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Peter Sculthorpe, who died in 2014, remains Australia’s best-known composer and is widely held to be the most important creative musical spirit the country has produced. Beautifully written and fastidiously researched, this authorised biography provides an insight into Sculthorpe’s formation years: his quest for personal voice, and his arrival – through many creative friendships and collaborations – at a place in the collective heart of the nation. It charts the realisation of a youthful vocation to become not merely a composer, but an Australian composer. Graeme Skinner’s biography is also a social history, examining Sculthorpe’s unique role in the creation of Australian musical modernism in the 1960s – an important era in Australia’s cultural evolution.
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The Acc07.143 instalment comprises pencil, proof and published music scores. It includes works hitherto missing from the W001-W305 series, belonging to Series 9 held at MS 9676 (2 fol. boxes).
Tells the fascinating story of the composer's rise to prominence. Also a social history, charting the rise of modernism in Australian music through the eyes of its key player.
Sculthorpe is one of Australia's most prominent composers and is among the most important composers on the international scene. Although he is a distinguished academic and popular lecturer, Sculthorpe does not fit any ready-made category of composer or teacher. In a body of work that so far includes orchestral and chamber music in many genres and mediums, opera and other theater music, songs and choral music, and music for documentary and commercial films, radio, and television, he has established a personal musical style and public presence that have shaped the history of 20th-century music in Australia and the world. Owing to circumstances of place and time--Australia in the 20th century--he has been defining, or redefining, the role of composer for himself and his audiences. This book is a record of Sculthorpe's work and of its reception by composer colleagues, performers, critics, and audiences.
Entrenched until recently in Western aesthetics, Australian composers are now developing a functional cultural identity expressed through a distinctly nationalistic musical idiom. Its ongoing formation, inspired by Australias Aboriginal heritage and unique natural environment, seeks to distance the nations artistic developments from the geographically remote Occidental regions and emphasize its native cultures. Presently, however, mounting sociopolitical and ethical concerns surrounding the cultural borrowing between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are problematizing the developing nationalistic idiom, as composers must determine whether the two groups share any legitimate connection b...
Drawing on newly available archival material, key works, and correspondence of the era, Australian Music and Modernism defines "Australian Music" as an idea that emerged through the lens of the modernist discourse of the 1960s and 70s. At the same time that the new "Australian Music" was distinctive of the nation, it was also thoroughly connected to practices from Europe and shaped by a new engagement with the music of Southeast Asia. This book examines the intersection of nationalism and modernism at this formative time. During the early stages of "Australian Music" there was disagreement about what the idea itself ought to represent and, indeed, whether the idea ought to apply at all. Michael Hooper considers various perspectives offered by such composers as Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale, and Nigel Butterley and analyzes some of the era's significant works to articulate a complex understanding of "Australian Music" at its inception.
Australia’s Jindyworobak Composers examines the music of a historically and artistically significant group of Australian composers active during the later post-colonial period (1930s–c. 1960). These composers sought to establish a uniquely Australian identity through the evocation of the country’s landscape and environment, including notably the use of Aboriginal elements or imagery in their music, texts, dramatic scenarios or ‘programmes’. Nevertheless, it must be observed that this word was originally adopted as a manifesto for an Australian literary movement, and was, for the most part, only retrospectively applied by commentators (rather than the composers themselves) to art mu...