Hero Of A Thousand Places: Explorations of Identity in Australian Music

Hero of a Thousand Places: 

Explorations of Australian Identity in Port Essington, Kakadu and Journey to Horseshoe Bend.

JAMES DOMEYKO

“There is no geographical or spiritual consistency in the landscape that is Australia, rather it is a diverse place stimulating a wide range of responses.” –Fiona Richards

One of the key issues in Australian classical music is and has been identity. Culturally Australia has many backgrounds the chronological first being Aboriginal or indigenous cultures followed by European descent and in the present day completely multicultural populations in major cities. With so many heritages and cultures it is understandable that in considering one’s place as a composer in Australia, composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Andrew Schultz, Matthew Hindson, Anne Boyd and Ross Edwards amongst many others have in their music a synthesis of ideas from the many cultures present in Australia. What they also have in common in their music is a search for what it means to be Australian.

This search for meaning has implications for the process of composition. Works by Australian composers tend to have strong cross-cultural music quotation and in some cases, musical gestures made in an attempt to capture Australia’s geographical qualities e.g. Sculthorpe’s Kakadu.

By examining the works Kakadu and Port Essington by Peter Sculthorpe and Journey to Horseshoe Bend by Andrew Schultz, one can see how the notion of identity has had a large impact on the work of Australian composers.

‘What is Australian music? If this could be answered, I’d probably stop writing music and answer questions.’ – Peter Sculthorpe

Port Essington

The Australian Chamber Orchestra performed Port Essington many times during its first Asian tour in 1980. In Singapore, even the clash with an important soccer match didn’t prevent expatriate Australians from attending the orchestra’s concert. The next day, one local newspaper ran the headline AUSSIE COMPOSERS’S BUSH SOUNDS BRINGS TEARS TO EXPATRIATE EYES.

This pleased me a great deal: Port Essington is really an allegory about Australia. It is also concerned with my own duality of experience, with my first confrontation, during Oxford days, with the Old World. It remains one of my most performed pieces.“ – Peter Sculthorpe

Peter Sculthorpe writes music that very consciously explores the notion of Australian identity. Over his career Sculthorpe’s music has explored numerous avenues of cross-cultural borrowing from both Indigenous and Asian cultures. Some of these have deliberately been placed in the context of musical synthesis as seen in his 1977 work Port Essington.

Sculthorpes borrowing from indigenous culture is most clearly seen in his frequent quotation of the Djilili melody. Sculthorpe says of his borrowing ‘It’s always seemed foolish not to take heed of a music that has been shaped by this land over many thousands of years.’

“Occasionally, in recent time, I’ve been criticised for this, especially for my direct quotations of Aboriginal melodies. My conscience, however, is clear: I’ve never used songs to be heard only by men, or songs only to be heard by women, nor have I, for instance, used the bullroarer, a sacred object.” – Peter Sculthorpe

While borrowing music from indigenous cultures can be a sensitive issue due to the sacred nature of the music, Sculthorpe’s use of the material shows a consideration of context and in the case of Port Essington, uses musical synthesis to explore cultural tension between European settlers and the land.

In its opening Prologue: The Bush, the dissonant and aggressive motifs, based on an Arnhem land melody, suggest a land tempestuous at the arrival of new settlers who perhaps because of a lack of respect for or knowledge of the land are not welcome. In the Sculthorpe’s commentary in the score for Port Essington, he explains that the bush is represented by string orchestra and the settlers a string trio, furthermore that the colonies at Port Essington failed on account of the settlers inability to survive within the harsh landscape.

What the music also seems to achieve is to point out a failed assimilation between two cultures and the anxiety that results from the incapability.

The settlers section creates a civilised scene, a far cry from the outrage expressed in the beginning but whose presence is to be interrupted. The Phatasy Unrest creates textures from high notes, bird calls and the highest note possible textures reminiscent of Penderecki, there an undercurrent threat of violence and rage

Nocturnal estrangement combine the two themes of settlers with the bush, constant conflict created as stated by the dissonance.

The Epilogue suggests that the bush is left without the settlers in it, however there is a melancholy that suggests incompleteness.

A detailed analysis of the keys, tonal centers and their meanings can be found in Anne Boyd’s Becoming Australian through music: an analysis of works (1977-90) by Peter Sculthorpe to which Boyd concludes that the work might represent the struggle of Australians to understand their environment and traditional Aboriginal culture.

While this is an important factor the piece finally represents the failing of two forces to harmonise successfully, perhaps because of this lack of understanding. With respect to the social realities for many indigenous today, this is still a relevant sentiment.

In his autobiography Sun Music, Sculthorpe said of the piece that:

“Initially it echoes the feelings of the defeated settlers, rowing to their rescue ship in the harbour. Then for the first time in the work, the string orchestra sings the barcarolle in unison with the string trio. The music suggests that, if the New World can adapt to the Old, then surely the Old can adapt to the New” – Peter Sculthorpe

“Sculthorpe never denies his European musical heritage, indeed it is the Australian/Europe duality which most significantly provides a basis for understanding the process of ‘becoming Australian’ in music” – Anne Boyd

Kakadu

 “It must be said, though, that I’ve never strayed too far from a pantheistic belief in the sacred in nature, and the main body of my music is concerned with seeking this.” – Peter Sculthorpe

“The work, then is concerned with my feelings about this place, its landscape, its change of seasons, its dry season and its wet, its cycle of life and death.” – Peter Sculthorpe on Kakadu.

“The country is also packed with music, much of which is yet to be found by a wide audience, and much of which takes landscape as a sound source, both literally and ritually ”  - Anne Boyd

Kakadu demonstrates how music can serve to represent what the feeling of a place can be, specifically the Kakadu National Park. At the time Sculthorpe had never  visited Kakadu.

Kakadu energising opening, constant rhythmic bongo ostinato much like aboriginal music that has a single drum creating forward motion goes into sweet sweeping gestures, like mountains with broad melodic contours and dense orchestration.

From this moment of respite listeners are thrown back into the energetic motion of the opening until the introduction of the lontano section 9, introduced birds, slow, atmospherics, like being in the thick of the forest.

Section 11 is written in predominately graphic notation with some intermittent traditional notation. Sculthorpe uses this section to create a representational soundscape filled with birds and the echoing sounds of the park.

Fiona Richards said of birdsong:

“Bird song, too has a very distinct place in Australian music, and for Aboriginal songsmen birds are often the form in which their spirit ancestors speak to them. Some composers think of birdsong not in literal terms, but as a metaphor, and attempt to convey shape rather than transcribe a particular birdsong in the manner of Messiaen”

Thus in the music of Ross Edwards, for example, it is clear that a sudden melodic interjection is the essence of birdsong, though not a specific named bird. Birdsong can also be the sound that marks the point between life and death – in Sculthorpe’s 1979 Mangrove the sudden appearance of birdsong after a period of marked time, and subsequent move to a different musical time, indicates a transition to a different spiritual place, the movement between worlds.”

This liminal section of Kakadu then comes into the final third of the work in section 19 with a thoughtful and considered Cor Anglais solo that uses the djililie melody to express the sentiment of love. Specifically the love of the man who commissioned the work, but also it bears with it a great depth of feeling from Sculthorpe towards the unknown parts of his country.

“In writing Kakadu, I decided to use material form some of my earlier music. I chose the Lament from my film score, Manganinnie (1980), and Djililie from Port Essington (1977). I first came to know the Lament when it was sung to me by Mawuyul Yathalawuy, a tribal elder, from Elcho Island, just off the coast of Arnhem Land.” – Peter Sculthorpe

There is then a slow build up back to another bongo driven section, with pages 27 and 31 bearing scenes of magnificent bird flights rushing out of the canopies.

Page 39 there is a sudden drop out that harkens back to the liminality of  section 11 and a suspenseful build up occurs from pages 42 – 45 with the flute and clarinet arpeggio contours lead into two glorious drum crashes preceding the final fortissimo at the end.

Kakadu shows how a composer can use his imagination and feeling of a place to create a landscape as he sees it. If one experiences a feeling associated with identity such as his feelings of confrontation in Port Essington, it is part of who he is as are the feelings associated with the unknown about ones heritage, as created in Kakadu.

“In writing Kakadu, I decided to use material form some of my earlier music. I chose the Lament from my film score, Manganinnie (1980), and Djililie from Port Essington (1977). I first came to know the Lament when it was sung to me by Mawuyul Yathalawuy, a tribal elder, from Elcho Island, just off the coast of Arnhem Land.”

“When I finally visited Kakadu National Park, it wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it. I’m glad that I wrote the piece Kakadu when I did. If I’d written it after the visit, it would have been a very different work.” – Peter Sculthorpe

Journey to Horseshoe Bend

“…music ”reflects” nothing; rather, music has a formative role in the construction, negotiation, and transformation of sociocultural identities. In this view, music engenders communities or “scenes”; it allows a play with, a performance of, and an imaginary exploration of identities. Its aesthetic pleasure has much to do with this vicarious exploration of identities.” - Georgina Born & David Hesmondhalgh

Finally Schultz’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend is a story about a boy who discovers that he has indigenous heritage along with his German heritage. What is most profound about this story is that the boy essentially represents modern Australia whose identity is composite of many heritages or specifically he is the embodiment of the Two Ways culture. Furthermore as the tensions were explored in Sculthorpe‘s Port Essington, the conflicting identities create the need for individuals to search for understanding of both in order to achieve maturity.

Understanding and its relationship with temporality is at the heart of Horseshoe Bends meaning. Hart Cohen explored the notions of influence of the landscape as part of a cultural tradition and the musicological engagement with the boundaries between past and present.” in his work Landscape and Memory:

The boundaries between past and present are always being played with, particularly with Schultz’s musical foundation that always aims to, like the Indigenous spirit and culture, be present though not at the forefront.

“You have a middle group of the orchestra which is largely warm sounds – strings, electronic organ, marimba, vibraphone, two horns, solo trumpet, bass clarinet – they’re like a central, warm body of sound, and they’re playing most of the time. They’re often very quiet, they’re very much background sounds, but they are there as the core of things.” - Schultz

Told in retrospect from the voice of a mature and older protagonist, Journey To Horseshoe Bend shows a young boy being immersed in Aranda culture. He is exposed to the language and traditions of a culture that he has not previously been immersed in  and although initially awkward, such as in the many mispronounced aboriginal words with Njitiaka correcting him, he starts to integrate Two Ways into his identity and thus begins his transformation from boy into man, with the full appreciation for who he is both as his “father’s son” and as one of the Aranda people.

“The story of journey to horseshoe bend has at its centre the narrative trajectories of both the author and his father. The former is moving through a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood; the latter from life to death. This doubling is mirrored in the two communities through which the narrative flows: the recently settled pastoralists of frontier Australia and the Aboriginal people – themselves indigenous to the country but who have encountered the pressures of both colonisation and missionisation.” – Hart Cohen.

“Because of the ubiquity of music in the mass-mediated world, and individuals’ subjectification and socialization by a number of different music, each bearing different dimensions of both their existing and desired, potential identities, rather than musical subjectivity being fixed and unitary, several musical “identities” may inhabit the same individual.” Georgina Born & David Hesmondhalgh

Musically, the work has many levels of expressing the Two Ways theme. The story is literally about a boy with two heritages visiting Aranda, a place that practices Two Ways. The music is a composite of the Ntaria choir, an Indigenous Christian choir who sing Christian Hymns in their native language, elements of Bach and the German heritage. The narration too shares parallels with song storytelling traditions of indigenous cultures whose songs tell everyday events to affirm it.

The message in Horseshoe Bend is finally that white or not, being an Australian involves acknowledging and looking back into the place of both heritages in the Australian identity.

In concluding Port Essington, Kakadu and Journey to Horseshoe Bend all show different ways in which composers have engaged the issue of identity in Australian music. Australian music is defined by a search for what it means to be Australian and in many cases this has involved looking to neighbouring and older cultures that have a long tradition to affirm their identities with. Port Essington explored the notion of cross-cultural tension with an optimistic outlook for harmony between two worlds, Kakadu showed how sentimentality for ones country can inspire musical portraits of a land, despite not having been there. Finally Journey to Horseshoe Bend embodies the modern Australia in a man reflecting upon his process of maturation through understanding and integrating the many sources of his complete identity.

“If we use music as a means of insight into other cultures, then equally we can see it as a means of negotiating cultural identity.” Nicolas Cook.

“For in music 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” – Anne Boyd

Bibliography

Born, Georgina & Hesmondhalgh, David. 2000. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music. (University of California Press)

- Boyd, Anne: Becoming Australian through music: an analysis of works (1977-90) by Peter Sculthorpe.

- Boyd, Anne. 2002 - Landscape Spirit and Music: An Australian Story

- Richards, Fiona. 2007 - Spirit of Place, Spiritual Journeys.  

Both from:

- The Soundscapes of Australia: Music, Place and Spirituality. Ashgate Publishing. 2007

- Cohen, Hart. 2006. Repertoire, Landscape and Memory: Williams’s and Schultz’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend Canata.

- Cook, Nicolas. 1998, Music: A Very Short Introduction.  (Oxford)

- Sculthorpe, Peter. 1999.- Sun Music: journeys and reflections from a composer’s life. (ABC Books)

- Williams, Gordon Kalton. April, 2005. Scored in Black and White. (The Australian)

Scores:

Sculthorpe, Peter. 1988, Kakadu (For Orchestra) 1988. Faber Music

Sculthorpe, Peter. 1977, Port Essington. Faber Music.

Schultz, Andrew (Music) and Williams, Gordon Kalton (Libretto), 2003, based on the novel by T.H. Strehlow. Journey To Horseshoe Bend.