Australia's Music Themes of a New Society SECOND EDITION Roger CovellCHAPTER SEVEN Creative development trrep Hint, soME OF WHOSE Music has been mentioned in an earlier A chapter, lived long enough to become part of the post-ABC world of music in Australia. He did not draw extravagant benefits from this circumstance. Some of his smaller, lighter pieces were and are regularly played on ABC radio as part of the ghetto-like programmes in which Australian music is usually accommodated one or two of his string quartets have been recorded and have become moderately well-known among string groups. But the orchestral concert of Hill’s music given under Henry Krips's direction in Sydney in 1959 to mark the composer's eighty~ ninth birthday was one of the very few tributes of any substance or scale arranged during the later years of a composer regularly described as the grand old man of Australian music. The truth is that Hill does not cut an entirely adequate figure as a grand old man, His music is rarely of a kind that fits the adjectives usually bestowed on the music of grand old men: strong, gnarled, rugged, highly individual, or even eccentric. It is charming, inoffensive, wistful; not the work of + rough-hewn backwoodsman of music but of a civilised, accomplished minor figure. His music is normally at its best when it attempts to be no more than a ‘warmly personal, intimate utterance. His viola concerto of 1940 represents him 3 his best in the supple, teeming variety of its melodic transformations in the first movement (technically demanding on the player, but simple-hearted i almost childlike way) and in the songlike limpidity of its central andantino; and itis only a harmless distraction, though disappointing, that the principal theme Chapter Seven: Creative development Masof the finale derives so obviously from the rhythmic and accentual cut of the gipsy finales of the Brahms and Max Bruch violin concertos and reminds us, little too forcibly, that Hill once played in the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig under Brahms's own direction. Similarly, his second quartet in G minor (1911) is none the worse for the fact that its tender, docile tunefulness makes us think less of the heroic legend attached to its *Maori” subtitle than of Dvofik at his most pastorally engaging. Both of these works are much more successful musically than Hill's Australia symphony in B minor, completed in 1951 when the composer was over eighty: The notes attached by Hill to this work make it clear that each of its four movements is intended to express some aspect of the Australian landscape or of the people who live in Australia, The third movement, for example, seems to be putting some of Tate’ theories into action by using a symphony orchestra to provide an impression of an Aboriginal walkabout, In musical terms this amounts to the use of some strongly accented themes in an entirely conventional orchestral texture; the effect is of a not very lively reminiscence of the Polovésian Dances from Borodin Prince Igor. 1 am not questioning that Hill may have made use of genuine Aboriginal themes in this movement or that, at least, they bore some resemblance in their original state to _genuine Aboriginal themes. His widow, Mirrie Hill, who was a student of composition with him before they married (in 1921), has also written works based on Aboriginal themes supplied to her by the South Australian anthropologist C.P. Mountford.! ‘This music includes ballet movements and an Arnhem Land symphony (1954). In these works the composer's sincerity is unquestionable; but she has not been able to resist, despite her conscious determination not to do so, placing the themes in a harmonic and instrumental context which denatures them and makes them seem only a filtered, concert-hall cousin of the real thing. The other three movements of Alfied Hill's Austratia symphony have even less relation to the most obvious aspects of the Australian scene—at least according to present-day notions of how these might be appropriately represented in sound. In the main allegro section of the first movement, subtitled “The Workers—the Thinkers”, the music is closely related in idiom to the bullet scores of ‘Tehaikovsky, another composer with whom Hill had a first-hand acquaintance during his student days in Leipzig. The second movement pays similar homage to Grieg; and the finale, subtitled “The Challenge”, collapses after an initial call to action by the brass into a rapid theme of strangely weak-kneed character. To assess Hill by such a work as the Australia symphony would be unfsir. I have already called him the Hugh MeCrae of Australian music; he is also perhaps its Henry Kendall, more at home with finding an equivalent in music for the relatively cool, wet us. AUSTRALIA'S MUSIC: THEMES OF A NEW SOCIETYgreenness of the Australian coastal valleys than with grappling with the immense, raw vistas of the inland, His music belongs to the shy, clear-running rivulets of art. Its essential nature is much better represented by his Green Water (1934),a spoken poem by John Wheeler set in a gentle halo of orchestral sound. The lilt ofthe clarinet theme that begins it, graceful and more than a little nostalgic, sums up many of the essentials of his music. Like Kendall’s poetry, itis not less valid for having most in common with the easily domesticated elements of the Australian landscape. Only well-meaning attempts to credit Hill with a range of expression that he did not possess can cause him to be judged harshly or to lose a small, permanent place among the most pleasant bypaths of Australian music: “channels of coolness” and tender charms of sentiment for which there seem likely to be very few successors in the immediate future. ‘The reflection of established European styles in music is not confined to Australian composers of Alfred Hills generation. The secondhand sound of most Australian music is a by-product of the unavoidably provincial nature of Australian society. Any comparisons drawn here between the styles and vocabularies of composers in Australia and well-known European figures are not meant to be taken as gleeful detective work, uncovering plagiarisms and forgeries, but as convenient and succinct, means of identifying their allegiances. I hope to make it quite clear where I consider these allegiances do not obscure the presence of a distinct musical personality: The limitations of Hill’s music are not in his faithfulness to the models of his youth but, in the moderate extent to which he was able to give renewed life to these reminiscent idioms. Even so, he is obviously of considerably greater importance than all those younger composers who, with much less excuse, have preferred to write in the manner of two or three generations earlier than their own time: composers such as the stalwart Dr Horace Perkins of Adelaide, whose violin concerto in G minor solemnly goes through the motions of pretending that itis still relevant to write as though Max Bruch had never existed. The delicate, daydreaming quality of some of Hill’ shorter ‘works and of the overgrown pastoral style of some lesser English composers of the carler part of the twentieth century make themselves felt in Lindley Evans's Idy/! for two pianos and orchestra (1943) and many of the pieces of his longtime colleague, the late Frank Hutchens. These belong to a kindly, not very vital area of Australian composition, though Hutchens's shorter pieces, such as some of his compositions for solo piano, are usually uncommonly well made, with a neatness and economy in the ‘working-out of basic material which speak of a kind of minor mastery. It is certainly not my purpose to belittle either Evans or Hutchens, whose contribution to musical education in Australia and to the encouragement of many of their contemporaries give them an honourable place in the country’s musical history. Chapter Seven: Creative development “arThat it should appe: sary to make this disclai inheritance from the neces time when all Australian composers were deer ally important—with the contrary result that many listeners outside their immediate circles of friends assumed ‘that none of them was. Hutchens has his place in Australi nusie as an Englishn . The lite Dr Edgar nt part of his working life as director of the New South Wales Conservatorium, is not a sufficiently distinctive composer to require a claim from Australia; and nor is Dr William Lovelock, the first director of the Queensland Conservatorium, Bainton's more ambitious music, such as the Symphony in C minor he wrote in Australia, shows a complete familiarity with the styles of Elgar (as in some of the passages for strings and barking trombones) wee characteristic of a school of English n who gave unstintingly of himself to his pupils and associate L, Bainton, an English musician who spent a si and with the pastoral relectiveness of uttera composers; and to these he added a certain modest, woodland grace of his own. Lovelock, despite his resourceful production of small pieces bearing such titles as The Scuffling Bandicoot or The Merry Pademelon, also belongs unequivocally to the cera and idioms of late Romanticism (principally represented in England by Elgar). As Lovelock was already in his sixties when he arrived in Australia, it would certainly he absurd to try to enrol him as an Australian composer, notwithstanding the stream cof works forall kinds of combinations he has brought into being since then, Lovelock’s importance, ike that of Bainton's, consists in the fact that he is a thoroughly capable ‘musician with all the professional devices of composition at his command. Such men are likely to be the teachers of important composers, even if their own works win admiration chiefly as examples of dexterous anachronism, Even Sir Eugene Goossens, though certainly much more famous than either Bainton or Lovelock, seems unlikely to retain the claims to being considered a significant composer which he was once freely accorded in English musical textbooks. Much of his music belonged to the "The Apocalypse (1953), the largest ofits carly years of his European career, and his orato work he completed during his Australian stay, was more remarkable for the si forces than for any compelling pressure of inspiration, Much of Goossens's music is ‘written in what now appears to be a style of gone-to-seed and irrelevant luxuriance, It is essentially simple in melody and structure, but the simplicity is often overlaid by a kind of protective, or at least randomly acquisitive, thickening of harmony ot colour. It was Goossens’ experience as a composer that was relevant and valuable during his term as director of the New South Wales Conservatorium, Students such as Malcolm Williamson who attended the conservatorium during, his directorship ‘may represent his most important, even if indirect, contribution to Australian musical creation, Goossens, though far from representing an advanced style in the late 1940s M8 AUSTRALIA'S MUSIC: THEMES OF A NEW SOCIETYand 1950s, at least had a flavour of the heady cosmopolitanism of the 1920s in his, music and looked toward much wider horizons in music than were available from the imported English organists and pedagogues who have been entrusted with a good deal of the task of education and administration in music in Australia. The English onganist ofthe old school had his virtues, no doubt, but itis certain that Australia has ‘made an unduly long acquaintance with him, ‘The heyday of the English organist in Australia or of the Australian who had laboriously tured himself into the equivalent of an English organist had several cffeets on the course of musical training. It made music seem a respectable profession, but it also made it a dull one; it encouraged it to be rule-bound and conservative. ‘These factors, combined with the time-lag in musical awareness contributed to by Australia's geographical remoteness from the dominant sources of its musical culture, helped give Australian musical creation a tendency to be not merely out of date but to be out of date by the span of two or three generations. It seems reasonable to say that a number of talented Australian composers have been crippled in their development by the limitations of the musical experience available to them in their youth and by 4 prevailing lack of ideas, other than those of a simple bread-and-butter kind, in musical society. Ideas may be dangerous or misleading in music; and any musician would probably prefer to talk about the practicalities of his task than to indulge in cloudy theorising around the subject. But the closed pride with which this attitude has been maintained in Australian musical society often seems to have stifled the sort of intellectual curiosity that would have opened up new areas of expression and technique for composers who have a tendency to reproduce only those principles that ‘were first presented to them as students with the force of Mosaic law. Except among, ‘younger composers of the present day, who are often as articulate as their elders are inarticulate, the liberating effects that a new concept of structure or a new convention of organisation can have on the actual invention of music have been largely denied to many gifted musicians in Australia, This lack of free circulation for regenerath ideas went hand in hand with the feelings of cultural inferiority inescapable in a neo-colonial or provincial society. It became one of the first tasks of able musicians to demonstrate that they could write fluent and grammatically acceptable music in established idioms. It was necessary that theidioms should be established in order that the demonstration should be convincing to their fellow countrymen. A radical style would have been interpreted in Australia in the earlier years of this century merely as a confession of incompetence. Like visual artists challenged to prove that they can “draw’, it was their task to achieve a likeness in music; and, since the music familiar in Australia at that time was itself anything but Chapter Seven: Creative development M9up-to-date for the most part, the ideals towards which composers had to strive in self defence were bound to be at best a kind of superior reminiscence. If Percy Grainger had been born in Paris instead of Melbourne, he would almost certainly have realised the radical tendencies in his nature much more satisfactorily at an earlier date. But Grainger sensed, correctly in my view, that however strongly he felt himself to be an Australian writing Australian music it would never be possible for him to pursue his unorthodox visions of what music might be like in a society where the customary reaction to the practice of musical composition was a kind of embarrassed scepticism. Other composers who stayed in Australia or returned there after brief periods of study abroad were not in the position of being able to flout a tradition: their first task was to persuade their doubting fellow-countrymen that they had the technical means to belong to one. As it is no part of this survey's ambition to be aimlessly comprehensive, I shall not reproduce long lists of names of composers who could be grouped together in a category of this kind. But there are some composers who deserve attention because their achievement is so obviously out of step with their innate talents. Such a composer is Miriam Hyde, of Sydney, whose works employ a considerable amount of skill and ‘warmly musical feeling for the purpose of disconcertingly exact mimicry. The mimicry varies from work to work, but it is nearly always grounded in the composers who seem to have influenced her during her student days. In her second piano concerto (1935), for example, the orchestra makes Brahmsian gestures to the soloist’s Rachmaninov- like responses; Lyric (1935), a short orchestral picce, mixes Rachmaninov (particularly in a prominent cello melody) with adherence to the palely anonymous school of English pastoralism; her Kelso overture (1959) combines a strong suggestion of Elgar in the mood of his Cockaigne overture with flavours of Wagner’s The Mastersingers, her piano music is apt to show more kinship with Debussy or, more precisely, with English music reflecting the influence of some of Debussy’s harmonic experiments. It is easy to identify the stylistic mannerisms in Hyde's music (and I do not claim for @ minute to have provided a complete list of them); but itis also easy to forget the very real degree of skill needed to give effective impersonations of the styles of some of the composers mentioned. Her musical equipment and the degree to which she has mastered particular sectors of her chosen craft are considerable; probably much more considerable than the skill of some of her younger detractors, who may have been liberated by time and changing circumstances from the necessity to satisfy Australian society that musical composition is possible within that society. The disappointing corollary of this is that her chances of having anything vital to say within a chosen. idiom are diminished by the accuracy of her own mental recording apparatus: anything, 150 AUSTRALIA'S MUSIC: THEMES OF A NEW SOCIETYnot conforming to the style or styles in which she feels sincerely and warmly at home is rejected. Originality would come easier to a musi with a less developed capacity for fixing the characteristics of a chosen style in mind and memory. Robert Hughes came to Australia at the age of eighteen from his native Scotland; but his relatively ate approach to formal musical studies gave him all the disadvantages, of being born in Australia and none of the advantages. He was as subject to the time~ lag in styles and techniques as any Austrafian-born composer, and his need to learn much of the craft of musical composition on his own account made the attainment of competent professionalism loom larger in his ambitions than it might otherwise have done. Competent professionalism is a necessary goal for any self-respecting ‘composer, but in Hughes's case it seems to have taken so much of his energies to do this in a well-defined, neo-romantie style as to paralyse his capacity for further stylistic development. Hughes is largely a self-made man in music and, like most composers in this category, his mastery of the technical detail of orchest thorough: he, in fact, has earned his living for much of his working life as an arranger with the ABC. His music is also that of a self-made man, particularly in the quicker is exceptionally movements of his most serious works. It is muscular, pugnacious, assertive to the point of carrying a chip on its shoulder. Hughes’ orchestral writing—and most of his works are for orchestra—can be criticised adversely on the grounds of an over-use of dark timbres and its uncouth writing for trumpets. Hughes undoubtedly knows enough about orchestration to rectify these characteristics, if he chooses. They are, as it happens, an apt expression of one side of his musical personality. They are allied to its dark, troubled, driving quality. Hughes's music is quite often of genuine power, 4 quality notably absent from the Hill-Hutchens sector of composition. This is not to say that it lacks humour or lightness entirely. Hughes's Farrago suite, revised in 1965, has some broad touches of parody; and his First Symphony of 1951 includes in its scherzo a satirical interlude of dance-band scoring at the expense of some of the ‘more mass-produced kinds of popular music. But Hughes’ attempts at humour tend to be heavy-handed. He is much more himself when his fast movements wear the imprint of an intent expression and furrowed brow. His quicker themes often come fiom the same stock: the territory where major and minor keys meet and change; thirds that alternate abruptly between major and minor degrees, augmented intervals characteristic of the harmonic minor scale help to shape a typical Hughes allegro movement. Hughes’ most satisfying work is probably his Sinfonietta originally commissioned forthe centenary season of the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester in 1957. The quicker movements develop in a purposeful, logical, emotionally disquieted way from some Chapter Seven: Creative development 6