Welcome to
Graeme Skinner’s
homepage and weblog
POST 20 APRIL 2012
What cost Australian music?
Thumbnails: Evidence (point 70): the original song from Judge Jacobson's ruling (4 February 2010); Greg Ham (from the original Down Under video clip), reproduced by The Mercury
Australian musician Greg Ham is dead, aged 58, and, of course, the big question now is: why?
The Australian reported this morning Men at Work member Greg Ham 'hurt and angry' over court ruling, says Colin Hay: "Hay says his friend and bandmate Greg Ham was", entirely understandably, "angry and embarrassed about the copyright controversy over the flute riff he played on the band's global hit Down Under." Ham himself had said: "It will be the way the song is remembered and I hate that. I'm terribly disappointed that that's the way I'm going to be remembered - for copying something."
To recap the story in the unlikely event that you've missed it, Ham's riff was nothing less than, and a good deal more than, the tune of the universally sung Australian children's round song Kookaburra sits in the old gumtree. Ham's choice of the tune, and the way he fitted it into Down Under was, by any artistic measure, inspired. His unwitting mistake, of course (though who would have guessed?) was that the melody was still in copyright. No matter that, as Molly Meldrum, told Faifax this morning: ''To me, Down Under is on a level with Waltzing Matilda.'' Read the whole article ...
A contest between "icons" of Australian music, but at what cost? Who pays? And why?
And are there further implications for what Australian music - popular, folk, community, multicutlural, classical, commerical - is and means? Almost certainly ...
More on this later ... but meanwhile, here is my selection of a range of differing perspectives from online archives that I've found illuminating so far:
Larrikin Music Publishing Pty Ltd v EMI Songs Australia Pty Limited [2010] FCA 29 (4 February 2010): Judge Jacobson's Ruling (ESSENTIAL READING!)
Kookaburra Sits (Anzagl.org website - the ultimate Guiding resource for Leaders from Australia and New Zealand) (2010)
Kookaburra case: publisher hits back at Colin Hay's 'greed' claim,
The Age ((5 February 2010)
LARRIKIN MUSIC PUBLISHING PTY LTD V EMI SONGS AUSTRALIA PTY LTD [2010]
FCA 29 TRESS COX LAWYERS (26 March 2010)
Larrikin Records
and Larrikin Music Founder Speaks Out (An Article by Warren Fahey)
((9 February 2010)
Australian Music Publisher Norm Lurie To Retire In 2011, Billboard Biz ((15 April 2010)
Copyright Battle (The Age Educational Resource Centre (15 February 2010)
'Kookaburra sits...' copyright controversy (ABC RADIO NATIONAL, 9 February 2010, audio download)
Which reminds me, I should have, much earlier in the albeit short history of my own site, warmly recommend an essential resource for everyone interested in the history of Australian music, the original Larrikin Warren Fahey's curated website the Australian Folklore Unit, of which the above article on the Kookaburra Controversy is just one small component. If you don't know where to look next, try investigating his introduction to some of the most important sources of our musical heritage, the colonial Songsters and Songbooks ...
The 2 volumes of Warren's Australian songster's vade-mecum (with melody lines, guitar chords, and lyrics) Australian Folk Songs and Bush Ballads can also be purchased in enhanced e-book format for iPad from iTunes Books (and the Amazon Kindle version is coming ...)
POST 17 APRIL 2012
Transparent peer review and open publishing ...
The question of open and improved systems of peer review, and open publishing, are rightly being addressed at the moment in the academic sciences. Music and the Humanities would be well served following suit.
For the peer review debate in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/
For the Directory of Open Access Journals:
http://www.doaj.org/
Try typing music into the search box ...
While Musicology Australia
has regretably (though does anyone really care?)
disappeared into the maw of Taylor and Francis, at least in Australia we
do have The Journal of Music Research Online:
http://www.jmro.org.au/index.php/mca2/index
POST 1 APRIL 2012
Bamboo in the billabong ...
I recently received another risibly tiny royalty cheque from my Sculthorpe book (a sum, incidentally, dwarfed by the considerably more generous annual public lending rights payment I receive in recompense for use and photocopying of library copies). It leads me to wonder, yet again, why anyone would bother writing serious books about serious Australian music, whether current or historical. Clearly, no one is very interested in publishing them - or, if they do, marketing them properly.
So little effort is expended in the latter respect that any residual gratitude I might once have had for my own publisher has well and truly evaporated longsince. And when it comes to the few copies still left of the original 1000 or so printed of my own book (on the first 800 of which I had to forego royalties, despite the press receiving a hefty publishing subvention from the Australia Council), I'd now frankly rather they remain unsold - and, if necessary, pulped - and that those who do want to read the book do so online at Google Books for free!
I hope that Gwyneth Barnes is enjoying a happier experience with her excellent recent book on Sculthorpe's long career as teacher and mentor of other composers, Peter Sculthorpe: an Australian composer's influence ...
But sadly, I doubt very much that her book is getting anywhere near the positive attention it deserves, since (... though I hope I've missed some ... ) I haven't been able to find a single press review of the book anywhere!
The book is based on her Gwyneth's earlier
postgraduate research, which, as I acknowledged in my book, was one very good
reason for me not to attempt to duplicate her important work. As I wrote
in my introduction (11-12):
I have not attempted to deal in any systematic fashion with
Sculthorpe’s career as a teacher at Sydney University, except insomuch
as it had an impact on the other aspects of his life and work.
Nevertheless, his students came to occupy a central place in his life
and thoughts, and, over time, it is to be hoped that they themselves
will start to tell the story of this relationship. Meanwhile, Gwyneth
Barnes’s pioneering introduction to this huge subject was for me a major
source of information about the music department at Sydney University.
Apparently the book was, at one stage, she was going to call this book Bamboo in the billabong : the educational legacy of Peter Sculthorpe. Great title! But whatever it is called, Gywyneth's fine book will be essential reading for serious students of Australian music everywhere.
Highly recommended.
POST 29 MARCH 2012
The Sibyl's not giggling ...
Harpsichordist and renaissance multi-instrumentalist Winsome Evans has become an unwilling University of Sydney emeritus in its current contested round of staff cuts.. I suppose at 70, she couldn't have expected to go on teaching (which she loved) for ever. But it is sad that her probably inevitable removal from the Conservatorium's Arts Music Unit appears to have been preceded by a prolonged death-by-small-cuts. Winsome also finds that the Unit now wants to wash its hands of any responsibility for the archives of her Renaissance Players, which for many years was its and the university's only high profile music ensemble. I mention Winsome's "redundancy" here, with her consent, because such carelessly casual mislaying of valuable human resources is unlikely to be resgistered in the musical press, and so neither on the MCA's news bulletin..
Back in 2008, the university was happy to acknowledge Winsome's creative research output in her re-arrangement for harpsichord of Bach's Unaccompanied Violin Sonatas and Partitas. In contrast, for instance, with Schumann's deservcedly redundant High Victorian (1853) reworkings of the same with piano accompaniments, her intuiting the music's coded harmonies was not only a thoroughly "authentic" baroque (indeed Bachian) undertaking, but the result is also highly enjoyable, both to listen to (on Celestial Harmonies CD) and, no doubt, to play.
POST 28 FEBRUARY 2012
Patrick Thomas, Australian master
Last year, 2011, ABC CLASSICS finally released a long-planned set of recordings by this Australian master conductor. At the prompting of a mutual friend Len Amadio, Patrick asked whether I could write the booklet essay, backgrounding his career and circumstances under which the recordings were made. I was delighted to do this, and reproduce what I wrote here on my website in the hope that it might encourage readers to dip into Patrick Thomas’s recorded legacy …
Get the CD set details from ABC Shop Online or from Buywell Classics
Meanwhile, here’s the start of my booklet essay …
On 1 July 1932, the ABC was legislated into existence. No other institution would have so great an impact on the course of Australian classical music in the mid-20th century. In the early 1930s, commercial recordings had not yet supplanted live performances as the major source of music broadcast on what was then known as ‘the wireless’. As envisaged by the Scullin and Lyons federal governments, the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Commission (later Corporation) was to manage its own radio orchestras, as well as choruses, and military and dance bands ... Read on
POST 23 FEBRUARY 2012
A biographical register of early colonial Australian musicians (under construction)
One of my reasons for building the Austral Harmony section of this site was to publish updates on my research into early colonial Australian music and musicains. This register is a long term project, intended primarily to supply basic biographical data on musicians, and especially composers, active between 1788 and roughly the 1860s. Currently there are three separate pages, the first covering entries A-B, the second, C-Z, the third E-Z still very much under construction. I've also now entered a preliminary list of headings in a similar register of organisations.
Entries to today's date (23 Feb 2012):
On the A-B page: Isaac
ABRAHAMS, John ADAMS, Mrs. St. John ADCOCK (Marianne Eliza PETTINGELL),
Glentworth ADDISON, W. M. AKHURST, Thomas ALFORD, ALFRED H.R.H. Duke of
Edinburgh, Alfred ANDERSON, James Henri ANDERSON, Thomas BANKS (senior),
Thomas Philip BANKS (junior), George BARROW, Charles Hastings BARTON,
BENNELONG (Woollarawarre), George BENNETT, Miss M. BINDER, William
BLIZZARD, Nicholas Charles BOCHSA, Charles BONNINGTON, Walter BONWICK,
Edward BOULANGER, Kate BOULANGER (Katharina Jane FITZSIMMONS), Mr. A.
BROWN, Frederick BUCK (BÜCKE), John BUSHELLE (Bushell) (senior), Eliza
BUSHELLE (Wallace, Bushell, Wallace-Bushelle, Bouchelle), John Butler
BUSHELLE (junior).
On the C-D page: Douglas
CALLEN, Edward CALON, C. A. CALVERT, Robert CAMPBELL, Ann CAMPBELL,
Gerome CARANDINI, Maria CARANDINI, Rosini CARANDINI, William CARR, P.
CAVALLINI, William Joseph CAVENDISH, George James CHAPMAN, Mrs. CHESTER,
Vincenzo CHIODETTI, William CLEARY, Michael CLEARY, Adam CLERKE, Stephen
CLIFTON, Edwin H. COBLEY, Charles Henry COMPTON, George COPPIN, W. J.
CORDNER, Ellen CORDNER, Emile COULON, CRABBE, A. F. CRANZ, Mathilde
CRANZ, John Christopher CROFT, Alfred Perkins CURTIS, Mary CURTIS, James
CURTIS, Cesare CUTOLO, Charles D'ALBERT, J. W. DANIEL, Miss E. DANIEL,
Johah A. DANIELL, Charles Henry DAVIS, Miss DAVIS, C. J. DAWSON, Robert
DAWSON, Edward S. DEANE, John Philip DEANE, John DEANE (junior), Rosalie
DEANE, Henry
DE GREY, Camille DEL SARTE, Francis DETRICK, Silvester DIGGLES, M. B.
DOTT, Ferdinand DRAEGER, Carl Wilhelm DRAEGER, Florentine DUDEMAINE, A.
P. DULY, George Frederick DULY, The Misses DUNCAN, W. A. DUNCAN.
POST 31 JANUARY 2012
Searching for Stephen Marsh’s The Gentleman in Black
Portrait of S. H. Marsh, by Walter Mason
The Illustrated Sydney News (4 March 1854), 4.
Further to my recent post on a lost colonial opera archive, another Australian colonial operatic mystery is the whereabouts of the performing materials for Stephen Marsh’s opera The Gentleman in Black.
Like most other Australian operas of the 19th century, the music of The Gentleman in Black was believed to be irrecoverably lost (and may yet be), while the little existing commentary on the opera’s genesis is mostly speculation.
However, in The Sydney Morning Herald in April 1955, the music historian James Hall made the surprising announcement that a full set of 37 orchestral parts for the opera were then still in the possession of Marsh’s daughter. According to Hall: “She told me that the National Library, Canberra, had asked her to deposit them in its collection, and I understand she intend to do so.” ... More
POST 25 JANUARY 2012
Music a terror?
Today’s The Sydney Morning Herald online has an article syndicated from The Washington Post on the subject of Classical music as a weapon.
A visit to a New York Port Authority bus terminal was the occasion for the author, Anne Midgette, the Post’s classical music reviewer, to revist the now well-rehearsed urban legend that the Port Authority uses piped recordings of classical music to deter homeless people from loitering (though an Authority spokesman told her that it plays classical music “to please travellers, not to control vagrancy”). Nevertheless, what Midgette heard issuing from the terminal speakers set her on edge:
“It was the scherzo from Schubert’s first piano trio. Schubert's piano trios are among my favourite pieces in the universe, but as I listened I found that I wasn't relaxing; quite the contrary. The music sounded awful: tinny, hard-edged, aggressive. I wanted to get away.”
Tomorrow being Australia Day (or, depending on your point of view, invasion day), Midgette’s article put me in mind of one of the earliest fictionalised accounts of music in colonial Australia, a short story by John Lang (1816-1864), written in the mid-1850s but perhaps set in the 1820s.
You can read it complete online in two versions. Under the title Music Terror: A recollection of Botany Bay the story appeared anonymously in the New York journal The Musical World (2 October 1858), and then later reappeared as the last story, Music a terror, in Lang’s collection Botany Bay; or, True Tales of Early Australia (London, 1859), two online modern editions of which can be viewed and downloaded as a pdf from the University of Sydney Library and at Project Gutenberg Australia.
The early part of the story, very possibly drawn from life, is a rather sweet and amusing tale of a ruined old piano given by the narrator as a gift to an isolated farming couple, Romer (who had been a soldier in the 73rd regiment during Macquarie’s governorship) and his wife, living near Bong Bong, in the bush highlands to the south-west of Sydney.
Their children have never seen a piano before; indeed their father playing on the fife was the only music they had ever heard:
“and the only airs that he could compass were God Save the King, Rule Britannia, and Poor Mary Anne. Neither Romer nor his wife had much ‘ear’ for melody, and never did more than hum the words of some old song.”
Poor Mary Anne, incidentally, was a Dirge to the tune of Ar hyd y nos, or the famous Welsh national melody All through the night, as fitted with words by Amelia Alderson Opie, and first published by Opie and Edward Smith Biggs in Six Welch Airs adapted to English Words, and Harmonized for Two, Three, and Four, Voices, with an Accompaniment for the Piano Forte or Harp (1801).
Given that these national tunes formed their staple repertoire, the narrator is keen to see what effect hearing a piano for the first time has on the children:
Alas! instead of delighting the children, I terrified them. Some ran out of the room, shrieking, ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’ others stood aghast with their mouths wide open. One of the little boys fancied the keys were a row of huge teeth, which would bite me if I continued to touch them; whilst a little girl of four years of age begged of her mamma not to let the baby go near it. The eldest girl, observing that the instrument was perfectly harmless, was approaching my side, but was violently pulled back by two of her brothers. Presently, those who had run away returned to the door, and finding that there was no real danger, re-entered the room. By degrees the whole of them were not only reconciled to the belief that the piano was inanimate, but vastly pleased with the tunes which I played upon it. Ere long they became both bold and familiar, and, approaching the old instrument, they dealt it several blows with their clenched fists, which, had they been repeated, would soon have silenced it for ever.
When the children had gone to bed—and it was a rather difficult matter to prevail upon them to retire, so maddened had they become with the sound of the music—I played several airs which in former days had been very familiar to the ears of Romer and his wife, but which they had not heard for upwards of sixteen years. Amongst others was The Girl I left behind me, an air which the band of Romer’s old regiment, the 73rd, used to play constantly on parade, when the regiment was marching past the colours.
When I had finished playing the air, I turned round, and said to Romer, “You remember that, don’t you?”
What was my astonishment to find my friend in tears. The large drops were rolling down his sunburnt cheeks. “What is the matter?” I inquired of him. “Ah, sir!” he replied, “you have brought back to me the morning when I embarked for this country and, when, for the last time, I saw my mother and sisters. That old piano makes it seem as though it were only yesterday that I parted from them.”
And Mrs. Romer was crying. Why? - Because when she knew that Charley really loved her, and they were engaged to be married, she used to go every morning to see the old 73rd paraded, and kept her eyes upon the colours, which Charley, as junior ensign, used to carry when the regiment marched past them and played that old tune The Girl I left behind me. And a very happy air it was, and sweet to her ears; for shortly after it had ceased, Charley and herself had their morning meeting, and used to walk round the spot which was called ‘the Government domain.’ The tears that were shed by Romer and his wife were not tears of unhappiness; for, although they were not musical, their domestic life had never known a single discord.
On the surface, this story is of no great profundity. Yet the author neatly addresses two contending colonial views of music. The nexus between melody and memory is at the very heart of the colonists’ own very simple musical aesthetic. In a settler society where music was still an extremely rare commodity, a melody had the power to summon up memories of the past and of distant home and family, usually in Britain.
Yet, at the same time, colonists were fearful that bringing up their children in isolation risked turning them into savages. For them, Lang contends, music exercised a primal power –at first “terrified”, then they became “maddened … with the sound of the music”.
Unfortunately, Lang deploys this insight as the basis of the story’s rather more sinister conclusion, in which Romer introduces the piano to some his Indigenous “neighbours” whose land he was now occupying.
Read it for yourself; but even if you think that the author’s intention was basically benign and humorous, it’s hard not to conclude that Music a Terror’s depiction of Australia’s original owners has uncomfortably close parallels with the New York Port Authority story.
See the Australian Human Rights Commission on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and Why reform of the Constitution is needed. See also parliamentary research paper on an even better idea, Dedicated Indigenous representation in the Australian Parliament.
POST 20 JANUARY 2012
A lost colonial opera archive of the 1850s ...?
Yesterday, by chance, looking for something else entirely, I came across the above unique record of a lost archive of colonial operatic performing materials. The original report appeared on 3 November 1868 in the Hobart Mercury and noted that the well-known Tasmanian musician and composer Frederick Packer (1839-1902) had acquired the music library of the former touring English Opera Company:
MUSICAL. The whole of the magnificent library of the English Opera Company (of which Miss Julia Harland, Miss Octavia Hamilton, M. Laglaise, and M. Coulon were members) has, we understand, been purchased by Mr. F. A. Packer. The full scores, and vocal and orchestral parts of the following operas are among the list:—Masaniello, Trovatore, Pasquale, Fra Diavolo, Maritana, Ernani, Favorita, Le Domino Noir, Mountain Sylph, Bohemian Girl, Puritani, Lucia, Lurline, Sonnambula, Cenerentola, Daughter of the Regiment, &c, &c, &c. Consequent on the breaking up of the company the music was sold at a great sacrifice, its original cost being over £400.
This trove evidently pertained to the tours of the so-called English Opera Company in 1856-57, and its immediate successors. The original company, convened for the touring soprano Anna Bishop, also included singers Theodosia Guerin, Harriet Fiddes, Emile Coulon, Jean-Baptiste Laglaise, Frank Howson, and musical director George Loder. Performing materials from Frederick Packer's uncle, the conductor Charles Packer’s roughly contemporary English Opera House in Sydney, and from the conductor, the late Lewis Lavenu’s company, may also have got into the archive (for instance, for his 1856 production of Wallace’s Maritana), while, as we shall see shortly, the later materials, such as those for Wallace’s opera Lurline, perhaps entered the collection in the early 1860s. ... More
POST 16 JANUARY 2012
This was the first post in my Austral Harmony history project, on an eponymous colonial musician:
George Skinner
Musician, entertainer, publican
{fl. Sydney, 1844-48}
I doubt whether this first G. Skinner
to
have anything to do with Australian music was a relation. He was George
Skinner, not Graeme (then only as a surname or middle name),
and he came to Sydney from the rural
community of Cowpasture, near Camden, to take over from the famous
theatrical entrepreneur and performer,
George Coppin,
as licensee of the Clown Hotel, in Pitt-street, in 1844.
... More
POST 16 JANUARY 2012
Sculthorpe at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival
Artistic director Jonathan Mills conceived the 2010 Edinburgh Festival as a “bridge between east and west”. Mills, an Australian and former composition student of Peter Sculthorpe, would have been well aware of his teacher’s long-standing belief that the future of Australia and its music is where its geography is—in the Pacific basin. But inevitably, there has been a disjunction between Australia’s continuing awareness of its western British past, and its geographical and new increasingly social eastern reality. Britain's perceptions of Australia have likewise been an issue. Colonisation, colonialism, and the impact of European settlement on Indigenous traditions were also thus themes of the festival.
I was invited by the Festival to write program essays for two Sculthorpe performances, in which I took up these themes. The first performance, by the Sydney Symphony, under its chief conductor Vladimir Ashkenzay, was of Memento Mori. The second was the western (European) premiere of the new String Quartet No 18, a joint Edinburgh-Australian commission ... More
POST 16 JANUARY 2012
In 2010 Opera Australia invited me to write a program essay for its production of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West. As a music historian, I thought it would be interesting to write a piece that dealt with the first arrival of Puccini (albeit in absentia) and the Girl in Australia. I've now also added a few live links.
Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West was first staged in Melbourne in June 1912, just 18 months after its world premiere. This remarkable near coincidence, seldom matched before or since in the annals of our operatic imports, was the climax of a short but intense period during which Australians—in the in the first flush of Federation—may well have felt themselves to be musically almost as up-to-date as anywhere else in the world. Of course, that this “up-to-datedness” was only with Europe (and to a lesser extent America) was soon made glaringly apparent, as war not only compromised supply lines between the hemispheres, but changed Europe itself for ever ... More
POST 17 JANUARY 2012
Seeking Gautrot’s Josephian Hymn (1844)
Having arrivd via the Cape Colony (South Africa) and Batavia (Indonesia) in 1839, the French-born violinist, soldier (formerly a member of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard) and composer Joseph Gautrot (c.1775-1854) spent the last 15 years of his long life in Australia, continuing to the last to ply his trade as a professional musician.
I charted his Australian career (and what little I could find about his earlier life) in my doctoral thesis (pages 152-67). Over the years, newspaper advertisements for his concerts list over 20 of his compositions, arrangements and orchestrations. His original works include several orchestral overtures, vocal arias and variations for his wife (a soprano), a chamber sestett and two septets, and many violin variation sets and other solos, including one in 1839 entitled Australiana, A Pastoral “composed for the Ladies of the Colony”.
All but one of these Australian works is lost. The exception is his Josephian Hymn. A setting of words in honour of St Joseph by parish priest of St Joseph’s, Hobart Town, J. J. Therry, it was composed, premiered, and published in 1844 ... More
