Introduction
Four musicians gather around a table scattered with wooden objects. Plywood sculptures echoing the shape of banksias are sounded with fingertips, cylindrical whistles evoke birdcalls, wood shavings are rustled, and clusters of wooden fragments are scraped with quick gestures suggestive of insect movements. This playground of sonic materials is a garden of sorts, it is a travelling theatre, and a musical garden.1
Art music in Australia has always reflected the dominant social and cultural values of its time. As with all forms of art, the context of music-making significantly influences the evolution of musical practice, from concept and narrative through to techniques and performance. Until the mid-twentieth century, Australian art music was dominated by a musical culture that emphasised classical or neoclassical forms imported from the United Kingdom and Europe since colonisation. The majority of performances around the country focused on celebrating historic European repertoire, and early Australian art music composition was heavily influenced by the pastoral English style.2 This focus was reflected in the activity of the majority of institutions established during this time.3 In the latter half of the twentieth century, greater numbers of composers and performers began to creatively identify with musical practices that spoke to the Australian social and cultural context, echoing the changing nationalistic sentiment of the time. The 1960s and 1970s marked a period of rapid change and growth in the Australian cultural climate, which facilitated an increase in activity by musicians, support for Australian composers, and recognition and opportunities for new music created for the Australian cultural context.4 During this period, the first national organisations and institutions dedicated to Australian art music were established, including the Australia Council for the Arts (est. 1975) and Australian Music Centre (AMC, est. 1976), as well as new tertiary music education programmes.5 Significantly, during this period numerous small to medium music organisations and ensembles, such as David Ahern’s A-Z Music (1970–1975) and Synergy Percussion (est. 1974) were formed, buoyed by an increase in support from organisations such as the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC, est. 1932) and Musica Viva (est. 1945).6 These groups began to create and support a broad spectrum of unique contemporary works embracing a range of influences including heritage and contemporary Eurological musical forms,7 musical traditions of Australia’s geographical neighbours, experimental electronic music, performance art and improvisation. The preoccupation with identity stemming from earlier nationalist trends in British music that took root in the early twentieth century led to persistent inquiries asking, ‘What is Australian art music?’ and ‘What does Australian art music sound like?’, which continued into the twenty-first century.8
Art Music in Twenty-First Century Australia
The definition of ‘art music’ in twenty-first century Australia is somewhat subjective, with a plurality of interpretations due to the wide variety of activity sprawling across state symphony orchestras and opera companies, small performing arts ensembles, tertiary education institutions, community settings and individual art practices. Practitioners active across these contexts variously refer to their music as contemporary classical music, Western art music, Eurological concert music, new music, experimental music or ‘the music of our time’. This chapter is guided by understandings of Australian art music as described by two national arts organisations, acknowledging the limitations of doing so given the role that major organisations such as these have had and continue to have in the formation and acceptance of what art music in Australia might be. APRA AMCOS defines the field broadly to include categories of ‘notated composition; electroacoustic music; improvised music (including innovative, original jazz); sound art; installation sound; multimedia, web and film sound and music; and theatrical, operatic and choreographed music’.9 The AMC uses the same categories in their definition, with the notable addition of ‘related genres and techniques’.10 Both interpretations signal the way art music in Australia is evolving and frequently overlapping with popular, electronic, traditional and experimental musics, as well as with neighbouring disciplines of sound art, film, performance art, acoustic ecology, digital humanities, theatre and dance. Many practitioners root their work in art music while simultaneously striving to extend the boundaries of the genre or resisting genre or artform categorisation entirely. While the questions ‘What is Australian art music?’ and ‘What does Australian music sound like?’ are still debated, how these questions are being addressed today has shifted away from genre-based descriptions, stylistic tropes or nationalistic tendencies. Further, the need for (arguably) restrictive definitions and parameters is itself under question, and newly reframed thinking asks, ‘What more could Australian art music become?’ and ‘How does Australian art music reflect our time and place?’. Questions of what Australian art music could become are addressed explicitly through the annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks (PGH) address, which plays a significant role in igniting debate and highlighting crucial issues within Australian art music, and can be viewed as a way for the community to take the pulse of the sector. Over the past five years, the PGH speakers have focused on global issues with a local perspective, calling on artists and audiences to address the key issues through a twenty-first century lens of social justice.11
In 2022, the zeitgeist of ‘our time and place’ is dominated by two global issues: the climate crisis and social justice. The Australian Human Rights Commission identifies the key areas within the latter as women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, First Nations rights, multiculturalism, homelessness, bullying and harassment, and refugees and asylum seekers.12 In recent years, links between the climate crisis and social justice are increasingly recognised, as marginalised groups are disproportionately affected by displacement or hardship due to extreme weather events, changes in food and clean water availability, and as access to other necessities continues to be threatened by ongoing shifts in climate.13 We argue that both the climate crisis and social justice issues are strongly influencing the evolution of art music in Australia, shaping new directions in creative practice, informing conceptual frameworks and guiding curatorial and collaborative approaches to programming and mentorship. In many cases, activity in the small to medium arts sector has led the way on engagement with these global issues through music. Thus, this chapter will focus on how the climate crisis and social justice issues are influencing curatorial and creative practices in Australian art music today, using works, projects and programmes from the 2010s and early 2020s, primarily from the small to medium sector, as examples.14 These examples will be presented in two forms throughout the chapter: as italicised vignettes describing works that intersect with one or both of the two issues outlined above, and in references to significant events of the past decade that have had a national impact on everyday life in Australia. The three vignettes together offer a sliver of a snapshot of the exceptionally broad and diverse practices, approaches and materials in art music in Australia today. The first, presented at the outset of this chapter, is Bree van Reyk’s Replica Garden (2020), composed for performance by Ensemble Offspring at Canberra International Music Festival to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Australian National Botanic Gardens (see Figure 12.1). Replica Garden comprises a collection of wooden instruments described by van Reyk as a portable micro-theatre, designed to represent the residue of a burnt native garden brought back to life as music. In addition to the vignettes, a number of works by expatriate and local composers based in Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia will be referenced in the text, serving as further examples of recent works addressing the climate crisis and/or social justice issues through music.
Figure 12.1 Bree van Reyk’s Replica Garden.
The Climate Crisis and Australian Art Music
Gentle synthesizer tones are layered with quiet bird calls, slowly forming a meditative atmosphere. ‘I’d like to, ah, meet up with you, and just meet you, and shake your hand if I could.’ Radio messages delivered in calm voices bely their context: the 2019/20 fire season. ‘Shall we have a day off? I think I’m up to sixteen.’ Understated sentences are repeated by a child’s voice, as warm pedal steel guitar phrases evoke a rural atmosphere, and louder bird calls emerge in the sonic texture. Audiences embody the experience of listening by the radio, waiting for communication and updates during uncertain times. ‘Rightio, not a drama, hopefully you’ll get home.’15
The natural environment and landscape have long been a source of inspiration for Australian art music composers; in the twentieth century in particular this was frequently pointed to as a key feature of a national musical identity that is unequivocally Australian.16 Discussion of the musical representation of landscape in Australian art music has historically focused on concert works featuring sparse soundscapes and textures designed to evoke the outback, bush land or tropical forests, and/or the influence of melodies, rhythms and phrasing drawn from Australian birdsongs. This has often been entwined with the appropriation of Indigenous melodies and musical materials while simultaneously excluding Indigenous musicians from participation in the sector.17 Towards the turn of the century, investigations of music and place through site-specific work became more prominent in Australian art music, particularly in the form of projects and events that connect with regional outdoor locations and the communities surrounding them. Examples include Jon Rose’s Fences of Australia project (1983–2021), which makes music on existing fences around regional Australia, or Alan Lamb’s ongoing project The Wires, exploring the sonic potential of telegraph wires since 1976.18
In the twenty-first century, the natural environment remains a popular point of departure for many Australian musicians. Australia’s ongoing journey towards reconciliation is seeing a gradual emergence of new ways to engage with the environment through music in a culturally safe way (discussed further below). Further, this is frequently viewed through the lens of the climate crisis and the impacts and politics of climate change. Musicians across all sectors of the Australian art music scene are communicating the experience of significant weather events through music or using their musical works as a form of artist activism to communicate broader issues surrounding the climate crisis. For example, numerous works emerged in the wake of the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires, such as Thomas Meadowcroft’s Talkback Burnback (2021), described in the vignette above. This contemplative digital work offers insight into some of the radio conversations that took place between volunteer firefighters in the New South Wales Rural Fire Service during Black Summer. The presentation of Talkback Burnback as a radiophonic work invites audiences to reflect on the role of radio communication as they enact the radio listening experience. Natalie Williams’ Fire Dances (2020) project with Muses Trio commissioned eight women composers (one from each state and territory) to write a movement reflecting on the same bushfire season. Seven of the eight composers took the physical properties of fire as a point of departure, highlighting the effects of out-of-control fires both at their source and in the cities nearby. Two of the works, Nat Bartsch’s Haze for Days (2020) and Olivia Bettina Davies’ Haze (2020), reference the unprecedented lingering of smoke haze in suburban areas far from the fires themselves, which affected 80 per cent of the Australian population during the fire season and for many brought the reality of the climate crisis home.19 Referencing global impacts of the climate crisis, Erik Griswold and Rebecca Cunningham’s Sounding Tides (2022) is based on sea-level rise data and global tidal models. This installation work premiered shortly after a time when parts of Queensland and New South Wales were under metres of floodwater, reaching tidemarks higher than any in recorded history.20
In addition to works focusing on specific events and data, works reflecting on the politics of climate change have also emerged in recent years. Dan Walker’s We Are Watching You (2020) references the work of climate activist Greta Thunberg and offers direct insight into the perspective of the generation most affected by inaction today. We Are Watching You tells stories based on the lived experience of the climate crisis directly from the children musicians in the Gondwana Voices, for whom the work was composed. Anna McMichael and Louise Devenish’s Climate Notes (2022) project explores the emotional impacts of living during a time when the climate crisis touches every aspect of our lives. Climate Notes brings together music by six Australian composers with handwritten letters by leading international science researchers from the Is This How You Feel collections.21 A more abstract comment can be found in Sally Whitwell’s choral work about ‘society’s propensity to go through cycles of behaviour, mass denial and attempts to rebuild’, titled Written in the Stars (2021).22 These works sonify the uncertainties and emotions associated with living through major climate events and provide a musical portrait of twenty-first-century climate change in Australia. The sound-worlds emerging from them are elicited by environmental destruction and exist in stark contrast to the untouched soundscapes recounted by twentieth-century Australian composers.
In addition to new works commenting on the impacts of climate change on the Australian environment, many Australian artists are making new work inspired by global locations where the impacts of climate change are highly visible, such as Earth’s polar ice caps. As one of the most proximate land masses to Antarctica, Australia occupies a unique position, as changes in Antarctic conditions directly impact Australian weather events, sea levels and ocean ecologies.23 The impacts of climate change on the Antarctic and its surrounds are very much felt in Australia, yet Australian climate policies are well behind other countries.24 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that themes of the global climate crisis have become a focus of new Australian art music, as its effects continue to transform life in the twenty-first century. Notable recent examples include Mary Finsterer and Tom Wright’s chamber opera Antarctica (2023) and Phillip Samartzsis and Speak Percussion’s Polar Force (2018). Where Antarctica uses more conventional art music instrumentation and compositional methods, Polar Force is an example of ‘post-instrumental practice’ in Australian art music as it is staged in a portable white structure reminiscent of a laboratory.25 In the centre of this performance laboratory is a row of pieces of apparatus that appear at first to be scientific research equipment, before they are revealed through performance by a pair of percussionists to be musical instruments. Post-instrumental works frequently showcase the development of instrumental infrastructure or instrumental sculptures, where materials fulfil both sonic and non-sonic functions in a performance context. Bree van Reyk has also turned to instrumental sculpture in works addressing the environment. In addition to Replica Garden, van Reyk’s How We Fell (2021) features two wood, string and ceramic instruments she has named ‘replica trees’. These replica trees are the design of imagined future humans living in a post-climate change environment, who can only guess at what a tree might have sounded like in the twenty-first century.26
The influence of bioacoustics and acoustic ecology is a growing presence in Australian art music.27 The latter uses carefully placed microphones to capture field recordings or live streams of environmental soundscapes that serve to gather information through sound about the health of any given environment. This is particularly effective for collecting data on underwater soundscapes, whose changing environments are often invisible from above the surface. In an art music context, field recordings can be used directly as compositional material, or the data resulting from their analysis used as a framework for compositional structures. Leah Barclay’s Listening Underwater (2022) reveals the acoustic ecologies beneath the surface of oceans, lakes and rivers in locations across the planet, including the Great Barrier Reef. Louise Devenish, Stuart James and Erin Coates’ Alluvial Gold (2022) explores the histories and sounds of dredging, changing estuarine ecology and the impacts of human intervention on Australian river systems, particularly in areas used as ports or trading routes following European colonisation.
Adjacent to the music itself, many artists are considering their individual contributions to climate change in professional and personal settings, which is in turn influencing collaborative practices and presentation models. Printed paper programmes are becoming rarer, and many organisations are reconsidering models for activities with significant carbon footprints, such as international touring and collaborations.28 Some arts bodies require artists to demonstrate environmentally sustainable practices in their work, and Sustainability Action Plans are now common in many art music venues.29 For smaller organisations, Green Music Victoria has introduced training programmes to ‘organise, facilitate and inspire musicians and the broader industry to make changes to improve our environmental performance’.30 Larger organisations are taking a slightly different approach, such as the Sydney Opera House’s move to being ‘carbon neutral’ since 2018.31 Such actions reflect the increasingly eco-conscious approach taken by many Australian artists and music-makers responding to the climate crisis beyond music and sound itself that pursues more sustainable models of artistic practice.32
Social Justice and Australian Art Music
‘I will not be lectured on misogyny by this man.’33 Six instrumentalists, six young vocalists, an array of electronics and objects including mouth organs, five 44-gallon oil drums and a goldfish bowl. The eight works in the programme variously include abstract emotive soundscapes, fragments from Julia Gillard’s infamous 2012 misogyny speech, shocking media quotes, drones or repeated melodic phrases. Together, they create a sonic time capsule, reminding us of this time in Australia’s political history and how the nation responded to it.34
Social discourse since the 2010s has been characterised by the popularisation of online social media platforms and an increasingly progressive, but polarised, political climate. Termed ‘fourth-wave feminism’, the culture of using online media to discuss gendered inequities has prompted the Australian art music world to better represent voices of women and gender-diverse artists.35 Illustrated in the vignette above, Decibel New Music’s After Julia project (2014) comprised eight works reflecting on aspects of Julia Gillard’s term as the first woman Prime Minister in Australia by female-identifying composers from Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. This programme was one of several initiatives that emerged during the 2010s to redress gender imbalances in the industry and present a more diverse repertoire to audiences. Similarly, after analysis showed that in 2015 only 2.2 per cent of their broadcast time was spent on works by women, national broadcaster ABC Classic aimed to increase gender representation in their programming; after deliberate effort, this was improved to almost 10 per cent in 2019.36 The ignition of the #MeToo into a global movement in 2017 furthered this momentum, as the normalisation of discussions around gender discrimination facilitated engagement with strategies designed to improve gender equity in Australian art music education.37 The year was particularly notable – both for these efforts and for gender equity advancements in composition.38 Academic discussions of gender were formally re-established after a sixteen-year hiatus, with the Women in the Creative Arts conference held at Australian National University in 2017, succeeded by conferences at Monash University (2018) and the University of Western Australia (2019).39 Curatorial and commissioning bodies sought to diversify their offerings in line with initiatives across many different industries, with changes to awards structures, establishment of new programmes and commissions designed to improve diversity in the sector.40 This activity has been supported by the publication of commissioned reports that shed light on disparities and offer suggestions for change.41
While awareness of the benefits of gender diversity has inched closer towards the centre of Australian art music practices, the focus on gender diverse approaches by marketing and promotion teams suggest this is far from the norm across the entire sector. Further, greater awareness of gender diversity in the context of fourth-wave feminism, as part of a larger concern for social justice, has highlighted the voices of historically marginalised groups and allowed a platform for intersectional experiences to be discussed on a larger scale – a trend that has been mirrored in Australian art music performance. Although 2017 was a watershed year for gender representation and celebrating the achievements of gender-diverse artists, other forms of diversity – such as disability, sexualities, First Nations background, and linguistic and cultural diversity – have remained less visible. The broad social shifts drawing attention to marginalised groups, coupled with industry support schemes aimed at proliferating and profiling the work of diverse artists, have resulted in the use of art music to bring attention to current Australian and international issues. An early example of this theme was seen in Deborah Cheetham AO’s work Pecan Summer (2010), which reflects on the 1939 Cummeragunga walk-off and intergenerational trauma resulting from the Stolen Generation. Cheetham engaged elements of the different cultural worlds she inhabits as a Yorta Yorta woman who was taken from her mother as a baby and adopted by white Australian baptists, and as an opera singer and composer.42 Cheetham’s oeuvre engages Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal performers and audiences with diverse musical, cultural and linguistic mediums, simultaneously bringing attention to suppressed historical narratives.
Themes of human rights and the continued desecration of land since Australian colonisation have continued in art music since the 2010s. Written for young Indigenous women’s choir Marliya, Felix Riebl and Ollie McGill’s song cycle Spinifex Gum (2017) incorporated field recordings of everyday life in Yinjabarndi/Ngarluma Country (in the Western Australian Pilbara region). English and Yinjabarndi song lyrics address environmental destruction caused by the domination of the iron ore industry in the region and ongoing struggles for Aboriginal land rights.43 Drawing from the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2014 report into human rights violations of children in detention, Cat Hope’s opera Speechless (2019) makes a statement on the mistreatment of the most vulnerable individuals of society. This work is a ‘musical act of empathy’ further explored in the work’s orchestration and notation, which features four soloists from metal, noise, Western classical and Persian classical music practices with a community choir and an orchestra comprising rock, pop and classical musicians.44 Animated graphic notation is used to enable everyone access to reading musical notation and participation in a contemporary opera. Tammy Brennan and David Chisholm worked with a multicultural team from Australia, New Zealand and India on Daughters Opera (2019), to explore gender violence through a multicultural lens, emphasising its universality across cultures and social groups. Each of these works has centred upon current sociopolitical injustices, spanning from the systemic problems caused by Australian institutional powers on local environments and communities, to issues of international human rights in which Australia has a role. Each engages relevant communities in different ways: from the use of community choirs and soloists from various musical genres in Speechless, to cross-cultural connections formed in Daughters Opera.45 In doing so, these works echo the ‘calling out’ and accumulation of individual voices and diverse perspectives against injustices that are the foundation of social movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.46 The sound of new Australian art music works is characterised by the power and diversity of the ensemble and the joining of voices to collectively express opinions and bring attention to ongoing issues from the perspective of artist, community, nation and global society.
The motif of social engagement through art music has also been reflected in a number of recent works generated from a nucleus of collaboration and cultural transmission. David Yipininy Wilfred, Daniel Ngukurr Boy Wilfred and Paul Grabowsky’s WATA (2021) was a powerful collaboration between Indigenous Australian songmen, composer, improvising soloists and conducted symphony orchestra. The work bases its structure around manikay (an Arnhem Land ceremonial song cycle), informed by songmen brothers David Yipininy Wilfred and Daniel Ngukurr Boy Wilfred. WATA’s manikay shares traditional stories, laws and knowledge.47 The Wilfred brothers affirm that this is a way to share their beliefs and cultural wisdom, as manikay are transformed in response to the environment around them.48 Traditional gumleaf playing is explored in Damian Barbeler’s Scenes from the Bundian Way (2022), in collaboration with elder and gumleaf player Uncle Ossie Cruse MBE AM, author John Blay and composers Eric Avery, Brenda Gifford and Kate Neal.49 This work brings together video footage of an ancient Indigenous pathway through the mountains with contemporary chamber music. Among other works, WATA and Scenes from the Bundian Way demonstrate the power of music as an interactive, collaborative and living tradition that continues through musical and cultural practices, in the spirit of reconciliation in twenty-first-century Australia. Recent art music has shifted away from descriptive, exclusionary or appropriative approaches towards genuine engagements with, and means of transmission for, many different knowledges, practices and traditions. Genuine engagement is led by guidelines from musicians across cultures and artistic backgrounds, such as Christopher Sainsbury’s recommendations for the new music sector, the first of which is ‘include us’, and Cheetham’s call of ‘nothing about us without us’ (personal communication 2021).50
Conclusion
Australian art music offers a social commentary on our time and place through the repertoire created and the practices of the creative community. In the twenty-first century, social discourse and political critique surrounding global concerns, including the climate crisis and social justice, have informed new curatorial, creative and conceptual practices in Australian art music. Practitioners are increasingly embracing new methods of making art music that allow communication of topics related to these issues in a variety of ways. As practitioners strive to further the evolution of art music in Australia, new methods facilitate the transferral of ideas, practices and materials across people and communities, encouraging a diversity of voices to contribute to this communication. Practitioners are demanding that our music is not only something that we make or do, but is something that reflects who we are, and where we are. Who is able to participate in Australian art music influences the stories that are told and celebrated – stories of place, society and culture. This reflects much about our collective identity and values now and into the future. This diversity is beginning to be supported by presenting organisations and curators nationally as the sector continues to develop the way that art music communities contribute to our cultural fabric and aid in understanding the world around us. While recognising that there is still much work to do, the benefits of commencing this journey are beginning to manifest themselves in Australian art music of the nascent twenty-first century; growing diversity within the curatorial, creative and conceptual approaches to art music in Australia offers a myriad of possibilities for what Australian art music could become.
