A Symphony for Australia

The Jubilee Composers’ Competition of 1951 was one of a number of competitions sponsored by the federal government to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Federation. The various competitions included poetry, novels, radio plays, stage plays, painting, national songs and the symphony competition. It was hoped that the symphony competition would result in the performance of a significant new work that would be premiered in Australia before the end of 1951.

During the 1930s and 1940s the importance of the symphony as a genre of concert music reached its peak, especially in the United Kingdom, the USA, Scandinavia and Russia, so it was not surprising that the symphony should be part of the Jubilee competition. Although an Australian was not the first prize winner in this competition, which was open to all “British citizens” of the British Commonwealth, four Australians figured among the final ten composers and eleven works, and one of the finest Australian symphonies composed to date, by Robert Hughes, won the second prize. It could be argued that the competition demonstrated publicly, for the first time, that Australian composers could compete favourably in an international forum.

The administration of the music competitions (and some of the others) was delegated to the Australian Broadcasting Commission, under the leadership of Charles Moses, head of the ABC and convenor of the arts sub-committee of the Jubilee celebrations. The ABC was a logical choice to co-ordinate the composers’ competition, as it controlled the six state symphony orchestras and was the principal entrepreneur of large-scale concert music in Australia.

During 1950 the scope and conditions of the competition were drafted by a music committee chaired by Eugene Goossens and including W.G. James and Bernard Heinze. Goossens, a renowned British conductor and composer, had taken up the dual posts of Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Director of the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in 1947. In 1950 he was the pre-eminent figure in Australian concert music. Heinze and James, both Australians, were arguably the next most powerful influences in Australian musical life after Goossens.

The music committee reported to the main Commonwealth Jubilee Celebrations organising body, headed by Lieutenant-General F.H. Berryman, and to Charles Moses. At a meeting of September 6, 1950, the music committee agreed that the musical genre of focus in the competition was a symphony “of no more than forty minutes duration” and that the first prize was £1000. Competitors were to submit their works under a nom de plume to ensure fairness. (Tracing the identity of the competitors remains difficult, and apart from the winning entries, the National Archives documents remain the only printed record to offer some proof or clues of who participated.) Entries were due by June 15, 1951.

There was a contentious element in the competition. All citizens of the British Common-wealth were eligible to enter, not just Australian-born or Australian-based composers. Robert Hughes, one of the Australian resident participants, told me in an interview in February 2005 that he considered these stipulations deeply insulting to Australian composers. Although none of the extant National Archives documents records the reason explicitly, their tone implies that the organisers considered that a competition restricted to Australian citizens and residents might not produce a significant body of work from which to choose a “Jubilee Symphony”. No one in the organising committee imagined that the competition would attract thirty-six entries from Australian composers and that the competition would lead to the burgeoning of symphonic composition in Australia throughout the 1950s.

Before 1950 few symphonies composed in Australia had been performed in public; they included works by Joshua Ives, George Marshall-Hall, Fritz Hart, George English, Alfred Hill and Edgar Bainton. Of this group, only Hill was Australian-born. A number of works by other resident composers had been written but had not come to performance. In Britain, expatriate Australian composers Hubert Clifford and Arthur Benjamin produced a symphony each in 1940 and 1945 respectively. However, by the late 1940s the establishment of professional orchestras in all states of Australia by the ABC provided many more potential opportunities for symphonic composition from Australian composers.

Seeking Australian material for his concerts with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, during 1947–48 Eugene Goossens sought out Australian composers to submit works to him for consideration. Writing in the Australian music journal the Canon in August 1948, Goossens admitted that he did not find much that impressed him or that compared with John Antill’s Corroboree, which he “discovered” in 1946. Given Goossens’s close association with the Jubilee competition, it is entirely likely that the committee he chaired found it difficult to believe that the “great Australian national symphony” would emerge in 1951. It was also hoped that major composers from Britain would participate. A memo from James to Moses about the competition adjudication shows that it was decided:

‘Two composers and a conductor all of international repute will act as final adjudicators.’ The meeting unanimously approved this wording. It was felt that the final adjudicators should be approached about January 1951; by then they will, no doubt, have heard of the Competition and any of them intending to compete will by that time have set to work. Much as we desire musicians of the calibre of Vaughan Williams or Bax as adjudicators, it would mean even more to us to have them as competitors.

A “Special Prize” of £250 was set aside for the best Australian symphony in case the first prize winner was not an Australian citizen. From this it can be surmised that the committee considered it likely that the first prize winner would not be Australian. The “Special Prize” was not, strictly speaking, even a second prize; it was intended to ensure that, somehow, an Australian would emerge amongst the final set of winners. To facilitate such an outcome, an additional clause was inserted into the draft entry form in which competitors had to state, “I am/am not an Australian citizen”.

Charles Moses used the ABC London office and the various national radio services of the British Commonwealth to disseminate the announcement of the competition and the entry forms to the main centres—principally the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States (for British subjects resident there). Before the official announcement of the competition by the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, on October 16, 1950, packages of entry forms and brochures were distributed. The numbers and the destinations of brochures are quite revealing of the original intentions of the competition organisers. The letters to T.W. Bearup, the ABC representative in London, and Nell Fleming, the ABC representative in New York, differed from the letters intended for other centres by virtue of the following sentence: “I shall be glad if you will do all you can to publicise the Competition as the Government is particularly anxious to secure a large number of entries of good standard.”

Of the brochures advertising the competition 7500 were for distribution in Australia, 7500 for the United Kingdom, 500 each for New Zealand and South Africa and 1000 each for Canada and the USA. Of the 3000 entry forms printed, 1000 were intended for Australia, 1000 for the UK, 200 each for Canada and the USA and 100 each for New Zealand and South Africa.

On September 18, 1950, Charles Moses outlined additional details about the adjudication process to General Berryman:

We do not propose at this stage to announce the names of the judges. It is intended that the preliminary selection of the best dozen or so entries should be made by a committee in this country comprising Eugene Goossens, Sir Bernard Heinze and Dr E.L. Bainton and that the final choice should be made by three eminent musicians of world standing overseas, probably including two composers and one conductor. Some of the conductors we have in mind as final judges may be interested in entering the competition—which we would prefer—and for this reason we propose to defer approaching them until early in 1951.

The December 1950 edition of the Australian Musical News criticised the competition sharply:

The £1000 prize offered for an Australian Symphony by the A.B.C. in conjunction with the Victorian [sic] Jubilee Festivities is both limiting and lacking in foresight to a degree. Firstly, there are few Australian composers who have written or might write a symphony especially for the occasion, and the very fact that a ‘Jubilee’ Symphony is required, would set the trade mark ‘made to order’ on the composition and probably curb the forces of inspiration. Then, secondly, who has time and economic freedom to write symphonies in these hectic and harassed days?

In late January 1951, the ABC began negotiations to secure the overseas judges. From a memo of Charles Moses concerning Sir John Barbirolli, then conductor of the Halle Orchestra, it is apparent that Goossens made the initial approach to Barbirolli, followed by official representations by the ABC. At the time, Barbirolli was in the midst of a tour of Australia for the ABC as a guest conductor. He agreed to participate. Arnold Bax and Ralph Vaughan Williams were Goossens’s first choices as the composer adjudicators and on April 17 Moses sent official letters to Barbirolli, Bax and Vaughan Williams. The composers responded quickly: Bax said yes; Vaughan Williams no. Goossens then suggested William Walton as the next choice but Walton replied on June 10 turning down the offer. On June 23 Charles Moses invited Goossens himself to fill the vacancy for the remaining final adjudicator.

This meant that Goossens was instrumental in overseeing the preliminary adjudication as well as being one of the final judges and the chair of the music committee that determined the original conditions of the competition. In the same letter, Moses reminded Goossens of his role in the first stage of judging and enquired about the process:

Would you prefer me to send you all the entries, so that you can distribute them to the other preliminary judges, or would you prefer them to be made up in three bundles of approximately equal size and sent out from the office? The entries are now being sorted and will be available in a few days.

Goossens accepted his appointment as a member of the final jury on June 27. His credentials were entirely respectable: he knew Barbirolli and Bax well and, apart from his conducting, he had written two large-scale symphonies himself during the 1940s. He outlined to Moses his plan of action for the preliminary stage of adjudication:

Yes, I will gladly act with John and Arnold as a member of the final jury, in addition to helping Bernard and Edgar in the preliminary adjudication … I can spend the weekend 7th-9th [July] weeding out the best of the scores … It’s immaterial whether E. & B. see them before I do; they’re bound to take more time over their inspection than I will, having had less practice in this sort of thing than I have had.

By late June 1951, it was apparent that the number of competition entries had more than doubled the original expectation of thirty to forty: there were eighty-nine entries, including forty-two from Britain, thirty-six from Australia and nine from Canada. The National Archives collection includes several copies of the final list of competitors, but unfortunately the identities of the noms de plume can only be revealed from the list of finalists and in connection with some of the other correspondence in the National Archives collection. Many intriguing mysteries remain.

Goossens played the primary role in the initial adjudication at some stage after July 18, 1951. By August 13, Heinze, based in Melbourne, had not yet seen any of the entries. Moses wrote to him:

Gene himself has already looked at the entries and has divided them into three groups probable, doubtful and impossible—and Dr Bainton, who decided he would accept Gene’s views about the ‘impossibles’, has examined the ‘doubtfuls’ and is now going through the ‘probables’. We thought that if you could find time to consider them … all three of you would then be ready to choose the ‘finalists’ so that we can send them off to England … I assume you won’t want to see the ‘impossibles’ but we could send off the ‘doubtfuls’ which total 22 at once, and then the ‘probables’ totalling 14, when Dr Bainton has finished with them.

The “doubtfuls” and “probables” were sent to Heinze—like Bainton he never saw the fifty-three “impossibles”—together with a list of the pieces in all three categories (which, unfortunately is not part of the National Archives collection) and he had completed his work on the scores prior to September 13, 1951.

The three preliminary judges made their final decision at a meeting in Sydney on October 4. The following day, Bainton wrote to Moses: “We found at least six works which would be worth a hearing, and three of these would hold their own in any symphony concert.” In a letter to Moses of January 29, 1952, Bainton added: “Judging the symphonies was certainly a responsibility … certainly no better ones could have been chosen.”

Eleven works were selected for final adjudication and sent to T.W. Bearup, Manager of the ABC London Office. He was informed that there were Australian works amongst the eleven. In fact there were four by Australians. Moses told Bearup:

I shall be glad if you will pass on the symphonies as soon as you receive them, to the two judges resident in England in turn. I assume that each will want to look at the whole eleven at one time, rather than in batches, but I should be glad if you would explain that we would be very grateful to have their assessment as soon as possible … You will remember that if the first prize is not won by an Australian there is a further prize of £250 for the best work by an Australian. There does not appear to be any need to mention this matter to the judges, as we are aware, for your own personal information, that there are some Australian works in the final group and if one of these is not the winner, the work which is placed highest on the preference list can be awarded the special prize. It will be necessary therefore to mark each of the eleven in order of preference.

Once again, this illustrates that the special prize for the best Australian entry was not necessarily the same thing as second prize.

Bax was the first of the judges to assess the symphonies, and he had completed his adjudication by December 18. Owing to conducting engagements, Barbirolli was not free to begin his work until January 7, 1952. Bearup personally conveyed the scores from Bax to Barbirolli. All three judges, including Goossens, made their final decision in London at the beginning of February.

The final adjudication was sent to the ABC by telegram on February 2 giving the awards according to noms de plume, adding the observation: “They expressed regret that works of more striking originality were not forthcoming. They wish to emphasise that there was complete unanimity in above placing.”

A request followed on February 6 that a second special prize of £100 be awarded to the third placing.

The first prize winner was Dr David Moule-Evans (1905–1988), a composition and theory professor at the Royal College of Music, whose Symphony in G major was entered under the nom de plume “Tromba Marina”. The successful Australian entrants were Robert Hughes (“Randall Alison”) and Dr Clive Douglas (“Karawora”), both ABC employees; one the music arranger in Melbourne, the other the Associate Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Charles Moses referred to their prizes as “second and third” in his confidential letter to T.W. Bearup dated February 9. The other Australians in the final eleven were David Morgan (“Brynawel”) and his Symphony No. 2 in D major and David Lumsdaine (“Witchetty Grub”) and his Symphony 1951. John Symons in his book The Music of Margaret Sutherland quoted Robert Hughes’s opinion in 1995 that Sutherland was among the finalists, but the documents from the National Archives show clearly that she was unsuccessful.

Other finalists were Ralph Wood, Daniel Jones with two symphonies, and James Hutton, all from the United Kingdom, and Jean Couthard and Graham George from Canada. Of these musicians, only two are listed in Grove Online, with Daniel Jones arguably the most notable in the area of symphonic composition with thirteen symphonies in his output. Judging from the dates, his second and third symphonies were possibly his entries. Graham George’s short list of works in Grove Online is of works for the stage.

An account of the judges’ report was issued by T.W. Bearup to Charles Moses on February 8, 1952. This is worth quoting at length:

The judges felt that the entries generally showed little originality, and they expressed disappointment with this fact. As regards the three works mentioned in our cable, the judges had independently arrived at the conclusion that they were very considerably in advance of all the other entries in musicianship, but when the matter of actual placement was considered by the judges in Committee a factor to which much weight was given was the potential impact of these compositions on audiences.

You asked that all the entries be listed in order of merit from 1 to 11, but the judges felt that this would be invidious to the entrants, and unfair to them as judges, and therefore they decided that they would limit their placings to the three mentioned.

As to the winning entry … it was felt that the great virtue of this work was its simplicity … The winning composition was also the brightest in colour and mood.

The entry which was placed second was considered to be the simplest of the works         submitted, but, although it contained fine material and was more closely knit than many of the others, it had not the same pleasant appeal as the winning composition.

With regard to the third placing, the judges said, ‘There is much that is attractive in this    optimistic and truly “colonial” composition. It is spaciously laid out, so that there is plenty of air to breathe. It may be considered somewhat naïve, but it is the naïvete of youth.’ In view of this, they agreed that a consolation prize of £100 might be awarded.

In short, the judges’ report showed that the competition did not unearth a masterpiece. In determining the winners, given the “little originality” in the entries, they selected works which would be attractive and understandable to audiences. In particular, Goossens may have been thinking about Australian concert-goers’ musical taste, as he was the primary figure in determining the choice of works to be played by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra—perhaps an instance of musical “horses for courses”.

There remains the possibility that the Australian entries were not the “real” second and third place winners, notwithstanding the first paragraph of the judges’ report. The reluctance to list the finalists from one to eleven is understandable from an adjudicator’s perspective, but it causes the status of the “special prizes” to remain unclear. Finally, the description of the third work as “colonial” and “naive” seems undeniably patronising from the perspective of 2010.

The official declaration of the winning composers was made by Mr Menzies in Canberra at 10 a.m. on Wednesday February 20. Official letters of congratulations were sent to the three winners the following day. Hughes’s award of a special prize was described by Moses as “second place”. Moses described Clive Douglas’s prize as “third prize” and added to Douglas in a letter to him: “As you know, no provision was originally made for a third prize, but the judges specially requested that your symphony should be recognised.”

The other Australian finalists, David Lumsdaine and David Morgan, and the British and Canadian finalists, were advised of their status as part of the final eleven on the same day. Aged twenty and nineteen years respectively at the time of the entry date, these two Australians were probably amongst the youngest entrants. Morgan’s symphony was finally performed in Adelaide, in a revised version for smaller orchestra, during the early 1960s and in 1994, but the composer has kept the original version with its finale amongst his papers and made a digitally produced score of it. Lumsdaine, according to personal e-mail communication with the author, no longer includes his symphony in his official output.

Other Australian entrants in the competition that can be ascertained from the National Archive documents included Margaret Sutherland, Raymond Hanson and Rex Hobscroft. Lesser-known competitors included Muriel King from Brisbane, R.C. Baddeley from Mosman, M. Hampton from Sandringham and Mr K. Evans from Mordialloc.

Arrangements were then made for performances of the three prize-winning works. On February 22 Charles Moses wrote to W.G. James:

As Mr Hughes comes from Melbourne and his work was first discovered by Sir Bernard Heinze, it would be appropriate that Sir Bernard should be offered the opportunity of presenting the first performance there … Mr Douglas might well be invited to conduct his own symphony and I expect Mr Goossens would want to conduct the ‘premiere’ of the winning work, since he was so closely concerned in its selection.

The cost of making orchestral parts for the works came out of Jubilee funds.

Moule-Evans described the musical approach of his symphony as “conservative” and “reactionary”. He was quoted in the Advertiser of February 21, 1952, as saying, “I hope that this work will prove an answer to all the ugly wrong-note music written these days.” The symphony was given its first performances in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra subscription series on May 28, 29, 31 and June 1, 1952, conducted by Goossens. According to the program note that Moule-Evans sent for the occasion, the symphony was not altogether fresh work but had been begun in 1944 and completed in 1948. The autograph full score of the work is now held by the National Library of Wales and I have a facsimile of this score for further research. Arrangements were made to record the symphony at the first performances. The completed recordings were sent to London and Charles Moses personally gave a copy to the composer. I have been unable to track down an extant recording of the work—certainly none presently exists in Australia.

In marked contrast to the four years gestation of the Moule-Evans symphony, Hughes claimed in the Advertiser of February 23, 1952, that his work was completed “in about ten weeks of evenings and weekends”. Hughes’s symphony was premiered in Melbourne on June 28, 1952, by the Victorian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Bernard Heinze. It was also given four performances on almost successive days. Subsequent performances occurred in Sydney under Goossens on August 19, and a broadcast and recorded performance in Melbourne under Joseph Post on December 12. Music by Hughes also figured in a Jubilee competition in another genre: he composed the score for the Australian film Mike and Stefani which won a special award in the film section. Douglas’s symphony was also premiered in Sydney during 1952, to mixed reviews.

On March 17, 1952, Moses wrote to Goossens, thanking him for his work in the Jubilee symphony project:

I hope that you feel the whole project was well worthwhile. It certainly seems to have given considerable encouragement to our own composers: even though one of them did not win the first prize, there were four in the final eleven and two in the first three.

Goossens replied on April 7:

I certainly felt that the competition was worthwhile even though it didn’t reveal an outstanding masterpiece. Perhaps for this very reason it has clarified the local situation and shown wherein lie both the strength and the weakness of this country’s creative music. It should be borne in mind too that the prize winning work represents technically and formally the pick of the bunch submitted, but I think it would stand little chance with the jury of any of the big European Festivals of contemporary music. Indeed we all commented on the strange lack of any really outstanding ‘modern’ work. True, some of them were written in a contemporary idiom, but diffusely and with no really sure or authoritative hand. The judges are therefore at pains to emphasise that the prize-winning work is not necessarily representative of their own conception of a highly important contribution to contemporary symphonic literature; they merely did their duty in selecting what seemed to them the best of the scores submitted …

In contrast to Goossens’s dismissive tone, Melbourne Herald music critic John Sinclair reviewed the first performance of the Hughes symphony and considered the event a milestone in Australian musical history:

The Moule-Evans work was recently played in Sydney, and good judges who have heard both prize-winning works say that of the two Mr Hughes’s is by far the more interesting and convincing … This was not only Mr Hughes’s first symphony, it was Melbourne’s first symphony. At least this was the first time a locally written work of these dimensions has been given front rank importance on orchestral programmes.

Today this important competition is largely forgotten. Given the large number of Australian entries, in hindsight it would have been far more beneficial to the development of Australian music if the competition had been restricted to Australian citizens and residents. Eugene Goossens’s hand in the organising of the competition and his primary role in the adjudication ensured that there was no significant Australian musical voice in the determination of the result. Bainton, resident in Australia since 1934, and especially Heinze, the only native-born Australian represented in the judging process, were relatively sidelined in the initial selection of works. The negation of an Australian voice in such an important competition illustrates profoundly the attitudes of national self-doubt and “cultural cringe” common at the time.

By the end of the 1950s, many other Australian symphonies had been composed and performed. I have traced over forty such works with extant scores in my research to date. Sadly, most of this music remains unknown, unperformed and unrecorded.

However, Robert Hughes was perhaps vindicated. Barbirolli admitted to Hughes after hearing his symphony that the judges’ verdict had been mistaken, and on the strength of the work commissioned Hughes’s Sinfonietta for the 1957 centenary of Manchester’s Halle Orchestra. After several attempts to revise the symphony during the 1950s with a new slow movement, Hughes reworked the musical material in 1971 into what he considered the definitive version. Following years of relative neglect, and Hughes’s own passing at the age of ninety-five in 2007, the early 1952 recording of his symphony as played by the Victorian Symphony Orchestra under Joseph Post was released commercially for the first time during 2008 by ABC Classics.

Moule-Evans’s Symphony in G remains in comparative oblivion.

Dr Rhoderick McNeill is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Southern Queensland. He is preparing a book on the Australian symphony during the 1950s. The principal source of data about the Jubilee competition is the collection of documents held by the National Archives of Australia.