Brilliant, provocative, compassionate—the composer Malcolm Williamson was one of Australia’s most famous expatriates. As Carolyn Philpott explains, his nostalgia for his homeland lasted fifty years, from his emigration in 1953 until his death in 2003. In works such as the ballet The Display, Symphony no. 6 and The Dawn Is at Hand, he explored inventive ways of expressing his Australian identity, collaborating with Australian artists, paying homage to Australian musicians and exposing his sorrow for the treatment of Indigenous peoples. As the first book-length examination of Williamson’s music, Composing Australia is a portrait of an intriguing and always imaginative Australian.

The Symphony remained a major orchestral form in Australia between 1960 and 2020, with a body of diverse and interesting symphonies produced during the 1960s and 1970s that defied the widespread modernist trends of serialism, electronic music and indeterminism that seemed harbingers of the symphony’s demise. From the late 1970s onwards, many Australian composers chose to work in styles that admitted modal and tonal melodic and harmonic elements with regular pulse. Major cycles of symphonies by Carl Vine, Brenton Broadstock and Ross Edwards began to appear in the late 1980s. Other prolific symphonists like Paul Paviour (10 symphonies), David Morgan (15 symphonies), Philip Bracanin (11), Peter Tahourdin (5), John Polglase (5) and many others demonstrated a revived interest in the form. This trend continued into the first two decades of the present century with symphonies by Matthew Hindson, Katy Abbott, Stuart Greenbaum, Andrew Schultz, Mark Isaacs and Gordon Kerry. This renewed interest in the symphony reflects similar trends in Britain and the United States. Rhoderick McNeill provides a comprehensive introduction to this large body of music with the aim of making the music and its composers known to concert- goers, music educators and students, conductors and music entrepreneurs.

Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, this book identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world. Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved, it demonstrates how it gives tangibility to the values that underpin different communities.

Songs of the Finnish Migration presents music and lyrics for more than eighty Finnish-language immigrant songs, alongside singable English translations and detailed notes on migration history and music in the New World. These songs provide a vivid and imaginative portrayal of momentous migration that forever changed Finnish and Finnish American society.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

The symphony retained its primacy as the most prestigious large-scale orchestral form throughout the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in Britain, Russia and the United States. Likewise, Australian composers produced a steady stream of symphonies throughout the period from Federation (1901) through to the end of the 1950s. Stylistically, these works ranged from essays in late nineteenth-century romanticism, twentieth-century nationalism, neo-classicism and near-atonality. Australian symphonies were most prolific during the 1950s, with 36 local entries in the 1951 Commonwealth Jubilee Symphony competition. This extensive repertoire was overshadowed by the emergence of a new generation of composers and critics during the 1960s who tended to regard older Australian music as old-fashioned and derivative. The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960 is the first study of this neglected genre and has four aims: firstly, to show the development of symphonic composition in Australia from Federation to 1960; secondly, to highlight the achievement of the main composers who wrote symphonies; thirdly, to advocate the restoration and revival of this repertory; and, lastly, to take a step towards a recasting of the narrative of Australian concert music from Federation to the present. In particular, symphonies by Marshall-Hall, Hart, Bainton, Hughes, Le Gallienne and Morgan emerge as works of particular note.