The Soundscapes of Australia

Music, Place and Spirituality

Fiona Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780754640721
• eBook ISBN: 9781351218160
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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.

Chapter 1
Landscape, Spirit and Music

An Australian Story

Anne Boyd

In his book investigating the concept of ‘belonging’, Australian writer Peter Read quotes the words of poet Judith Wright (1915–2000):

These two strands – the love of the land we have invaded, and the guilt of the invasion – have become a part of me. It is a haunted country … It was not ‘wilderness’ to the people who lived by it and through it, but the source of their very life and spirit; and to those of them who somehow survived our invasion, it remains so. And for us, too, it can be a place where we find some kind of rest, joy and even forgiveness (Wright in Read, 2000: 14).

Similar strands can be found within the music of living Australian composers Ross Edwards (b. 1943), Peter Sculthorpe (b. 1929), David Lumsdaine (b. 1931) and Aboriginal songman, the late Tommy Barrtjap (Barandjak) (b. ?1931–91), examples of the numbers of Australians whose music reflects not only their individual responses to landscape but, sung in very different voices, articulates a vibrant relationship with the essence of country. Each loves this land, is acutely sensitive, in different ways, to the issues surrounding white ‘invasion’ and each looks to the Australian earth as a source of life and spirit (inspiration), rest and joy. While Judith Wright in her poetry shows eloquently how the ‘earth-sky-water-tree-spirit-human continuum’ (see Tacey, 1995: 148), summarized in the inadequate word ‘landscape’, exists as a basis for the spiritual relationship of human kind to the unique Australian environment, it is the composers who sing the inspirited land into the present – ‘a haunted country’ but not a ‘wilderness’.

The process of establishing a sense of belonging and identity in Australian culture has been investigated by Read, David Tacey (particularly in Edge of the Sacred and ReEnchantment) and within John Cameron’s collection of essays, Changing Places (2003), mostly through an examination of literature, and to a lesser extent painting, but music has been largely ignored, something this book endeavours to begin to put to rights. For in music, while it is difficult to talk about, especially in terms an intelligent layman might understand, the process of articulating cultural identity, of bonding with the earth and with each other, is perhaps at its most elemental and therefore possibly at its most powerful.

I have written elsewhere (Boyd, 2001) of music’s special capacity to tap into what Tacey calls ‘earth language’, described by him as ‘the main language of Australia’ (2000: 96), and its potential to give form to the feelings which arise in the deep world of the psyche. Defined in Jungian terms, this deep world of the psyche, Tacey points out, ‘is really “nature” inside us’ and ‘directly influenced by the forces of nature ‘outside’ us’. He goes on to say: ‘In Australia, where land and aboriginality are fused, this means that white Australians, virtually in spite of themselves, are becoming slowly aboriginalized in their unconscious’ (Tacey, 1995: 135). This is also the view of Germaine Greer, who believes that Australia’s future as a healthy nation, rather than being trapped in ‘a strange nightmare of alienation’, depends upon its becoming Aboriginal (in Ellinsen, 2001). While this notion of ‘aboriginalization’ may be contentious, and even resented by some, evidence of music’s power in conveying the spiritual is everywhere around us. An example can be found in the description by Peter Read of his chance encounter with Ross Edwards’s Dawn Mantras (1999) while taking the long flight across Australia from Melbourne to Perth:

I wake to find the in-flight film nothing but explosions and car chases. Turning to see if the ‘concert hall’ channel is worth listening to, I am enraptured by the sustained boom of the didgeridoo forming a slow drone bass, a long insistent phrase built on a deep rhythm. It’s a bit like the beginning of the Ring Cycle, where the basses are the deep currents of the Rhine from which the Rhine maidens emerge; but this rhythm is different, it is more secure, it is of our own continent. It neither swells nor falls. Surely this bass has been there from the beginning. Enter the tenor instruments, cor anglais, and – what’s that plaintive mid-register? The Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi … The instruments catch and repeat the phrase, they intertwine, frolic solemnly, touch and interdrift like clouds, float apart on the landscape, sustained by the didgeridoo ground bass, at once geographical and musical, not quite meditating, nor ritual dancing, not laughing, not mourning, like movement of airs, or themes, or histories, or spirit forces. Enter the human, first the collective voice, the choir; now the individual, the child soprano, leaps and soars. This is no longer music, it is spiritual Australia (Read, 2003: 226).

Dawn Mantras was commissioned for the millennial telecast, first performed from the sails of the Sydney Opera House in the grey dawning of 1 January 2000. Australia’s greeting to the world, it was heard by an audience estimated in the billions. Written for shakuhachi, alto saxophone, two percussion (playing six crotales and two Burmese gongs), child soprano soloist, children’s choir, men’s choir and didjeridu, the ensemble reflects contemporary Australia’s multiculturalism, while the use of children’s voices gives expression to its youthfulness. The choice of shakuhachi and tuned percussion relates to Australia’s Asian neighbours. The text of the work, too, draws upon words in Japanese and Indonesian, acknowledging Australia’s geographical position within Asia.

The droned character of the music has a special significance in Edwards’s musical language: a stylistic crisis in the mid-70s led him to reject European modernism in favour of the development of a musical language based upon his acutely sensitive listening to Australian bush sounds – to frogs, insects and birds. In his own words:

I clearly recall the moment when I found myself questioning the validity of this course of self-destruction and at the same time that of accredited post-war European art music. What, ultimately, was the point of all those neurotic convulsions so meticulously ordered? Did they do anybody any good or were they just self-indulgent?

So ended my angry young man phase (Edwards, 1992a: 25).

Describing the natural environment of the bushland on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where he settled in the coastal village of Pearl Beach with his young wife Helen in the mid-70s, Edwards writes:

The summer days were swathed in the drones of cicadas with their mysteriously abrupt starts and stops and, at evening, the insects would start up. I was entranced by the insect chorus because it seemed to be on the verge of conveying some profound message which was ultimately elusive. All the temporal relationships in my music – the relative lengths of phrases and sections – are influenced by these ancient voices, whose near-symmetries and inconsistently varied repetitions often seem close to our inherited musical syntax. I don’t doubt that, over the millennia, such voices have generated much of the world’s music and it’s not hard to detect their presence in various surviving folk and religious traditions (Edwards, 1999a).

And:

During this time my only serious listening was done sitting in the bush, listening more carefully than most of us get a chance to do to the natural sounds. It helped me come to terms with the fact that all of the world’s music must have originated, in some way from the sounds of nature… And later, when I started writing again, it was especially the insect patterns and rhythms I’d heard that helped me (Edwards, 1992b: 40–42).

Since this stylistic crisis Ross Edwards’s musical output has fallen into two basic styles: his slow and ritualistic ‘sacred’ compositions of which Yarrageh-Nocturne for Percussion and Orchestra (1989) is a superb example (Yarrageh being an Aboriginal word meaning ‘the spirit of spring’), and his lively, rhythmic, dance-chant maninya style spawned in works such as Laikan (1979) and fully developed in his much played Maninyas Violin Concerto (1988). The special characteristics of these styles have been discussed by Hannan (1986, 1990), Powells (1988) and Stanhope (1994). The works of the 90s show a gradual merging of these two styles, a development which has been extensively examined by Philip Cooney (2002).

Ex. 1.1 Ross Edwards, Dawn Mantras, opening, 1999 (ABC Publications)

Dawn Mantras is a natural outgrowth of Edwards’s ‘sacred style’ and might be understood as a product of a musical collective unconscious, which is why it sounds so very old, reflecting and contributing to Tacey’s concept of an Australian ‘earth language’. Ex. 1.1 above shows the work’s opening.

A pitch analysis of this example shows the material to be modally conceived, based upon a droned C in the didjeridu: this low resonant C sounds from beginning to end, forming a meditative framework from which the rest of the fabric of the composition draws its significance. This droned characteristic reflects the Australian bush insect chorus to which Edwards listens so attentively. In a mythical and mystical sense the drone acts in the work as the creative presence of God. The use of the Aboriginal wooden trumpet is especially significant for two reasons: first, the sound of the didjeridu, in the minds of most listeners, evokes the sacred feeling of Australian landscape – its vastness, its monotony (note monotone), its brooding grandeur, its static, eternal time-feel; second, this is a special acknowledgement by Edwards of Aboriginal precedent – far from an act of appropriation this is a very public and subtle gesture towards genuine reconciliation and healing.

Dawn Mantras returns us to a primal conception of music. In terms of its notes it is very simple, based upon a cycle of fifths fanning from C, both upwards (C–G) and downwards (C-F-B♭), complemented by the note E sounding as the strong major 3rd in relation to the fundamental (the 4th partial). Spread out as scale these intervallic relationships produce the notes of a five-note pentatonic scale, C–E– F-G-B♭, a scale which makes some claim to universality as it occurs in the folk traditions of all the world’s musical cultures, though more usually constructed around a minor rather than a major 3rd. Adding the decorative pitches D and A into this scale transforms it into a medievally conceived Mixolydian mode beloved of the early Christian composers of plainsong, the basis of Western conceptions of sacred melody from around the sixth century and possibly before. In modern Western theoretical terms the scale of Dawn Mantras might also be described as a C major scale with the all-important 7th degree flattened (i.e. B becomes B♭). Why all-important?

Modern Western tonality works on a scale system in which degrees of tension are established which need resolution to a neighbouring or home pitch, providing a sense of fulfilment and rest, however temporary, and eventually, at the end of a musical work, producing a sense of arrival at a destination and permitting closure. The flattening of the leading note, therefore, because it is the most active degree of the scale, divests that scale of its intensity, setting up a modal feel which evokes a sense of antiquity and, because of its special acoustical relationship to the fundamental drone, of tranquillity. Conceived in a modern harmonic sense as a dominant 7th in F major (the key with B♭ in its signature) the effect of the 7th is always to fall, just as in Dawn Mantras the primary melodic contour always falls, arriving on one of the primary 5ths (G or F) or on the tonic (C) signalling resignation (rather than upward striving), providing a sense of peace and obedience to the dictates of the droned sense of an eternal God-like Being. This droned sense of God is further reinforced from the beginning of the work where the low male voices intone a G. C-G makes up the interval of a perfect 5th, which signals the divine presence. The use of a major rather than a minor 3rd in relation to the fundamental (i.e. E instead of E♭) has a similarly profoundly consequential effect, projecting a radiant major sonority and capturing what sounds and feels like typically Australian light – brilliant, harsh even. The words intoned by the Godlike male voices are the Latin ‘aurora’ meaning dawn and the Aboriginal words dhilbi-dhilbi which in the Bundjalung language of north-east New South Wales also means dawn.

The music grows as an accumulation of texture and colour. Over the droned 5th between the didjeridu and the male voices, the shakuhachi (the traditional Japanese bamboo flute associated with Buddhist meditation) and tenor saxophone (associated with the low throaty warbles of American jazz) intertwine in a conversational relationship based upon the articulation of a kind of sighing, singing shared plainsong-like melodic phrases anchored around the drone and its 5th (C and G) (see Ex. 1.1).

The entrance of the children’s voices adds another layer of meaning:

Hei-wa, Hei-wa, Ake gu-re,	Heiwa: Japanese for peace.
Hei-wa, Hei-wa	Ake gure: Japanese for dawn.
Hei-wa, pen-yem-buh-an,	Peny...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Colour Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Spirit of Place, Spiritual Journeys
• 1 Landscape, Spirit and Music: An Australian Story
• 2 Colin Bright and the Psyche of Place
• 3 Women, Spirituality, Landscape: The Music of Anne Boyd, Sarah Hopkins and Moya Henderson
• 4 Singing the Land, Singing the Family: Song, Place and Spirituality amongst the Yanyuwa
• 5 Words and Music: Clive Douglas and the Jindyworobak Manifesto
• 6 A Case of Discontiguity: Musical and Cultural Irony in the Situation of the Lubavitch Community of Shepparton, Victoria
• 7 Visions of the Great South Land in Peter Sculthorpe’s Opera Quiros
• 8 Sing a Country of the Mind: the Articulation of Place in Dhaḻwangu Song
• 9 European Sounds, Australian Echoes: The Music of Marshall-Hall, Hill and Hart
• 10 An Expatriate Englishman: Fritz Hart in Australia
• 11 Journeys across Australia: Ealing Film Scores of the 1940s and ’50s
• 12 From Port Essington to the Himalayas: Music, Place and Spirituality in Two Contemporary Australian Compositions
• 13 To be Alone: The Theme of Isolation in the Music of Barry Conyngham
• 14 Sonic Inscriptions: Sound Installation and Acoustic Art in Australia
• 15 Spirit, Place and Power in Arnhem Land Traditional and Christian Music
• Bibliography
• Discography and Website References
• Index