[Paul Watt]

Dear colleagues

Attached is the program for our Roundtable on 12 May, to be held at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (in conjunction with The Elder Conservatorium, University of Adelaide).

If you would like to attend via zoom you can register here: https://forms.gle/3s93dFk1vpFRkC2j8

If you want to attend in person, please RSVP to John Gabriel who can organise entry to the venue: john.gabriel@unimelb.edu.au

Kind regards

Paul

[Paul Watt]

Musical Exchanges, Networks and Migrations to and from Australia 

Melbourne Conservatorium of Music

Ian Potter Southbank Centre Room 701

Program

10.00 Welcome and Introduction

John Gabriel

Session 1

Facilitator: John Gabriel

10.15

Resonant Histories of Musical Encounter in Australia

Amanda Harris, University of Sydney

This project aims to understand Australia’s cultural past by situating histories of musical encounter in the nation’s Oceanic location and colonial history. Three entry points for the project are: Australian musical institutions; sites/places/Country, and; intercultural encounters. I’m interested in encounters that occurred at: international exhibitions/expositions; public displays of Australian culture for visiting royalty and other VIPs (e.g. public corroborees, gala orchestral concerts, staged ballets, and other performative diplomacy); festivals (local and overseas); encounters between ethnomusicologists and Indigenous performers from Australia, the Pacific and Asia; border encounter performances such as those for disembarking cruise passengers; inbound tours of international artists (such as those funded by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in the mid twentieth century). The project aims to conceptualise Australian musical cultures in a history of diverse encounters grounded in reciprocal exchange, shaped by place, and supported by new cultural institutions.

10.30

Transnational Representational Tropes Given New Meanings in Australia; Widespread International Dissemination of Australian Music through Cultural Diplomacy

Rachel Campbell, The University of Sydney

International cultures of classical and popular music circulated widely in Australia as a result of imperial networks, global touring circuits, and media exchanges. From these, Australian artists absorbed and redeployed many musico-cultural tropes, including primitivism and exoticism, to create new, localised meanings. In addition, government and private institutions conducted cultural diplomacy on behalf of Australian artists, sending Australian music around the world in the service of numerous agendas. 

10.45

Louise Hanson-Dyer and Musical Nation-building

Rachel Orzech, University of Melbourne

This project aims to investigate the role of music publisher and patron Louise Hanson-Dyer (1884–1962) in French and Australian cultural nation-building processes during the interwar period. I am interested in the idea that transnational processes and cultural exchange are integral to the formation of national cultural identity.

Session 2

Facilitator: Sarah Kirby

11.00

Professional Opera Companies in Australia

Stephen Mould, University of Sydney

My current research is concerned with the growth of professional opera companies in Australia, post WWII, particularly in relation to the building of the Sydney Opera House, the development of the Australian Opera (today Opera Australia) and the perceived lack of ‘artistic vibrancy’ which led, in 2014 to the formation of the National Opera Review. The findings of this review made little reference to the history of the company’s establishment, artistic leadership and growth, which would seem a necessary starting point from which begin to articulate how ‘artistic vibrancy’ has failed or lost its direction. Therefore, some of my research is historical, and I am currently engaged writing a book about the career of Carlo Felice Cillario, who was the first Music Director of the Australian Opera, and who was a leading figure in the company’s artistic development and achievements over the 35 years that he was associated with it.  The book will ‘fill in the gaps’ in terms of identifying an attrition in ‘artistic vibrancy’ in current practice. 

11.15

Exchanges in Australian Improvised Music

Roger Dean (Western Sydney University), Simon Chambers (Western Sydney University), Sandy Evans (UNSW), Liam Magee (Western Sydney University)

We are currently acquiring web and interview data concerning improvisers active in Australia in the period since 1970, taking off from the end of the period addressed splendidly in John Whiteoak’s book. Our purposes are not simply historical, though that will hopefully be a useful contribution in itself. Rather we are interested in the social and music networks that have evolved during the period. We are beginning to use both quantitative (notable acoustic) and qualitative (notably interview material), to assess multifaceted links between individuals, curators, and the broader process of mediation of the musics to listeners. We are explicitly aiming to be broadly inclusive, so that traditions of improvising from other cultures represented in Australia as a result of earlier migration can be understood both within and outside of our broader networks, as appropriate. Transcultural exchange is a clearly important component, as are questions of (Un)Australian-ness and metacultural freedom. We are only in the early stages of a 4-year ARC Linkage project, so much of our thought is still conjecture, but input from the meeting will no doubt be valuable to those processes.

11.30

Localising Italy, Engaging Asia: Musical Representations, Scenes and Hybridities

Aline Scott-Maxwell, Monash University

Over 25 years of research into musical outcomes of migration to Australia and Australian musical intersections with Asia continue with a focus on 2 large and ongoing projects. Volare: Popular Modernity and Tradition in Italian-Australian Music-Making and Entertainment (with John Whiteoak) has produced many articles and chapters including, most recently, my investigation of the first Italian-Australian popular music show on television. Future research will bring together this material for a book on post-WW2 migrant community popular and vernacular music-making. A second book project, provisionally titled Asia and Australia: Historical and Contemporary Musical Encounters, Representations and Connections, will also collate and expand on a vast amount of my existing published research spanning different modes of musical engagement and cultural interaction. These encompass exoticised representations; creative adaptations, transformations and hybridisations; mediated presentations; and direct encounters across stage performances and music.

11.45

Black American Spirituals and Ideological Collision in Australia

Christopher Coady, University of Sydney

In this presentation, I introduce a conceptual divide between how Australian audiences and Black American performers articulated the value of Black American spirituals during the first half of the twentieth century. My interrogation of this divide raises familiar but not entirely resolved questions around how musicologists might best map the misunderstandings, reimaginings, and ideological collisions at play in transnational musical exchanges while drawing particular attention to the stakes of this mapping for Australia’s understanding of Black American culture and politics – an understanding facilitated in no small part by the circulation and consumption of Black American music.

12.00 BREAK

Session 3

Facilitator: Julja Szuster 

1.00

Memories of Musical Lives

Rosemary Richards

Rosemary Richards’s recent publications include Memories of Musical Lives: Music and Dance in Personal Music Collections from Australia and New Zealand, co-edited with Julja Szuster (Lyrebird Press Australia, 2022). At the New Zealand Musicological Society conference in June 2023, Rosemary plans to present a paper related to Elise Wiedermann Pinschof’s autograph books held at State Library Victoria. For more information, see https://rosemaryrichards.com/.

1.15

Gregorian Chant in Australia

Paul Watt, University of Adelaide

This project explores the place of Gregorian Chant across Australia from the post-colonial period to the present. I’m interested in tracing the influence of Spanish, French and Italian traditions of chant in Australia in both sacred and secular contexts. I’m also researching the worldwide propagation of chant and the ways this affected the musical life of Catholics and peoples of other faiths—including Anglican, Jewish, Orthodox, and Freemason communities—right around the country.

1.30

Transnational Meter Fundamentals Through Ski-hill Graph Pedagogy

Andrea Calilhanna University of Adelaide

Globally, at the heart of all music (acoustics), experiences are responses (psychoacoustics) of the mind and then the body to sound. All music theory defaults, at some point, to represent music as notation rather than as the experience of sound. Time signatures provide little helpful information for students’ experiences of meters because people worldwide experience many more pulses and meters beyond the capacity of time signatures to represent. The meter is subjective; people hear the same music differently, implying that meter theory requires excellent flexibility to define micro-to-macro structures while respecting the culture of origin. Music is identity, a mode of communication, so profound truth is necessary for teaching music. My paper offers a solution to develop student listening skills for ethical, inclusive, and transnational music education from the earliest lessons, Ski-hill Graph Pedagogy, meter fundamentals and introduction to mathematical music theory (Cohn, 2020).

1.45

Continental European, Hispanic and North America influences on Music, Dance and Related Popular Entertainment of 19th- and 20th-century Australia

John Whiteoak, Monash University

This topic embraces two parallel and ongoing book projects. One is The Tango Touch: ‘Latin’ and ‘Continental’ Influences on Music and Dance before Australian ‘Multiculturalism’, which so far brings together research and theorising for around 35 academic articles, book chapters and conference papers, including the 2019 monograph, Take Me to Spain” Australian Imaginings of Spain Through Music and Dance. The other project is ‘Rag-Time Australia’ Music, Dance, Race, Revolution and War Before Australia’s Jazz Age, that also brings together and extends research for numerous existing publications, including a monograph, and theorises and documents American (and African-American) influences on pre-1920s music-related popular entertainment, society and culture in Australia (see http://www.ausmdr.com for publications and projects).

Session 4

Facilitator:

Paul Watt

2.00Next Steps | Group Discussion

[Alison Tokita]

Hello

I would like to register for attending this by zoom.

Can you please send me the link.

Alison Tokita

fuyusona57@gmail.com

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