"CORROBOREE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 421, 18 July 1947, Page 21

"CORROBOREE"

mAntill’s Batlet Music from 2YC

HE BBC Transcription Service has made a recording of the ballet suite Corroboree, by the Australian composer John Antili, and 2YC listeners will have fa chance to hear it at 9.1 p.m. on Sunday, July 27. Corroboree was recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult--in the presence of the composer. This strange and exciting music is Antill’s impressions of a dancing ceremony of the Austalian aborigines, transcribed for mod«fn orchestral instruments-plus one or two instruments not quite so modern. When John Antill was a boy he saw a ceremony of dances at the aborigine settlement among the sandhills on the north shore of Botany Bay. When he got home he wrote down the melodies and rhythms he had heard, but it took him 20 years of study and research before deciding the form which his own version of Corroboree was to take. He had to find a way of representing the aboriginal rhythms in a form which would also be choreographically possible for modern representation. His score calls for an unusual percussion section; it must be almost a unique experience for the conductor of a symphony orchestra to have among his instruments such bizarre items as a_ slap-stick; Chinese temple blocks, a thunder-sheet and a bull-roarer. Here is the picture that John Antill has recreated in his music. Under a rising moon in a star-studded sky, the dencers, all painted in bright colours with costumes of leaves, feathers and skins in imitation of birds and animals,

are waiting. The music begins. Up from a gully come the first dancers, the Witchetty Grub Men and the men of the Emu Totem. They dance to a persistent rhythmic figure. The tribal jester has capered and the medicine man _ has worked his magic, and now the appearance of the evening star demands a more sedate dance by the Bell Bird people and the Thippa Thippa Bird. And -so the ceremony works up to its climax, in which representatives of the Lizard, Cockatoo, Honey Ant, Wild Cat and Small Fly totems participate. First comes the raising of the totems and the grand procession of Emblems. Forcing its way through the music comes the. dreadful sound of the bull-roarer, and _ in a mass of howling, grotesquely | painted men, the ballet ends in,a scene_ of chaos and prostration. ’ Antill was born in Sydney in 1904. He composed his. first melody at the age of six, and throughout his school | days his interest in music led te most. of his school-books containing sketches | of elaborate "symphonies" in the mar- | gins. After winning a scholarship to the. New South Wales Conservatorium, he | played in several opera orchestras, and then he became -senior presentation | officer for the ABC. When his Corrobo- | ree was given its first London perform- | ance, a public subscription was raised | in Sydney to enable him to be present. | The illustration above shows the) sketches made by Antill himself to illus- | trate his score. They are (from left), the Witchetty Grub, Emu, Cockatoo, Cat, Bell Bird, and Thippa Thippa costumes.