It has been over 50 years since the publication of Roger Covell’s 1967 book, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society, which was described as both a scholarly account of Australian music history but also “an entertaining social history”. It’s a book, Associate Professor Amanda Harris FAHA says the editors had in mind when planning the newly published Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia.
‘It did prompt me to think about how we shape the account we’re giving of music in Australia. That book in 1967 was also trying to understand the place that we’re in, and the music that has been made here for a very long time,’ said Harris in conversation with Professor Sarah Collins FAHA at the book’s launch.
Co-edited with Noongar song-maker, composer, and Professor of Music, Clint Bracknell FAHA, The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia features a wide range of stories about music, from a diverse group of authors. It is a feature, Bracknell says, which provides a unique angle for the book.
‘I think this book, rather than being an update of prior Companions to Music in this relatively new nation state, is about the taking a wider view of what music research is and interrogating those terms: music and Australia, which are both heavily contested,’ says Bracknell.
The book acknowledges the complexity and contestation inherent in the term ‘Australia’, whilst placing the music of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at its very heart.
‘It was about zooming out to various different practices that maybe haven’t been included in companions previously and opening the door, not just to scholars, but to practice-based scholars, composers and musicians themselves to have a voice in a weighty tome like this.’
That ‘zooming out’ has brought dividends in representing the vast and varied landscape of music in Australia — from metal bands and musical subcultures, Torres Strait Islander music and music across the Arafura Sea, to the ‘Australianising’ of country music.
‘I think that was another thing that we were really interested to do, to think not about a national sense of Australian music, but a sense of all of the interwoven influences that are coming in and out of musical practices here,’ says Harris.
Place, song & identity
Place is a common theme throughout the Companion. When asked about a place where music is made, iconic sites such as the Sydney Opera House may come to mind. Harris reminds us that music was made on these sites and places long before the modern buildings were conceived.
‘Some of the very earliest records we have of Aboriginal singing come from that exact site [the Sydney Opera House]. Of women … paddling a canoe while singing and coming ashore at Tubowgule singing a song.’
In early conversations about the publication, Harris says, ‘Indigenous musical practice had to be at the centre’ of the book.
‘Whenever we are thinking and writing about and making music in Australia, we are always on Aboriginal country,’ says Harris. ‘And so that was immediately a priority for us in thinking about how to tell stories about music in this place.’
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music narratives are at the heart of the Companion. They interweave throughout the book and this, Bracknell says, reflects the reality of music-making in Australia.
‘To me, it goes back to place. And if we’re approaching this from a position of music emanating from or existing within a place, then that place is always relevant as a touchstone. And therefore, to exclude what Indigenous people—who are Indigenous to the place we’re talking about—are doing in that sphere of musical activity, that’s a fallacy. If you’re blind to it, it’s actually exclusion,’ says Bracknell.
‘So rather than this being like we’re trying really hard to be inclusive, it’s just like, well, we’re actually acknowledging the reality of the situation.’
‘I consider music a site of hope, because as human beings, it’s one of the most powerful affiliative and communicative things that we can do. And no matter how social climates and indeed environmental climates shift and change, it’s one of the things that persists.’
The power of music to transcend
Through a collaborative and diverse authorship and wide-reaching scope, The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia is ambitious in approaching music in Australia. The universality of music engages readers with Australian stories in alternate, new ways, say Harris and Bracknell.
‘There’s something unquestionable about the power of music to transcend challenging times and persist and keep people together, and hopefully keeping people in some sort of positive reciprocal relationship with where they live,’ says Bracknell.
‘I think there’s a tendency to think about music as somehow unknowable. If one isn’t a musician, if one isn’t literate in reading music notation, or if one isn’t fluent in improvising by ear, it sort of seems like an unknowable art that moves us in some way, but we can’t really understand it,’ says Harris.
But music, and stories about music making hold histories and can connect our present experiences of culture with the past.
‘I’m really motivated by telling stories about music, and particularly, encounters with music at the centre, that illuminate our histories in ways that are harder to get at by thinking about policy or looking at documents or other static visual sources,’ Harris continues.
The Companion to Music in Australia is out now with Cambridge University Press.
