Edited by Fiona Richards

Ashgate Publishing Ltd

ISBN 978-0-7546-4072-1

Reviewed by Tony Mitchell

This book has had remarkably little publicity here, although it came out in 2007. This is possibly because it is a UK-generated project, and the publisher, Ashgate, which specialises in books on more obscure sources of music around the world, issues only expensive hard cover editions which are beyond the price range of the average reader. The listed price of this book on dstore.com.au is $218.35, although it seems to have crept into a number of university and conservatorium libraries around the country, which is where one of my research assistants managed to track it down. It should also not be confused with a series of eight rather dubious tourism DVDs with the same title which are advertised on the ABC bookshop’s website as a “sublime musical journey through the magnificent Australian environment”. These feature photographs of rural Australia by John Henshall, for which “relaxational instrumental music has been specially composed to compliment [sic] each particular track” by one Greg Andrew, who describes himself on his website as “a professional piano vocalist entertainer performing in many of the premier resorts, hotels and casinos throughout Australia”. Enough said!

This of course highlights the problems in using a term such as “soundscapes”, the origin of which is usually attributed to Canadian musician R.Murray Schafer in his 1971 book The New Soundscape. Schafer tends to write in a rather florid and mystical style, although his notions of “figure”, “ground” and “field” are still widely and productively used for “spatialising” music. But there are dangerously dodgy new age byways in this territory, and this book does not always avoid them, especially in its emphasis on “spirituality” in Anne Boyd’s chapter, a densely musicological analysis of “inspiriting landscape” in works by Ross Edwards, Peter Sculthorpe, David Lumsdaine and Aboriginal musician Tommy Barrtjap. Boyd reiterates Germaine Greer’s rather questionable assumption of a legacy of white settler “guilt”, but usefully draws on poet Judith Wright’s idea of the “earth-sky-water-tree-spirit-human continuum”, as well as the works of Peter Read and David Tacey on Australian landscape and belonging. With the exception of Barrtjap, these composers write in a highly conventional European classical orchestral tradition, with the addition of Aboriginal elements which are not always successful, to say the least. Christine Logan’s chapter on Colin Bright and the “psyche of place” deals with a rather more experimental composer, and argues that he “favours unconventional combinations of western instruments which emphasise contrasts of musical tone qualities and textures and thereby negates musical and cultural boundaries”.

Whether it’s quite that simple is arguable, but John Bradley and Elizabeth Mackinlay are on surer ground in their chapter on song, place and spirituality amongst the Yanyuwa in Borroloola in the Northern Territory, arguing that “the relationship of song to place is expressed by the Yanyuwa in an understanding that all of their country has both a cosmogonic and historical determination”. Not so many problems of European and colonial mediations here, although the indigenisation of western elements in compositions such as Aeroplane Dance are a distinctive feature in Yanyuwa music. Fiona Mcgowan’s chapter on traditional and Christian music in Arnhem Land is similarly nuanced, as is Peter Toner’s chapter on the articulation of place in the songs of Yolgnu group the Dhalwangu. As Bradley and Mckinlay argue, “songlines are ever present on the country like flowing conduits of meaning and if the code is known they can be tapped into and followed”, but how applicable is this to non-Aboriginal musicians? As Toner notes, British author Bruce Chatwin’s use of the term “songline” does not help us much, and it “has been widely adopted as a kind of catch-all concept, along with the boomerang and the didjeridu, which attempts to condense the complexity of Aboriginality into an easy-to-digest form”. As a result we have ghastly new age excrescences like Kate Bush’s The Dreaming to contend with.

Generated by Fiona Richards, Head of Music at the Open University in the UK who became interested in the film scores of British composers such as the “three Johns” - Ireland, Greenwood and Addison - as well as Vaughan Williams for Ealing films of the 1940s and 1950s about Australia such as The Overlanders (1946), Eureka Stockade (1949), The Shiralee (1957) and Bitter Springs (1950). These are films which are of course described in most of the literature on Australian cinema (none of which is referenced here) as the “colonial period”, and indeed Richards focuses almost exclusively on the music of Ireland, about whom she has previously published a book. Of course it is arguable that Australian music which deals with landscape, particularly that of Peter Sculthorpe, is heavily influenced by the British pastoral tradition of Vaughan Williams and others, and has an inevitably colonial heritage, as does this book. Richards’ house-and-garden focused introduction, and the fifteen chapters which follow, touch a wide range of bases too numerous to detail here, from Sally Macarthur’s study of feminist composers such as Sarah Hopkins and Moya Henderson, to chapters on Jindyworobak and Barry Conyngham, to Ros Bandt’s informative survey of the acoustic art of important figures such as Jon Rose, Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, despite its excessive self-promotion. There is an over-emphasis on Sculthorpe, but I was especially grateful to be introduced to more obscure composers like the Tasmanian-based environmental activist Ron Nagorcka, who lives in the midst of a remote forest and uses birdsong widely in his work. Despite its exclusive emphasis on classical and art music, this is an important book, which provokes a plethora of important issues about the relationship between music, place and locality in Australia. It deserves to be much more widely circulated and discussed.