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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), Pet...
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 ge...
Entrenched until recently in Western aesthetics, Australian composers are now developing a functional cultural identity expressed through a distinctly nationalistic musical idiom. Its ongoing formation, inspired by Australias Aboriginal heritage and unique natural environment, seeks to distance the nations artistic developments from the geographically remote Occidental regions and emphasize its native cultures. Presently, however, mounting sociopolitical and ethical concerns surrounding the cultural borrowing between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are problematizing the developing nationalistic idiom, as composers must determine whether the two groups share any legitimate connection b...
Peter Sculthorpe, who died in 2014, remains Australia’s best-known composer and is widely held to be the most important creative musical spirit the country has produced. Beautifully written and fastidiously researched, this authorised biography provides an insight into Sculthorpe’s formation years: his quest for personal voice, and his arrival – through many creative friendships and collaborations – at a place in the collective heart of the nation. It charts the realisation of a youthful vocation to become not merely a composer, but an Australian composer. Graeme Skinner’s biography is also a social history, examining Sculthorpe’s unique role in the creation of Australian musical modernism in the 1960s – an important era in Australia’s cultural evolution.
Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond represents the first interdisciplinary volume of chapters on an intricate cultural field that can be experienced and interpreted in manifold ways, whether in Ireland (The Republic of Ireland and/or Northern Ireland), among its diaspora(s), or further afield. While each contributor addresses particular themes viewed from discrete perspectives, collectively the book contemplates whether ’music in Ireland’ can be regarded as one interrelated plane of cultural and/or national identity, given the various conceptions and contexts of both Ireland (geographical, political, diasporic, mythical) and Music (including a proliferation of practices and genres) ...
Australia’s Jindyworobak Composers examines the music of a historically and artistically significant group of Australian composers active during the later post-colonial period (1930s–c. 1960). These composers sought to establish a uniquely Australian identity through the evocation of the country’s landscape and environment, including notably the use of Aboriginal elements or imagery in their music, texts, dramatic scenarios or ‘programmes’. Nevertheless, it must be observed that this word was originally adopted as a manifesto for an Australian literary movement, and was, for the most part, only retrospectively applied by commentators (rather than the composers themselves) to art mu...
John Antill (1904-1986) was one of the foremost composers of Australia's post-colonial period. Although a relatively prolific and much esteemed composer in Australia, Antill's wider reputation is sustained chiefly by his famous ballet Corroboree - a work which was perceived to bring an authentic Australian musical style before both a national and international audience for the first time. Through Sir Eugene Goossens' championship, the work was heard by enthusiastic audiences in Australia, Britain, Europe and the USA, and was, for many years, the best-known work of any Australian-born and resident composer. Indeed it has remained, for both Australian and overseas audiences, an Australian musi...
"Using first-hand accounts, including contemporary correspondence, articles and interviews, this account of Walton's life also draws on material newly available relating to his friends and associates. The reception of Facade and Walton's work in both films and radio are fully explored."--BOOK JACKET.
This long-awaited study of the life and music of Anglo-Irish composer Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950) finally provides a full biography of the last senior figure in early twentieth-century British Music to have been without one. Although Moeran's work was widely performed during his lifetime, he suffered neglect in the years following his death. It was not until a re-awakening of appreciation for the music of the folksong-inspired English pastoralism in the latter part of the twentieth century that Moeran's tuneful, well-crafted and approachable music began to attract a new audience. However, widely accepted misconceptions about his life and character have obscured a clearunderstanding of both man and composer. Written with the benefit of access to previously unknown or unresearched archives, Ernest John Moeran: His Life and Music strips away a hitherto unchallenged mythological framework, and replaces it by a thorough-going examination and analysis of the life and work of a musician that may reasonably be asserted as having been unique in British music history.
"To the economist and ballet enthusiast John Maynard Keynes he was potentially the most brilliant man he'd ever met; to Dame Ninette de Valois he was the greatest ballet conductor and advisor this country has ever had; to the composer Denis ApIvor he was the greatest, mostr lovable, and most entertaining personality of the musical world; whilst to the dance critic Clement Crisp he was quite simply a musician of genius. Yet sixty years after his ... death Constant Lambert is little known today. As a composer he is remembered for his jazz-inspired The Rio Grande but little more, and for a man who ... devoted the graeter part of his life to the establishment of English ballet his work is largely unrecognized today. [This book] looks not only at his music but at his journalism, his talks for the BBC, his championing of jazz (in particular, Duke Ellington), and, more privately - his longstanding affair with Margot Fonteyn. ..."--Book jacket.