The Soundscapes of Australia: Music, Place and Spirituality.

Campbell, Peter

The Soundscapes of Australia: Music, Place and Spirituality. Edited by Fiona Richards. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2007. [xiii, 327 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7546-4072-1. 55 [pounds sterling]]

Exactly what qualities of Australianness Australian music possesses has long been the subject of academic discussion, if not necessarily the central focus of Australian composers themselves. Soundscapes of Australia does not address this question directly, but rather approaches the topic from the conviction that, as the music emanates from Australia, by its very nature it must reflect that origin. The question, then, does not so much concern the formation of Australianness, as the form of that Australianness.

Exploration of the relationships between art and the landscape is not, of course, limited to Australia, nor indeed to music. At the University of Nottingham, the interdisciplinary Water, Culture and Society project is investigating rivers as cultural spaces (perhaps they are not the cultural backwaters one might presume). Daniel Grimley, author of Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity, whose research concerns constructions of landscape in Nordic music, is a member of the Nottingham Landscape and Regionality Group that overseas the WCS project.

In 1998, the Australian Music Centre published a slim collection of essays edited by Caitlin Rowley entitled Australia: Exploring the Musical Landscape, in which, much like the present volume, various writers discuss aspects of Australia's musical culture. While the earlier work acknowledges that it is not comprehensive, it nonetheless provides a brief introduction to all the major areas of music: Aboriginal, folk, classical, popular, jazz and rock. Richards's new volume is a collection of individual essays--she also acknowledges that it is not intended to be a comprehensive or "historical account" (p.2)--yet the overall feeling one gets from the book is that the views are far too tantalising, the topics too broadly scattered while at the same time the discussions too finely focussed for a coherent picture of Australia's engagement with its landscape to be appreciated. Two of the authors are represented in both publications, but there is a clear distinction in audience (one general and one more academic) that makes one want all the earlier authors to have had the opportunity to expand on their contributions in the latter.

This present volume, then, sits within a broader area of research into music and landscape. What we have is small, personal reactions to composers, works or genres. There is a fascinating chapter by Kay Dreyfus and Bronia Kornhauser on the music of a Jewish community in Shepparton, a country town in Victoria, yet it serves merely to highlight the lack of chapters on Vietnamese or Italian or Welsh musics. Peter Tregear and Anne-Marie Forbes both contribute chapters dealing with the English expatriate composer Fritz Hart, but there is none specifically on Isaac Nathan or even Percy Grainger. Contemporary classical composers fare better. As might be expected, they engage more obviously (and more often more definitively) with the concept of the landscape of Australia in their works. Here there are in-depth discussions of the works and workings of such composers as Clive Douglas, Anne Boyd, Colin Bright, Peter Sculthorpe and Barry Conyngham.

Not forgetting that spirituality is also the subject of this volume, along with explorations of spiritual dimensions of Western composers, there are essays concerning Yanyuwa and Dhalwangu musics specifically, and Arnhem Land aboriginal music more generally. Each chapter in the volume contributes greatly to our understanding of the subject, although they vary widely in style and in the disciplines they cover. Ros Band details 'Sound Installation and Acoustic Art in Australia' without really grappling with any hard analysis, while Linda Kouvaras delves deep into the scores of Sculthorpe's Port Essington and Stuart Greenbaum's Ice Man. David Symons investigates the likely links between the composer Clive Douglas and the literary Jindyworobak movement (surely one of the clearest examples of a landscape-based artform), while Fiona Richards's own chapter on the 'Ealing Film Scores of the 1940s and '50s' attempts to trace Australianness in the film scores of such quintessentially British composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland.

I have some quibbles. Delays in publication between 2005 and 2007 mean that some of the author biographies are seriously out of date, although they easily could have been revised. The list of 'Libraries' in the acknowledgements (p.xii) is an admixture of archives, libraries and other organisations, some of which do not even have 'libraries', and several of which are misnamed: it is the National Archives of Australia, and an 'Aboriginal Islanders and Torres Straits Unit' is probably the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit (ATSIS) at the University of Queensland, although the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) is equally likely. The index refers to the Australian Broadcasting Commission with no mention of (or differentiation from) the Corporation that it became in 1983, and the first entry is 'Aboriginal' without a noun for it to qualify: aboriginal music, culture, society, language, treatment? (The same goes for 'Celtic', although there is an entry for 'Jewish community'.)

The dust-jacket promises a book that shows us 'ways in which composers and performers have attempted to convey a sense of the Australian landscape through musical means'. This it achieves admirably, if a little patchily. The publication is also infused with 'a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of the music inspired by the sights and sounds of the Australian landscape'. My only disappointment is that the 'vibrancy' of the garish green-and-gold cover (that looks nothing like an Australian landscape) might mean that possible readers won't go near it.

Peter Campbell

Trinity College

The University of Melbourne