Frontierswomen in Metal

For example, elsewhere, it has been argued that the frontier narrative serves as an identification schema for women musicians in Perth metal music because of the way the frontier connects to feminine rhetorical traditions of the literary gothic.¹⁸ Far from being exclusionary and anti-women, this particular metal scene demonstrates the way that women, at least more recently, have excelled as metal musicians and written themselves back into the frontier narrative following the historical trajectory of feminine literature.¹⁹ In fact, it is the legacy of the frontierswoman that is called into action and that women’s accounts of surviving Perth’s pronounced isolation manifest in bands such as Claim the Throne, Sanzu and Deadspace. Women, in this context at least, have taken it upon themselves as metal musicians and metal aficionados to claim space within the existing hypermasculine model. These musicians, paradoxically, are not only talented but well respected. This is because it is understood they have ‘earned’ their way into the space as a result of resilience in the face of adversity – which again echoes the masculine-coded ideal in the frontier narrative in which toughness in the face of harsh environments is rewarded with reverence.

The location of women as outsiders is a critical factor in reading metal scenes. For many women, the boundaries of femininity are restrictive and, thus, metal music offers a liminal space through which to engage with non-traditional gender practices. This idea is explored by Gabby Riches in her ethnographic study of women operating in the Leeds metal scene in the UK. In this work, Riches explains that ‘[h]eavy metal scenes can be considered spaces for transgressive bodies whereby women perform embodied resistance through dress, physical contact, risky behaviours and alternative bodily comportments, which subvert conventional and subcultural norms about the bodily capabilities of women’.²⁰ Riches also quotes a survey respondent, who explains that being in the moshpit made her ‘feel powerful’ because she had always felt her body was too big, but when she was in the moshpit, it made her feel strong and ‘a part of something’.²¹ This is useful to think about the ways in which many women enjoy practices typically coded as masculine. In the Australian context, this is echoed in the ways in which women have been recognised as rewriting and recoding ‘gender politics and boundaries of activity in metal scenes’²² with growing contributions not just as musicians but also as fans, merchandising and support staff, journalists and photographers.

There are other ways in which metal has, perhaps surprisingly, rejected heteronormative trends and expectations. Perhaps the most notable is the continuing respect and admiration in the metal scene for Jaime Page, a Perth metal guitarist who has played professionally since the 1970s in such notable acts as Gypsy, Trilogy and Black Steel. Page underwent hormone therapy in the late 2010s and announced her transition to the Perth metal community in 2016, to generally widespread support.²³ Of course, this example, and many of these examples we list above stand out because they are unusual. For the most part, they serve as the exceptions that prove the rule. This is not only because of the totalising nature of the Australian imaginary but also because of the spectrum of metal music that hosts some of the most extreme and brutal manifestations of its kind. We are thinking here of genres such as goregrind and grindcore, which function both as part of the metal community but also as its most excessive manifestation.

Rosemary Overell’s work is key in this regard. In her extensive work on the genre of grindcore, Overell unpacks the many and complicated ways that brutality functions as an overarching theme or ‘affective intensity’ that organises members’ sense of belongingness.²⁴ However, ‘brutality’ is a loaded configuration and, as such, is unavoidably gendered and connects directly to notions of gendered violence. As Overell explains, the notion of brutality ‘represents the masculine aggression and violence present in media accounts of brutal crimes, which generally focus on crimes by men, against women. Brutality, then, indicates grindcore’s violent aesthetics, as well as the broader masculine significance of such actions.’²⁵ In addition to this, there are even more extreme versions within grindcore itself, notably ‘gore-grind or ‘porno-grind’, much of this content having been banned by the Australian standards authorities.²⁶ However surprisingly, it should be noted that this reality does not necessarily preclude women’s participation or enjoyment in these most extreme manifestations of metal music: there are in fact female grindcore fans. However, what Overell’s work does is explain that the obvious misogynistic, sexist and chauvinist surface of grindcore belies a more complicated relationship between affectivity, belonging and gender. For example, using a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, Overell unpicks the ways in which members ‘use’ the abject in order to form attachments and explore affect at the absolute limits of intensity.²⁷

No Joke

Many kinds of extremity certainly form part of metal’s aesthetic. However, and undeniably, there are metal bands operating beyond the limits of taste in order to cloak their racism within the frame of ‘larrikinism’. This manoeuvre is a common strategy in casual racism more broadly, usually operating with the modifier that something is ‘just a joke’, despite the clear and deliberate damage it may cause. While nationalism, whiteness and masculinity bring unique understandings of identity within Australian metal, the use of larrikinism injects an element of humour and non-seriousness into the Australian metal identity.²⁸ As Vallen emphasises, this allows significant themes present in music to become comical, ‘taking the piss’, and therefore, to not be taken seriously by listeners and performers alike.²⁹ The emphasis on larrikinism is especially problematic for bands that advocate extreme-right and fascist views in their music because this gives band members a means of deniability where they can argue that their music is not completely serious.³⁰

Hillier and Barnes’ exploration follows Hoad’s earlier arguments in which the author mobilises Michael Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’. Through the framework of banal nationalism, Hoad argues that ‘the fetishization of white “sameness” and banality has enabled the exclusion of Otherness from extreme metal’.³¹ Coupled with the protection of ‘larrikinism’ and the defence that ‘just joking around’ provides, Australian metal, particularly extreme genres, harbours long-standing racist and sexist ideology.

This is not to suggest that these bands and associated politics go completely unchecked. There are at least two standout cases in which metal bands have publicly denounced either chauvinist or racist behaviour from existing or former band members. In 2019, the depressive black metal band Advent Sorrow (based in Perth) had a public falling-out on social media. The lead singer Rhys King claimed he was splitting from the band due to financial disagreements; however, the rest of the band together made a statement indicating that they were distancing themselves from the singer because of his alleged associations with national socialism.³² In the same year, Melbourne-based group Ne Obliviscaris distanced themselves from their bassist after he was embroiled in allegations of domestic violence.³³ In Glitsos’ survey of women as musicians in metal music, Fatima Curley (Sanzu, bassist) stated that she was ‘particularly proud of the Australian metal scene recently taking a strong stand against domestic violence as can be seen by the recent headlines surrounding Melbourne metal band Ne Obliviscaris where allegations against their bass player and condoning domestic violence has been very damaging for their reputation’.³⁴ It is no coincidence that both examples occurred only in recent years, illustrating that, while slow and differing across various scenes, there is change and growth within metal scenes across the continent. Additionally, both cases were played out on social media, indicating that these platforms are implicated in the changing cultural climate because of the power of public forum.

This view resonates with the work of Rosemary Hill, Caroline Lucas and Gabby Riches, in which they argue that ‘women’s positioning within metal is neither permanent nor inactive’ and it is the very conceptualisation of metal as ‘outsider music’ that opens up space in which to bring about destabilizations of cultural norms.³⁵ Ironically, women are often positioned as outsiders to an outsider genre – a kind of double alienation. However, coupled with this, Hill, Lucas and Riches also recognise the rapid emergence of women in the metal scene and women as metal music scholars, which further changes the phenomenon of metal itself and what we understand it to be. The authors note that feminist metal scholars have ‘illustrated that occupying a marginal position within metal opens up temporary spaces where gender norms, both mainstream and subcultural, are transgressed, negotiated, challenged and reconstituted’.³⁶ Often, it is the very fact of a precarity within a space that can be one’s point of power.

The Pub Test

Taking the above into account, Australian metal music has come a long way since its roots in Melbourne and Sydney’s late 1960s hard rock scenes. Bands such as Buffalo, Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls, and Blackfeather paved the way for a certain kind of ‘Australianness’ to manifest in later heavier styles ‘formed around qualities of intensity, extreme volumes, power, aggression’ and rebelliousness.³⁷ As Hoad points out in the introduction to her edited collection, ‘Australian metal further owes a stylistic debt to harder pub-rock acts of the 1970s and 1980s such as AC/DC, The Angels and Rose Tattoo. “Pub rock” or “Oz rock”, the colloquial labels for rock’n’roll music played in crowded inner-city and suburban pubs, is an important generic forebearer for mapping the growth of Australian heavy metal.’³⁸ Still to this day, a high proportion of metal shows are situated in pubs and bars (though certainly less than previously, due to the rise of alternative options such as festivals, underage venues and privately owned spaces). It is no surprise then that the ideological conventions tied to the Australian pub – practically a sacred icon in the national imaginary – are ever-present in the ongoing discursive construction of heavy metal music. In fact, up until at least the late 1970s, Shane Homan indicates that there were ‘continued social and regulatory obstacles still evident for women within pub cultures’,³⁹ such as ‘publicans’ refusal to serve women in the front bar, the lack of female toilets in pubs and a general consensus among male patrons and male and female bar staff that the front bar was not a suitable public space for women’.⁴⁰

There is also a long history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples being excluded from pubs and bars. It was only in the 1960s that most states and territories repealed the prohibition of alcohol for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Subsequently, some publicans have continued to refuse service based on race.⁴¹ The inclusion of Aboriginal rock groups in the pub touring circuit from the 1980s onwards was often only at the behest of bigger-profile Australian rock groups such as Cold Chisel bringing them on tour as support acts and occasionally threatening to boycott venues who objected to Aboriginal bands playing on their stages.⁴² Pubs and bars, the typical venues for metal performances, are not necessarily welcoming spaces for women or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This adversely impacts their participation in Australia’s rock and metal scenes. The doubly significant barriers to Aboriginal women’s participation in the music are evident in Ripple Effect Band being the first and possibly still the only all-female rock band with Aboriginal instrumentalists – rather than just singers – in the Northern Territory.⁴³

Aboriginal Metal Bands

The popularity of country, reggae and hip hop music among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia has been widely documented.⁴⁴ The popularity of these genres parallels the emergence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander singer-songwriters (Jimmy Little, Seaman Dan, Archie Roach, Kev Carmody), reggae rock groups (No Fixed Address, Coloured Stone) and rappers (Briggs, Mau Power) pivotal to the broader story of music in Australia and key to increasing public awareness of Aboriginal lives. Given the similarly widespread popularity of metal among younger Aboriginal men in regional areas, it is anomalous that few Aboriginal metal bands have sustained careers in the Australian music industry.⁴⁵

Amid the burgeoning popularity of ‘rap-metal’ and ‘nu-metal’ at the turn of the century, Alice Springs band NoKTuRNL received international attention, were nominated for ARIA awards, toured Australia with Rollins Band (USA), received enthusiastic support from Triple J Radio and were signed to Festival Mushroom Records. Frontman and guitarist Craig Tilmouth describes the sudden rise and fall of the band: ‘We went through a phase where we were hyped to the max, where everyone in the industry was talking about us being the next big thing, telling us all these great things, to then watching our profile fall all the way down to the point where we lost all support from the industry in the areas that we needed.’⁴⁶ Parramatta group Dispossessed is the last metal band with mostly Aboriginal members to gain anywhere near NoKTuRNL’s hype, sensationally hailed in Vice as ‘The Most Uncompromising, Unapologetic and Important Band in Australia’ and nominated for an Australian Music Award in 2019.⁴⁷

Like NoKTuRNL before them, Dispossessed are among a number of contemporary metal groups with Aboriginal members, making music with actively anti-racist intent. Yugambeh man Axel Best fronts the Brisbane band Wildheart and describes their music as dealing with both ‘issues of bigotry and racism on a more global spectrum’ and ‘issues surrounding the Indigenous people of Australia’.⁴⁸ Yugambeh/Bundjalung man Shaun Allen fronts another Brisbane band, Nerve Damage, and feels that regardless of style, the ‘next musical “trend” is going to be brutal honesty, no matter what the genre is of the music backing it’.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, metal’s extreme volume and style of presentation make it a powerful way to express social truths and call for justice. As lead guitarist Chris Wallace of Southeast Desert Metal from the Ltyentye Apurte Community says, ‘My guitar … is my spear!’⁵⁰

Race and Australian Metal

Internationally, it is undeniable that some metal bands make subtle or more overt associations with a white supremacist philosophy.⁵¹ This, along with the overwhelming whiteness of metal performers and audiences, makes it convenient to correlate metal with racism. In his study of online Australian metal forums, Kennedy finds little evidence of overt racism in Australian metal scenes.⁵² However, Kennedy does state that ‘the naming of Black bands positions them as the non-normative other and illustrates the existence of white privilege in online heavy metal spaces’.⁵³ Kennedy also notes how some metal fans describe their surprise that Aboriginal bands can play music at a high standard, suggesting their inability to comprehend Aboriginal people as successful musicians stems from societal discourses of Aboriginal peoples as less civilised, pre-modern and lacking the talent and commitment to put together complex musical compositions, at least to the standard of non-Aboriginal people.⁵⁴ This kind of ‘casual racism’ and white privilege is not isolated to metal scenes. It is typical of most Australian cultural fields, in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are frequently distinguished, distanced, categorised and patronised based on race.⁵⁵

Many Australian metal and heavy bands emerging at the turn of the century, including Full Scale and Karnivool along with more recently instigated groups such as Justice for the Damned and Divide and Dissolve, espouse decidedly pro-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander values. Karnivool even followed the tradition established by Cold Chisel in the 1980s, taking Aboriginal group Southeast Desert Metal on tour in 2019. Anti-colonial ideals fit comfortably within metal’s anti-establishment ethos and are reflected in early influential metal tracks from outside of Australia, most strikingly in English group Iron Maiden’s track ‘Run to the Hills’, released in 1982. Its themes of colonial violence on the North American frontier readily correlate to Australia’s frontier history.

Since the late 1980s, Aboriginal youth in the isolated town of Wadeye in the Northern Territory ‘have become avid fans of heavy metal, though the extensive equipment required for producing heavy metal music has prevented any metal bands from forming in Wadeye’.⁵⁶ Socially distinct metal scenes have arisen all over the world, often producing metal music imbued with local culture.⁵⁷ With few drum kits and guitar amplifiers in town, Wadeye is not home to a fringe metal scene, but ‘rather a highly conventionalised metal fandom that is shared to some extent by all the young men’.⁵⁸ This fandom is mostly confined to commercially successful bands introduced to Wadeye last century via the Australian music television programme rage (for example, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, Fear Factory, Megadeth).

The most striking way metal fandom at Wadeye manifests itself is through the association of certain groups of metal bands – their music, logos and t-shirts – with kinship groupings among men aged up to their thirties. Rather than buying into global conceptualisations of metal as an exclusively white domain, men at Wadeye describe metal as ‘blackfella music’.⁵⁹ Wadeye has ‘quite firm black/white social segregation’, and Mansfield explains how locals are quick to differentiate between the two groups, ‘pointing out differences such as shoe-wearing (whitefella) versus barefoot (blackfella), keeping one’s tobacco to oneself (whitefella) versus sharing it freely among relatives (blackfella). There is a firm conceptual divide between the two types of people, and heavy metal falls clearly on the blackfella side.’⁶⁰ Rather than seeing music primarily in racial terms, as is so common throughout the history of music in Australia,⁶¹ Aboriginal men at Wadeye identify on their own terms with the ‘rebellion, freedom and licentiousness’ inherent to metal as a genre.⁶²

Conclusion

What is surprising is that despite all its exclusionary politics, outright sexism, blatant misogyny and both casual and acute racism, women and people of colour can and do mobilise metal music to create some of the most important and challenging work in the genre. The exploration above highlights the often contradictory and paradoxical nature of subcultural practices. However, the site of paradox or contradiction is often the space in which hypocrisy is most exposed and ideology at its weakest and thus open to challenge. In these spaces, disenfranchised groups appropriate stories inherent in the conventions of genre and rewrite them for altogether different purposes.

The two authors of this chapter are performers who were associated with the ‘heavy music’ scene in Perth, Western Australia, at the turn of the century, before social media became ubiquitous. Due to Perth’s geographical isolation, this scene was tight-knit and inclusive of many kinds of music, including metal and a range of other loud subgenres. As a woman and a Noongar man, we have first-hand experience of the ways in which a music scene can function as a microcosm of broader society, emulating the misogyny, racism and exclusion found elsewhere. We also understand how a scene fosters group identities and social bonds that can be protective against marginalisation.

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.

Photo credit: Brett Boardman.

The Climate Crisis and Australian Art Music

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

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.

Australian Contributions to Electronic Music Technologies

As well as engaging with existing technology in exciting new ways, Australians have been responsible for a number of key developments when it comes to electronic music technology. While it only played an electronic rendition of the Colonel Bogey March, Australia’s first digital computer, the CSIRAC (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer) gave the world its first computer music.⁶ Another first came in the form of the Fairlight CMI, developed by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, which was the first commercially available device that rolled a sampler and sequencer into the one package with its futuristic, light-pen interface. While some of its features, like the ability to draw a waveform on the screen, were seen by critics as little more than a gimmick,⁷ the power and flexibility of the Fairlight quickly drew the attention of several popular artists of the time. Peter Gabriel was the first in the UK to have one, and he introduced Kate Bush to it.⁸ The device also stands as a testament to the power of default settings: a sample of the opening chord of the ‘Infernal Dance of King Kastchei’ from Stravinsky’s Firebird, recorded from vinyl by Peter Vogel himself, was included as part of the sample library that came with it. The sound quickly found its way into the popular music of the 1980s, with the orchestra hit becoming an identifiable part of the 1980s sound.

A number of audio software applications have been developed here in Australia, and with the decentralised nature of many open-sourced projects, there may be many more contributions than can be catalogued in a brief survey such as this. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, a surge in interest in telematic performance software saw several programmers from around the globe join the JackTrip development team. JackTrip is a software that supports bidirectional, high-quality, uncompressed audio streaming with any number of channels, which was established in the early 2000s by Chris Chafe, Juan Pablo Caceres and CCRMA at Stanford University.⁹ One of these programmers, an author of this paper, is Melbourne based programmer, musician and conductor Aaron Wyatt, and his work led to the creation of a graphical user interface that greatly simplified use of the software, among other improvements.¹⁰

Looking at software developed entirely in Australia, one of the key applications to have emerged is AudioMulch, a program for sound synthesis and processing with a patcher-like interface; users connect signal processing modules known as ‘contraptions’ to build the sounds that they want.¹¹ The program was developed by Ross Bencina and grew out of his own performance practice at a time when personal computers were finally starting to become powerful enough to process audio. While similar in some ways to Max/PD, especially in terms of its interface, AudioMulch instead places a greater focus on being a playable instrument rather than emphasising the programming side of things.

Like AudioMulch, the Decibel ScorePlayer developed as a response to the performance practice of its developers and creators in the Decibel New Music Ensemble.¹² Originally prototyped in Max by group members Lindsay Vickery and Stuart James, the tool was turned into an iPad app by one of the other ensemble members, Aaron Wyatt. It allows for the network synchronisation of animated graphic notation scores and is well suited to works that eschew a traditional sense of rhythm or pulse, like those of the ensemble’s artistic director, Cat Hope. Her works, which have a particular focus on bass and low-frequency tones, often employ long drones and glissandi that would be hard to notate precisely using traditional notation. While it was originally developed with this sort of writing in mind, other composers have experimented with the software in completely different ways. A project by Decibel, 2 Minutes From Home, which saw the commissioning of twenty-one short compositions, stands as a solid example of the sorts of approaches that are possible.¹³ Hope’s 2019 noise opera, Speechless, written as a response to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Forgotten Children Report on Children in Immigration Detention also demonstrates the capacity of the software to facilitate a major, long-form work with orchestra, choir and soloists, including stage management, light and audio cues on the score.¹⁴

Writing about Australian Experimental Music

A range of publications on experimental and electronic music have emerged in recent years. Perhaps the key text is Gail Priest’s edited collection Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia (2009), which covers practices in almost every state of Australia.¹⁵ Linda Kouvaras’ Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age (2016) provides an important exploration of music beyond more traditional frameworks,¹⁶ as does Ros Bandt’s Sound Sculpture (2001).¹⁷ Key publications have emerged in conference proceedings and journals, with the Australasian Computer Music Conference making important contributions through its journal Chroma.

Melbourne composer and sound artist Rainer Linz maintained an important magazine series between 1982 and 1992, NMA Publications (New Music Articles).¹⁸ Founded by Richard Vella, it aimed to encourage musicians, composers and sound artists to write about their work as a way of informing the general public and creating wider musical debate. CDs, cassettes and an important early book were also published during this time.¹⁹ Linz currently maintains the archive of Australian experimental violinist and composer Johannes Rosenberg.²⁰ Another violinist and composer, Jon Rose, co-authored the influential Australia Ad Lib site that began as a radio programme on the national radio service, ABC.²¹ The chronicles by composers and performers such as Paul Doornbusch, Warren Burt²² and Robin Fox²³ have also made important historical contributions in publications beyond Australia; however, these publications have significant gaps in coverage, focusing largely on the work of white men in the academic realm in Sydney and Melbourne (with Fox and Kouvaras providing important exceptions). Clinton Green’s music label Shame File Music released two volumes of Australian experimental music on CD titled Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music, covering 1930–73 (volume 1) and 1974–83 (volume 2), which remain key surveys of that period.²⁴ Other labels featuring new experimental music include Jim Denley’s label dedicated to improvised music, SplitRec, and a very prolific Queensland based label, Room 40, which focuses broadly on electronic music and sound art.

Radio has played an important part in the archiving and promotion of experimental music in Australia. Up until recently, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was an important part of this. ABC Radio National programmes such as The Listening Room and Australia Ad Lib promoted stories about exploratory music, whilst ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late, which ended in 2014, provided an important platform for recording and broadcasting live music concerts throughout Australia. Now it is largely inner-city community radio that supports experimentation, with each state in Australia host to at least one programme where experimental music is supported and showcased. Two long-standing examples of this are RTR FM’s Difficult Listening in Western Australia, founded by Bryce Moore, and PBSFM’s The Sound Barrier in Melbourne, founded by Ian Parsons.

Electronic Music

Since the 1980s, the introduction of microprocessors to computers has seen electronic music technology become increasingly affordable and portable. As a result, electronic music in Australia and across much of the world has shifted from the realm of academia into popular music and underground experimental scenes.²⁵ However, electronic music has still developed over several trajectories, with academia having a strong hold over the development of acousmatic music – specifically composed for presentation using speakers, as opposed to a live performance – up until the mid 1990s. University music faculties were usually the only places that would house expensive spatial music speaker set-ups, fund software licences and provide equipment for complex acoustic–electronic music combinations.

There were several university departments across Australia that were exploring the development of electronic music. John Exton maintained the electronic music studio at the University of Western Australia in the early 1970s, joined by the British composer Roger Smalley, who was brought out to establish a composition department there and oversaw a range of visiting artists working in that studio.²⁶ This approach of bringing in experts from overseas epitomised early electronic music in Australian academia. Other examples include US composers Warren Burt and Keith Humble, brought out to teach at the music department at La Trobe University in Melbourne’s western suburbs, as well as Tristram Cary, from the UK’s Electronic Music Studio (EMS) at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide. The legacy of Percy Grainger was an important part of early electronic music and experimentalism in Australia, and his work with Bernard Cross and the University of Melbourne led to the purchase of a Synthi 100 synthesiser in 1972. Recently restored by Leslie Craythorn, it is now one of only three Synthi 100 synthesisers restored to original condition and operating in the world.²⁷

Electronic music thrived in Australia during the second half of the twentieth century, with many composers exploring its potential. Don Banks travelled to the UK to find out more about synthesisers, resulting in the development of the Don Banks Music Box, later renamed the VCS1, a synthesiser that could fit into a suitcase and be brought back to Australia. It was a precursor to the first commercial synthesiser from EMS, the VCS3.²⁸

The Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS) is a recent development, a membership-driven collection of historic and recent electronic music instruments founded in 2016 that can be booked for music creation. Unique in the way the historic instruments can be accessed by members of the public, the studio is housed in the Meat Market in North Melbourne, and the centre is a hub for aspiring musicians to learn about electronic music and composition, via educational programmes and concert series. One of the directors of MESS, Robin Fox, a graduate from the foundational La Trobe music programme, is a key figure in Australian electronic music, more recently working with music and laser combinations internationally. MESS is a prime example of how electronic music and art music in Australia are increasingly crossing over, becoming more inclusive and reaching broader audiences and venues.

Today, artists fusing electronic and art music practices are not just white men at city universities. Wiradjuri artist Naretha Williams works with the software Ableton to create works that bring beats and gothic aesthetics, in works such as Blak Mass (2020), which uses Melbourne Town Hall’s grand organ to pose questions about the colonialism that brought it to be.²⁹ Additionally, the electronic pop duo Electric Fields, whose members are both Indigenous and part of the LGBTQIA+ community, has recently risen to further prominence after their 2022 NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee) week collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.³⁰ In a similar stylistic vein, Canberra-based electric guitarist, vocalist and electronics artist Shoeb Ahmad infuses songwriting with experimental electronic elements, sound art and scoring practices in combination with running a music label, hellosQuare.

Improvisation and Adaptation

In addition to leaning into new or modified technologies, improvisation is central to the practice of much experimental music in Australia. Melbourne’s Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, founded by Warren Burt and Tasmanian Ron Nagorcka, remained throughout the 1970s and 1980s a key centre for the formulation and support of new and experimental music outside of the institutions of academia and for artists including Tasmanian improvisatory guitarist Greg Kingston, who performs with various gadgets and home-made instruments, and ‘sonic explorer’ Ernie Althoff, whose early works were for low-budget found objects, cassette recorders and toys.³¹ Alice Springs-based artist Jon Rose built his work around a reimagining of the violin, exploring the sonic possibilities that it offers – in both its original form and through modification and augmentation of the instrument – and propelling forward the practice of free improvisation for which he is known. His work in outback Australia culminated in his Great Fences of Australia project, where he and Hollis Taylor bowed amplified fences in some of the furthest reaches of the country.³²

Similarly inspired by the outback, wind instrumentalist Jim Denley, an original member of the group Machine for Making Sense, frequently performs experimental music in natural environments and has long supported the Sydney improvisation scene.³³ Sarah Hopkins brought Australian experimental music to the mainstream by showcasing her ‘harmonic whirlies’, invented in 1981, on the television show Australia’s Got Talent in 2012.³⁴ The instrument’s flexible tubes spiral through the air at different speeds, playing around six tones from the harmonic overtone series; it featured on Icelandic musician Björk’s 2017 album Utopia.

Sound Art

Australian sound artists have a strong history of exploring the sounds of the natural world, of our urban environment and of the intersections where these meet. Sound art in Australia was largely pioneered by Ros Bandt, who since 1977 has created some forty sound installations worldwide and was the first woman to win the prestigious Don Banks Composers Award in 1990.³⁵ She founded website and database the Australian Sound Design Project, currently archived in the Australian National Library’s Trove collection. Ross Bolleter has explored the sound-worlds of ruined pianos as they progress through various states of decay and degredation. His work has seen him set up a ruined-piano sanctuary on an olive farm in Wambyn, near York, Western Australia, where he can explore the sounds that they offer as they slowly return to the land.³⁶ Much as Jon Rose extended the concept of bowed strings over long distances using fences, sound artist and instrument maker Alan Lamb extends the aeolian harp over kilometres using contact microphones on telegraph wires.³⁷ These are vibrated by the wind and other interactions from the natural world, such as contact with birds and insects.

Increasingly, Australian sound art is interdisciplinary and engages with social and environmental issues. Queensland-based artist Leah Barclay has built soundscapes on recordings of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Her 2020 work Listening in the Wild in collaboration with Lyndon Davis and Tricia King intersperses ecological recordings with Kabi Kabi stories and accompanies these with photographs from the team’s journey across the Sunshine Coast. Sonia Leber and David Chesworth similarly create installation and film works that explore and respond to both natural and built environments, their recent work Where Lakes Once Had Water (2020) exploring the ancient dry lakes of the Northern Territory.³⁸ Soprano and sound artist Eve Klein’s 2015 multimedia work Counting uses crowdsourced video and collaboratively curated datasets to highlight the affective quality of numbers in online social justice campaigns.

Contemporary Composition

Despite the prevalence of collaboration, chance and improvisation in experimental music, many Australian experimental artists have engaged heavily with notated composition, although often extending upon it to fulfil their musical aims and blurring the lines between performance, composition and improvisation. Composer David Ahern returned to Australia in 1970 after study overseas with Stockhausen and Cardew, forming the AZ Music ensemble at the Sydney Conservatorium. It aimed to provide a non-elitist and non-hierarchical approach to music-making, with the group often performing verbal or graphical scores, and improvising.³⁹ Martin Wesley-Smith had a broad range of compositional interests, from computer music and audio-visual works to music for children’s performance. His works variously extended players’ musical capabilities, introduced graphic notation to young performers and conveyed his activist concern over the 1977 Indonesian occupation of East Timor.⁴⁰ Elsie Hamilton was writing microtonal works in the early part of the nineteenth century, an era when this was uncommon in Australian music.⁴¹ The work of composer and electronic musician Anthony Pateras often takes an experimental and innovative approach to texture, although he tends to work primarily with traditional Western notation, with the occasional use of graphic instructions for musical parameters such as timbre.⁴²

Ensembles

Many Australian experimental ensembles sustained activity for substantial periods of time and reached international recognition. Ensembles that featured electronic music thrived in the 1990s. New South Wales-based ensemble Machine for Making Sense performed in Austria in 1989 and toured Australia in 1991. Group members Rik Rue, Amanda Stewart, Jim Denley, Chris Mann and Stevie Wishart were key experimental-music figures of the time. Percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson and prepared-piano performer and composer Erik Griswold comprise Queensland duo Clocked Out. Their recent focus on site-specific and environmental works has seen the development of the Piano Mill, an installation close to the Queensland/New South Wales border featuring sixteen pianos in a purpose-built building in the forest.⁴³

Melbourne chamber group ELISION ensemble, led by Daryl Buckley, commenced in 1986 and were key to putting new Australian composers’ works on the world stage via their touring and overseas residential engagements. Speak Percussion, an ever-changing line-up of percussionists led by director and performer Eugene Ughetti, debuted in 2000 and continues today with concerts, commissions and tours that question the very notion of percussion and its potential through performance and cross-disciplinary collaborations.⁴⁴ Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera was formed in 1988 by theatre director and librettist Douglas Horton and continues as ‘Chamber Made’; operating more as an organisation supporting the development of new work involving artistic director Tara Saulwick, it explores the intersection between music, theatre and technology.⁴⁵ The authors of this chapter are involved in Decibel New Music Ensemble, a six-member group founded in Western Australia in 2009 with a focus on combining electronic and acoustic instruments. This in turn led to a focus on alternate notations and the eventual development of the Decibel ScorePlayer in 2012.

Scoring Electronic and Experimental Music

Australian artists have contributed to the evolution of music notation for experimental and electronic music. This began with Percy Grainger’s work with theremins, where he scored Free Music No. 1 (1935) for four theremins – originally performed by a string quartet – and Free Music No. 2 (1937) for six theremins.⁴⁶ These scores consisted of continuous lines on graph paper, where pitch and dynamics were each drawn over time. Other artists exploring graphic notations tended to focus on guides for improvisations; these works include those by Robert Rooney and Ron Nagorcka, the sound poems of Chris Mann and Amanda Stewart, and Jeff Pressing’s important edited collection of scores, Compositions for Improvisors – An Australian Perspective⁴⁷ providing other important examples. But more recently, Australian composers working with notations native to digital media, such as animated notations, have garnered attention with international performances and publications.⁴⁸ These include works by composers such as Lindsay Vickery, David Kim Boyle, Amanda Cole, Kate Milligan, Cat Hope and others.

Conclusion

While there is so much more that could be covered here, we hope that this representative sample provides an insight into the current and historical practice of experimental and electronic music in Australia. The country has a thriving and vibrant new-music scene where performers, composers, improvisers, sound artists and instrument makers push the boundaries of what is possible, blurring the distinctions that exist between these sonic endeavours. Far from being hampered by our distance from the ‘old world’, Australian artists and innovators have continued to find imaginative solutions to both creative and technical problems in the field. In an era when Australian music was perceived to be lagging behind that of Europe, composers such as Elsie Hamilton and Percy Grainger were experimenting with microtonal music and exploring ways in which this could be precisely notated. Australian inventiveness gave us the first music played on a computer and the first commercial sampler/sequencer, paving the way for the contributions to music software that followed. We have improvisers and instrument builders, pioneers in sound sculpture who have explored our natural and built environment. These diverse music practices are supported by a loose network of publishers and long-running ensembles who have championed new works and supported the discourse around them.

Sydney

Beginning in Sydney, the musical turning point in my own EDM journey was hearing Severed Heads for the first time. Their independently released album Since the Accident is a mash of harsh synth sounds and heavily manipulated tape-loop constructions offset by tuneful toy-synth melodies, sped-up vocals and playful song titles.⁵ It is at times hard, dark and intense yet somehow still makes you laugh at how good these extremes make you feel. Constructed on an eight-track tape machine, the drum-machine grooves underpin multitrack tape loops created from scratchy vinyl sources. They are manipulated to speed up and slow down, played in reverse or looped to create a mix of seasick vocals, church choirs, spoken-word narratives, orchestral stabs and childish babble. The synth orchestration supports this perfectly with bouncy basslines, warm pads, simple melodic ostinatos and the occasional noise solo. It is a perfect balance of dissonance, melody, horror and most importantly humour. Unlike their contemporaries, Severed Heads always struck a balance between over-the-top incongruity and playful whimsy. Perhaps it is difficult to maintain industrial-grade goth-angst when you live in a city of beaches and sunshine – Sydney.

Severed Heads’ most accessible early-career single was ‘Dead Eyes Opened’, which would later become hugely influential to the next generation of Australian EDM artists when DJ/producer Robert Racic remixed it in 1994. In Australia, Severed Heads signed to Volition Records, who began releasing their music in 1985. Volition subsequently became the home of many first-wave EDM artists. The compilation album High showcased tracks by Vision Four 5 (Brisbane), Southend (Sydney), Sexing the Cherry (Brisbane), Itch-E & Scratch-E (Sydney), Third Eye (Melbourne), Boxcar (Brisbane) and Mister Morrow (Brisbane).⁶ Despite its eclecticism of styles, Richard Harley describes how the compilation gave the impression of a ‘coherent music scene’.⁷ Volition was manufactured and distributed in Australia by Sony, hoping for a successful investment in local dance music. The label became more influential as label head Andrew Penhallow co-curated the first few years of the Big Day Out’s Boiler Room.

The Boiler Room (not to be confused with the current-day DJ iteration) provided a national platform for EDM artists and helped facilitate EDM’s crossover to a more mainstream audience throughout the mid 1990s and beyond. As the Sydney Big Day Out’s Boiler Room grew in size, it ended up in the Hordern Pavillion from 1995 to 1997. The Hordern is a significant site for Sydney’s LGBTQIA+ community and its dance music history. As a not-quite-out-of-the-closet proto-queer, the Hordern parties were a revelation to me. Hearing and feeling 5,000 people slow down and speed up in orgasmic pleasure in sync with Lil Louis’ ‘French Kiss’ was a new way of experiencing music within a crowd.⁸ The audience who dressed to theme or to show off their bodies WERE the artist. They faced each other and not the stage. Unlike the suburban beer-barn pub-rock gigs, diversity in sexuality was celebrated and embraced. Ecstasy-fuelled and soundtracked by house music, the atmosphere was more sensual than predatory. In fact, for the queer community struggling with the reality of the AIDS epidemic, Kane Race suggests that the Mardi Gras and the queer Hordern dance parties provided a ‘powerful, exciting, and profoundly political statement of resilience and possibility’.⁹ While DJs tended to favour the more commercial acid/Italo/hip house and vocal-driven tracks dominating the dance charts, the Hordern parties (see Figure 14.1) were wild all-night events that successfully fused the growing confidence of the Gay and Lesbian community with the nascent acid house explosion.

Figure 14.1 Sweatbox ‘Meltdown’, Hordern Pavilion, 25 February 1989.

Image by William Yang.

The first Australian mainstream EDM hits out of Sydney could be said to align with our cultural copycat history. Influential Hordern DJ Peewee Ferris produced an acid house-flavoured cover of Anita Ward’s ‘Ring My Bell’ for singer Colette, an idea not dissimilar to Yazz’s acid-flavoured cover of Otis Clay’s ‘The Only Way Is Up’.¹⁰ It reached the Top 5 of the ARIA charts. Similarly, Euphoria’s diva-driven Italo house track ‘Love You Right’ would possibly not exist if producer Andrew Klippel had not heard Blackbox’s ‘Ride on Time’.¹¹ It reached the number one position on the ARIA chart.

In a recent podcast interview, Ferris’ production motivation was to create local dance tracks that he could play out at the broad cross-section of clubs, parties and, later, raves that he was on the bill at across the nation.¹² Ferris is renowned for his ability to satisfy the needs of any event from the most commercial suburban disco night to the hardest rave dancefloor.

Due to increasing noise complaints from neighbours, and police and media concerns about wild all-night ecstasy parties, the Hordern parties came to an end in June 1990, the final being F.U.N’s Vogue party.¹³ For Sydney, this was a blow to a dance scene in full swing. Without the central dance church that was the Hordern, promoters learnt from their UK rave peers. Rave addresses were revealed by dialling a pre-recorded phone number on the night as makeshift venues were found in basketball stadiums, disused warehouses, inner-city parks and carparks, and semi-rural properties. The parties got smaller and more clandestine. Culturally, this seemed to fit EDM’s sonic evolution, where genres splintered into smaller factions of devout followers, and specialist DJs stuck to their genre lane. The Hordern was gone; the age of legal genre-driven club nights and illegal raves would continue to evolve throughout the 1990s.

For artists like Itch-E & Scratch-E, this was an exciting time to explore what was musically possible with multifaceted genre possibilities. Initially influenced by the playful noise of Severed Heads; Detroit pioneers Derrick May, Underground Resistance and Richie Hawtin; the UK’s dreamier techno artists Orbital and Future Sound of London, the Warp label and Sheffield bleep, techno was an open slate to improvise sonic worlds that could make you both dance and dream. Tracks could stretch to twelve minutes’ duration, moving through ambient intros, acid explorations, melancholic melodies and stab-driven tech workouts. Our live studio set-up could be reconstructed onstage, allowing us to perform live in the Boiler Room and at raves around the country. The peak of this cultural connection occurred at the Happy Valley 3 Rave in 1993. Held in a field south of Sydney, video maker Jay Richards captured footage of our sunrise set in all of its dazed glory. Dancers in baggy clothes, pigtails and madhatter hats blissfully sway and air-conduct in the day’s first light in a crowded field, or solo on a speaker stack. Rantzen and I (and live member Sheriff Lindo) frantically bounce in time, playing, mixing and tweaking filters to recreate the rave-friendlier portion of our back catalogue.¹⁴

In hindsight, this was the peak of rave culture for me. From 1994 on, the beats got faster, the breaks got heavier, the manic helium vocals, hectic stabs and piano riffs favoured a more speed-fuelled intensity miles away from the dream-vision possibilities offered by Detroit’s more cerebral funk. By Happy Valley 4 in early 2000 (where one man died of a drug overdose), I hung up my raving clothes and pivoted back to EDM songwriting, releasing ‘Just the Thing’ in 2000, a dancey-house diva-driven pop song that captured the mood of the city’s new mega-clubs.¹⁵

Melbourne

As documented in Techno Shuffle, the first wave of Melbourne EDM artists were similarly influenced by the post-punk electronic sounds of Melbourne artists such as Ollie Olsen, Primitive Calculators and Whirly World.¹⁶ Venues were large with a sizable club-going community, popular with the communities of first- and second-generation European migrants. Melbourne also has a large and connected LGBTQIA+ community catered for by popular club nights, and similar to Sydney’s Mardi Gras after-parties at the Hordern Pavilion, the ALSO foundation ran large warehouse parties on disused piers in the Docklands precinct as fundraisers for their community outreach services. It also had a thriving rave scene that ran virtually uninterrupted until 1997.

DJ and Razor Records dance label owner Gavin Campbell has been a significant player in Melbourne’s club scene since 1983, running popular club nights Swelter (1983), Razor (1986), Temple (1992), Savage and Tasty (1993) and Bump and Uranus (1995–1998). With the exception of the gay night Tasty, Campbell describes the demographic of his club’s patrons as a mix of straight club music fans and the more sonic-curious portion of the LGBTQIA+ community.¹⁷ Campbell suggests that the thriving mix of club and rave scenes and the Docklands pier parties resulted in Melbourne EDM artists striving to create tracks that would work being played in these larger settings. The first wave of successful Melbourne EDM tracks reflects this. Campbell and music partners Robert Goodge and Paul Main began doing club remixes under the moniker Filthy Lucre, informed by the popular sounds that they were currently DJing.

The Filthy Lucre remix of ‘Treaty’ by the band Yothu Yindi could be considered one of Australia’s first international dance hits, charting on the US Billboard dance chart.¹⁸ As a DJ, Campbell knew what worked on the floor and which sounds and trends were on the up. From the original Yothu Yindi funk rock multitrack, Filthy Lucre kept half of the original’s powerful English lyrics discussing self-determination, empty promises from white politicians leading up to the 1988 bicentennial celebrations, and female voices singing the refrain, ‘Treaty Yeah, Treaty Now’. The repetition, distinctive vocal quality, yidaki (didjeridu), and bilma clapsticks of the djatpangarri popular music genre of north-east Arnhem Land feature prominently in the mix.

The remix adds dreamy synth drones, conga loops, a ‘ha’ sample cut from the lead to create a rhythmic hook, a funky house sub bassline, a four-on-the-floor kick and TR-909 hats, Italo house piano, tuned clapsticks, gated guitar samples and a disco-diva sample ‘clap your hands and dance’. It is a powerful rework that musically transforms the original song into a more international club language. The remix peaked at number eleven on the ARIA chart and was also successful in several global markets. Its expansive mix clocks in at 6’52” and is still popular to play out. The ‘Treaty Now, Treaty Yeah’ refrain takes on more significance each year Australia continues to exist without one.

Another early 1990s crossover hit and dancefloor filler out of Melbourne was Ground Level’s ‘Dreams of Heaven’.¹⁹ Beginning with a simple bell melody, followed by a I–IV upright bass, quaver arpeggios, TR-909 hi-hats and congas, its introduction sounds like the sonification of innocence. Next up, synth stabs play major sevenths over the I–IV chords, as vocalist Jean-Marie Guilfoil blissfully encourages us, ‘You dream of heaven, now create what you like and have fun’. A Shep Pettibone-like bass enters, centred around the relative minor, transforming the harmonic atmosphere into darker, more magical terrain. It is the perfect club track for the more innocent end of the 1990s, invoking the joys of first-time ecstasy, fun and heaven. It is not difficult to understand how it reached number three on the UK dance chart.

Quench managed a similar feat with ‘Dreams’.²⁰ The beginning choir pads, buzzy bass, male voice-over saying ‘Dreams’ and midrange buzzy pulse set the stage for the almighty kick to enter. It is deep in tone, slightly distorted, pitched down and loud in the mix. After several layers of staggered percussion entries and filter tweaks, a doom-laden church bell adds to the dark drama. After a manic bell solo, the real business begins. A soloed buzz-saw theme enters. It is phased and slathered in spacious delay and reverb. The thud of the dark kick returns underneath, and your mind situates you in a massive warehouse complete with laser and fog. Your mouth automatically gurns as it mimics the theme’s filter sweeps. At 3’19”, the theme is then gated and juts out as staccato semiquavers. To this old raver’s ears, it feels like a synaesthetic representation of a strobe light. Even if you were listening in your car, you feel as though you are in the world’s biggest warehouse rave. By 2000, it had sold over a million copies throughout the world.²¹

These three tracks point to Melbourne artists’ business-savvy awareness of labels, genres, trend timing and dancefloor sonic finesse. Labels such as Vicious Vinyl (run by DJ/producers Andy Van and John Course) survived by focusing on being ahead of the major trends in EDM and creating or licensing tracks that fit the market. Andy Van’s project with vocalist Cheyne Coates, Madison Avenue, went on to have an international hit with ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’.²² It peaked at number two on the ARIA chart and number one on the UK chart. It is an incredibly catchy slice of disco sampling, funky-bassed, vocal-driven house pop with empowering lyrics and delivery. Again, returning to this chapter’s theme of international ‘inspiration’, it is difficult not to think of Mousse T’s ‘Horny 98’ when you hear it.²³ The feel, vocal cadence, harmonic movement and disco-drum samples all feel rather familiar.

Not all Melbourne EDM artists are limited to commercial club-friendly bangers. Any survey needs to include the pioneering work of the legendary Ollie Olsen, Gus Til and their psytrance band Third Eye (and Psy-Harmonic label), Christopher Coe’s Digital Primate project, FSOM (Future Sound of Melbourne/Josh Abrahams, David Carbone, Steve Robbins) and live acid performer Honeysmack (Dr David Haberfeld). Melbourne has always had a darker, hard techno side. Artists such as Luke Charbell, Phil K and the members of NUBREED have created their own distinctly Melbourne underground sound.

Adelaide

Gavin Campbell suggests that Melbourne and Adelaide seem to have a ‘reciprocal love’ of hard techno producers and DJs, and that many of the harder tracks ‘resonate’ in both cities. One example is HMC’s ‘Phreakin’.²⁴

HMC is the moniker for Cam Bianchetti’s more banging techno tracks. ‘Phreakin’ is superbly minimal in its construction: consisting of a bit-crushed robot voice sample, a mono TR-909 four-on-the-floor beat, a shreaking synth note every fourth beat and an acid filter-tweaked upper-mid sequence. It is relentless and driving, stomping along at 126 bpm. The only variations come from programmed TR-909 fills, and Bianchetti live-muting individual parts at the desk. Bianchetti said that it was one of the first tracks that he had ever made.²⁵ He just programmed the parts with sounds he liked, plugged them into a desk and turned them up until they hit the red. The crunchy output sounded so good that he quickly improvised an arrangement and recorded it doing the filter and EQ tweaks live. It is simple, brutal, funky and still a joy to hear. Bianchetti more recently works under the moniker Late Nite Tuff Guy, producing popular disco-edits and remixes. Another notable Adelaide act is DJ Groove Terminator (Simon Lewicki), whose hip hop/house/and big-beat anthems are informed by his extensive DJing around the country. In 2005–2006 he formed Tonight Only with Sam Littlemore, and currently works with Ministry of Sound on their tours incorporating orchestral and choral versions of house and rave classics.

Brisbane

The most influential EDM artists to come out of the 1990s Brisbane scene both happened to be signed to Volition. Initially focusing on synth-driven guitar pop, Boxcar (Dave Smith, Carol Rhode, Brett Mitchell, Crispin Trist and Stewart Lawler) had three singles on the US Billboard dance chart (with remixes by dance royalty Arthur Baker and François Kevorkian). In their pub-rock-loving hometown, their New Order-influenced techno-pop sound sometimes struggled to gain acceptance but was perfect for support slots for international acts like Depeche Mode, Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys.²⁶ Their live band set-up also worked as a novel point of difference at dance parties and on the Boiler Room stage.

Label mates Vision Four 5 found the general Brisbane culture ‘horrendous’ for appreciating live electronic music. Band member Noel Burgess described it as ultra-conservative and extremely macho.²⁷ If you sat outside that normality, you were a ‘weirdo’. Consequently, there would be one club night that would shift from club to club, where all of the goths, punks, ravers and alterna-queers would gather.

However, one possible upside of living in the smaller population of Brisbane was that there were more community points of connection. Burgess was inspired by Boxcar’s set at Brisbane’s Expo 88 and would later remix their single ‘Comet’. Everybody knew each other and supported each other’s gigs. As the rave scene began to flourish in the 1990s, those club nights suddenly got much bigger in size. Vision Four 5 engaged with it as a three-piece live band, conscious of the need to compete with the predominantly thumping techno DJ sets. Ben Suthers (who would go on to co-curate the Boiler Room) focused on the sonics, Noel Burgess on the music, and Tim Gruchy (who had previously provided visuals for the Sydney Hordern dance parties) provided interactive live visuals. Their rave hit ‘Everything You Need (Tragic Rave Mix)’ can be better understood when viewed through its Brisbane scene setting.²⁸ While the tracks mentioned above, by Ground Level, Quench, Itch-E & Scratch-E and Filthy Lucre slowly reveal their sonic deck of cards like a slow-moving game of Trance 500, Vision Four 5 seem to anticipate losing the floor’s attention and circumvent this by constantly shifting the game with stimulation-grabbing moves. Every eight bars, something shifts. At a stonking 145 bpm, they introduce manic polyrhythmic basslines, endlessly building and dropping TR-909 beats, hats and snare rolls, squelching acid from an overdriven TB-303, polyphonic pitch bends that resolve to a momentary quiet, gentle whole-note filter envelopes, rising oscillator syncs, pumping breakbeats, dissonant bells, octave jumps, ‘wooh’ samples and the ever-present diva sample bellowing ‘Everything, everything, everything you need, believe the word’. The Tragic Rave Mix is as ravey as you can get. The video matches the track’s intensity, consisting of classic early 1990s Amiga-style animations and live footage of a Gold Coast Boiler Room gig, where sweat drips from the roof and Suthers sprays the raver crowd with a super-soaker. Everybody present is lost in the magic, eyes rolled back, rave outfits on, with smiles on all of their faces. This is the hard-hitting rave that can compete with Brisbane’s macho crowd culture. The track deservedly ended up being released on the Ministry of Sound’s compilation ‘Rave Anthems 1990–1996’.

Canberra

The early EDM scene in Canberra was a cooperative-based scene. Clan Analog is a collective and record label for musicians passionate about synthesisers and all things electronic. Begun by Brendan Palmer in 1992 in Sydney, it rapidly spread to Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and beyond and functioned to build networks, organise meet-ups to share gear, play live, co-produce recordings, release compilations and promote bands associated with the collective. Clan Analog has been operating continuously for thirty years and has over thirty releases, the latest being a celebration of the Roland TB-303.²⁹

One of the most intriguing acts from the collective was Canberra-based B(if)tek. Consisting of Kate Crawford and Nicole Skeltys, their music refuses to follow the louder/harder/faster EDM trajectory and has a sonic palette that is warmer, trippier and deeper than their contemporaries. Crawford explains,

Their first album Sub-Vocal Theme Park was released via Rosie Cross’ Geek Girl website in 1995. It initiated a label bidding war resulting in Sony’s Murmur imprint signing them for their second album 2020.³¹ Crawford recounted how Murmur offered them complete creative control over the album, but they hit the standard major label road hump of ‘Yeah we like it, but where’s the single?’. Crawford and Skeltys responded with a suitably sideways move by asking cult-vocalist Julie Cruise to sing a TR-808-driven electro cover of Cliff Richard’s ‘Wired for Sound’.³²

Conclusion

In this chapter I have attempted to outline some of the different stories, sounds and artists that emerged from a cross-section of Australian cities in the early 1990s, and the creative influences afforded to or limited by those cities. Returning to the sentiments expressed in my 1995 ARIA speech, perhaps the creative possibilities offered by the collectives like Clan Analog, the DIY ethos of independent releases and the cultural impact of community radio programmes mentioned by Crawford are more significant markers of value than chart success. If space allowed, it would be fitting to discuss the European impact of Newcastle’s nosebleed label Bloody Fist (1994–2004) and the work of its creators Nasenbluten. Similar in ethos to early Severed Heads, their music is hard, relentless and hilarious. Likewise Perth’s drum’n’bass pioneers Pendulum.

Trying to summarise the Australian 1990s electronic music scene in one chapter is a difficult task, and I can already feel the heat of emails reminding me whom I left out. So, in no particular order, I would like to continue my ARIA speech by thanking Kazumichi Grime, Garry Bradbury, Dark Network, Sub Bass Snarl, Ali Omar, Infusion, Pocket, Ian Andrews, Bass Bitch, Bexta, Lush Puppy, Deep Child, Telemetry Orchestra, The 5000 Fingers of Dr T, Transcendental Anarchists, Dub Doctor, Sheriff Lindo, Pavo Cristatus, Monobrow, JujuSpaceJazz, Friendly, Five Star Piazzaria, Downtown Brown, Groovescooter, FC Europa, The Hive, Love Tattoo, Purdy, Alterboy, Toy Death, Coda, The Vibe Tribe, Club Kooky, Frigid and 2SER for making Sydney an inspiring place to be alive in the 1990s. As the decade progressed, mainstream EDM continued its global upswing of mega-clubs, power trance, big-beat and superstar DJs, but I would suggest that it is the eccentric artists that constitute the underground scenes that keep it creatively alive, evolving and dreaming of the future.

This chapter is dedicated to Andrew Penhallow, who passed on 17 May 2023.

The term ‘jazz’ in the twenty-first century has become something of a catch-all genre descriptor. At times it seems that if a song contains an element of jazz harmony, has a horn section or has even a short improvised solo, the ‘jazz’ term gets applied. As someone who has spent my life studying, performing and teaching within the ‘jazz’ realm, even I find it difficult to determine where the outer edges of ‘jazz’ are now – where does ‘jazz’ stop and something else begin, or alternatively, when does something enter the space of the ‘jazz’ genre? This is the first question that I put to a panel of six prominent Australian artists who are commonly identified as jazz musicians. All members represent a similar generation of artists and have spent most of their careers in Australia. The group was well known to each other. In fact, though we hail from different parts of the country, we have all performed with each other in one format or another over the past thirty years, which enabled a free-flowing conversation. During the discussion we explored some interesting tangents that emerged from this initial question. Is there an Australian jazz dialect? Are there issues with how jazz is perceived in Australia?

As a precursor to the conversation, I asked panellists to list their main musical influences during their formative years. Though many Australian artists were named, it was also very clear that Black American improvising music artists have had a major impact on the music produced here. This influence is one that was clearly recognised by the group and has undeniably formed the foundations for a lot of ‘jazz’ music that is created in Australia.

The participants in this panel were Jamie Oehlers (moderator and participant), Andrea Keller, Gian Slater, Phil Slater, Kristin Berardi, Simon Barker and Stephen Magnusson.

I would like to thank the panellists for their candour and willingness to contribute to this discussion, which I feel positions jazz in Australia accurately in 2022. Many of the responses published here are verbatim, as they really capture the feeling of the group, and hold expression that aids the dissemination of ideas. Not all responses are printed for some questions, generally because the ideas among panellists were held in common.

What Is Jazz?

The Australian Jazz Identity

Awards and the Public Perception of ‘Jazz’ in Australia

Summary

It was clear that the panel were aligned with their thought that, from a practitioner perspective, ‘jazz’ was a process, an approach to music-making, rather than an easily defined genre. This definition has been captured by many other artists in the field and moves people away from a definition of jazz as a music that must have a ‘swing’ feel, contain elements of the blues or embed other specific musical devices. The need for a ‘jazz’ genre categorisation seems more important for audiences, music organisations and performance venues than the artists themselves, though the impact of this categorisation (or not) can be significant to a performer’s career. The seeming dichotomy of jazz being hard to define stylistically, yet being easier to define in terms of what is ‘not jazz’, speaks to the challenges facing the community and the organisations when funding or awards are being disseminated. An open discussion on the ingredients of the jazz process may aid this space. It became clear in future communication with the panel (not transcribed here) that in order to make an impact on associations such as these, and to control the narrative around what ‘jazz’ is in Australia, we need to organise ourselves more than we currently do. As a community, we are wholeheartedly united in creative music-making but somewhat disjointed in our approach to developing opportunities for the collective. It may be time to develop a national jazz organisation once again – one that can navigate the nuances of the modern music industry and support the incredibly diverse and creative musicians that we produce in Australia.⁹ As to whether there’s an identifiable Australian ‘sound’ or dialect within the jazz music being produced here, the panel presented some differing opinions; while no one could specifically attach a specific stylistic reference to Australian jazz, some felt they could hear it in the approach to music-making. Perhaps because of a lack of larger organised opportunities (like comprehensive touring circuits), we seem to just get on with making music while reinventing ourselves more often than most, due to the fact that we are playing to a smaller audience base and to our desire to present fresh creative material to these audiences. Challenges aside, Australia continues to develop incredible artists who are gaining global recognition. Artists such as Linda Oh, Troy Roberts, Shannon Barnett, Tal Cohen and Evan Harris, to name a few, are forging pathways for the next generation of Australian jazz artists in the international arena. And the next generation are ready to play – a few that stand out in 2022 include Flora Carbo, Niran Dasika, Helen Svoboda, Harry Mitchell, Jessica Carlton, the Avgenicos brothers and Freya Garbett. All fiercely original in their approaches to composition and improvisation, these young Australian jazz artists will undoubtedly continue to add to the diversity of music being produced here.

Post-war mass migration has fundamentally transformed Australia’s population, society, culture and musical landscape over the last seventy-odd years. But flows of people from diverse non-Anglophone countries together with their distinctive music cultures trace back to colonial Australia. This less familiar ‘multicultural’ dimension of Australian pre-World War II music history coexisted with the pervasive influence of creatively exoticised stage and other representations of the music of so-called ‘oriental’, Hispanic and other peoples and places.¹ These dual musical strands involving both real and part-imagined cultural difference have continued to dilute and diversify Australia’s British cultural and musical heritage in significant ways, while also enriching the panorama of Australian musical life.

While acknowledging the dauntingly kaleidoscopic span and complexity of influences on music-making, musical taste and musical life in Australia – and that all musics with the exception of Indigenous Australian traditions originated elsewhere – this chapter is limited to examining some selected ways that migration and migrating musics shaped Australian music and musical culture. It opens windows onto four periods of social, cultural and political foment from the pre-Federation colonial era (pre-1901) to the present that illuminate diverse musical encounters or engagements between ‘minority’ cultures and what has been, until recently, an Anglo-Australian majority. These examples also recognise the role of community in fostering musical diversity and generating self-contained music scenes.

Because the music of minority cultures tends to become articulated and defined through uneven power relationships with the majority and its mainstream culture and institutions, an important aim of this article is to provide a more nuanced view of this relationship. Therefore, various of our examples illustrate how the ‘power’, or value, of difference – whether the appeal of the mildly exotic to majority culture patronage, the power of being (rightly or wrongly) perceived as hailing from an ethnic group or region with particular music-related attributes, or the perceived ‘authenticity’ of performance by musicians with an ‘ethnic’ identity – has been strategically deployed for professional or other advantage. These examples further demonstrate the shifting relationship and persistent tension between minority and majority whereby ‘minority’ musicians exploit opportunities provided by the mainstream which, simultaneously, shapes and can even redefine minority musics.

Two influential colonial-era groups of visiting and resident non-Anglo musicians were from German and Italian-speaking parts of Europe.² The first section of the chapter centres on the pre-WWI musical contributions of German-speaking residents and visitors, who eventually formed the largest non-Anglo colonial-era community. A key factor in their positioning and acceptance within the colonial community is that ‘Germans were viewed as having a privileged relationship to music and this view was one that also came from the United Kingdom with the British settlers’.³ The following section discusses Italian influence on musical entertainment in the interwar and post-WWII era alongside the role of Jewish resident, migrant and refugee musicians. These musicians shaped trends in mainstream popular musical taste through their expertise in Latin, so-called Gypsy (‘Tzigane’) and other music that was (or was perceived to be) widely popular in Europe, while also providing ‘music of home’ for their own ethnic communities.

Taking a historical musicology perspective, both sections emphasise minority musicians’ creative and strategic channelling of ethnic ‘difference’ into professional success and their transformative impact on the Australian musical entertainment industry. They both draw on three concepts developed specifically to apply to migrant professional music-making within a ‘pre-multiculturalism’ musical entertainment industry where commercial and reputational success rather than, for example, identity construction through music formed the primary impulse. ‘Assimilated ethnicity’ refers to modes of cultural expression watered down through social and cultural assimilation, as illustrated below. ‘Hyper-ethnicity’ denotes the creative inflation, or burlesque, of actual or perceived ethnic characteristics into colourful stereotypes, including by musicians of another ethnicity. ‘Ethno-mediation’ involves an ethnically defined genre mediated via another ethnic group to the extent of blending or juxtaposing characteristics of both ethnicities.⁴

The remainder of the chapter shifts to an ethnomusicological focus on political, social and cultural developments from the later twentieth century and the related growth and diversification of music-making emanating from or associated with particular communities. We consider how, from the 1980s on, the twin forces of local multiculturalism and the new globalised phenomenon of ‘world music’ intersected in Australia to foster a wealth of musical diversity including creative musical interventions and experimentations.

Lastly, we address the many multifaceted music ‘scenes’ found in Australia today that revolve around diasporic and/or genre-based communities and encompass both participatory and presentational music, amateur and professional activity, while variously projecting ethnic or musical identities and linking into musical domains beyond ‘community’. Employing a case-study approach, this section hones into the local world of Indonesia-related music-making to exemplify the complex dynamics of individual scenes.

A German Musical Presence in Colonial-Era Australia

Music traditions associated with German-speaking migrants had begun to reach colonial Australia by 1838, with the establishment of a Lutheran community in South Australia and a largely Moravian community in Victoria in 1849. Later migration was more often for economic or political reasons, boosted by the monetary attractions of the Victorian and New South Wales gold rushes. A notable feature of German-speaking society in Australia was its propensity to rapidly form clubs and cultural societies, or ‘German Unions’, which also provided platforms for musical performance, the formation of choirs and instrumental ensembles, the organisation of festivals and engagements for resident or touring musicians. A primary example was the Liedertafel (song table) male singing-society tradition that became immensely influential in late nineteenth-century Australian choral music. Liedertafels were established in both Adelaide and Melbourne by the 1850s and, later, in numerous other large and small population centres. They represent a cogent example of ‘assimilated ethnicity’ in the sense of increasing Anglicisation. The Melbourne Deutscher Liedertafel (1868–), for example, was re-established in 1879 as the Melbourne Liedertafel with many non-German choristers and orchestra members, female concert artists and a change of formal club language from German to English. In 1905 it combined with the rival Metropolitan Liedertafel as the Royal Victorian Liedertafel and, in 1980, became the Royal Victorian Choir.

German-speaking instrumentalists were the backbone of Australian opera orchestras ‘partly due to the migratory habits of the graduates of German concervatoria [sic], which were then the world’s primary sources of skilled instrumentalists’.⁵ Resident and touring German-speaking classical musicians were a significant presence in colonial concerts, and one especially colourful example is violinist and composer Miska Hauser, who thrilled colonial audiences with his virtuosic improvisations and intriguing novelty showpiece ‘Bird on a Tree’.⁶ German-speaking immigrants had a traditional association with the guitar and zither, and colonial-era tours of costumed ‘mountain singers’, yodellers and traditional instrumental ensembles, such as the very popular Jungfrau Kapelle Swiss Band and Singers, popularised the zither with guitar accompaniment. German-speaking music teachers often taught both zither and guitar. Zither virtuoso Joseph Pfleger, for example, established a zither studio in 1880s Melbourne and formed a large mostly female Zither Club (zither orchestra) that presented ‘Grand Zither Concerts’ at Athenaeum Hall.⁷

The term ‘German band’ may conjure images of the ‘hyper-ethnic’ music and costumes of oom-pah band musicians at Oktoberfests or the numerous Bavarian-style cabaret restaurants that appeared from the late 1950s.⁸ But brass (and reed) band music (Blasmusik) was an important Lutheran tradition and German community brass bands eventually became integrated with the Anglo-Australian brass band movement. The German-settled town of Tanunda in South Australia (with its own notable town band since the 1850s) became an important national championships site for the movement immediately after WWI. To fully appreciate the significance of German brass band influence it must be understood that brass band music was mainstream popular musical entertainment before Australia’s 1920s Jazz Age.⁹

Numerous itinerant ‘German’ or ‘Bavarian’ brass (and reed) street, concert and dance bands flocked to the colonies from the beginning of the Gold Rush and, besides street-playing, are thereafter documented in the colonial press as having been hired in their distinctive uniforms for a remarkable range of functions. These included picnics, circus parades and ring accompaniment, dance competitions, colonial celebrations, German club functions, German National festivals, German Biergarten entertainment, indoor classical concerts, stage accompaniment, race track entertainment, regattas, ploughing races, church and funeral services, roller skating-rink music, hotel entertainment, aquarium, zoo and botanical garden entertainment, ship voyages and ferry cruises, all manner of public processions, charity fundraising events, temperance meetings, political rallies and protest marches.¹⁰

Various German band musicians were deeply respected within the Australian band movement, and some were already leading local bands by the end of the 1850s. They include the Wirth musical family (of Wirth’s Circus fame) and the legendary cornet virtuoso, arranger, composer and Fitzgerald’s Circus bandleader Herr (Henry) von der Mehden, who inspired amateur bandsmen wherever he travelled.¹¹ The 1907 fantasia ‘Le Cirque’ was dedicated to him by the ‘Sousa of the Antipodes’, Alex Lithgow, and two of his own compositions, ‘Bucephaleon’ and ‘Tarador’, entered the Australian amateur brass band repertoire. WWI hostility towards Germany ended the era of German bands as popular public entertainment and diminished German influence on Australian banding. But for more than six decades, ‘German’ or ‘Bavarian’ bands had provided the colonies with an impressive and influential model of highly disciplined, popular wind-band music that was ‘strong and sweet’, good to listen and dance to and had the mildly exotic attribute of being ‘from the Continent’.¹²

Italian and Jewish Musicians and ‘Continental Music’

Vigorous importation of American popular entertainment culture continued immediately after WWI as the prime impulse of Australia’s Jazz Age (c. 1919–28) and provided little cultural space for Continental European migrant or visiting musicians. By the 1930s, however, a seismic shift in Australian popular taste foregrounded new ethnic musical dimensions. Industry reports that Britain and ‘the Continent’ were usurping America’s hegemony in popular and light musical entertainment¹³ were accompanied by an Australian craze for rumba and tango dancing and music and the formation of costumed radio and restaurant ‘tango’, ‘Gaucho-tango’, ‘Tzigane’¹⁴ (‘Gypsy’ or ‘Gypsy-tango’) and ‘rhumba’ bands. The popularity of Latin dance music, Tzigane and other music perceived to be popular on ‘the Continent’ was boosted by sound movies like Flying Down to Rio (1933) and The Blue Danube (1932), which brought the exotic sights and sounds of real or imitative Hispanic and Tzigane (European Romani) music performance to Australian cinema audiences. The notion of ‘Continental music’ as sophisticated, romantic and imbued with European charm and, if possible, ‘Latin’ ethnicity was reinforced by The Gay Divorcee (1934) and its sensual rumba song hit ‘The Continental’, which became the Australian ‘Dancing Sensation’ of 1935.

A German ‘Continental Orchestral Club’ had been established in Sydney by 1933 to meet the new demand for ‘Continental music’ band scores. Overseas artists such as the world-famous Jewish-German Weintraubs Orchestra were also able to exploit the Australian popularity of this music.¹⁵ Increasing demand for European-venue cuisine, service and atmosphere created a corresponding demand for Continental-style musical entertainment.

An Australian Music Maker article titled ‘Continental Style Pays Big Divs!’ defines the music that was to give Continental European musicians a transformative foothold in the entertainment industry: ‘The basic principle of [Continental music] is the playing of Latin music in its original style, which, coupled with their playing from table to table of Gypsy melodies, creates an atmosphere of the Continental cabaret.’¹⁶ In this field of employment almost any type of perceived foreignness in appearance, accent and presentation offered a professional advantage over Anglo-Australian dance and cabaret musicians. However, Italian-Australians and Italian migrants became especially notable in Latin music performance, while Jewish-Australians and Jewish migrants and refugees were prominent in both Latin and Tzigane music.

Despite Hispanic origins, tango music became widely associated with Hungarian, Russian and other European Romani as Tzigane or ‘Gypsy-tango’ music. Many European countries had their own popular tango songs and dance music (such as the ‘Yiddish tangos’ of Poland). In Australia, the tango became strongly identified with the stereotype of the soft, romantic music of ‘old world’ Gypsy cafés and cabaret-restaurant orchestras of ‘Old Vienna’, Budapest, Moscow, Paris, the ‘Blue Danube’ or similar places of part-imagination, when played expressively ‘in the Gypsy manner’. Sweet and melancholic Gypsy-tango songs like ‘Play to Me Gypsy’ or ‘At the Balalaika’ (the antithesis of manic 1920s jazz) epitomised the genre and became 1930s global hit songs. A 1930s article, ‘Play to Me Gypsy’, describes how music at Sydney Continental restaurants was presented ‘in the Gypsy manner’.¹⁷

The Jewish factor in Australian Tzigane music connects with a historical tradition of Jews in central Europe as professional performers (klezmorim) of Romani and other music for weddings and also with the Australian klezmer revival discussed below. A remarkable proportion of reputed Tzigane band leaders were of Jewish heritage, including violin virtuosi Mischa Dobrinski, his brother Sasha (or Sascha) as ‘Sasha Berlina’, Gregory Sisserman (as Gregory Ivanoff), Alex (or Alec) Burlakov and Philip Cohen, whose music library includes handwritten notated examples of his violin embellishments ‘in the Gypsy manner’.¹⁸

Profound Jewish affinity with Latin music in Australia is demonstrated by the number of significant bandleaders associated with Latin music between the 1930s and 1950s who were of Jewish heritage, representing examples of ethno-mediation and hyper-ethnicity.¹⁹ They included the 1930s ABC National Tango Band leader Harry Bloom, late 1940s–early 1950s Sydney ‘Orquesta Tipica’ leader, Leo ‘White’ (Weiss, formerly of the Weintraubs), his even more Latin-dedicated Sydney broadcasting, recording and nightclub rival Ernest Rittie, who led his Cuban-costumed Latin orchestras as ‘Ernesto Rittez’, and Russian-Australian Abe Walters, whose remarkable career eventually took him to London as the celebrated Latin band leader ‘Don Carlos’.²⁰

Italian names punctuate colonial-era classical music performance and teaching, and the influence of Italian opera and late nineteenth-century visiting Italian opera companies was immense. Furthermore, musicians from itinerant Italian street bands from the 1850s formed Italian orchestras for classical concert-giving, functions and popular entertainments. By WWI, Italian bands for hire in Melbourne alone included Di Gilio’s, Alberti’s, Allietti’s, Labataglia’s, Ricco’s, Briglia’s, Curcio’s and Cerbasi’s. Italians had a traditional affinity with the mandolin, guitar and harp, and were considered masters of the archetypal Continental musical instrument, the piano-accordion, at the peak of its mainstream Australian popularity.²¹ They could sing in Spanish without difficulty, and their Latin music was ‘ethno-mediated’ and not simply delineated, interpreted or modified Hispanic music. Numerous Australia-recorded examples reveal it as a genre in its own right, exhibiting a distinctive liscio (smooth) sonority albeit with variation between individual ensembles and practitioners. It was later promoted as ‘Italian-Latin’ or ‘Italo-Hispanic’ music to distinguish it from the music of Latino-Australian musicians.²²

Costumed all-Italian so-called ‘Argentino tango bands’ became a prominent feature of Australian popular entertainment, with an early high-profile example being the Argentino Tango Band formed in late 1932 to broadcast Rio Nights weekly from 3LO Melbourne and led by the tango composer and bandoneon player Dom Caffaro. A network of all-Italian or mostly Italian tango, rumba or ‘cosmopolitan’ bands, including most of the best-known Italian-Australian commercial musicians of the day, can be traced from the personnel of Caffaro’s 1932 band.²³ Partly inspired by the success of the ‘Argentino’ bands, Anglo-Australians and other European migrants also formed costumed tango and rumba bands for radio and Continental cabaret work.

WWII brought internments and other restrictions for Italian-Australians, but European post-war migration opened a new chapter for their ethno-mediated Latin music. Latin dance music experienced a surge of popularity in Australia from 1949 and, by then, included samba and mambo, followed a decade later by the cha-cha-cha, an immensely popular genre that Italian-Latin bands particularly excelled in. The popularity of their Latin music is illustrated by the band names that many adopted, such as Cubana, Cumbachero, El Bajon, Duo Moreno, Los Amigos, El Combo Tropicale or Mokambo.

Between the late 1950s and mid 1970s these bands were in great demand for the endless Italian community cabaret-balls, Continental cabaret-restaurants, Italian sporting and social club functions as well as Jewish community functions. If a Continental venue proprietor wanted to feature ‘Latin American’ music, the obvious choice was to hire an Italian band. By the late 1970s, however, Australia’s Latin-Italian era, which had substantially shaped Australian perceptions of ‘Latin American’ music, was largely at an end. Practitioners from Latin America were already reclaiming the music as their own and the vast Continental cabaret scene of previous decades was in decline with the proliferation of discos and Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants and the growing support for ‘folkloric’ forms in new regional community clubs, among other factors.

Multiculturalism Meets World Music

Ethnic communities and organisations formed by the burgeoning post-WWII migrant population created an environment for the maintenance or renewal of country-of-origin musics. Ranging from traditional to popular forms, music supported social, cultural and religious life and also affirmed ethnic, national and/or regional identities. Vernacular migrant musics lacked visibility in mainstream Australian society,²⁴ but from the 1980s on, two major interconnecting strands of influence provided a public platform for musical diversity, including the music of migrant Australia.

The new government policy of multiculturalism from the 1970s brought recognition of the rights of post-war migrants to equal participation and representation in Australian society and aimed to both support and celebrate Australia’s increasingly diverse population, languages and cultures. This brought about a different social and cultural positioning of migrant musical expressions, which began to gain appreciation and endorsement within mainstream society without regard to their specific entertainment or commercial value.

Nevertheless, some continuities from the previous era became apparent in relation to the styles or genres of music that yielded opportunities for musicians, specifically, those carrying visual and sonic markers of their ‘ethnic’ character. Notably, government funding for ‘multicultural arts’ included direct support for public forms of so-called multicultural music that conspicuously flagged ‘difference’. This was in contrast to, say, the vernacular pop and other seemingly less authentic forms that dominated the music played for dances and other types of entertainments within migrant communities.²⁵ However, groups successfully availing themselves of funding mainly comprised Anglo-Australian musicians with a folk background who, in bands such as Sirocco, brought together a culturally eclectic repertoire in what Smith describes as ‘polyethnic fusion’.²⁶

Riding on the back of multicultural policy, these ‘multicultural music’ groups fortuitously tied in with the new ‘world music’ movement that swept the Western world from the late 1980s. ‘World music’ in Australia encompasses both music culturally and ethnically linked to migrant communities and the hybrid musical fusions that, regardless of performer identity, are nevertheless validated by reference to Australian multiculturalism. As argued elsewhere, ‘the interplay and tension between musicians with … post-War migrant backgrounds who engage with musical traditions from their own cultures and … Anglo-Australian musicians who engage with the musical traditions of others represent arguably the most distinctive aspects of Australian world music development’.²⁷

Nevertheless, musicians with a migrant background, significant entrepreneurial and networking competencies and a willingness to trade on their ‘authentic’ ethnic identity are particularly well placed within the world music arena. Melbourne Jewish violin/fiddle player Ernie Gruner, for example, has long been a virtually full-time professional musician, playing in or forming and leading multiple bands simultaneously and/or successively since the early 1990s, from Flirting Mazurkas (‘jazz, French, Latin, Russian, Gypsy …’), Melisma (Greek, Sephardic) and Yalla (‘Middle-Eastern’) to Bohemian Nights (aka ‘Gypsy’) and Saray Iluminado (Sephardic and Bosnian Sevdah), among others.²⁸ Though trained as a classical musician, Gruner’s core practice has been klezmer music and he has been a central figure in the Australian klezmer revival through his trio, Klezmeritis. With subsequent global and local world-music trends privileging the nebulous catch-all of ‘Gypsy music’, Gruner’s musical activities have similarly adjusted to incorporate klezmer within this broader frame. But he also brings his musicianship in Jewish vernacular musics to Melbourne’s large Jewish community as a klezmer or Jewish professional musician. Whereas Klezmeritis targets and mainly appeals to an audience for world and ‘multicultural music’, Gruner’s other Jewish band, Klezmer Trio, caters for Jewish weddings, bar mitzvah and other Jewish celebrations requiring a much wider range of music.²⁹

The intersection of multiculturalism and world music has also provided a nexus for some of Australia’s most high-profile ‘world music’ artists, such as Egyptian-Australian oud player Joseph Tawadros, Hindustani musician and tabla player Bobby Singh, and Japan-born koto player Satsuki Odamura. Musical ‘authenticity’ is not only underlined by their ethnically marked cultural relationship to the instrument they play and musical traditions they represent. The artistic profile each has achieved also derives from their status as exponents of highly complex art music traditions and their versatility in collaborating and experimenting with other musicians in diverse styles, thus achieving recognition across multiple music genres. In addition to performing with fusion groups, Odamura has diversified into contemporary repertoire and received many commissions from Australian composers.³⁰ Singh – as well as being the ‘go to’ tabla player for visiting Indian classical artists – has played with groups ranging from Dha and ARIA-award winning Djan Djan to electronic dance group The Bird.³¹ Multiple ARIA award winner Tawadros – also internationally recognised – has collaborated with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, classical guitarist Slava Grigoryan and American and European jazz musicians, among others. As Keogh observes, Tawadros demonstrates agency in the construction of plural identities and in strategically positioning himself within different fields of music.³²

Drawing on Tony Bennett’s three-stage model of policy development in social and cultural diversity, Graeme Smith proposes that Australia has entered the third stage whereby the music that benefits from government policy and support is understood not as linked to community and tradition but to a valorisation of cultural diversity and fluidity where ‘Hybridity and fusion become the marks of a new form of Authenticity’.³³ Identities can be constructed through, variously, ethnicity, an assumed and contingent musical persona, or even a generalised musical cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, in a sign that musical representations of diversity derive their authority from multicultural Australia, Anglo-Australian world musicians sometimes claim disadvantage and even reverse racism due to the reification of ‘difference’.³⁴

Alongside hybridity and fusion, intercultural collaboration, which validates participation by ‘non-ethnic’ musicians as collaborative partners, is increasingly the mode by which cultural diversity is expressed in Australia. The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO)’s decades-long exploration of ‘the meeting points between cultures and disciplines’,³⁵ demonstrated through its many and varied intercultural collaborative projects, including with Arnhem Land musicians Daniel and David Wilfred, provides a cogent example. Since the AAO’s first such project in 1996, ‘Into the Fire’ with South Indian mridangam drummer Kaaraikudi Mani, AAO has partnered with Balinese musicians, South Korean singers and local guzheng player Mindy Meng Wang among many others. These mainly jazz-framed and jazz-inflected projects are enriched musically and culturally through non-jazz instrumental and vocal colours, scales, rhythmic structures and modes of compositional and improvisational interplay. They belong to the ‘intercultural turn’ in Australian jazz that, according to Webb and Robson, represents ‘the conscious pursuit of creating a locally meaningful form of jazz’.³⁶ While undoubtedly highly collaborative in their musical processes, they are initiated by, funded through and, ultimately, controlled by the AAO. Moreover, notwithstanding outstanding musicians and compelling musical outcomes, these intercultural ventures overall represent something of an AAO brand involving the seeming pursuit of ever new cultural sources and sounds: almost a cultural shopping expedition.

Micromusics in Diaspora: the Indonesian-Australian Musical World

Collaborative jazz and Asia-related hybridisations in Australia take place within a broad nationwide panorama of musical activity that incorporates a myriad of ‘micromusics’ and subcultural scenes, many of them linked to diasporic groups as well as broader platforms of world music and/or cultural institutions that bring Australia’s musical diversity to wider audiences. Diaspora groups are often multi-generational, heterogeneous and interconnected in various ways into the cultural mainstream. The multiple music scenes revolving around them are nevertheless unique and mostly narrowly visible ‘musical worlds’, each distinct in their social, political, cultural and demographic dynamics and in the way they interact with broader Australian society. The widely but loosely used term ‘migrant community’ can give the impression of a self-contained, internally homogeneous social and cultural entity, but ethnicity or ancestral background are not necessarily determinants of connectedness to a community of people of similar background, let alone its cultural activities, nor is its culturally marked music-making necessarily the exclusive product of a diasporic community. Slobin’s interlocking concepts of subculture, superculture and interculture are useful in understanding the interplay of cultural forces within and across diasporic music scenes.³⁷

Musical activities affiliated to the medium-size migrant grouping of Indonesian-Australians illustrate how Slobin’s framework can be applied to an individual ‘micromusic’.³⁸ Australia’s diverse Asian diaspora has rapidly grown to include two major heterogeneous groups, ethnic Chinese migrants and those from South Asia. As the largest overseas-born migrant populations, their collective musical activities cannot be defined as ‘micromusics’. But the musicking of smaller lesser-known Asian-Australian diaspora groups, such as the Indonesian diaspora, can more appropriately be described this way.³⁹ Of particular significance is Indonesia’s proximity to Australia, which has resulted in extensive and long-term cross-border engagement, including pre-contact cultural connections with north-coast Indigenous Australia. But this diaspora group also illustrates a micromusic that is a locally inflected distillation of the musical richness of Indonesia’s huge multilingual, multi-ethnic, majority-Muslim population and span of genres from ‘high art’ forms to countless local traditions and home-grown and globalised popular musics.

Consequently, this migrant grouping provides the core of a highly diverse micromusic. The field of music represented as Indonesian or Indonesia-related is identified with and to some extent emanates from Australia’s local diaspora but also crosses into communities of interest and connects to other musical and cultural networks as well as having institutional links. It includes activity directed within and/or beyond the community, amateur and professionally inclined musicians, Indonesia-originating and non-Indonesian participants, and diverse subgroups or sub-communities. And it projects diverse identities and ways of relating to music from Indonesia. Demographic factors that impinge on the scene include a diaspora profile that now includes many Chinese-Indonesians and transient international students from Indonesia. Within the local diasporic community (described by Slobin as an ‘“involuntary” subculture’⁴⁰), community-wide events organised by various community organisations provide an important forum for presentations by amateur community performing groups. These range from bands performing national vernacular genres such as kroncong or dangdut or else Indonesian-language pop through to ethnic-specific groups such as, say, a Batak (North Sumatra) choir, a Sundanese (West Javanese) calung (bamboo xylophone and rattle) ensemble or a Balinese dance group. These groups tend to form around ‘activists’ or individuals with particular skills and knowledge. International students from Indonesia, who represent a distinct ‘sub-community’, organise their own large-scale Indonesian pop culture events, such as Monash students’ annual Soundsekerta concerts in the Melbourne Town Hall.⁴¹ All this activity connects participants to their cultural roots and affirms Indonesian or ethnic identities both to those engaged in it and others, while also strongly emphasising sociality. This ethos is exemplified in a Melbourne group called Orkes Jawi Waton Muni, comprising a fluid collective of up to twenty people performing Javanese or other Indonesian songs with an eclectic mix of Western and occasionally traditional instruments and prioritising participation, getting together and enjoyment – including by the audience.

Another domain of local Indonesian musical activity comprises the various gamelan ensembles that have formed in all Australian cities. Indonesia’s spectacular gong-and-drum percussion orchestras from Java and Bali attract many non-Indonesians, who join groups that accommodate differing levels of knowledge and skill. Gamelan’s collective dimension is intrinsic to the music’s structure and practice and, as with the above community groups, involves both participatory and presentational performance.

Gamelan in Australia mostly entails a ‘superculture’-type infrastructure: overarching structures that control or impact on micromusics and subcultural activity.⁴² This comprises the institutions that own sets of instruments, host performing groups and to some extent regulate their activity, in particular, Indonesian consulates and university music schools with ethnomusicology programmes. While gamelan music-making may include Indonesian performers and performances at community events, it is mostly not Indonesian-community-based. It thus represents a cross-cutting ‘interculture’, that is, linkages connecting with, but not within, a migrant community. Gamelan groups are essentially affinity groups, ‘charmed circles of like-minded music-makers drawn magnetically to a certain genre that creates strong expressive bonding’ and that creates music identities through it.⁴³ The mostly musical focus of these groups, which may extend to gamelan-based composition and experimentation, contrasts and can create tensions with Indonesian community-based gamelan groups, whose primary goal is social and cultural rather than performative as such.

Another area of culturally linked musical activity that can also be categorised as a cross-cutting ‘interculture’ comprises independent semi-professional artists who use their engagement with Indonesian culture and music as a springboard for funded creative projects that sometimes have cross-cultural aspects. Melbourne-based musician Ria Soemardjo, who has Indonesian heritage and training in traditional Javanese vocal practice, creates and performs diverse work often in collaboration with contemporary dancers or theatre-makers – tapping into the multi-artform dimension of much Indonesian performance. In the world-music ensemble Fine Blue Thread (also including tabla and baroque cello), Ria Soemardjo’s original vocals draw on Javanese traditions and aesthetics in their delicately minimal and meditative quality.⁴⁴ In other contexts she supplements her voice with Javanese gongs or other traditional instruments. Her creative projects are pitched to contemporary art audiences, but as a traditional pesindhen singing in wayang shadow-puppet plays with Melbourne Community Gamelan, her exceptional skills receive acclaim from audiences that include or have connections with the Indonesian community. Other, differently positioned Melbourne-based independent artists, such as heavy-metal experimental vocalist Karina Utomo and jazz pianist Ade Ishs, draw in different ways on their Indonesian backgrounds but are firmly situated within the wider Australian musical milieu.

These diverse fields of culturally informed music-making – ranging across a wide variety of genres, performer backgrounds and relations to the diaspora group – come together at events facilitated by the institutions that form the superculture. They include Indonesia-related events run by universities and events such as Independence Day or trade fairs presented by Australia’s Indonesian consulates.

Conclusion

This ‘micromusic’ case study illustrates how the dynamics of a specific migrant grouping can shape the activation of its musical expressions within its broader Australian environment as well as underlining how the complexity of present-day musical diversity resists generalisation. It further highlights the importance of identity construction and of community – where music speaks for groups rather than individuals – as factors in creating meaning through cultural difference or in shaping the way musical diversity is expressed. The preceding European migration examples show, among other things, how perceived musical and ‘ethnic’ attributes and varying degrees of exotic ‘difference’ became (and in some cases continue to be) a professional advantage for non-Anglo musicians and even enabled them to influence Australian popular entertainment development.

Over the sweep of Australian history, musicians and musics from the margins have intersected professionally, commercially, collaboratively, cross-culturally or in other ways with mainstream audiences, institutions and other structures. Whereas such encounters sometimes lead to a co-option of the margins by the majority, musicians also demonstrate their agency by shaping and transforming majority music consumption and music-making through the paradigm of difference.

Australia’s Chinese Community

In 2022, it was recorded that Australia’s second-largest migrant group comprised people from mainland China,⁷ and the 2016 census found that nearly 900,000 people in Australia (3.7 per cent of the population) spoke Mandarin or Cantonese at home.⁸ Since the first recorded arrival of a Chinese carpenter, Mak O Pong, in Australia in 1818,⁹ people of Chinese ancestry have made crucially important contributions to Australian music and life. Their work in the nineteenth century as indentured labourers, farmers, goldminers and cabinetmakers is well known,¹⁰ but less well known is that, according to the 1855 ‘Petition of Quang Chew’, these immigrants also included ‘people who make musical instruments’.¹¹ In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, other contributions in the areas of business, cuisine, the arts and health, among many others, as well as economic stimulus through migration, have become important.

Despite the many positive interactions between people of Chinese and non-Chinese heritage in Australia, anti-Chinese sentiment and violence has also been present and became particularly prominent in Australia’s mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes, periods which saw the greatest expansion in Chinese migration to Australia (records suggest at least 20,000 and perhaps as many as 40,000 Chinese people lived in Victoria alone in 1857).¹² The White Australia Policy, the first government policy of the newly federated country in 1901, was based explicitly on anti-Chinese racism and was only fully repealed in the 1970s.¹³ Over the intervening decades, there have been further instances of racial tension.

Xiqu in Australia

Modern historians often presume the earliest Xiqu 戏曲 (Chinese opera) performances in Australia to have been Cantonese opera (Yueju 粤剧).¹⁴ This is based on numerous newspaper reports of performances from approximately 1858 onwards, especially those from the Victorian goldfields, where thirty troupes in the 1850s had increased to fifty by the early 1860s.¹⁵ Yet considering the collective of mutually unintelligible Chinese languages and dialects present in colonial times, Michael Williams suggests that ‘it is most likely that the opera troupes of the Victorian goldfields sang in yet another language known as Southern Mandarin – a language with the highest cultural prestige’.¹⁶ The details of the musical elements in those performances are as-yet unknown. Doggett mentions instances of charitable performances in 1860s Ballarat which involved a chamber ensemble of eight regional operatic instruments,¹⁷ while Wang cites an 1861 review of an 1850s performance on a fretted Chinese instrument and suggests a possible 1872 performance by the Ah Goon company of a three-piece ensemble.¹⁸

Beyond the goldfields, nineteenth-century Chinese opera performances were also held in various locations in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. This includes a tent performance in Melbourne’s Chinatown to an audience of eighty or ninety, with performers accompanied by ‘a monotonous gong and a wearisome one-stringed fiddle’,¹⁹ and the 1893 appearance of the Boo Yu Tin troupe (comprising professional mainland Chinese and locally trained actors) in the NSW Protestant Hall on Castlereagh Street.²⁰ Although all Australian colonies had legislated anti-Chinese restrictions by 1888, the company was sponsored by two football teams for their debut at Brisbane’s Theatre Royal in 1894.²¹

A vast number of operatic performances continued to take place well into the early twentieth century in northern Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania, where large communities of Chinese had established a way of living around tin mining, market gardening and running general stores.²² For example, the ‘Chinese Opera Company’ performed in Cairns Shire Hall in 1901 to the Cairns Chinese community, which made up a fifth of the population.²³ Figure 17.1 shows that Chinese opera performances followed the secondary migration of Chinese workers from the Victorian goldfields to Queensland. Here, Chinese gardeners from Irvinebank hold a plucked stringed instrument, the yueqin, and a bowed stringed instrument, the erxian, which were two of the five basic instruments (wujiatou) used in Cantonese and other forms of southern Chinese opera.

Figure 17.1 A portrait of three Chinese gardeners from Irvinebank, Queensland, 1908.

Taken on 10 July 1908, available from https://hdl.handle.net/10462/deriv/80145, State Library of Queensland.

More intermittent performances continued into the twentieth century, including a Melbourne performance of Chinese opera by sailors from Hong Kong and Singapore during World War II and performances from among the 580 Chinese phosphate miners at Hatches Creek (Northern Territory), documented by English nurse Bridget Ristori (Figure 17.2).²⁴ The Chinese Seaman’s Union rebranded as the Chinese Youth League and ‘continued to arrange opera performances for an increasingly isolated Chinese community’.²⁵ Chinese opera returned in a significant way with the establishment of Melbourne’s Gangzhou Society Cantonese Opera Group in 1961.²⁶

Figure 17.2 Chinese theatre in Hatches Creek, Northern Territory (1942).²⁹

Today, xiqu remains popular. Cantonese opera is enjoyed by audiences of all ages; one recent high-profile performance sponsored by Willoughby City Council and the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, Sydney, was the 2019 lunar new year performance of ‘Pigsy’s Wedding’ from the epic Journey to the West, produced by Vietnamese-Australian-Chinese performer Gabrielle Chan with celebrity host Claudia Chan Shaw. Beijing opera (Jingju 京剧), sung in Mandarin and first heard in a 1956 production sponsored by entrepreneur J. C. Williamson,²⁷ continues to be popular among older migrants and receives some government support. Associations of Shanghainese opera (Yuèjù 越剧), sung in the Wu language, rehearse in venues like Ashfield Town Hall, Sydney. Teochew opera (Chaoju 潮剧 in Mandarin), sung in a Southern Min variant, was brought to Australia in the 1980s by Chinese immigrants from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and mainland China.²⁸ Recent Teochew opera performances, and especially those held for lunar new year and the Moon festival, usually involve hiring overseas professionals as teachers and stars.³⁰

Ritual Music

Bendigo’s annual Easter Procession is one of the most well-known Australian contexts where Chinese ritual music is performed today. Since the 1880s, it has mostly involved lion dancers, costumed figures (often from Chinese opera), Bendigo’s Chinese dragon and an ensemble of percussionists.³¹ The music in the Chinese section of the parade is mentioned in various sources – for example, an 1892 report describes ‘Chinamen vigorously playing the tom-tom, the shrill clang of which caused great amusement to the audience, while here and there to the rear of these conveyances were individuals blowing lustily in a wind instrument bearing a close resemblance to a clarinet, but which emitted sounds resembling those of the thrilling bag-pipes’.³² Similar percussion ensembles accompanying displays of acrobatics and martial arts, especially Chinese dragon and lion dances, are often involved in celebrations connected with the Chinese lunar calendar – including New Year, Moon Lantern, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn festivals – which are a fixture in many Australian urban areas. The Chinese Youth League, established in 1939, is among the oldest community groups with a continuous history of such performances across the country, while other more recent groups and lineages include Choy Lee Fut and the Prosperous Mountain Dragon and Lion Dance.³³ This Canberra-based troupe, established in 2007 (see Figure 17.3), is one of the youngest in Australia. Director David Wong draws on the rhythms and movements of Cantonese lion dancing from his home town of Kota Kinabalu (Malaysia).³⁴

Figure 17.3 Prosperous Mountain Dragon and Lion Dance.

Image courtesy of David Wong.

Religious rituals involving members of the Australian-Chinese community have also featured different types of Chinese music – such as for various Chinese temples (formerly referred to as ‘joss houses’³⁵) and for the Australian Catholic Chinese community. These ethnospecific centres of worship function as both stagnant spaces of cultural retention, where ideas of Chineseness and tradition are maintained, as well as hybrid spaces of creativity. Besides hosting performances of traditional music – for instance, ensembles of Chinese instruments and vocal music sung in Chinese languages – these places also facilitate the negotiation of cultural identities in the Australian context and connections with the wider non-Chinese community.³⁶

Sacred music from Australia’s predominantly urban Buddhist and Daoist temples ranges from generations-old melodies and traditional Chinese instrumental pieces to modern songs and compositions. The prominent Fo Guang Shan order of Humanistic Buddhism established Nan Tien Temple (near Wollongong) in 1995. The temple maintains a liturgical practice of fanbai (chanted hymns and praises), often accompanied by Dharma instruments including jiao (handbells), luogu (bell and drum set), ba (small cymbals), muyu (wooden fish) and qing (temple bowl), as well as hosting Chinese cultural and musical performances. The lay community, known as Buddha’s Light International Association, assists with the annual ‘Sound of the Human World’ global composition competition.³⁷ These songs, based on the words of the late Grand Master Hsingyun, are written in a variety of languages and musical styles.

The Australian Chinese Catholic Community was established in 1954 among a primarily Cantonese speaking subcommunity from Hong Kong. Since the 1970s, Chinese families from Indo-China, East Timor, Southeast Asia and mainland China have also joined the community. The liturgical music performed includes an eclectic collection of Latin plainchant as well as traditional Wesleyan-inspired and contemporary hymns in soft ballad and pop style sung in Mandarin, Cantonese and English, accompanied by organ, keyboard and Western band instruments.³⁸ Song writing competitions are also held on a regular basis, with an interest in ‘reconciliation’ with Protestant groups.

Folk and Classical Music

The history of Chinese folk and classical music in Australia relies on sparse historical records and is difficult to piece together. Yet it is certain that despite the Chinese migration restriction acts of White Australia (1901–1973), Chinese musicians appeared in benefit concerts and other performance contexts. Sources from the 1920s describe Chinese instruments (often percussion) as ‘jazz bands’: ‘Mr Henry Foo’s Chinese jazz band, which has been playing at broadcasting station 2BL, Sydney, comprises six performers, who play a three-string violin, a two-string banjo, another two-string instrument, a trumpet (or something like it), a cymbal and a drum.’³⁹ The connection between early ideas of jazz and Chinese music seems to have arisen from early misunderstandings of jazz rather than ideas promoted by Chinese musicians. As Scott-Maxwell explains, ‘jazz’ in Australia was often associated with ‘oriental’ elements, while Chinese music was sometimes ‘confused with “jazz” since, as jazz historian Andrew Bisset puts it, Australians in the 1920s had only “hazy notions of what jazz was”’.⁴⁰

Nevertheless, this conflation helped to promote Chinese music. There is a report of Sun Moon Lee’s 1927 Chinese jazz act, which was described as ‘the real thing in jazz’ and ‘the real thing in Chinese’.⁴¹ The band was welcomed by the wider Chinese community, and they gave a ‘fund-raising performance in a “Chinese carnival” for the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital’.⁴²

Frank Thring’s Efftee Entertainers’ 1931 film of the ‘Melbourne Chinese Orchestra’ captures an ensemble of suona, erxian, yueqin and various percussion instruments at His Majesty’s Theatre.⁴³ The Chinn family (comprising Misses Eunice, Valda, Hazel Chinn and Mrs T. C. Chinn) were musically active through their ‘Oriental Concert’ at Brunswick Town Hall and other projects,⁴⁴ though it is unclear whether Chinese elements in their performances extended beyond the costumes. Alma Quon (or Quong) and the Joybelles, often performing jazz and swing music at the Young Chinese League annual debutante balls, ‘occasionally included a Chinese popular song played on Western instruments’.⁴⁵ They featured in the Chinese Exhibition and Bamboo Fair at Myer Mural Lounge (1941), attended by the Lord Mayor and the Chinese Consul-General. The programme included ‘a pageant of famous Chinese women “enacted by members of the Chinese community to oriental music by Misses Lorna and Alma Quong”’, in addition to a performance by a visiting Chinese soccer team who sang a ‘national war song’ and played Chinese instruments.⁴⁶

Since the 1980s, performances of folk and classical music have often been associated with Chinese community or cultural events, which may be funded privately or through government support. Such music is usually performed by conservatory-trained musicians who migrated post-1980s from mainland China and elsewhere, as well as various students of both Chinese and non-Chinese heritage. Some of these musicians work as educator-performers (tertiary and pre-tertiary) or as artists-in-residence, enabling them greater engagement with the wider Australian community. While such employment reflects a growing interest from more mainstream Australian organisations in programming and recognising Chinese artists, it is still not a regular occurrence.

Festival performances have also featured some of these musicians, particularly with the increasing appreciation of Chinese musical traditions catalysed by the 1980s ‘festival movement’ that ‘greatly diversified the styles of music offered as Australian public folk music’.⁴⁷ Chinese folk and classical music has been heard at the National Folk Festival (2008, 2024), Woodford Folk Festival (2008–11), Floriade Festival (2008) and the Sydney Sacred Music Festival (2016–18). The recent inclusion of erhu and zheng workshops amid the Celtic fiddling sessions of the ‘Stringmania’ camps held annually in Victoria was a conscious act to further redefine ‘Australian music’ within a multicultural framework.⁴⁸ Anecdotal evidence suggests that social media and the digital landscape have assisted trained Chinese musicians in establishing extensive contacts outside the Chinese community in recent decades.

Many Chinese conservatory-trained musicians gave their first Australian performances in an adventitious mixture of formal and informal settings (as the following examples demonstrate), and were obliged to teach privately while finding employment in other industries. Seven months after arriving in Sydney, Lei Hu gave yangqin performances for restaurant dinners and at the former Tasmanian State Institute of Technology in a small ensemble.⁴⁹ Hu felt it a pity to relinquish her lifelong craft but found it necessary to teach privately while working in aged care services. Lu Liu saw her own post-1999 career in Australia initially develop in a similar way – performing on pipa at private gatherings, casinos, Chinese functions, clubs, churches, schools, nursing homes, local council fairs, festivals and occasionally concert halls.⁵⁰ She started teaching privately in Sydney (2011) and established the Australian Pipa Association (2017–2023). Other Chinese instrumentalists have also released commercial recordings including Conversations (2012) featuring Shan Deng (piano) and Wei Deng (pipa).⁵¹ Notable studios include the Australia Dunhuang Arts Academy (Melbourne, since 2015), Meya Conservatory of Chinese Music (Sydney, since 2015), Sydney Guyun Guzheng Arts Academy (since 2015) and the School of Chinese Music and Arts (Adelaide, since 2005).

Amateur and professional Chinese instrumental ensembles are important contributors to the Chinese music scene in Australia and include Melbourne’s thirty- to fifty-piece Chao Feng Chinese Orchestra (since 1982), perhaps the earliest ongoing amateur Chinese ensemble in Australia, Perth’s Chung Wah Orchestra (since 2004) and Sydney’s Xi Yangyang Chinese Orchestra (since 2014).⁵² Semi-professional groups include Melbourne’s Australian Chinese Music Ensemble (since 1989), Canberra’s Australian National University Classical Chinese Music Ensemble (since 2004) and the Silk Girls Ensemble in Brisbane. Amateur Chinese community choirs are also an important musical forum for many older Chinese-speaking Australians. A singing group (since 2008) auspiced by the Kingston Chinese Senior Citizens Club in Melbourne comprising Chinese-speakers from numerous countries mainly performs popular Chinese songs (1950s–1980s).⁵³ Sydney’s Australian Yellow River Chorus (since 2000), led by Yanshen Huang, continues to perform Chinese and non-Chinese works.⁵⁴

Several tertiary music institutes maintain Chinese ensembles: Sydney Conservatorium (since 2016), Melbourne Conservatorium and the Australian National University School of Music (since 2004), Queensland Conservatorium (1970s). The Sydney and Melbourne ensembles hold at least two concerts annually, featuring traditional music and contemporary compositions. These ensembles focus on deepening student understanding of Chinese music through informed reading, listening, and practical performance in solo and ensemble contexts. Our research has shown that Chinese instrumental music teaching, especially within our Chinese Music Ensemble in Sydney (Figure 17.4), has had an observable impact on the perceptions, lives and intercultural awareness of a wide range of tertiary student learners, as well as their teachers.⁵⁵

Figure 17.4 Sydney Conservatorium of Music Chinese Music Ensemble (2023).

Image courtesy of Xiaomeng Luo.

New Music with Chinese Connections

Today, Australia-based composers, songwriters and performers of Chinese and non-Chinese heritage are creating diverse new musical performances with Chinese connections. Their musical content often parallels developments in Chinese-speaking regions while demonstrating ways that elements of Chinese music performance have begun to assume some life of their own in Australia. Such music reveals how Australia’s heterogeneous Chinese community is part of a transnational zone maintaining continual links between what Ien Ang describes as ‘the local and the global, the here and the there, past and present’.⁵⁶ The following observations highlight some of the richness and diversity of these new creative and performative ventures in Australia.

Chinese musical idioms and features have been used by various Australian composers from the 1970s onwards. Composers of non-Chinese heritage include Corrina Bonshek, Anne Boyd, Bruce Crossman, John Huie, Larry Sitsky and Tony Wheeler, and prominent composers of Chinese heritage include Julian Yu, Liza Lim, Caroline Szeto and Caitlin Yeo. A common thread between these composers is the element of hybridity and negotiations of ‘Chineseness’ through sound.

Notable works include Julian Yu’s music for the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony and major orchestral works,⁵⁷ where his engagement with Chinese music is more conceptual with the deliberate avoidance of ‘so-called Chineseness’.⁵⁸ Liza Lim has worked extensively with instruments such as the qin.⁵⁹ Moon Spirit Feasting (2002), co-commissioned by the Adelaide and Melbourne international festivals, draws on Chinese folk legends, with a Chinese–English libretto and an ensemble which includes erhu. Nicholas Ng’s Harvest of Endurance project (2010, 2017) brought eighteen composers together to set Mo Xiangyi’s 50-metre-long Harvest of Endurance scroll to music. In the ABC Compass film Divine Rhythms, Ng performed in The Inner Chamber, an original work for a huqin (bowed fiddle) ensemble, cello and voice, in a subterranean de-commissioned artillery chamber at Sydney Olympic Park in honour of the Chinese Anzacs.⁶⁰

Other collaborative projects include The Wide Alley: A Chinese-Western Jazz Ensemble (2007), created by Clocked Out (Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson) with Sichuan composer Zou Xiangping and commissioned by Paul Grabowsky for the Queensland Music Festival 2007.⁶¹ Involving five Sichuan and five Australian musicians, it toured widely within and outside Australia. The theatre show China (2007–2010), featuring William Yang narrating his travels to China alongside Nicholas Ng performing on Chinese instruments, toured nationally and internationally through Performing Lines.⁶² Lu Liu was recorded on pipa for the 2009 film Mao’s Last Dancer, for which composer Christopher Gordon utilised Chinese instruments textually and melodically in his score. Grenfell and Deng’s collaboration on Five Songs from the East by Maria Grenfell (2012), for pipa and piano stands as a solid contribution to intercultural art music.⁶³ Lu Liu’s 2019 Road of Sonic Voyage at Sydney Conservatorium with pipa virtuoso Professor Zhang Qiang (Central Conservatory of Music, China) included three world premiere performances of intercultural works featuring the pipa.

In recent decades, Chinese instruments have featured in non-traditional contexts and productions. Annette Shun Wah’s CAAP (Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, formerly Performance 4a) has produced a series of stageplays drawing on Chinese musical elements including The Serpent’s Table (2014) and Double Delicious (2020), with sound design and performance by Nicholas Ng.⁶⁴ The Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture has provided a flourishing live performance space for often under-represented Chinese musicians through its series of art exhibition openings and in collaboration with various government and community organisations. The 2022 world premiere of Richard Mills’ The Butterfly Lovers at the Melbourne Arts Centre (presented by Victorian Opera and Wild Rice Singapore), involved Liu (pipa) with Qiuming Dong (zhudi). Zheng player Mindy Meng Wang (born Lanzhou, active in Australia since 2011) appeared with Telenova at the 2022 Australian Performing Rights Association (APRA) Awards and with Tim Shiel (guitar/electronics) on numerous releases, including ‘Body of Water (What Is Love)’ (2021).⁶⁵ Wang’s naming as a 2022 Melbourne Recital Centre Artist in Residence and 2022–2024 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow indicates new areas of recognition for Chinese music, while suggesting mainstream Australian interest may currently be focused more on collaborative cross-genre endeavours than traditional or virtuosic musical playing.

A series of international Chinese popular music stars (of Cantopop, Mandopop and other styles) have appeared in Australia since the 1980s, including Faye Wang (Wang Fei) at the Sydney Entertainment Centre (June 2000), Na Ying at the Star Event Centre (March 2016), Frances Yip (2019) also at the Star Event Centre and Jay Chou (Zhou Jielun) at Sydney Olympic Park (2020, 2023). Such music sometimes features traditional Chinese instruments and is reminiscent of the earlier touring Chinese opera and ‘jazz’ groups in their organisational structure.

Appealing more to mainstream audiences, songstress Jasmine Chen appeared in a Shanghai jazz programme presented by Annette Shun Wah and produced by the Melbourne Art Centre (2012).⁶⁶ Rainbow Chan has created her own subcultural following by engaging with Chinese cultural elements in projects such as Lull (2019), an ABC podcast on endangered Weitou folk songs and In the Mood (co-created with Marcus Whale and Eugene Choi; 2020), inspired by Wong Kar-Wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000) at Sydney Opera House.⁶⁷

Conclusion

Several interesting dimensions emerge from this condensed overview of Chinese music performances in Australia. One concerns the ways in which musical performances with Chinese connections have served to maintain different types of social cohesion or to articulate and explore social and cultural connections with ideas of Chineseness, rather than being used to shift political priorities. This is clear from certain contexts where Australians of Chinese descent have become a part of the broader Australian social fabric – such as for the Bendigo Easter procession, in contemporary art music and in music education. In other instances, such as the performance of xiqu over the decades, it is possible that music played a part in bonding among individual Chinese Australian communities, and the mechanics and significance of its obvious maintenance within a difficult political context are worthy of further examination.

Another dimension that emerges as significant is familiar in diasporic contexts: the importance of avenues of musical transmission. Chinese musical performance in Australia owes its existence to practitioners with requisite skills, some of whom have gained their musical skills in Australia and others who have been invited from overseas to perform as required. To date, processes of transmission within the Australian context appear to have been most successful for genres which require relatively little formal training or Chinese language skills – such as certain types of ritual music. However, the last two decades of more intensive musical tuition on individual Chinese instruments seems to promise the possibility of important shifts in this area.

Finally, the creation of contemporary Australian-Chinese music is a newer dimension to the Chinese musical performance soundscape in Australia. It has emerged alongside a careful maintenance of long-standing musical traditions within Chinese Australian communities, resulting in the incorporation of a wide range of Chinese musical idioms into a distinctively Australian musical landscape. Furthermore, this seems to have occurred despite a relative decrease in most Australians’ exposure to Chinese musics in more recent times. In some respects, the 1920s integration of Chinese percussion and other musical elements into Australian jazz could be viewed as a precursor to this process. Whilst the integration of Chinese musical features reappeared in the 1970s in new musical works by people in Australia without Chinese ancestry, Australians of Chinese heritage are now prominent creative artists in this domain. As both creators and performers, they are often controlling the new directions that this process follows, leading to an exciting richness and diversity that characterises contemporary Australian-Chinese music performances.

Background

There is a long history of African migration to Australia, with the first settlers of African descent arriving on the First Fleet in 1788.¹⁵ The important role of people of African descent in the early years of colonial settlement has been obscured, however, in dominant narratives of Australian history shaped by particular notions of race and Australian identity that became entrenched leading up to and during the White Australia Policy era.¹⁶ Beginning in 1901 and not completely dismantled until 1973, the White Australia Policy consisted of a set of race-based restrictions that prevented people of non-European descent from coming to Australia. As a result of these restrictions, migration from Africa to Australia during the first half of the twentieth century primarily consisted of white South Africans and (from 1940–1960) Egyptians.¹⁷ Migration from other African countries increased gradually from the 1960s onward, and by the 1990s black Africans made up a large proportion of Australia’s humanitarian entrants. As Fozdar, Prout Quicke and Mickler note, while much research on the African diaspora in Australia has focused on refugees from countries such as Sudan/South Sudan, these humanitarian entrants are outnumbered by African-born migrants entering Australia through the skilled worker and family migrant programmes. At the time of the most recent census, 2.6 per cent of the Australian population was either born in Africa or had one parent born in Africa.¹⁸ Reflecting varied migration pathways over time, the African diaspora in Australia is highly diverse in terms of national origin, ethnicity, culture, language and socio-economic status.

The growth of the African-born population in Australia in the 1980s following the dismantling of the White Australia Policy led to the emergence of African performers in the developing multicultural arts scene. Smith and Brett describe the development of ‘public multicultural music’ in the 1980s, led by ‘performers and cultural activists, some from the folk scene, others from ethnic communities and various levels of public administration’.¹⁹ The multicultural arts scene provided important opportunities for artists, but it also entailed reframing musical practices to fit within the ‘framework of a state-sponsored multiculturalism’.²⁰ As we will discuss further below, multicultural festivals in particular have provided a space for self-representation and community engagement for African Australian artists, while at the same time imposing constraints on the way in which music and cultural practices can be represented and shared.

The legacy of the White Australia Policy continues to be felt in what Mandisi Majavu describes as the ‘normative whiteness’ that underlies Australian multiculturalism and the ‘everyday racism’ experienced by African Australians.²¹ Negative representations of Africans in the Australian media, including sensationalist reporting on ‘African gangs’ in Melbourne,²² also reflect racial anxieties and ideas about national identity and belonging that exclude people of African descent and that shape the opportunities available to African Australian artists and the way their music is received.²³

The musical practices associated with African Australian individuals and communities are highly varied. There are a growing number of African Australian artists who have achieved mainstream success, particularly in genres such as R&B and hip hop, for example Timomatic, Sampa the Great and Tkay Maidza, among others. Zambian-born Sampa the Great is particularly notable for the strong emphasis on African themes and stylistic influences in her music, lyrics, videos and stage presentation, and for her rapid rise to international popularity.²⁴ For our research collaborators, the success of these artists is celebrated for providing much-needed positive representations of Africans and African Australians and challenging the notion that artists of African descent are only suited to performing in settings designated as ‘multicultural’. The majority of African Australian music-making occurs in less high-profile settings, however, including performances associated with community and family gatherings to mark holidays, births, marriages, coming-of-age ceremonies or religious worship. Other performances take place in public settings at venues ranging from community centres, bars, restaurants and nightclubs to concert halls, and in educational contexts where varied music and dance practices are taught to children or adults in schools or community centres.²⁵ Australia is also home to radio programmes featuring African musics and a growing Afrobeats DJ scene featuring the most popular music from West Africa, particularly Nigeria.²⁶

While some performers seek to maintain traditional music practices very much as they are performed in their communities of origin, others engage in processes of collaboration and exchange, developing new stylistic approaches to reflect their experiences in Australia. For example, the Melbourne African Traditional Ensemble is a unique Australian creation that combines instruments from Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa to develop an innovative pan-African musical creation. The Ethio-jazz band Black Jesus Experience experiments with musical crossovers that are distinctly Australian, such as their collaboration with Kuku Nyunkal man Sean Ryan on Yiki Yiki (didjeridu) on the album Good Evening Black Buddha.²⁷

The performances of African Australian artists must also be contextualised through a consideration of the broader influence of African diasporic styles and sounds on the development of Australian music culture. This broad influence of African diasporic musics has been neglected in dominant representations of Australian music history which have emphasised whiteness.²⁸ A growing body of research, however, has explored the way First Nations peoples in Australia have adapted, and made their own, African diasporic musics such as hip hop and reggae and the cultures of resistance associated with these musics.²⁹ This process of cultural exchange has been made possible both through consumption of recordings featuring African diasporic artists as well as through direct engagement with African and African diasporic musicians who have toured or resided in Australia.³⁰

Striking in this scholarship is the way African and African diasporic musics have been instrumental in the development of shared cultures of resistance to colonialism and racial oppression. The absence of African Australian perspectives in this research is notable, however, reinforcing a representation of African and African diasporic culture as a foreign, non-Australian influence that is only made Australian when it is adapted and performed by First Nations artists. A more complete picture emerges when the perspectives and musics of African Australian artists are included. There is a long history of African Australian musical practice that is informed by the Australian cultural landscape,³¹ and contemporary African Australian performers and composers have used music to negotiate ideas about race and belonging and to build solidarities with First Nations peoples in Australia and with a global African diaspora.³² Solidarities may be articulated through reference to shared experiences of racism and discrimination, and in some cases through reference to Indigeneity and histories of colonial oppression in Africa and Australia. In addition, African Australian performers frequently emphasise ways in which music can contribute to building social connection and healing in the face of challenges encountered in the Australian social environment, such as cultural loss, intergroup tensions and discrimination.

Contexts of Performance Practice: Senegalese Australian Examples from the Work of Lamine Sonko

In this section, we briefly discuss three projects led by Lamine Sonko that serve to illustrate his unique creative approach while also providing insight into broader themes that have emerged through our work with African Australian artists.³³ These three projects highlight contrasting contexts of African Australian music practice and the challenges and opportunities experienced in these settings.

Sonko’s approach as an artist draws from his cultural heritage and education as a guéwel, as a descendant of the Sing Sing clan and Korings of Kaabu and as a member of the Serer, Wolof and Mandinko cultural communities of Senegal. A West African hereditary role, a guéwel is responsible for maintaining and communicating cultural knowledge through customs and rituals that are channelled through music, dance and oral storytelling.³⁴ A guéwel’s practice is informed by a lifetime of learning within the community. Beginning in early childhood, this cultural education is guided by community elders and takes place through observation and participation in rituals and ceremonies including rhythmic, chant and dance traditions. A guéwel is skilled as a communicator and mediator. This communication can occur through music, song, dance or speech. Guéwel comes from the Wolof word for circle (guew), while the verb ‘guéwel’ means ‘to create a circle’.³⁵ Traditionally, a guéwel is someone who gathers people together when there is an important message concerning the spiritual or physical wellbeing of the community that needs to be communicated.

Sustaining these culturally significant musical practices associated with the guéwel after migrating to Australia has, for Sonko, involved multiple iterations and different approaches to engaging people through music. In some settings, such as within family and Senegalese community events, music is performed and enjoyed in ways that are closely aligned with cultural practices in Senegal. For example, Sonko performs at naming ceremonies for Senegalese families living in Australia. In Senegalese culture, naming ceremonies celebrate the birth of a new child and give the child a name that reflects their cultural heritage. As is true for many African cultures, Senegalese names are not just a way to identify an individual but also carry deep cultural and spiritual significance. As guéwels are a fundamental part of the spiritual and physical well-being of the community, they have a key role in the naming ceremony by evoking ancestral knowledge through the playing of specific rhythms. A naming ceremony is also an opportunity for the family to share their joy and excitement with others and to receive support and guidance from the community as they raise their child. In this way, naming ceremonies play a role in building strong, connected communities and in passing down cultural traditions and values from one generation to the next.³⁶

While musical events such as naming ceremonies are important for Senegalese families to sustain cultural heritage in the context of migration, such events are limited in number, reflecting the small size of the Senegalese community in Australia. In addition to performing in these community settings, Sonko has developed a range of creative projects that explore new ways to share culture and engage people through music in the Australian context. In the following sections, we examine three examples of this musical-cultural work, including festival performances, school and community programmes and a collaborative multi-artform project.

The Multicultural Festival

Scholarship on music and multiculturalism in Australia has shown that performers often encounter challenges when adapting their musical practices in the context of multicultural events that cater to a predominately white Australian audience.³⁷ Multicultural festivals have been described by Ghassan Hage as a kind of ‘multicultural zoo’ featuring ethnic cultures as a ‘collection of “otherness”’ for the benefit of white Australians.³⁸ Others such as Rimi Khan have suggested that this ‘ethnic zoo’ model of multiculturalism does not adequately capture the creativity and agency of festival performers and audiences who engage in forms of self-representation and community building through festival participation.³⁹

The diversity of music festivals featuring African Australian artists, and the range of performer and audience experiences within those festivals, resists easy classification. Nonetheless, presenting their music on festival stages involves processes of adaptation to align artistic expressions with the expectations of audiences and organisers in the Australian context. Through this process, old meanings may be lost and new meanings attached to the musical sounds, attire and dance movements shared. For some performers, this reflects a process of transforming the associations of music with religion, education or other aspects of cultural life into entertainment. At the same time, performances can provide important opportunities for public representation and cultural sharing.

Sonko’s band The African Intelligence is a popular music ensemble that has performed at festivals throughout Australia and achieved significant recognition including winning Best Reggae and Global Album at the Music Victoria Awards (2017). Sonko established the band in 2011 as a way to connect with broad and diverse communities and advocate for the issues that African migrant artists faced in Australia. The music combines Senegalese traditional music and a unique blend of jazz, blues, salsa and Afro-funk genres. The name of the band (The African Intelligence), musical style and song lyrics work together to present a compelling message of African cultural strength, history and resilience. This message is particularly important in the Australian context, where media and political discourse represents African cultural difference in negative ways, contributing to problems of racism and discrimination against people of African descent.⁴⁰ The songs of the African Intelligence address histories of colonisation and slavery, while emphasising a narrative of solidarity in the face of racial oppression and a positive vision of the future.⁴¹

While many supporters of the African Intelligence appreciate the lyrical messages and the representation of African culture, the band’s success can also be attributed to the unique mix of genres that make the music both accessible and interesting to a wide audience. Perhaps most importantly, the band’s exuberant and high-energy performances get people dancing. The African Intelligence uses festival performances to entertain audiences, while also presenting positive representations of African culture in Australia and communicating values of community unity.

The African Intelligence can be seen as part of a movement of African Australian artists pushing back against negative representations of Africa and Africans in the media and in political discourse, with other examples including the young women’s arts collective New Change and Zimbabwean Australian hip hop artist Kudzai, among many others. Performances in festivals provide a space for self-representation and public celebration of African culture and identity that is highly valued by many participants, including artists and audiences.⁴² Indeed, audience members interviewed by McConnell explained that dancing to performances by the African Intelligence and other African Australian artists gave them a strong sense of cultural pride and belonging that they had not previously experienced in the Australian context. These examples illustrate that the ‘multicultural zoo’ model does not adequately describe the festival experiences of many African Australian participants.⁴³ At the same time, for some artists, adapting music practices with cultural significance into staged entertainment or spectacle is a challenging process, serving as a point of friction and learning in the context of diasporic experience.

School and Community Programmes

Many African Australian artists note that making a living as a performer is challenging. In addition to the general challenges associated with the music profession, African Australian performers noted that they felt a sense of exclusion from performance opportunities as a result of their skin colour, migrant or refugee status, or assumptions about their place of origin. This was attributed to a range of factors, including racism and discrimination, lack of connections or understanding of the industry, and approaches to arts programming that result in culturally and linguistically diverse performers being restricted to events and opportunities marked as ‘multicultural’ or ‘world’.⁴⁴ In the face of these challenges, one of the strategies that African Australian performers use to make a living through music in Australia is to diversify their activities, engaging in public performances while also teaching or conducting workshops with schools and community groups. For many performers, these activities are also valued as an opportunity to educate and share culture in ways that are not possible in public performance settings.

The Knowing Project was established by Lamine Sonko to share African ways of learning in the education sector in a mode that pays respect to the cultural knowledge embedded in musical practices. The Knowing Project draws on the cultural tools within music practices of Senegal, particularly drumming, to promote playing and learning together as a collective, and an understanding of music as a tool to break down barriers, heal and teach us how to relate to and connect with each other in new ways. While these are cultural philosophies rooted in Senegalese culture and guéwel traditions, the Knowing Project shares these practices in recognition of a universal human need to connect, to have purpose, identity and belonging. In addition, the Knowing Project aims to promote positive understandings of African culture and to tackle issues of inequality and racism from early on. This approach has been used in schools and also with local government areas in programmes designed to improve community safety in outdoor public spaces and strengthen social cohesion and inclusion.

These kinds of school and community-based music activities with African migrant communities and young people have begun to receive attention from researchers. For example, a study by Cain, Istvandity and Lakhani examined how community-based, participatory music practices may contribute to well-being for migrants and refugees in Australia.⁴⁵ While not focusing specifically on African musical practices, their research included newly arrived migrants and refugees from Sudan and Congo. Likewise, Bartleet, Dunbar-Hall, Letts, et al. include some examples of African Australian musical practices in their discussion of the large-scale Sound Links project, which aimed to ‘stimulate understanding and appreciation of community music activities’ across different settings in Australia.⁴⁶

Focusing more specifically on young people, Kathryn Marsh has conducted research on school and community-based music programmes for refugees and migrants, including participants from Sierra Leone and South Sudan.⁴⁷ Her research indicates that programmes contributed to a sense of inclusion both for children and their parents. In addition, Marsh, Ingram and Dieckmann examined an innovative music-teacher training programme at Sydney Conservatorium of Music that engaged South Sudanese Australian youth.⁴⁸ The programme enabled multidirectional learning, building university students’ understanding through engaging with South Sudanese Australian musicians and young people, while also facilitating music engagement and intercultural learning for South Sudanese Australian participants.

School and community-based programmes such as these represent a significant area of research and practice. While varied in their form and structure, programmes frequently emphasise sharing of African music practices and the cultural knowledge embedded within them as a means to support intercultural understanding, well-being and social inclusion. In these settings, music can provide a tool to engage a broad audience and create awareness of the complexity and depth of African music practices that may be overlooked in mainstream music education settings. Furthermore, for many African Australian artists, engaging in school or community programmes can provide an important source of income, while also enabling sharing of culture in ways that is frequently not possible in public performance settings.

13.12 Project

Scholarship on multicultural arts in Australia has identified a tension between so-called ‘grassroots’ initiatives oriented toward community development and artistic ‘excellence’.⁴⁹ That is, multicultural arts are frequently represented as amateur or of lesser quality than mainstream arts but as possessing value for building community and cross-cultural understanding. Furthermore, a perceived incompatibility between commercial goals and community goals has shaped the way multicultural arts programmes are represented and supported.⁵⁰ Some African Australian performers have identified challenges in working sustainably in this cultural environment, where longer-term creative development may be hampered by funding models for community programmes, and community-based ways of working may not be well aligned with programmes oriented towards developing individual artistic excellence.

In this section we offer a brief discussion of Sonko’s 13.12 project, which aims to bridge this tension between ‘grassroots’ and ‘excellence’ by maintaining both a strong grounding in community and emphasising long-term creative experimentation to develop unique artistic outputs.⁵¹ The 13.12 project presents a new model of working that is built on deeply rooted cultural knowledge systems from Senegal, while also being engaged and innovative within the Australian arts context. It was established in 2018, informed by Sonko’s cultural background as guéwel, his early career experience in the performing arts scene with Senegalese and Swiss-based theatre companies, and his years of experimentation with the African Intelligence band and the Knowing Project. The challenges of adapting musical practices with cultural significance in the Australian arts context provided motivation to develop new ways of working in a collaborative, research-informed creative process that combines in-depth cultural knowledge and artistic experimentation.

The 13.12 project brings together a team of producers, artists, academics, cultural elders and communities to develop and present multi-artform experiences including theatre, music, visual art and film and to nurture research that promotes wisdom cultures and global Indigenous ways of knowing. The name ‘13.12’ refers to an ancient celestial ratio including the cycle of the moon and sun; it is also a sacred number connected to the constellation of the star Yoonir (Sirius). One of the key concepts in the 13.12 project is the idea of music as an embodied or internal knowledge, described as xaam xaam mou yeug yeug in Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal. In this context, musical practice activates an awareness in the individual to understand and follow cultural ways of viewing the world, cosmologies and metaphysical principles. An example of this is seen in Senegalese bakk (rhythmic invocations), which are chanted messages that have a rhythmic equivalent and contain sacred language limited to performance by specific members who hold particular roles in the community.⁵² These rhythmic languages show how knowledge is communicated beyond words to connect with the past and present through sound.

A key element of the 13.12 project has been the focus on in-depth and long-term research and development, including exploration of cross-cultural composition and how to bridge gaps between Western classical music and African music pedagogies. Outcomes have included the production of a short documentary film Deup (2021), as well as theatre and music productions. The performance narratives developed through the 13.12 project, particularly for presentation in a music theatre context, look to subvert dominant colonial histories of Africa that have relied on written archives and mostly excluded the embodied and oral traditions. The work seeks to evoke a new awareness of collective belonging by highlighting the knowledge embodied in music and new perceptions of African and broader global Indigenous cultures. In this way it aims to be both grounded in cultural knowledge and practices from a specific area of West Africa while also exploring solidarities and commonalities with other Indigenous cultures, including First Nations cultures in Australia, that have likewise been marginalised through an emphasis on written archives.

The 13.12 project is a unique exploration of both cultural specificity and universality that is grounded in guéwel knowledge of music as the fabric of collective experience. The project provides insight into key issues that have emerged in broader research with African Australian artists, particularly the challenges experienced in adapting musical practices and associated forms of cultural knowledge in the Australian music environment. Whereas scholarship has identified tensions between ideas about artistic excellence and community engagement, the 13.12 project explores models of working that bridge this tension, maintaining long-term community involvement as well as new forms of creative collaboration.⁵³

Conclusion

In this chapter we provided an overview of research on African musics in Australia and shared examples of projects led by Sonko in order to highlight diverse African Australian musical practices and contexts of performance. These included the African Intelligence, an innovative popular music ensemble that has performed extensively at music festivals and other events throughout Australia; the Knowing Project, which runs school and community programmes focused on building cultural understanding through music; and 13.12, a multi-artform project that explores creative, collaborative ways of engaging and sharing art in Australia, based on deeply rooted music-knowledge systems from Senegal. These three projects share common goals while also employing distinct ways of engaging Australian audiences through music.

Together, these three projects provide insight into key themes that emerge in research on African musics in Australia. Firstly, they demonstrate an interplay between cultural specificity and ideas about universality that is a recurring theme in representations of African Australian musical practice. Many artists emphasise a connection to a specific ethnic group, country, or region of origin, seeking to challenge homogenising representations of Africa in Australia. At the same time, artists frequently embrace ideas about universality, seeing music as a way to forge connections with new communities in Australia and globally. In Sonko’s work, both cultural specificity and universality are layered together, enabling artistic practices to emerge that are grounded in Senegalese guéwel practice while also embracing broader Indigenous solidarity against racial oppression and notions of shared human experience and a coming-together across difference.

Secondly, these examples highlight challenges and opportunities experienced by African Australian artists in engaging with multicultural arts programming. Research has shown that multicultural arts programmes can reinforce exclusionary notions of Australian belonging in providing funding and space for artists to perform in segregated events that are designated as ‘multicultural’ and that may cater primarily to white Australian audiences.⁵⁴ Even as celebratory notions of multiculturalism represent the arts as a space of openness and inclusion, the expectations of venues, event organisers and funders frequently require adaptations of musical practices that may not always align with their cultural significance and individual artistic priorities of performers. At the same time, for many African Australian artists and audience members, festivals and other multicultural event performances offer valued opportunities to share music and culture with people from African and wider Australian communities.

Taken together, these examples illustrate the way artists use music to negotiate the complexities and challenges of diasporic experience and to articulate the relevance of African cultural practices in contemporary Australia. This is significant in a country where dominant notions of identity, race and belonging exclude people of African descent and where racism and discrimination continue to negatively impact the lives of individuals and communities. A growing body of research points to the importance of community-based musical practices for supporting social connectedness and belonging in the context of migration and resettlement.⁵⁵ We suggest that the diverse and varied forms of African Australian music-making deserve further research in their own right, and also for the insight they provide into changing notions of Australian belonging and African-diasporic experience.

About the Ngarra-burria Programme and its Rationale

The Ngarra-burria programme was necessary on two fronts. Firstly, because First Nations composers were – and are – there, and secondly because a gentle Indigenous-led correction was needed in the composing sector – a re-calibration of engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and culture. Many in the sector genuinely appreciate our recent leadership, including non-Indigenous composers and educators, broadcasters, ensembles and festival directors, among others.

For decades many non-Indigenous Australian composers occupied the Indigenous space. Instances of appropriation numbered over one-hundred composers and potentially many hundreds of works.⁴ For any Australian music organisation it is simple as far as the Ngarra-burria team see it: if in the past a music group or festival has been happy to commission and/or programme non-Indigenous composers using aspects of Aboriginal culture in their works (perhaps using an Indigenous story, a melody, borrowing from Aboriginal language or even appropriating Aboriginal spirituality), then the same ones are obliged to commission and programme First Nations composers today. Many such non-Indigenous composers and works were celebrated as enriching Australian culture, while First Nations composers were largely unheard until the 2010s. It demonstrated the blindness of a sector tethering itself in part to Aboriginal culture yet drifting, unaware of the same, resulting in a great irony.

So how did we get to that point? There was encouragement from a previous Australian literary movement known as the Jindyworobaks, and from some composers, including a leading composer in Australia, Alfred Hill.⁵ In 1950 Alfred Hill inferred Aboriginal music was Australia’s folk resource and was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald stating, ‘There is enough material in these [Aboriginal music] recordings to start an entirely different Australian school of music … It’s a gold mine … All these young fellows who are composing now will have the chance of a lifetime with this material.’⁶ In the 1960s, romantic notions of the Dreamtime were popularised by Ainslie Roberts and Charles P. Mountford in their book The Dreamtime: Australian Aboriginal Myths.⁷ These serve as a few examples of many that resulted in a kind of surrogate ownership of Aboriginal culture being adopted by millions of Australians in the second half of the twentieth-century. Of course, Australian composers responded to that broad and growing sense of who we are as Australians too, and where Aboriginal culture was in all of that, and they often engaged with it genuinely, although clumsily. The ‘horse bolted’ back then, while Aboriginal Australians were still not even counted as citizens.

Since the 1980s, in some concert works I have explored aspects of my Indigenous heritage and culture.⁸ Today we have Nardi Simpson, Rhyan Clapham, Deborah Cheetham, William Barton, Troy Russell, Aaron Wyatt, Brenda Gifford and also Will Kepa, Lou Bennett, Clint Bracknell and James Henry. James is working near full-time as a composer, and the list goes on. And five in the Ngarra-burria programme had music degrees in performance when they came in. There are about two dozen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander composers working in the classical arena who I am close to, so it stands to reason that there must be dozens more that are either composing or would like to train and work in that space. For many it is a natural and welcome extension of their cultural expression, and for some it is an experiment that they may yet turn from, but one that adds to their breadth along the way. In 2022 the Ngarra-burria programme received a Classical:NEXT Innovation Award in Europe. This represents the fact that the international classical and new music community have voted to support the enablement of First Nations composers in Australia. They expect that we will be a part of shaping what is current, and what is yet to come.

Embracing Diversity among First Nations Composers

The identity of First Nations composers is not for others in the classical or new music sectors to decide. However, with a growing number of composers, I feel that it is appropriate to comment on potential judgements and determinations about our identity and even what we write, which at times stem from some in the industry.⁹ First Nations peoples are many and diverse, and I would encourage the Australian music industry to actively engage with that diversity and, as far as is possible, to work locally with Indigenous peoples of your own city, region or state.

Pertaining to First Nations diversity I pose a question. Do Indigenous composers write absolute music, music for its own sake – for instance a Sonata in F, or twelve-tone music; that is, music without any context pertaining to Indigenous culture? The answer is, of course, yes. And for me it can be more significantly Indigenous in its expression than those First Nations composers who may express their culture in a more direct way, say by way of an attached narrative – an Indigenous programme of sorts. Here, I’m advocating for composers more broadly – those creatives who reconstitute the images and themes of their lives in new ways, their influences and so on, things that they live with daily – and exploring how all of that informs new creative works and not simply transcriptions of the same images and themes, influences, dualities and interpenetrations. First Nations composers, like any composer, must do more than simply transcribe. A composer must be artful. However, I observe that many in the industry seek to hold First Nations expression to whatever their perception of ‘Indigenous’ may be. Presently, in 2022, many commissioners, performers, concert programmers, broadcasters, reviewers and audiences in Australia want to hear an Indigenous composer share tangibly from their culture rather than that Sonata in F. They want to hear a differentiation.

Aaron Wyatt, who is known as a professional violist, conductor and academic, now composes more and more. He recently stated that only one of his pieces explores his culture.¹⁰ Tim Gray is often content to write music centred on science fiction and comical pseudo-horror narratives. For me, my Indigeneity is expressly represented in less than 5 per cent of my output, which includes concertos, symphonies, works for wind symphony, chamber works, choral works, children’s music, and jazz and surf music going back some forty years. It is a part of my breadth but not my sole expression. And then, of course, there are many of our composers who frequently express their culture in new works with a depth and tangibility that impacts upon commissioners and audiences, including Brenda Gifford, Rhyan Clapham and Nardi Simpson, to name a few. Their work is seen by the industry as a recent welcome enrichment to Australian concert music. This diversity among First Nations composers is a rich part of the First Nations narrative, and I suggest that those works that are not tied to cultural context alone are also politically and culturally significant. Such composers derail things; they have moved outside of being tied to commissioners or audience expectations of what it is to be Indigenous. Yet they still know from where they have come. Their challenge, however, is that many in the industry, and audiences too, may not understand them. The Ngarra-burria programme is now a part of the industry, and supports the musical and cultural development of any participating First Nations composers, no matter what their expressions may be. We assist to make it a culturally relevant space that we all share as Australian music-makers. We are grateful to the industry for shifting with us in the last decade or so.

In front of me now, perched among the chaos of my work desk is a fish trap. It is small, the same length as my keyboard, and its stiff, ochre-yellow strands radiate from my papery mess. The trap’s composition is faultless – an intricate combination of fibrous twists and loopings masterfully fashioned to both entice and capture. With a rounded yawning mouth and elegant tapered base, the object’s form is as rigorous as it is beautiful. It is simple. And powerful. Complex. And strong. The individually dyed and treated fibres of Yolŋu Country’s pandanus tree have been woven in such a way to create a functional yet striking object. Its form encompasses the bark of its construction to resemble its prey – snug enough for only one, lending watery weight to the custom of working with the landscape for sustenance, regeneration and longevity.

I am an unending piece of fibre. Robust rope or bush string if you will. But I did not begin life this way. I was nurtured and grown around the belly of a tree. My Mother Tree grew from the sustenance of Yuwaalaraay country. The kurrajong or nhungga is one such tree that rises upon my homelands. Around her belly I grew and then detached, a length of bark drying then twisting, making myself into the twine I am today. I am the happy product of Mother Tree. Through it I am connected to earth and sky, water and light, animal and being. And thus, I am charged with the freedom to weave myself into creation the best way I know how. So, I choose to make my string spirit song. I am reverberating rope, singing string, tune-soaked thread. I am a chorus in the never ending First Nations refrain.

I was a practising contemporary musician and songwriter for twenty-one years before joining Ngarra-burria First Peoples Composers programme. Many participants have similar, if not longer, established careers. A small community, us Blak music-makers necessarily cultivated a significant history of playing, performing, recording, learning and making alongside or with each other in some cases, for decades. We arrived at Ngarra-burria already invested in each other, a part of each other’s continuing song. We were already uplifted by each other’s music. We were passionate supporters of each other’s practice. We had shared professional frustrations as well as successes. So, we were all family when we arrived. Ngarra-burria then was a coming together of individual lengths of robust musical and cultural thread. Our fibres were of varying species. Luckily for us we were ready – as flexible but hardy lengths of chord. Ngarra-burria was about to bind us in a different way. Our collective form was to alter our kinship as band members and backup singers and co-writers and producers, and would make way for the plaiting of a family of song people into a new musical landscape. And we needed the strength of our bonds in the new world we were to find ourselves in.

In Ngarra-burria I was submerged into a river of new musical knowledges that was at times confusing, frustrating and incredibly foreign. I was challenged with learning a new sonic language, one reliant on the written mark rather than an aural relationship. I was asked to create relationships with non-Indigenous musicians with different creative approaches and unfamiliar musical practices. With each challenge, I wove myself through my fellow First Nations participants. With every additional instrument, device, tool, theory, approach and excerpt, we strengthened. If I faltered, it was alongside them. If I struggled, my burden was shared. I quickly bound myself into my new knowledge, looping through my friends again as I did. A structure arose. A Ngarra-burria weaving began to strengthen and rise.

This structure not only catches the bounty on offer but allows the flow of already existing practice to course through. Ngarra-burria proves itself to be the perfect little fish trap nestling into the rivers of sound of Australia’s new music landscape. It is precisely because it is open, it both holds and releases, traps and guides, that Ngarra-burria works for its First Nations music-makers. We are not woven into a form we can never take. Rather, through the leadership of Dharug composer Dr Chris Sainsbury and his team of collaborators and mentors, we are asked to bring who and what we are into the world of Western music composition. Intwined into the vessel that is Ngarra-burria, our existing musical and cultural knowledges are valuable. So too is our enduring friendship. Our relational, aural musicality provides the foundation of our weaving. Western, Eurocentric, classical styles pass through either being trapped as nourishment or allowed to flow on. I believe the result is much more than the creation of interesting or unique or new Indigenous work. The vessel compels its First Nations composers to be all that we were, are and wish to become. It also allows us to engage and choose what we wish to let go. This particular fish trap is the sound of a negotiation of musical knowledges, of cultural relationing, of deep connectedness and the potential to shape the anthem of Australia’s new music landscape.

One commissioning project, ‘Ngarra-Burria Piyanna’, saw four First Nations composers invited by a researcher at the Australian National University (ANU) to compose a piece for Australia’s oldest piano – a musical artefact held in the ANU’s collection. The instrument was a Henrion, made in a copy of the original piano, that arrived in 1770 – the same year of James Cook’s charting of the coast of what would later become known as ‘Australia’. The project’s premise was that this instrument, while significant to colonial Australia, was also significant to First Nations people. But to me, the weight of the project, the knowledge system it was born of and the way its compositions would be contextualised was firmly set in the Western, European, classical tradition. Although the instrument was of modest size, the hill was too big and too white to climb, whatever the opportunity for creative resistance. I considered the Henrion to be emblematic of the systematic destruction of Indigenous musical traditions. To me it was the embodiment of domination, colonisation and control. I wasn’t into it, especially as the timing of the project coincided with the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. Yet the intensity of my disdain towards the project meant I needed to sit in the reasons why I felt that way. I accepted the challenge of the commission and sat within its conflict. From it came a piece titled The Binary.

As a composer I was disappointed in my work. I failed to recognise the instrument’s particular characteristics. To me, it was rigid and inflexible. I heard only limitation in its texture and severity in its tone. The modest, boxy Henrion laid claim over my making, and my piece struggled in its resistance against the musical, political and cultural tide. The recording of The Binary confirmed what I already felt. I wasn’t yet skilled enough to make complex compositional statements. The work was poor. Its sound was unpleasant. I awkwardly spoke about ‘Ngarra-Burria Piyanna’, disappointed with what I had delivered. It wasn’t until I heard my colleagues’ compositions, their responses to the same instrument, their sonic statements to the same opportunity, that I fully understood the context my making existed in. Their compositions opened my eyes and lifted my heart. It was in that moment I understood the role Ngarra-burria plays for its First Nations participants. I also saw the influence it could wield upon Australia’s musical landscape.

My composition was meaningless without my countrywomen and countrymen’s alongside it. The strength of my work was in its relationship to theirs. The Binary, my musicalised political chant was nothing without the werewolf’s lament (Tim Grey’s Lupe’s Waltz), the family reflection (Elizabeth Sheppard’s Kalgoorli Silky Pear) and the deadly rap (Rhyan Clapham’s 1770). The thing we had been commissioned to provide, an ‘indigenisation’ of a colonial instrument and its associated narrative, surged through the weave, giving way to the context of our connection. ‘Ngarra-Burria Piyanna’ harmonises the skills Ngarra-burria composers have acquired in our own musical practice with the respect we hold for culture, community and Country. Accompanied by the care we extend to each other, piano becomes speaker, its four resonant and diverse movements amplifying a creative, historical, Blak, sonic truth. Together we climbed and laid claim to that too big, too white, hill. At the mouth of a trickling stream at its tip we placed a small, yellow, woven fish trap.

At present the programme continues to support new cohorts of composers as they channel through its structure. But we must go backwards if we are to grow. Remember Mother Tree? Her ecosystem requires sustenance to birth lengths of twine. She is reliant on a continuing musical practice that strengthens country and community, upholds its knowledges, practises reciprocity and enters exchange to thrive. Blak musicking in all its forms feeds her. Thriving First Nations contemporary, country, pop, alternative, dance, folk, soul, jazz and classical music is essential to the creation of more Ngarra-burria twine. The idea that we must undertake decades of classical training in Western conservatoires before being recognised as composers sweeps into the netting and flows through it with the tide. The trap catches. It also lets go. And its form will and should alter with each added fibre and extended length. Its shape must be a result of its combined materials – the bindings and openings it creates. My hope is that the broader world of new and classical music does not seek to train or homogenise such uniqueness or bend it in the way it believes is best. For we are the weavers, the vessel’s creators, and it is an interlacing of creative and ancestral making. I also hope there is no greed or pressure for its catch. With thoughtfulness and care it can provide all that is needed in a way that will reflect and sustain the communities it binds.

The fish trap that wades in the mess of my desk was given to me by a beloved mentor and beautiful friend, Gamilaraay woman Tracey Cameron. I was with her when she bought it. She told me it was a present she was buying for herself. A few months later she slid it across a coffee table and handed it to me – an act of friendship, of relation, of art, of knowledge, culture and community. The weaving is a gift, within it we are bound.