Australian Music
HE Australian composer John Gough has a lot to say about his Sundowner, which may be heard performed by the Westminster Orchestra in a recording of a BBC London Studio Concert. Briefly, he maintains that it should be possible to produce a music which would be recognisably Australian, as there is music which we recognise as Hungarian, Scandinavian, and so on; that the nature of the soil must have its effect on habits of thought, and that in style and idiom composers must necessarily express something of themselves and their environment. The composer offered his Sundowner suite as an example of what he meant. It remained for the listener to judge whether he had achieved his object. Is this’ idiom typically Australian? Possibly. Percy Grainger found the Australians a musically sentimental race, and this work, in spite of a modern idiom, has its moments of © romantic sentiment, But surely the way | to produce a typically Australian music is not to set out consciously to do so. I can’t help feeling that the typically Australian music (and John Gough admits that it is a long way off yet) will come, when it does, as an accidental byproduct of minds which were concentrating on their music as music, and not as a conscious expression of nationality.
D.
S.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19490819.2.19.8
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 11
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218Australian Music New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 11
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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