing the national culture to define his style. In other words, that Sculthorpe is Australianism, in the same way that Sibelius has come to be the characteristic sound of Finnish music.30 

As one of Sculthorpe’s most important students, and possibly his closest ally in compositional processes and influences, Ross Edwards embraces nearly all of Sculthorpe’s self-imposed composition rules. Jeanell Carrigan posits that Sculthorpe and Edwards both worked from a similar musical language and training.31 Both composers felt the need to depict the environment of the Australian landscape.32 By attempting to depict the Australian natural environment both Sculthorpe and Edwards are fulfilling Henry Tate’s recommendation of using bird and insect sounds to help establish a uniquely distinct Australian voice. 

Organizations 

The first national involvement in the musical life of Australians happened with the founding of the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) in 1932. The ABC has long been accused of stunting the growth and experimentation of Australian composers, because “this organization tended to foster conservatism and inhibit or ignore avant-garde activities through its funding and broadcasting policies and practices.”33 In fact, the accusation of the ABC causing the delayed development of a national sound can be seen by dates of performances of major works by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. “For example, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, Mahler, Bruckner, Vaughan Williams, and Hindemith were given first Australian performances only in the period 1946-53, when Eugene Goossens conducted the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.”34 Also, “music education was so far behind that students in the late 1940s at the Melbourne Conservatorium learnt serialism only by sending overseas for texts, through which they worked with no guidance.”35

The establishment of “Australianism” was also occurring in other art forms, most commonly in literature. The Jindyworobak Club, established in 1937, was formed by a group of poets stating, “its challenge to a better understanding of the Australian environment is a challenge to all Australians to create a living and unique Australia.”36 This group decided on this Aboriginal name because the Aborigine definition is to join or to annex. The group chose this word intentionally because they wanted to, “represent an annexing of all that is beautiful and true in the Australian background, and the joining to it all that is good and applicable in our English cultural heritage,” truly attempting to combine the two cultures to create an unique, distinct Australian voice.37 

Along with the foundation of the ABC, another major non-musical development has also had a profound impact on the Australian music culture. The Sydney Opera House has, since its difficult construction, come to represent Australia and the music scene more so than any thing else. The close association that Australia, and particularly Sydney, has with the building itself can be compared to that of the La Scala Opera House to Milan, Italy. 

The Sydney Opera House has an interesting and complicated history, even in its short life span. Beginning as a suggestion by Goossens back in the late 1940s, the New South Wales government held an open competition in 1956 for architects from all around the world to create a design for the new opera house. The structure was to be constructed in the Sydney Harbour on display directly beside the other famous structure, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The winning design was submitted by Jørn Utzon, a little known Danish architect.38 The original sketches Utzon submitted were little more than pencil sketches with no further information about the buildings materials or construction. But the design was so striking that the committee chose Utzon without any further information or application requirements. Utzon’s design was based on that of a shell that has been slightly disassembled. Utzon’s idea was that every exterior part of the building can be reassembled to create a nautilus shell.39 This shell design also fit perfectly with the placement of the opera house as it sits on a man-made peninsula extending into the Sydney Harbour.

The construction of the Sydney Opera House has been a topic of many documentaries and books and is a fascinating case of ingenuity in construction. The exterior of the building is, in fact, comprised of not a larger outer shell, but hundreds of individual concrete ribs that are positioned beside one another to create the curved surface. The construction took sixteen years to complete and several times the original budget.40 When the construction was finally completed in 1973 it was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II and a series of concerts was dedicated to the performance of Australian music. Currently the opera house contains several performance spaces, including the main stage for operas as well as the main hall for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. There are also several smaller theaters used for plays and chamber concerts. 

Not only did the Sydney Opera House provide the city of Sydney with a beautiful and unique location for both the Opera and Symphony Orchestra to perform, but also a physical symbol of how the city and state feels about their musical and arts culture. Along with a concert series to promote Australian composers and performers, the Sydney Theater Company resides in one of the halls and the ABC manages and broadcasts nearly all of the concerts given throughout the season. The Sydney Opera House has not only provided a beautiful location for all of these performances but also inspiration for everyone who visits or performs there. 

Conclusion 

The earlier connection to place that was developed by musical training becoming available domestically began to evolve into a unique Australian voice. The Australian musical ideals began to coalesce around the unique influences in and around Australia to develop an Australian musical voice promoted by several composers, Henry Tate, the ‘middle generation’ composers, and Peter Sculthorpe. The Australian arts culture was promoted by Australian music and musicians through the work of the ABC, Jindyworobak Club, and the Sydney Opera House. The composers that have followed Sculthorpe have continued to expand the ideal of what it means to sound Australian.

1 Henry Tate, Australian Musical Possibilities, (Melbourne: E.A. Vilder, 1924), 11.

2 Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967), 6.

3 Tate, 11-13.

4 John Carmody, “Tate, Henry (1873-1926),” Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), 12.

5 Tate, 24-26.

6 Tate, 34. The concept of repetition of a lower key-note will be used when discussing the individual works in Chapter 5.

7 Tate, 55.

8 David Symons, “Sutherland, Margaret (1896-1984), ”Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2012), 18.

9 Symons, 18.

10 This includes the Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, Western and South Australia Symphony Orchestras.

11 Frank Callaway and David Tunley, eds., Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century (Melbourne: Oxford, 1978), 34.

12 Harold Hort, “Antill, John (1904-1986), ”Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 17.

13 Hort, 17.

14 Callaway, 46-47.

15 Callaway, 47.

16 Callaway, 47.

17 Shaw, 15.

18 Jennifer Isaacs, ed., Australian Aboriginal Music (Sydney: Aborignial Artists Agency, 1979), 52.

19 John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, eds., Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v. “Corroborree.”

20 Hort, 17.

21 Callaway, 49.

22 Covell, 154.

23 Australian Music Centre, “Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014): Represented Artist,” http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/artist/sculthorpe-peter (accessed July 11, 2013).

24 Peter Sculthorpe, “Brief Biographies & Profiles,” http://www.peterschulthorpe.com.au/biography.htm (accessed July 13, 2013).

25 David Hush, ‘Interview with Peter Schulthorpe’, Quadrant, Vol. 23 (December 1979), 32.

26 Covell 201-202.

27 The Irkanda series is comprised of Irkanda I for violin alone (1955), Irkanda II for string quartet (1959), Irkanda III for piano trio (1961), and Irkanda IV (1961).

28 Michael Hannan, Peter Sculthorpe: his music and ideas, 1929-79 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982), 179.

29 Peter Sculthorpe, “Sculthorpe on Sculthorpe,” Music Now 1 (February 1969), 9-10.

30 Callaway, 5.

31 Jeanell Carrigan is the author of “Towards an Australian Style: On the Relationship between the Australian Landscapes and Natural Environment and the Music of Peter Sculthopre and Ross Edwards”.

32 Jeanell Carrigan, “Towards an Australian Style: On the Relationship between the Australian Landscape and Natural Environment and the Music of Peter Sculthorpe and Ross Edwards” (D.M.A. thesis, University of Queensland, 1994), 54-55.

33 Patricia Shaw, The Development of a National Identity in Australian Contemporary Music, B. Mus, (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1988), 8.

34 Shaw, 8.

35 Shaw, 8-9.

36 Gifford, Kenneth H. Jindyworobak: Towards an Australian Culture. (Jindyworobak Publications: Melbourne, 1944), Introduction, no page number.

37 Gifford, Introduction.

38 Covell, 258. 

39 Sydney Opera House, “Sydney Opera History 1954-1958,” http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/about/house_history/1954_1958.aspx (accessed August 2, 2013).

40 In fact, construction was such a problem that in 1966 Utzon was fired from the project by the NSW government and a new team of architects and construction project managers were brought in to complete the building. Peter Hall, Lionel Todd, David Littlemore, and Ted Farmer were the four men brought in to complete the project.