AUSTRALASIAN
MUSIC
RESEARCH
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contents |
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editorial |
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CSAM |
Abstracts
Thérèse Radic
Federation: Music in Service to National Ambition
Two major ceremonial events marked the birth of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901: its inauguration in Centennial Park in Sydney on 1 January presided over by the Crown-appointed first Governor-General, the Earl of Hopetoun, and the opening of the first Federal Parliament in Melbourne's Exhibition Building on 9 May by the Duke of Cornwall and York, Heir Apparent to the British throne. Music was central, not only to the official business on these two dates, but also to the events programmes that surrounded them. This article examines the music utilised at each event, as reflected in the mainstream press in both cities.
John Whiteoak
Popular Music, Militarism, Women, and the Early 'Brass Band' in Australia
Australian musicologists have tended to shun the study of brass banding as being somehow too lowbrow or prosaic for consideration. For many popular music studies scholars, this conservative and notation-bound tradition appears to have little in common with the mass mediated, youth oriented 'popular music' they mostly study. Yet, until the 1920s jazz age, all-brass and mixed brass and reed band music was, in fact, mainstream popular music. This article explores the nature of this early 'popularity' including its relationship to the popularity of militarism. It also examines the militaristic and ultra-masculine meanings that became deeply encoded in brass banding and how these played a role in the exclusion of women from both active brass banding and the most prestigious field of professional popular music-making of the interwar period: the palais orchestra.
Adrian Thomas
Linda Phillips: Composer, Performer, Critic and Adjudicator - A Centenary Retrospective
Linda Phillips, who was born in Melbourne and has lived most of her life there, celebrated her one-hundredth birthday on 8 June 1999. As a composer of chamber music and songs, she was active during the 1930s and 1940s and into the 1950s, when she was well known for her regular broadcasts over ABC radio, usually with herself as pianist. During 1949-76 she was music critic for the Melbourne Sun and adjudicator for the Sun Aria. Beginning with a brief biography, this retrospective of her life outlines her achievements as a musician/critic and provides an insight into the difficulties she faced in a climate of dismissive and unsupportive attitudes towards Australian composers, and female music critics.
Linda Kouvaras
The Semiotic and the Symbolic in Music in Two Sweets-smearing Scenes
An analysis of and comparison between the film Life is Sweet, directed and written by Mike Leigh (1990), and the one-act chamber opera Sweet Death (1991) by Andrée Greenwell to a libretto by Abé Pogos. In each work is a young woman of around twenty years with a severe eating disorder. Both women are also extremely concerned to defy their mothers, who contribute significantly (if unwittingly) to the etiology of the heroines' disorders. Music is deployed by each work to explore this etiology and also the young women's quest for identity. This article examines both music and plot through Kristeva's Semiotic and Symbolic Orders.
Malcolm Gillies
Doreen Bridges on the History, Education and Future of Music
Doreen Bridges is one of Australia's leading music educators. Born in Adelaide in 1918, she graduated with a Bachelor of Music from the University of Adelaide in 1941. Over the following half century Bridges taught music at all levels from kindergarten to postgraduate, and served on numerous national and international music education and research commissions. In 1970 she completed the first Australian PhD in music edu-cation, and later served as a Senior Lecturer at the Nursery School Teachers' College in Sydney, and then as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the NSW State Conservatorium. A collection of Bridges's writings on musicianship, music pedagogy and early-childhood musical development was produced in the ASME Monograph Series of the Australian Society for Music Education in 1992, under the editorship of Martin Comte.
Frank Van Straten
The Riddle of 'FFF,' A Forgotten Australian Musical Comedy
FFF, an early Australian musical comedy, was created by Clement John De Garis, better known as a pioneer of the Mildura dried fruits industry. The music was by Melbourne composer Reginald A.A. Stoneham. Produced by the Tivoli Circuit, FFF had its world premiere in Adelaide in 1920. It subsequently played in Perth and Melbourne. It was never restaged, though several of its songs were recorded and remained popular for a few years. Following FFF, Stoneham continued to produce songs; he also worked in radio in Adelaide and Melbourne. After a series of financial and personal crises, De Garis committed suicide in 1926.
Christopher Wainwright
'Terra Incognita,' The Unknown Australian Harpsichord: A Provisional Listing of Australian Solo Harpsichord Music with Brief Chronological Commentary on Selected Works
This is a study in progress of Australian solo harpsichord music. Missing manuscripts and manuscripts that have been incorrectly catalogued or have yet to be discovered, complicate its bibliographic history. The first known Australian solo harpsichord compositions are Margaret Sutherland's works Sonatina for Piano or Harpsichord and [Three] Pieces for Cembalo of circa 1938. It took thirty more years for the harpsichord to be used on a semi-frequent basis as a compositional medium, many works being written for a particular performer - a distinctive feature of this repertoire. Since a late re-birth in the 1960s, over fifty works have been composed.
Joel Crotty
Australian Music Studies 1998-2001
This is not a comprehensive survey of monographs about, and score editions of, Australian music for the period under review. Rather it aims to highlight the breadth of the published word in the areas of art music, jazz and popular music. The scope is impressive in terms of biography and social analysis but there exists, if not a lacunae, certainly a lack of penetrating traditional notation analysis.
Authorised by: Dean, Music Faculty
Maintained by: S.Cole - Email: s.cole@music.unimelb.edu.au