Australian Music

[jowcol]

Violin Concerto by George Tibbits has been posted in the downloads section.






University of Melbourne
Guide to George Tibbits' Papers


George Richard Tibbits was born in Boulder, Western Australia, 7th November 1933 and was educated at State schools in W.A. and Colac, Victoria, and at The University of Melbourne (B. Arch. Dip. TRP). An architectural historian, George Tibbitts has studied and reported on the history of a number of University buildings, an activity he has continued since his retirement from the Architecture School. As a composer, he is largely self-taught, acquiring a theoretical grounding through the study of composers such as Schonberg and Cage. "Indeed," he wrote in 1976, "as an outsider in music, I have been greatly stimulated by the critical disinterest and hostility which my participation has created". Tibbits was a foundation member of the Carlton Association in it siege against the Victorian Housing Commission's notions of 'slum' clearance and urban renewal. For related information see both the Carlton Association Records and the Frank Strahan Papers.

Wikipedia:

George Richard Tibbits (7 November 1933 - 6 July 2008) [1] was an Australian composer and architect.

Tibbits was born in Boulder, Western Australia, to a family of mining prospectors, and when his father returned wounded from the First World War, the family moved to Colac, Victoria, to take up dairying. He studied architecture at the University of Melbourne, [2] and eventually taught urban studies and architectural history there and established the urban studies program. He initiated the first heritage conservation study, the Beechworth Historical Reconstruction Project. He was also prominent in opposing the former Housing Commission's slum reclamation project in inner Melbourne.

He was not formally trained in music and worked outside of the main channels of art music production in Australia. At age 16 he wrote his first major work, Otway Ranges Symphony. His early works show the influence of his interest in the music of Indonesia, as well as American modernists such as Milton Babbitt and John Cage.[3] He would often jot down pieces of tunes while travelling on public transport. Late in the 1950s, he concentrated on works depicting what he referred to as the 'brutalist' aspects of urban civilization, but by the 1960s had returned to a more lyrical style. He became more interested in rock and pop music after a 1965 trip to England to work on urban planning.[3] Later compositions incorporate elements of parody and collage. He set some poems by Vin Buckley to music for soprano and orchestra, as Golden Builders. 1976 was a setting of a 1906 newspaper article describing a massacre of aborigines in Gippsland. He wrote 45 works in total, and all but one were given performances by professional orchestras or chamber groups. They include 5 string quartets, an octet for wind called Battue, and other works. [1]

In 1975 he won the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award.

[Dundonnell]

At the end of the Wikipedia article on the Australian composer Dorian Le Gallienne, whose delightful Sinfonietta I have reuploaded tonight, there is a link to a paper on Australian Symphonies of the 1950s written by Dr. Rhoderick McNeill of the University of Southern Queensland.

It is well worth reading as a corrective to the far too common alternative view which I read recently when I did a Google search for Horace Perkins. That alternative runs along the lines of:

'Before Peter Sculthorpe came along Australian Music was hopelessly old-fashioned and out of date, beholden to the influence of conservative British composers with whom many Australians had studied or by whom they were too heavily influenced, composers like Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Bax, Herbert Howells and Gordon Jacob. Until Australian Music could break free of these colonial cultural bonds there was no possibility of establishing an independent Australian music culture or identity.' (I paraphrase )

McNeill's excellent paper discusses those fine Australian composers like Alfred Hill, Robert Hughes and Dorian Le Gallienne whose music has been consigned to a stereotyped ghetto in modern Australia and is virtually never heard now in that country.

Well worth your attention if you like the music of Alfred Hill or Robert Hughes

[jowcol]

Joanna Drimatis  wrote her thesis covering this period, and focusing on Hughes's first symphony, and the appendices provide a detailed listing of unpublished works by several composers of that period, including Dorian Le Gallienne,  All told, this is a labor of love running more than 600 pages.

http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/63475/4/01front.pdf
http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/63475/1/04concl-append-list_of_sources_v.2.pdf

She also wrote an article about some of the issues and versions of Hughes magnificent first symphony.

http://www.jmro.org.au/papers/Drimatis-Hughes-2011-128.pdf

[jerfilm]

Bill, it was my upload and I just checked it and got it to download. 

Here's the link again: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?szf75oc5p6ehbyp

If someone else has problems, let me know please and I'll re upload it.

Jerry

[JimL]

That Le Gallienne Sinfonietta (in A, in case anybody was wondering) is absolutely delightful!  Is there a movement listing anywhere?

[fr8nks]

That Le Gallienne Sinfonietta (in A, in case anybody was wondering) is absolutely delightful!  Is there a movement listing anywhere?

Jim--Here is what I have:
1. Allegro
2.Andante molto tranquillo
3. Allegro con spirito

[JimL]

Great!  I'm going to split this puppy up, and put it on a CD with a monster concerto!

[Christopher]

I have put in the Australian Music folder a great fun piece by Sir Malcolm Williamson written for the 1971 Last Night of the Proms:

The Stone Wall - A Cassation for Audience and Orchestra

BBC Chorus, BBC Choral Society, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis

(from a long-out-of-print BBC cassette)

He wrote some other Cassations (see http://www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/shows_c/cassations.htm ) - does anyone know if any have ever been recorded?

(I also put this into the British Music folder...)

[MikeW]

Well Kats Chernin ...is very well known.

But not outside Australia, surely?

The "Eliza aria" from her Wild Swans suite was used in Lloyds TSB's 2007 ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3xe9dSY7zM

[semloh]

Well Kats Chernin ...is very well known.

But not outside Australia, surely?

The "Eliza aria" from her Wild Swans suite was used in Lloyds TSB's 2007 ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3xe9dSY7zM

It would be nice to think her music was known beyond the big brown land, Mike, but I expect few British people would know it was composed by Kats-Chernin. 

[MikeW]

I didn't make any claims to her wide notoriety, but I expect few British people know who composed much of anything outside of classical pops really.

[jowcol]

Radio Broadcasts of two Exotic Works

I'm placing The Heart of the Night (by Ross Edwards) and Rain Forest by Graeme Koehne in the downloads folder.  Both are radio broadcasts, and they make a nice pair.

Ross Edwards: The Heart of the Night


This is some very mystical, meditative music- it seems to combine a part for a bass Shakuhachi (Japanese) flute, but much of the accompaniment reminds me of the free-metered Alap that opens a work of Hindustani classical music.  Whatever it is , I really like it, but you need to be in a contemplative mood.  One thing you''ll find out after the broadcast was that this work was performed in nearly complete darkness, until the last few bars which were performed in total darkness.   His comments are also very informative at the end of the work.

Here are the performance details:

Ross Edwards: The Heart of Night
Riley Lee, Shakuhachi
West Australian Symphony Orchestra
Paul Daniel, Conductor
26 Jan 2007,  (Radio Broadcast-)

1- Radio Intro
2.  The Heart of the Night
3.  Interview with Composer


Anyway, this seems to be the standard bio from his press kit:

Ross Edwards (b. 1943)
Australian composer Ross Edwards has created a unique sound world which seeks to reconnect music with elemental forces and restore such qualities as ritual, spontaneity and the impulse to dance. His early teachers included Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale and Sandor Veress and he also studied with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies in Australia and in London. Intensely aware of his vocation as a composer, he has largely followed his own path, rejecting most of the standard prerequisites for career development and depending on the music's ability to speak for itself. He gratefully acknowledges the award of two Keating Fellowships in the 1990s as having been crucial in his development

Edwards considers it his responsibility to make the most effective use of one of the planet's most potent forces to communicate vividly and widely at the highest possible artistic level. His music, whose global significance has been acknowledged, is at the same time deeply connected to its roots in Australia, whose cultural diversity it celebrates, and from whose natural environment it draws many of its shapes and patterns - notably birdsong and the mysterious drones of summer insects. Edwards' belief in the healing power of music is reflected in a body of meditational works inspired by the Australian landscape.

Ross Edwards' compositions, which are performed worldwide, include symphonies, concertos, chamber and vocal music, children's music, film scores and music for dance. Works designed for the concert hall sometimes require special lighting, movement, costume and visual accompaniment. Recent works include the highly acclaimed oboe concerto Bird Spirit Dreaming, commissioned for the Sydney Symphony, whose U.S. premiere was given in February 2005 by Diana Doherty, Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic; and The Heart of Night, premiered in April 2005 by the shakuhachi master Riley Lee, Hiroyuki Iwaki and the Melbourne Symphony. His 5th Symphony - The Promised Land, with a text by David Malouf, will be given its world premiere in October 2006 by the Sydney Symphony and Sydney Children's Choir. Edwards' work has won numerous accolades and awards, the most recent of which, APRA/AMC's 'Best Orchestral Work for 2005', is for the ABC Classics recording of his Guitar Concerto by Karin Schaupp, Richard Mills and the Tasmanian Symphony.

Ross Edwards bases himself in Sydney where he lives with his wife Helen, spending as much time as possible working in his studio in the Blue Mountains. His music is mainly published by Ricordi London www.ricordi.co.uk For more information and a complete catalogue of works and recordings, see his website www.rossedwards.com

Finally, from his site, these are his notes for the work:

The Heart of Night (2004, rev. 2005)
For shakuhachi and orchestra

In 1995 I began to compose for the shakuhachi, a five-holed end-blown Japanese bamboo flute originally played by mendicant Buddhist priests. An apparently simple instrument, it's capable, in the hands of a master performer, of an astonishing range of expression and colour. In the 18th century it flourished under the auspices of the Kinko school, whose legacy is a repertory of profound meditational solos known as honkyoku.

For years people had been observing that the phraseology of some of my more quiescent compositions, especially The Tower of Remoteness (1978) for clarinet and piano, recalls the classical honkyoku pieces. This had hap- pened naturally: I'd come to regard certain of my own works as musical contemplation objects and my source of inspiration was the timeless and mysterious continuum of the natural sound world, especially the insect chorus. And since these works were designed to focus attention inwards and create trance-like stillness, the similarity to the honkyoku was as inevitable as my being drawn to compose for the shakuhachi.

With Riley Lee's encouragement I composed Raft Song at Sunrise (1995) for Riley to perform at an exhibition of Ross Mellick's bamboo construction 'Raft No. 3′ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in January 1996. Later that year Riley made an important contribution to my music for Bruce Beresford's feature film Paradise Road. Our collaboration has continued over the years with such works as Tyalgum Mantras (1999), in which the shakuhachi is joined by didjeridu and percussion; and Dawn Mantras, my piece for Australia's new millenium telecast to the world from the sails of the Sydney Opera House, which has solos for shakuhachi as well as saxophone, didjeiridu and child soprano.

Having combined the shakuhachi with voices and other instruments, the logical next step was to compose for shakuhachi and orchestra. The Heart of Night, commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony and Symphony Australia, explores the intuitive "night" mode of consciousness in which linear, or clock time is suspended and lis- teners are invited to turn their attention inwards in present-centered contemplation. This is not the sort of listening normally associated with western concert halls where symphonic dramas are played out. It's actually the response you'd expect to the traditional honkyoku pieces which have the effect of relaxing the body while keeping the mind calmly alert. This capacity to still the unquiet mind has been universally recognised through the ages as one of music's great blessings to humanity, but it's been neglected in the western world in recent centuries. One cause for optimism in these turbulent times is that we're beginning to rediscover its importance.

The Heart of Night was first performed in Hamer Hall, Melbourne, on 7 April 2005. The soloist was Riley Lee, to whom the work is dedicated, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Hiroyuki Iwaki.


Rain Forest, by Graeme Koehne




Another "Non-Western" Australian work. Koehne started as a major follow of Boulez, and has been on an anti-modernist trajectory, where now he is writing extremely triadic, melodic music.  "Rain Forest" stands somewhere in the middle, like a mixture of Ravel and early Messaien.  A bit edgier than the Edwards, but still sounds more impressionist than modernist to me.

Details:


Graeme  Koehne,. Rain Forest
Australian Youth Orchestra
Christoph Eschenbach, conduction
14 Sept, 1990 (Radio Broadcast)

1. Radio Intro
2. Rain Forest
3. Radio Outro

Bio (Wikipedia= I think.)

Graeme Koehne (born 3 August 1956) is an Australian composer and music educator. He is best known for his orchestral and ballet scores, which are characterised by direct communicative style and embrace of triadic tonality. His orchestral trilogy Unchained Melody, Powerhouse, and Elevator Music makes allusions to Hollywood film score traditions, cartoon music, popular Latin music and other dance forms. He cites influences from "much-maligned and misunderstood" work by composers Les Baxter, Nelson Riddle, Henry Mancini and John Barry.

Koehne was born in Adelaide, South Australia. He completed his undergraduate and post-graduate studies at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide, studying composition with Richard Meale.

In 1984, Koehne was awarded the Harkness Fellowship to work at the School of Music, Yale University. Here he studied with Louis Andriessen and Jacob Druckman. For two years of the fellowship he also took private lessons with Virgil Thomson in New York, whose influence is immediately discernible in the radically simplified, direct and anti-modern style of subsequent scores.[1]

He returned to Australia in 1986 and was appointed Lecturer in Composition at the Elder Conservatorium of Music.

He gained national attention at the 1992 Adelaide Festival of Arts when he was awarded the Young Composers Prize for his orchestral work Rainforest. Around this time, Graeme commenced his long and fruitful collaboration with choreographer Graeme Murphy, which included a children's ballet based on Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant and the full-length work Nearly Beloved.

As of 2005, Koehne is Head of Composition at the Elder Conservatorium of Music. Until recently he also chaired the Music Board of the Australia Council and was a Board Member of the Council.

[semloh]

jowcol - thank you for the opportunity to hear these pieces, by two of Australia's most valued composers.  Greatly appreciated!  

Ross Edwards' violin concerto - Maninyas - popped up on the "most uplifting music" thread and is much loved here. Graham Koehne is very prolific, and well-recorded, but I think perhaps he is best known for the very short Elevator Music (1997) and the (naturally! ) longer In-Flight Entertainment (2000). He has an informative webpage, which includes details of his compositions at: http://www.graemekoehne.com/music.html

[JimL]

Is there anyplace I can get the movements of the Glanville-Hicks Viola Concerto?  I'm listening to it now.  Like what I've heard so far.

[eschiss1]

Hrm. Australian Music Centre gives just that the Concerto Romantico was composed in 1956 (not 1957) and dedicated to Walter Trampler.

However: The Free Library Catalog of Philadelphia has score and parts (published 1957 - grah, will people stop taking date of publication for date of composition, I should shut up about that.. right.. but I won't)

and gives

Maestoso -- Lento moderato e molto espressivo -- Molto spiritoso.