An analytical survey of the music of Peter Sculthorpe.

An analytical survey of the music of Carl Vine.

Australia offers tremendous scope for understanding the relationship between music, spirituality and landscape. This major, generously-illustrated new volume examines, in fifteen chapters, some of the ways in which composers and performers have attempted to convey a sense of the Australian landscape through musical means. The book embraces the different approaches of ethnomusicology, gender studies, musical analysis, performance studies and cultural history. Ranging across the country, from remote parts of the Northern Territory to the bustling east coast cities, from Tasmanian wilderness to tropical Queensland, the book includes references to art and literature as well as music. Issues of national identity, belonging and aboriginalization are an integral part of the book, with indigenous responses to place examined alongside music from the western orchestral, chamber and choral repertories. The book provides valuable insight into a wide range of music inspired by Australia, from the Yanyuwa people to Jewish communities in Victoria; from Peter Sculthorpe's opera Quiros to the work of European expats living in Australia before the Second World War; from historic Ealing film scores to contemporary sound installations. The work of many significant composers is discussed in detail, among them Ross Edwards, Barry Conyngham, David Lumsdaine, Anne Boyd and Fritz Hart. Throughout the book there is a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of the music inspired by the sights and sounds of the Australian landscape.

Described on its first publication in 1967 as “a scholarly account of Australian music that is also entertaining social history”, Roger Covell’s Austrlaia’s Music: Themes of a New Society has become a classic of Australian music history for its beautifully written explorations of almost two hundred years of music-making across classical, Indigenous and Anglo-Celtic traditions. This revised edition, including more than sixty musical examples, is supplemented by a new postscript written by the author.

Minimalism, savagery, the raw and the cooked, the primal and the pre-verbal, Elvis’s hips, The Rite of Spring . . . Earth Dances is an original investigation of how music and primitivism intersect – a dazzling journey through music and culture. With alternating chapters of criticism and interviews, including with Liza Lim and Brian Eno, composer and broadcaster Andrew Ford explores the relationship between primal forms of music and the most refined examples of the art – between passion and control. He looks at the voice, the drum, the drone and the dance, at ‘music that is in touch with something fundamental in our existence, music that seeks and rediscovers the earthy side of our nature, the primitive, the “simple, rude or rough”, and in doing so restores and resets our humanity’. ‘The perfect, knowledgeable, enthusiastic friend . . . I couldn’t put it down!’ —David Robertson ‘Much has been made of the search for the lost chord. But chords are sophisticated structures. Earth Dances documents Andrew Ford’s intrepid quest for the lost thud, and the lost scream . . . Music can’t survive without primitivism. It is the bushfire clearing overgrown and cluttered musical landscapes, paring them to essentials. This results in fresh structures, materials and practices that lead us to the place we belong.’ —Brian Ritchie, Violent Femmes, MONA FOMA ‘Earth Dances is a vivid and rarely less than astute history of the debt modern music simultaneously owes to the inheritances of tradition, and the texture of dissonance.’ —Kill Your Darlings ‘Filled with insightful musical analysis made accessible for a general audience.’ —Sydney Morning Herald

Sculthorpe is one of Australia's most prominent composers and is among the most important composers on the international scene. Although he is a distinguished academic and popular lecturer, Sculthorpe does not fit any ready-made category of composer or teacher. In a body of work that so far includes orchestral and chamber music in many genres and mediums, opera and other theater music, songs and choral music, and music for documentary and commercial films, radio, and television, he has established a personal musical style and public presence that have shaped the history of 20th-century music in Australia and the world. Owing to circumstances of place and time--Australia in the 20th century--he has been defining, or redefining, the role of composer for himself and his audiences. This book is a record of Sculthorpe's work and of its reception by composer colleagues, performers, critics, and audiences.

Drawing on newly available archival material, key works, and correspondence of the era, Australian Music and Modernism defines "Australian Music" as an idea that emerged through the lens of the modernist discourse of the 1960s and 70s. At the same time that the new "Australian Music" was distinctive of the nation, it was also thoroughly connected to practices from Europe and shaped by a new engagement with the music of Southeast Asia. This book examines the intersection of nationalism and modernism at this formative time. During the early stages of "Australian Music" there was disagreement about what the idea itself ought to represent and, indeed, whether the idea ought to apply at all. Michael Hooper considers various perspectives offered by such composers as Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale, and Nigel Butterley and analyzes some of the era's significant works to articulate a complex understanding of "Australian Music" at its inception.