Towards an Australian Art-Music Canon

Is there an Australian art-music canon? Does Australian music feature in any lists of 1001 works to be listened to before you die? Have any masterpieces of Australian composition found a place on the eight indices of pieces classical music lovers cannot live without, produced between 2000 and 2010 by Australia’s own canon-generator, ABC Classic FM? No. Though Brett Dean was mentioned as a possible non-contender in Bob Maynard’s “Ode to the Classic 100 Ten Years On”, not a single Australian-written note cracked the list itself.

The ABC’s cultural arbitration of our listening tastes could be cynically viewed as little more than an effort on the part of the organisation’s marketing wing to create saleable CD box sets for a ready-made focus group. But such canonical lists are, in their way, an indicator of what is popular with classical music audiences. For the most part the lists were a mirror image of the standard musical pantheon—Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Haydn, Handel, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and so on. But how did these “great men” enter and remain in the canon? To answer this question we must go back to the eighteenth century, to the Age of Enlightenment, when musicians began to resuscitate music from the past and historicism became a continuing feature of our aesthetic experience. Up to the twentieth century, music of the past sat comfortably alongside music of the present. However, as the artistic sensibilities of twentieth-century modernism steadily estranged its audiences, the musical pantheon increasingly appropriated the old as a way of ignoring the new—this despite the fact that CD technology appears to have made available the world’s entire musical heritage.

I am not aware of any kind of published canonical catalogue of Australian compositions. There have been periodic attempts in surveys and histories to a give a fluctuating group of Australian composers the keys to the national pantheon. From the sixties onwards, Sydney-based composer Peter Sculthorpe has managed to survive being dismissed as yesterday’s man and is probably the best-known compositional voice of Australia. Other composers have not fared so well, as sonic fashion strongly dictates who is promoted and who falls away. A good example of involuntary artistic redundancy would be Robert Hughes, who was one of the leading figures in Australian music until the mid-1960s, when his conservative idiom was displaced by that of then younger composers who embraced postwar European modernism. Richard Meale became one of the leading figures of the sixties generation, but by the 1990s he too was sidelined, even though his musical language had re-aligned itself with postmodernism, by others such as Ross Edwards, Carl Vine and Elena Kats-Chernin.

The latest book on Australian music, New Classical Music: Composing Australia by Gordon Kerry (University of New South Wales Press, 2009), is focused on developments since 1979. Unlike most of his published predecessors, Kerry, himself a composer, has chosen to organise his discussion around themes—Asian influences, landscape and non-modernism, for example—rather than individuals. Occasionally, a single work is detailed, but in the main the reader is presented with a compositional who’s who without encountering a critical word about the music itself, perhaps because the sole selection criterion was that the works chosen for comment should be what Kerry considered as “well made”. Kerry does not explain what he means by well made and I suspect subjectivity was a major influence in his decisions. 

The French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, once an enfant terrible and now very much a mainstream personality in the European music fraternity, is alleged to have said, “I don’t estimate music in order of importance; simply it is, or isn’t, interesting.” I suppose this aphorism weaves its way in and out of my approach to what could be the beginning of an Australian musical canon. But I was also mindful of Gustave Flaubert’s maxim, “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” In order to make my task manageable, I created some rules on how the canon should be formulated: the selection was to include no more than thirty works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; each composer could appear only once; only acoustic music would be included; no arrangements were permitted. I divided the list into six categories—Choral, Song, Opera, Chamber, Orchestral and, to wrap it up, my “Top Five”. Apart from the last category, in which my own personal ideas of “well made” prevailed, the selection of music was influenced by variables as diverse as historical significance, longevity in the active repertoire, and a quality-crafted work.

Probably the biggest challenge was to limit the list to thirty pieces. My selection was re-formed on countless occasions over a six-month period as works that seemed strong contenders at first were sometimes easily dismissed later. The list, as published here, is one in which I have not vacillated over my selection criteria. 

Choral 

Frank Hutchens (1892–1965) The Australian Sunrise (after 1911)              

William James (1895–1977) Australian Christmas Carols Book One (1948)     

Anne Boyd (b 1947) As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams (1975)                       

Clare Maclean (b 1958) Et Misericordia (1986)                                               

Nigel Butterley (b 1935) Spell of Creation (2000) 

Australian choirs range from community-based groups without entry restrictions to ensembles with strict audition policies. Even so the choral movement is largely an amateur activity, and locally-written choral music needs to lie within the capabilities of hard-working but not necessarily trained choristers. Accordingly, the most successful choral music is simple and direct and facilitates voice leading and pitching. Frank Hutchens’s The Australian Sunrise and William James’s Australian Christmas Carols are products of Australia’s amateur music-making choral tradition.

Hutchens was a leading figure in piano pedagogy around New South Wales until his death in 1965, and formed a forty-year piano duo partnership with fellow pianist-composer Lindley Evans. The Australian Sunrise was composed sometime after Hutchens’s return to Australia from his studies at the Royal Academy of Music in 1911. Scored for sopranos and altos, it was ideally aimed at school choirs and it became an important work for the composer. The beautiful melodic lines and simple counterpoint undoubtedly made it an attractive addition to school recitals, even though it would have seemed exotic in a prevailing repertoire of English choral works. The Australian Sunrise might have had an enduring lifespan but for the rather twee lyrics by James Lester Cuthbertson.

William James’s Australian Christmas Carols were even more popular with choristers and audiences alike. The carols appealed to our national sensibilities, as John Wheeler’s lyrics transformed the ubiquitous Northern Yuletide themes to hot summer days on dusty, brown paddocks. The three wise men became three drovers, and references to Australian flora and fauna were scattered throughout. The first collection, composed in 1948, was so successful that James and Wheeler collaborated to produce another two sets in 1954 and 1961. Appropriately, the melodies are immediately “hum-able”. James spent a considerable part of his working life as an Australian Broadcasting Commission bureaucrat, and though most of his music is instantly forgettable these carols are his enduring legacy.

The Australian Sunrise and Australian Christmas Carols fit squarely in the amateur music arena. Anne Boyd’s As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams and Clare Maclean’s Et Misericordia, however, are works that need strongly-committed choristers with years of training as neither is easy to perform. Boyd has been associated with tertiary music education in England, Hong Kong and Australia. She is probably best known for her passionate advocacy of the now defunct University of Sydney Music Department in the documentary, Facing the Music (2001). Boyd has composed across the genres but is deeply attached creatively to the voice. She is also one of those Australian composers who, since the 1960s, have embraced Asian musical influences as an alternative to the reliance of European musical traditions. The influence of Japanese gagaku in As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams (1975) is more theoretical than overt. In gagaku there is a slow unfurling of sound that Boyd adapts by eliding the music’s harmonic elements at a meditative pace. The work is divided into three SATB unaccompanied choirs who sing letters derived from the name of two Buddhas, Amatersau and Amida. This is not a conventional choral piece, and might prove a challenge for those unfamiliar with late-twentieth-century compositional techniques, listener and performer alike. But it is rewarding if one can allow one’s senses to dissolve into the sonic texture. Gordon Kerry hails As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams as a “masterpiece”; it certainly came very close to being in my “Top Five”.  

Clare Maclean’s Et Misericordia (1986) is more traditional in its compositional craft but no less challenging for the unaccompanied choir. Maclean was a chorister herself for some years, and her training and understanding of the voice are clearly evident in this piece. Her interest in Renaissance music is noticeable in the chant-like activity and virtuosic contrapuntal textures that at times confront the singers with many sub-divisions of the voice groupings. But when the vocal gymnastics go into remission, as in the hauntingly beautiful setting of “I know that my Redeemer lives” (Job 19:25–27), the simple chordal writing allows the listener to savour the moment. This is a stunning work.

Nigel Butterley is one of the country’s best composers for voice, and his vocal-symphonic composition Spell of Creation (2000) won the Paul Lowin Award for orchestral work in 2001. The work calls for soprano and baritone soloists, semi-chorus, double choir and orchestra, which regrettably does not help with repeat performances. Nonetheless, Spell of Creation sums up Butterley’s compositional approach in many respects, which above all else is an engagement with texture, with beautiful momentary nuances that make his music sparkle with originality. 

Song with piano or chamber ensemble 

Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–1990) Come Sleep (early 1930s)                      

Helen Gifford (b 1935) Music for the Adonia (1993)   

Brenton Broadstock (b 1952) Bright Tracks (1994)          

Andrew Ford (b 1957) Learning to Howl (2001)               

One would be hard pressed to find an Australian composer of acoustic music who has not written a song or two, a fact that made the creation of this section very difficult. What determined my selection? On occasion it was prosody, or how effectively the text was set. At other times I considered how creatively the composer had used the voice and the accompanying instruments. Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s miniature Come Sleep is a setting of John Fletcher’s 1579 poem, “Sleep”. It was written while she was studying at the Royal College of Music in London in the 1930s, and shows the influence of the prevailing English pastoral style. It is a perfect lullaby in its simplicity (it never strays out of G major) and its melodic material is wonderfully sleep-inducing. Glanville-Hicks was probably the most cosmopolitan Australian composer of her generation, living as she did in London, New York and Greece before returning to Australia in the mid-1970s. Come Sleep is a small gem of perfection.

The works by Gifford, Broadstock and Ford extend the voice in musical languages far removed from that used by Glanville-Hicks. Helen Gifford’s Music for the Adonia (1993) is the most experimental of the three. She invented her own phonetic language for the solo soprano and wove it through a series of vocal expressions that traverse emotional states ranging from grief to joy as the listener enters into the composer’s theatrical response to the ancient Greek Festival of Adonis. The work’s rigorous performance demands and its large accompanying ensemble that includes unusual instruments make frequent performances unlikely, well-deserved though these would be.

Brenton Broadstock’s Bright Tracks (1994) is more conservative in style but still highly effective. The mixture of tonal and more chromatic sections reinforces the poet Ivor Gurney’s mental anguish and instability; the use of strings as the accompaniment allowed for more flexibility in gliding around the text’s heightened states. Broadstock, who spent many years as a composer-academic at the University of Melbourne, won the prestigious Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize in 1994 with Bright Tracks, and deservedly so.

Andrew Ford, known to many people for his work on Radio National’s Music Show and his numerous books, won both the Australian Music Centre/Australasian Performing Right Association’s Best Composition award and the Lowin Song Cycle Prize for Learning to Howl in 2004. Ford uses a series of texts, mainly by women, ranging from Sappho through Elizabeth I to Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Smart, to name just a few. Disjointedness can be an issue with multi-authored song cycles, but Ford has made sure that this cycle’s journey from childhood to old age is bound together and constantly engaging through his use of insightful textural colourisation on saxophone, clarinets, harp and percussion and his fluid vocal lines. As with the Gifford work, the unusual instrumental requirements have probably prevented more performances of Ford’s cycle and it has not been recorded commercially. 

Opera                                  

Richard Meale (1932–2009) Voss (1985)                        

Brett Dean (b 1961) Bliss (2010)

 It is rare for opera troupes to take risks on new works, particularly new Australian endeavours that have less appeal to ticket-buyers and sponsors. This is not to say that Australian operas are never performed, but they are usually only given a limited run, and return seasons are not the norm. Richard Meale’s Voss (1985), with a libretto by David Malouf after the novel by Patrick White, was accompanied by much fanfare at its premiere at the Adelaide Festival in 1986. It was revived by the Australian Opera in 1990, but has now disappeared from the repertoire, though it occasionally receives radio airplay as it is available on commercial CD (and video). The opera ably conveys the essence of White’s 1957 book and navigates much psychological and metaphysical territory. Based on Leichhardt’s doomed fourth expedition, the libretto deals with the idea of the iconic tragic hero, Voss, who battles the harsh environment of the interior at the same time as he mystically communes with the Sydney-based heroine, Laura. Meale had only relatively recently abandoned his modernist ways before writing this work, and the opera, probably much to the chagrin of his earlier supporters, reinforced his new artistic position. It is a marvellous postmodern score that highlights an affinity with Wagner and Puccini, with a dash of Benjamin Britten. Nineteenth-century quadrilles such as La Illawarra are inserted to add authentic colonial colour.

I am probably taking a huge risk by including Brett Dean’s opera Bliss (2010) in my Australian canon, not because of any second thoughts on its artistic merit, but because of its newness. It was only premiered last year, and had seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, Edinburgh and Hamburg. There has been no time for thoughts about the work to mature. Nonetheless, I venture to predict that the opera will stand the test of time due to the ingenuity of the partnership between Dean and librettist Amanda Holden, who between them transformed Peter Carey’s novel into a very “operatic” opera, complete with solos, duets, trios and chorus numbers. Dean’s music is not always easy on the ear, though there are intriguing moments of jazz, swing and (in collaboration with Bob Scott) 1980s electronic sound design to set scenes and enhance the vivid orchestration. Both Voss and Bliss deserve to have periodic returns to the stage. 

Solo and chamber 

Miriam Hyde (1913–2005) Piano Sonata (1944)           

Dorian Le Gallienne (1915–1963) Duo for violin and viola (1956)        

Roger Smalley (b 1943) Strung Out (1988)                      

Julian Yu (b 1957) Piano Trio, op26a (1994)                            

Chris Dench (b 1953) Ruins Within for clarinet solo (1993)                

Elena Kats-Chernin (b 1957) Cadences, Deviations and Scarlatti (1995) 

Damien Ricketson (b 1973) Chinese Whisper (2000) 

In solo and chamber pieces, musical communication is direct, intimate and exposed. Attention to detail is all-important with small musical forces.

Miriam Hyde is probably one of the most recognisable Australian composers, due to the popularity of her pedagogical output. Over the years, piano syllabuses have been liberally sprinkled with her music. I imagine many readers would remember fondly her pieces as part of their childhood musical experiences. However, Hyde’s concert piano music has also maintained its place in the national musical memory. At the 2010 Australian National Piano Award competition, most of the finalists chose a Hyde work as the Australian component of their recitals. The Piano Sonata in G minor (1944) is comfortably Romantic in style, with discernable echoes of Brahms, Chopin and Rachmaninov. Nonetheless, this sometimes brooding, sometimes ecstatic wartime piece does have significant pianistic merit and is one of the strongest essays of its kind from her generation.

While Hyde made a name for herself primarily in solo and chamber music, her Melbourne-based contemporary Dorian Le Gallienne was able to demonstrate his talents across the spectrum from esoteric art music to commercial film music. He was a true craftsman who could turn his hand to any requirement. Few Australian composers have demonstrated such flexibility save perhaps Don Banks, George Dreyfus, Laurence Whiffin, Julian Yu and Nigel Westlake. In his Duo for Violin and Viola (1956), composed for the husband-and-wife team of Sybil Copland and John Glickman, Le Gallienne was able to produce a taut sonic essay permeated with influences of Bartok and perhaps the more experimental Shostakovich. It is pity that this short piece has yet to be commercially recorded. 

Roger Smalley’s Strung Out (1988) for thirteen solo strings, though often performed, is likewise yet to be commercially recorded. Having sampled music from across various decades of Smalley’s creative life, I am of the opinion that his early- to mid-career music outclasses his later work in quality (a slippery term in the arts, if there ever was one), and that Strung Out is a high point. Thirteen players are stretched symmetrically in a line across the stage with the double-bass as the central pivot so that the sound sweeps stereophonically in various directions as the piece unfolds.

Chinese-born Julian Yu has been awarded numerous prizes for his work, including the Paul Lowin orchestral award in 1991 and 1994. However, it is his Piano Trio (1994) that has stood the test of time. According to the composer, the work is an homage to Brahms, most obviously because Yu incorporates the principal theme of the second movement of Brahms’s First Symphony. More subtly, Yu has constructed a work that has Brahms’s solid sense of form and mirrors Brahms’s ability to keep the piano line from overpowering the strings. Originally written as a piano quartet, the trio version is now most often performed.

Of all the composers that feature here, English-born Chris Dench is probably the most under-rated in his adopted homeland. Up to 2010, Dench had applied to the Australia Council on thirty-five occasions without success. Thankfully, musicians from Europe, America and Australia have come to his aid creatively (if not financially) with requests for his music. Dench is a texturalist, creating incredibly beautiful layers of sound in diversified impressionistic episodes. One might not necessarily hear texturality in Ruins Within (1993) for clarinet solo, but one will hear a modernist piece that is brilliantly shaped, particularly in terms of dynamics. The work is not for the faint-hearted, neither performer nor audience, but demonstrates admirably that sinewy language of modernism, when used without guile, can breach the gulf between composer and many concert-goers.

Elena Kats-Chernin has been one of Australia’s compositional success stories, as she has enjoyed regular commissions. With such a high level of compositional activity it is unrealistic to expect her to maintain a consistent quality or output—some of it is dazzling and some of it more routine. One work that sits squarely in the “inspired” category is Cadences, Deviations and Scarlatti (1995). Written for a large chamber ensemble, the piece won the 1996 Sounds Australian Award. Kats-Chernin constantly re-engages the audience with rhythmic and textural variety as the music pushes forward without a flagging moment. The title contains the irony of what the piece is and what it is not in three simple words: “Scarlatti” refers to the great Baroque master, but only insofar as the composer was the impetus for the composition to be written; “Deviations” quite rightly expresses the fact that the piece has no neo-Baroque inspirations; while “Cadences” correctly pinpoints the incorporation of traditional structural characteristics. The music is mildly spiky, a style Kats-Chernin favoured before she switched a few years later to a more conservative approach—which can be heard as bookend music for Late Night Live on Radio National.

Damien Ricketson is arguably one of the most exciting composers of “Generation X”. He favours sophisticated sonic experimentation, and Chinese Whisper (2000) is a good example of his need to test out new possibilities. Twelve strings are divided into three sub-sets: amplified violin and cello, string quartet, and muted sextet. Each group is given a distinct sound, for example, the muted sextet is permanently tuned flat, and specific musical characteristics are allocated to the various combinations. Initially this approach makes the work appear somewhat disconnected, as if jigsaw pieces are being pushed around a table, especially as repetition and distortion are fundamental premises (hence the title). However, the sound coalesces and the work slowly comes together. Chinese Whisper is a fascinating work that requires a committed group of musicians to reveal the work’s mobile lines in their kaleidoscopic splendour. 

Orchestral 

John Antill (1904–1986) Corroboree (1946)               

Robert Hughes (1912–2007) Sinfonietta (1957)               

Malcolm Williamson (1931–2003) The Display (1964)             

Barry Conyngham (b 1944) Ice Carving (1970)             

Don Banks (1923–1980) Nexus (1971)               

Ross Edwards (b 1943) Piano Concerto (1982 rev. 2003)       

Graeme Koehne (b 1956) Powerhouse (1993) 

John Antill could be called a “one hit” wonder. Due to the novelty of using Aboriginal-influences in Australian art-music, his ballet score Corroboree (1946) became the work that demonstrated Australia’s cultural independence after the Second World War. It was heard on both the theatre and orchestral stages between the mid-1940s and mid-1950s and Antill became the “Voice of the Nation”. This publicity became a millstone around the neck of a shy man and he subsequently went out of his way to compose little else in the same style (a mild-mannered Rite of Spring). The work is historically significant inasmuch as it heralded a new generation of composers such as Margaret Sutherland, Robert Hughes and Dorian Le Gallienne at a time when, for a brief moment, Australia rode a wave of postwar economic prosperity and the musical culture-cringe appeared to dissipate. On a musical level, however, the orchestration of Corroboree is, at times, extremely stodgy.

A far better orchestrator, in fact, probably the best of his generation (those born between 1900 and 1918) was Melbourne-based Robert Hughes. A thorough-going traditionalist, Hughes wrote almost exclusively for orchestra but his music was eclipsed in the 1960s as a push of younger composers like George Dreyfus and Keith Humble hustled to gain airtime. Hughes’s Sinfonietta, arguably one of his best works, was commissioned by Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra in 1957. Its matter-of-fact structure, oscillating between vigour and lyricism, could still make an attractive opener for a professional orchestral concert. Perhaps for a start the Sinfonietta needs to be re-released on CD.

Hughes dedicated much of his time to the service of promoting Australian music. Malcolm Williamson on the other hand appeared to relish opportunities to deliver spiteful aphorisms more than attending to his duties, chiefly as Master of the Queen’s Musick. One notable Williamson barb, “[Andrew] Lloyd Webber’s music is everywhere, but then so is AIDS”, did the rounds in the early 1990s, but did him no credit. However, The Display (1964), Williamson’s colourful orchestral ballet score composed to support Robert Helpmann’s choreography, secures him a place in my Australian canon. The Display toured Australia and overseas with the Australian Ballet in the sixties. A powerful mixture of gritty social realism and fantasy, the ballet can be seen as taking Australian dance to a level of maturity beyond water sprites and white dancers pretending to be Aborigines. Like John Antill before him, Williamson created an orchestral suite from the original ballet score for which, again like Antill, he is chiefly remembered.

Barry Conyngham has had a dual career as both academic and composer. Years of service at Southern Cross University (where he was Vice-Chancellor) and the University of Melbourne have undoubtedly cut into his time for composition. In many respects, it is not surprising that I place an early work of his on my list, as it was as a student that Conyngham was probably freest to compose. Ice Carving was written while he was studying with Toru Takemitsu in Japan in the early 1970s. Scored for amplified solo violin and four string orchestras, the music attempts to represent a sculptor forming his creation in ice, and its subsequent slow disintegration under the sun’s rays. The ice figure’s multiple shapes allowed Conyngham to scope a score that ideally demonstrated both his interest in texture and the extended instrumental techniques that were prime concerns of composers in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the intricacies of its modernist style, the work deserves more than an occasional airing.

Don Banks was a musical journeyman who was just as comfortable composing music for B-grade horror films as for the concert stage. Like his fellow composer Keith Humble, Banks was interested in both jazz and classical music, and was a passionate believer in the “third stream” approach that attempted to bring jazz and classical styles together. In many cases, such attempts are artistically fraught as composers often preference one style while the other is a clichéd veneer. Banks’s composition Nexus, scored for orchestra and jazz quintet, is a quality example of fusion, with its oscillation between a spiky orchestra palette and a rather “cool combo”. The work is occasionally performed.

While Antill—and to a lesser extent Williamson—had to live with being a “one hit” wonder, Ross Edwards has made a career out of recycling the style that made him noticed. This may appear to be a cynical reading of his music but Edwards has, since the early 1980s, had two frames of reference—a highly extroverted rhythmic one that he calls his maninya style, and a more introspective, melody-driven one. The word maninya is of Edwards’s own devising, meaning “dance/chant”. His first maninya essay was his Piano Concerto (1982/2003), a spontaneous, exuberant musical experience for both the piano and orchestra that broke the modernist mould he had settled into up to that point. It is a pity that Edwards appears unable or unwilling to depart from his recycling ethos, but the Piano Concerto sits at the pinnacle of his work.

Adelaide-based Graeme Koehne has not endeared himself to some in the compositional community with his decades-long negative remarks about modernist music. These rather tiresome tirades cannot diminish the fact that Koehne is one of this country’s best orchestrators. As would be expected from a man who dismisses modernist techniques out of hand, his orchestral palette is a conservative one. Powerhouse (1993) was the first of a series of orchestral pieces that were written as short curtain-raisers. Although some might suggest the music is “cheesy American”, Koehne’s vitality, colour and musical wit come through, while the samba dance rhythms make for an enjoyable listening experience. 

The top five Australian art-music works  

Oddly enough, the selection of my “Top Five” was relatively easy, perhaps because musical quality was my primary criterion. These works cover orchestral, chamber and song repertoire, and were composed in a variety of styles between 1927 and 1990. Each work, I believe, stands out as a classic example of each composer’s individual style and capability. I admit that most of the works fall outside the commonly understood idea of “accessible”, in that, broadly speaking, most have a modernist-language base. Therefore it could be argued that my list is one based on intellectual interest rather than audience appeal. So be it. 

5. Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984) String Quartet No. 2 “Discussion” (1954) 

Of the generation that was born between the late-1890s and the end of the First World War, Margaret Sutherland, along with Dorian Le Gallienne and Robert Hughes, sat well above the others in terms of compositional excellence. However, there are qualifications to this accolade. Sutherland was far more comfortable in writing for small forces and her chamber music was, I believe, without peer. Not so her orchestral work. Sutherland’s String Quartet No. 2 “Discussion” stands out from the rest of her significant chamber music achievement. As the title suggests it is a “discussion” between instruments. There is a forthright determination in the instrumental exchange that has as its forebears the languages of Bartok and Hindemith. Many Australian composers have attempted to write string quartets, but none so far have matched Sutherland’s brilliance in “Discussion”. The work needs to be re-recorded by a professional quartet and released commercially. Sutherland demands the highest standards of musicianship. 

4. Peter Sculthorpe (b 1929) Sun Music III (1967) 

Peter Sculthorpe is a towering figure in Australian music both in terms of the popularity of his music and his impact on the training of subsequent generations of composers. Among composers in this survey alone Anne Boyd, Clare Maclean, Ross Edwards, Barry Conyngham, Elena Kats-Chernin and Damien Ricketson were all mentored by Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney. He has written a vast amount of music with a stylistic pragmatism that embraces avant-garde instrumental requirements while not eschewing a lyrical melodic line. Sun Music III (1967) is a work of its time. It is an example of Sculthorpe’s Asianist style, which was particularly influential in the 1960s as young composers tried to disengage (philosophically, at least) from European musical traditions and relocate Australian composition in its geographic region. In this score, the transplantation of the melodies and gamelan rhythms of Balinese music is coupled with Sculthorpe’s own individual voice to create a kaleidoscope of beautifully orchestrated sounds. Sculthorpe reflects in his autobiography that at the time of its composition, his critics condemned the work as being “Suzie Wong music”, but it is one of the best Australian examples of Western instruments translating and transfiguring musical sounds from beyond their traditional, Euro-centric frame of reference.  

3. Carl Vine (b 1954) Piano Sonata No. 1 (1990) 

Each year I ask my honours piano students at Monash University what they are performing as part of their repertoire and nearly each year at least one nominates Carl Vine’s Piano Sonata No. 1. I realise this is a small sample but, given the scope of the piano repertoire, it does say something about the appeal of the work. Originally commissioned for the Sydney Dance Company, the music has an abundance of energy. The abrupt rhythmic juxtapositions so characteristic of dance music give the Sonata a marvellous edge, and listeners are constantly and rapidly pushed into new territory. If played with flair, as by the work’s dedicatee Michael Kiernan Harvey, the Sonata is not only exciting to listen to but wonderful theatre as well. Vine’s Piano Sonata No. 1 is certainly showy, but its intelligent rhythmic interplay allows it to transcend shallow virtuosity. The sheer monumentalism of the work makes it a masterpiece in the Australian piano literature. 

2. May Brahe (1884–1956) “Bless This House” (1927) 

It could be argued that this popular ballad does not properly have a place in a classical music canon. However, the timeless popularity of this simple, affective song has allowed it to sit comfortably in both the drawing room and the recital hall. “Bless This House” is a perfect specimen of its type and has been widely recorded over a long period by singers ranging from Bryn Terfel and Leontyne Price to Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney. Helen Taylor’s durable lyrics refer to a fundamental human desire for security that allows listeners to discover their own meanings in the song. Not surprisingly, it sold 90,000 copies in 1943 when the world was at war. “Bless This House” is an Australian evergreen.   

1. George Dreyfus (b 1928) Sextet for Didjeridu and Wind Instruments (1971) 

The sound of the didjeridu is quintessentially Australian. At the same time, the “foreignness” of the instrument’s traditions and timbres to the European art music tradition has made it a problematic sound source. Composer John Antill tried to overcome this through imitation; other composers such as Peter Sculthorpe and Colin Bright have had limited success in incorporating the instrument into their Western tapestries. For the most part, the inclusion of the didjeridu has been a superficial gesture, an instantly recognisable nationalistic colouring. In George Dreyfus’s Sextet, however, the didjeridu is not an added extra, an exotic “other”, but a thoroughly consolidated voice within the ensemble as the composer asks the didjeridu player to improvise on the music that the Western instruments are performing.

The language of the work is mid-twentieth-century Euro-centric modernism, with obvious influences from the work of Penderecki and Ligeti. Dreyfus is well known for his folk-music arrangement for the credits of the 1970s television series Rush. Since then he has cashed in on his fame with numerous arrangements of his theme, and delicate or not so delicate citations of it in subsequent works. Dreyfus’s flair for blatant self-promotion aside, his Sextet for Didjeridu and Wind Instruments is his crowning artistic achievement, and one that towers over the other compositions discussed in this survey of potentially canonic Australian art music.

Australia’s music would only be a drop in the ocean of Western art-music over the centuries. But that is not to say that the country’s music does not find (usually) fleeting exposure abroad. At home, national radio stations exchange internally-made recordings, compact discs are within reach for composers and their performer friends to “self-publish”, internet downloads are accessible to all, while formal and informal musician networks allow for fruitful concert commitments.

While all these activities occur in the present, there is as yet no discussion of an Australian art-music canon that includes the music of the nation’s past. Perhaps we are too involved in the here and now to reflect upon Australia’s relatively short musical history. Perhaps our national egalitarianism prevents us from creating such hierarchical matters. My list is not set in concrete, as many would have other works to promote. Rather this article attempts to launch a debate on what constitutes enduring quality or iconic art music status in Australia, and to bring together the “thirty Australian art-music works you should hear before you die”! 

Joel Crotty works in the School of Music-Conservatorium, Monash University. He wishes to acknowledge the comments of Dr Kay Dreyfus.