A State of Harmony?
Music in the Deep North
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600001665Keywords:
Music in Queensland, musical culture, history and social conditions, compositionAbstract
The subject of this paper is music in Queensland, rather than Queensland music. Although we speak readily enough, and unselfconsciously, about Queensland literature or Queensland art, the idea of ‘Queensland music’ (suggesting that there is something distinctive about music composed here) sits uncomfortably to those of us who are not Queensland composers-and even to some who are. I will not be concerned in this paper with distinguishing between the original and the derivative in Queensland musical culture. Rather, I begin from the premise that Queenslanders — like people elsewhere — have developed a unique set of cultural interactions with music, reflecting our particular history and social conditions. In this understanding of music, performance has as much social and cultural significance as composition.
References
John Rickard Australia: A Cultural History (Melbourne: Longman, 1988), p 1. See also Katharine Brisbane, ed. Entertaining Australia: Two Hundred Years of Opera in Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan and ABC, 1988), P 10: ‘From the start the entertainment culture [in Australia] was provincial yet, paradoxically, international in a real sense. In due course it matured into a cosmopolitan culture, gathering to itself the tastes and cultural traditions of many nationalities.’
Malouf, David, keynote address, ‘Australian Identities’ Conference, University College, Dublin, July 1996.
Astley, Thea, ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit,’ Southerly 36: 263. I borrow the term ‘imagined community’ from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991).
Kouvaris, Linda, ‘An Act of Affirmation,’ Centre for the Study of Australian Music Newsletter 2 (1995), 4.
Brier, Percy, ‘Autobiography of a Musician’ mimeo (10 copies published Brisbane: Eric Blyth Brier, 1973); Percy Brier, ‘One Hundred Years and More of Music in Queensland’, mimeograph [1971], ARMUS Library, University of Queensland.
‘The Pioneers of Music in Queensland’, mimeo (Brisbane: Musical Association of Queensland, 1962), p [1].
Brier, Percy, ‘One Hundred Years and More of Music in Queensland’, Chapter 1.
Stable, J.J., Introduction to J.J. Stable and A.E.M. Kirwood, eds, A Book of Queensland Verse (Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, 1924), p xii. Fifty years later, in Because I Was Invited (Melbourne: OUP, 1975), p 61, Judith Wright voices the same idea: ‘In the “frontier” countries, life was at first a hard and raw struggle. Man was in opposition to nature, first and foremost, in a physical battle for survival. Hence what counted, in their societies, was usually material success; the life of the mind, education, and culture took a very minor place.’
Eva Mary O'Doherty, ‘Queensland’, in Byrnes and Vallis, eds, The Queensland Centenary Anthology, p 12.
See Stable, J.J. and Kirwood, A.E.M., eds, A Book of Queensland Verse (Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, 1924); Henry Arthur Kellow, Queensland Poets (London: George Harrap, 1930); Cecil Hadgraft, Queensland and Its Writers (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1959); R.S. Byrnes and Val Vallis, eds, The Queensland Centenary Anthology (London: Longmans, 1959).
Carole Inkster in Philip Candy and John Laurent, Pioneering Culture: Mechanics' Institutes and Schools of Arts in Australia (Adelaide: Auslib Press, 1994), P 270.
Brisbane, , p 68; Brier, ‘One Hundred Years and More of Music in Queensland’, Chapter 1.
Brisbane, p 68.
Fotheringham, Richard, ‘A Short Guide to the Theatre in Queensland’, unpublished paper acknowledged in Queensland: A State for the Arts, Report of the Arts Committee, February 1991 (Brisbane: Arts Division, Department of the Premier, Economic and Trade Development, 1991).
Brier, , ‘One Hundred Years’.
West, John, Theatre i Australia (Stanmore, NSW and North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1978), p 58; Brisbane p 68.
Dawson, Jenny, ‘Opera in Colonial Brisbane’, M.Mus. dissertation, University of Queensland, pp 172–173.
West, p 65.
Brier, , ‘One Hundred Years’, Chapter 5.
Queensland: A State for the Arts.
West, p 76.
Brier, ‘One Hundred Years’, Chapter 13.
Brier, ‘One Hundred Years’, Chapter 2. Brisbane gives 1924 as date for QS&M orchestra name change.
Brier, 100 Years, Chapter 5.
Covell, Roger, Australia's Music: Themes ofa New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967), p 124.
Astley, p 263.
Sitsky, Larry, interviewed by Belinda McKay, 28 September 1993.
Brumby, Colin, ‘Touring in the Outback’, Opera News (10 Jan 1970), p 13; Patricia Kelly, ‘Fellowship Allowed Brumby to Write Operas’, Opera Australia (March 1991).
McKay, Belinda, ‘Beethoven by Bus: Nancy Weir and Queensland Music.’ Queensland Review 2.2 (1995), pp 27–38.
Queensland: A State for the Arts, Report of the Arts Committee, February 1991 (Brisbane: Arts Division, Department of the Premier, Economic and Trade Development, 1991), p 3.
Queensland: A State for the Arts, pp 34, 63. The review was requested by Labor premier Wayne Goss, who was also Minister for the Arts.
The Federal Labor government's elevation of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to the status of national flagship sparked fears that the other ABC orchestras would be deprived of Federal funding. These fears were exacerbated by the Coalition's 1995 budget, which slashed funding to the ABC. Theatre critic John McCallum reports the belief in the theatre community that ‘up to 10 theatre companies nationwide will have their Australia Council funding withdrawn next year and will therefore collapse’ (John McCallum, ‘Small Theatre: Exit Stage Right, Bleeding’, The Australian 11 November 1996, p 13).
