FEATURE ARTICLE

Keynote Address

Delivered at the 21st National Conference of the MSA

University of Adelaide, November 1998
by
Stephen Wild

(Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, Canberra,
Former National President, MSA)

 

“What’s in a name?”

or,

 “As soon as you cross one boundary another one appears”

 

Introduction

As one who is a little bit slow on the uptake when it comes to new technology, I recently had a baptism of fire in the terrors of an e-mail discussion list.

I subscribed to the Society for Ethnomusicology Discussion List. Nothing had prepared me for what followed, although I was already a subscriber to an Aboriginal Studies Discussion List which has perhaps a dozen messages on a busy week and which I occasionally threatened to unsubscribe from but was too lazy or not inconvenienced enough to do so. My subscription to the SEM List began on 8 June of this year, and by 11 June I had received some 40 messages entirely on one subject. It was not unusual for messages to be several paragraphs long, constituting mini-essays some of which I would not have been unsatisfied with as mid-term assignments from undergraduate students. I read all these messages diligently because they were quite fascinating, until I stopped it after 4 days and returned to scanning them after about a month (and I had caught up on my work) when the other subscribers had moved onto other topics. I have an image of people huddled over their computers 12 hours a day following and contributing to multiple subscriber lists.

 

The first message (and I think I got in at the beginning of this series of exchanges) read as follows:

 

       “Dear All:

 

I’d like to suggest to Bonnie Wade (and to anyone else concerned that the name of our organization does not adequately convey what we do) that we change the name of our organization to the Society for Contextual Musicology, and that we change the name of our journal to Contextual Musicology.

This would avoid the problems inherent in using the prefix “ethno.”

It would separate us from those who feel that all musicological answers are to be found “in the notes” (or worse, in a notated score).

It gives us the advantage of including popular/folk/ritual/“art” music, etc. without having to define those terms (because it implies a common methodology rather than a common type of music).

 

What do y’all think?”

 

I believe the suggestion was in response to SEM election material issued supposedly by Bonnie Wade, but a subsequent subscriber said it was by Judith Becker (not Bonnie Wade) as posted on the Subscriber List by Larry Witzleben – well, things do sometimes get tangled in cyberspace.

 

What followed was an impassioned discussion about the name of the Society for Ethnomusicology. It was a revisiting of the debate about the title ‘ethnomusicology’ and the need for the Society’s separate existence which occurred in America (and elsewhere) in the 1950s. People such as Victor Grauer, Jeremy Montagu, Ernst Heins and Jeff Titon contributed to the discussion. In addition to Contextual Musicology, some of the names that were suggested were (prefixed by ‘Society for…’): Musicology, Cultural Musicology, Music-cultural Studies, Anthropology of Music, Holistic Study of Music, Anthropology of Performance, Holistic Study of Performance, Comparative Musicology, Anthropomusicology, Contextology, [my spell-check went wild with some of these] Sociomusicology, Social Musicology, Alternative Musicology, and just plain Music. Some argued for a merger with the American Musicological Society, others for a merger with the American Folklore Society, and still others (mainly the Europeans) for changing the name to ‘The American Society for Ethnomusicology’. The arguments for changing the name were fascinating, but it was probably the issues listed eloquently by a graduate student (so identified in his signature block) as more important than a name change that have the greatest resonance, with the appropriate changes, for our own situation:

·     How to encourage entities outside of music schools and departments to hire ethnomusicologists [read musicologists] and thereby increase the number of jobs available.

·     How to keep the society responsive to the changing interests of its members and potential members so as not to get left behind or suffer from splintering.

·     How to deal with the popular music industry in the development of materials for the classroom.

 

Musicology and Ethnomusicology

We members of the Musicological Society of Australia have often congratulated ourselves for avoiding an organisational division into musicology and ethnomusicology which has occurred in other parts of the world. This achievement should not be taken lightly or even without questioning. As one who was trained in both traditions, I believe that there is a fundamental difference between carrying out fieldwork in living communities and sifting library and archival records, even if the two activities are not mutually exclusive. The difference is at least methodological, and it has often been a difference of attitudes to and values about music. I am reminded of a comment by a visiting musicologist overheard at an international symposium held in Australia about an Aboriginal performance that ‘We must not over-estimate this Aboriginal music.’ I am aware of the fact that periodically young ethnomusicologists in our Australian midst have agitated to establish a separate organisation because the dominant paradigm of our Society has matched neither their training nor the reasons why they chose ethnomusicology as a field of study. At the same time, our methods are not mutually exclusive and, as members of the same Society, attending the same symposia and conferences, and contributing to and reading the same journal, we have influenced each other in our attitudes and values. It is for these reasons, and for the pragmatic reason of our small membership, that I have supported a single organisation.

It is not a new suggestion that the term ‘musicology’ has tended to be appropriated by music historians. Charles Seeger railed against this tendency in his opposition to the American Musicological Society, claiming that ethnomusicology is the true musicology. But the division (in America) between musicology and ethnomusicology was demonstrated to be simplistic when the Society for Music Theorists split from the AMS. It was this split that was cited as a salutary lesson by the previously mentioned American graduate student when he identified the need for SEM to be responsive to the members’ changing interests to avoid splintering. Again, MSA has included music theory/music analysis in its conferences, publications, membership and self-identity and few would wish it otherwise, although I cannot speak for the music theorists/music analysts who might well have centripetal or even splintering forces in their midst. At this point in my address I should ask your indulgence of my comparisons with the American situation, because having spent 10 years there it is what I know best outside Australia. In America, there does not seem to have been a separate development of what European musicologists know as systematic musicology, although I note that there is (or at least was) a separate Department of Ethnomusicology and Systematic Musicology at the University of California Los Angeles.  I do not know where or whether musical aestheticians, psychologists and sociologists of music, musical acousticians and organologists meet excepting, presumably, at philosophy, psychology, sociology, physics and perhaps museum meetings. Part of the problem of splitting up into ever more specialisations is that some are inevitably left out and so more need to be created. Fortunately, we have been largely spared this problem with our marvelously integrated Musicological Society of Australia. But we must be ever vigilant.

 

The history of MSA with its diversity and inclusiveness, recent though it is, has deep roots in Australian music research (if I may slip that expression in now), particularly in relation to the inclusion of ethnomusicology which is what I know best. Isaac Nathan, arguably Australia’s first music researcher, in the middle of the nineteenth century, dabbled in Aboriginal music, even if the dabbling consisted of “arranging” the tunes in a more satisfactory way. Percy Grainger notated Aboriginal songs from Central Australia recorded by pioneering anthropologist Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne University. Indeed, Spencer’s cylinder recordings of Aboriginal songs made at the turn of the century, along with recordings of Torres Strait Islander songs made by the Haddon Expedition in 1898, were among the earliest field recordings of non-Western music in the world. Grainger, despite his contradictory racial attitudes, was an early Australian advocate of a “universal approach to music”, and took a particular interest in Asian and South Pacific musics. Grainger’s vision, articu­lated in a series of ABC radio broadcasts in the 1930s, was a clear signal of and influence on what became characteristic of Australian music research. E. Harold Davies, educated at and later Director of the Elder Conservatorium right here, made field trips to Central Australia to record Aboriginal songs in the 1920s, later publishing notations and analyses of them in international journals.

 

We are probably all familiar with the post-War history of Australian music research leading up to the founding of MSA in 1963 at Sydney University and its attainment of national status through the amalgamation of state-based organisations in 1976. But perhaps the ethnomusicological part of that history is not so well known. It has several strands which were eventually gathered into the MSA. Undoubtedly, Donald Peart’s appointment as founding Professor at Sydney University in 1947 was a major source of stimulation to the develop­ment of ethnomusicology in Australia as much as to other kinds of music research. Professor Peart encouraged the study of Aboriginal and Asian musics in particular, encouragements that were continued by his successor Professor Peter Platt. One of the early graduates of the Sydney department was Trevor Jones, one of the pioneers of research in Aboriginal music, who went on to establish the Department of Music at Monash University and gave it a strong ethnomusicological flavour which persists to this day. Alice Moyle got started in ethnomusicology at the Sydney department, and later joined the Monash department. The Sydney University  Music Department continued its important role in Australian ethnomusicology with the appointment of Allan Marett who brought with him a research specialisation in Japanese music and went on to develop a specialisation in Aboriginal music. These key scholars have trained subsequent generations of Australian researchers. Other strands in the development of Australian ethnomusicology have been initiated by single researchers who were inspired either by the Australian context or by developments overseas or both. Catherine Ellis here in Adelaide picked up where E. Harold Davies left off in researching Central Australian Aboriginal songs, Noel Nickson at University of Queensland developed an interest in Chinese court music of the Tang dynasty, Gordon Spearritt at the same university carried out substantial research on music of Papua New Guinea, and Margaret Kartomi wrote her PhD thesis on Indonesian music at Humboldt University before taking up a position at the newly established Monash University. The present writer, after inspiration from Trevor Jones who taught for 5 years at University of Western Australia before taking up the chair at Monash, was trained in ethnomusicology in the United States and has taught at Monash University and Australian National University. Former students of these early researchers have established ethnomusicology at University of New England, Melbourne University, and University of New South Wales.

 

Recent Developments

In preparing my entry on ‘Music research and writing’ for the Companion to Music and Dance in Australia I investigated the amount of research and writing on Australian and New Zealand music as a proportion of all research and writing on music as evidenced in our journal Musicology Australia. Since 1985 when it became an annual publication until 1997, of 711 members’ publications listed in the register 221 (31%) were on Australasian music (including Indigenous and multicultural music). The variation from year to year was quite wide, ranging from a low of 12% in 1992 to a high of 48% in 1997, but neither a steady increase nor a steady decline could be discerned – in 1985 the proportion was 29%, close to the average over 13 issues. I also counted the number of honours theses completed on Australasian subjects: of 595 theses listed, 121 were on Australasian subjects, the average being somewhat less (surprisingly) at 20%, and the variation from year to year being similarly wide from a low of 9% in 1988-89 (it was a double volume) and a high of 37% in 1996. Again, no particular trend could be discerned, the proportion in 1985 being 27%, higher than the average. Sixty-six articles were published in Musicology Australia over the same period, of which 19 (29%) were on Australasian subjects. I also examined the topics of Australasian post-graduate theses listed in the latest issue of the journal, of which 59 out of 286 thesis topics (21%) are on Australasian subjects.

 

What can we make of these statistics? I am aware of the fact that not all members’ publications are listed in every issue, and that sometimes a music department misses the deadline for submitting the topics of completed honours theses. I am also aware of the fact that the Australasian nature of the subject is not always clear from the formal title. (I should mention that the proportion of New Zealand/Aeotearoa titles is quite small.) However, I think I am justified in concluding from these figures that approximately 20-30% of our music research and writing is Australasian in subject matter, and that this proportion has not changed significantly over the last 13 years. Is this a good or bad thing? It seems to me to be quite a healthy proportion, implying that we are researching and writing significantly about music of our own experience and the experience of the community in which we live. That experience includes European music of this and previous centuries, American music particularly of this century, and musics of the Asian and Pacific region, which together make up the subjects of the remaining 70-80% of our music research and writing. (I did a quick check of papers on the preliminary program of this conference, and counted 12 out of 41, or ca.29%, on Australasian subjects.) I do not wish to argue, of course, that the music on which we carry out research should exactly reflect the music being performed and listened to in the community, since I believe that music research and writing have an educative role to play in opening people’s minds to music they may not have otherwise heard. The point I wish to make is perhaps best demonstrated by saying that the mix of Australian music research and writing should be different from that of Europe or North America or anywhere else due to our unique location and experience.

 

I am enormously encouraged by the range and variety of subjects represented in recent Australian music research and writing. The latest issue of Musicology Australia included articles on acoustics, Chinese music history, Hindustani music, German romantic music and film, and musicological analysis. Members’ publications listed in the last issue cover music education, military band music, Baroque music, Japanese musical instruments, Southeast Asian music, Medieval European music, music criticism, Romantic music, Renaissance music, and of course Australian and New Zealand music. Undergraduate theses cover music education, feminist issues, relationships between music and architecture, music and festivals, musical analysis, music therapy, Australian hymnody, Australian performers, Australian multicultural traditions, aesthetics, and popular music. The subjects of post-graduate theses are the most interesting of all: New Zealand organology, Australian choral music, Australian piano music, performance practice, Medieval, Renaissance, Classical, Romantic, and Twentieth Century music, and non-Australasian traditional music of PNG, Fiji, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Flamenco, Afghanistan, India, Vietnam and Africa. This range of topics represents an enormous breadth of interests in Australasian music research which is quite remarkable considering the relatively small number of active music researchers in Australia and New Zealand.

 

There is, however, one area of research where MSA is under-represented, though not completely un-represented. In June this year I attended a conference of the Australian and New Zealand chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music here in Adelaide. A symposium on Arnhem Land Aboriginal music was associated with it and the two parts of the gathering held some plenary sessions (a popular band of Arnhem Land Aboriginal musicians was brought down to the conference). Apart from those who participated primarily because of the Arnhem Land symposium (which was by far the smaller part of the meeting), there were a few MSA members who were interested in popular music, but by far the majority of the conferees I had never seen before, although I knew of some of them. I have to say they spoke a foreign language, musicologically speaking. Now I have not been a full-time staff member of a university for most of the last 20 years, and it took me a little time to realise that there is a wholly new kind of music department developing in Australian universities which focuses on popular music. I had been aware, however, that there is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of popular music in Australia and the South Pacific – Perfect Beat – established in 1992 and published about twice a year. The reason I was aware of it is that it is the location of a number of published articles on Aboriginal popular music. Generally speaking (and I hope I am not offending anybody here), the scholarly standard of articles in Perfect Beat is uneven at best and often poor. But an Australian scholarly journal of popular music exists (in fact, one of MSA’s most prominent members is, or was at least, a member of its editorial board), an Australian scholarly association for the study of popular music exists, and whole Australian university music departments focusing on the study of popular music exist. Is the MSA left out of this particular loop? What happened to our goal of being all-inclusive as far as music research is concerned?

 

It is not true, of course, that we have excluded the study of popular music from our conferences, members’ publications, student theses, or courses in some of the older university music departments. I myself have supervised an honours thesis and an MA thesis on Aboriginal popular music for the Canberra School of Music, ANU, and I have examined a very good PhD thesis on Aboriginal popular music from a well-established and “regular” university music department. But contrary to this, I cannot identify one paper listed on the preliminary program of this conference as a paper on popular music, and I do not think we have yet published one article on popular music in Musicology Australia. I have two relevant personal anecdotes to relate. Some years ago when I gave a paper on Aboriginal popular music at an MSA National Conference it received a decidedly mixed response – I like to think not because of the quality of the paper but because of the subject matter. I do think we have moved on from those days, but have we moved enough? The second anecdote concerns the one-semester unit on Aboriginal music I have taught at the Canberra School of Music for the last 9 years.  Although I always include a couple of lectures on popular Aboriginal music I have thought for some time that a second unit focused on popular music is needed. The proposal was rejected on the grounds that a unit on popular music could not be countenanced in a university music school. I know that some university music schools do teach units on popular music, but we do not seem to encourage research in it. Are we being hypocritical? Are departments or schools that teach units on popular music merely practising demand-side musicology: give the customers (ie the students) what they demand? I ask these questions in all humility, because I think they are serious questions which are difficult to answer. In these days of shrinking budgets what to do about popular music poses a challenge to MSA and to tertiary music education in Australia.

 

What’s in a name and where do we go from here?

Music research and writing has suffered from the pseudo-scientific title ‘musicology’ (but one not coined by the German founders) for the whole of the twentieth century. Its form is borrowed from the physical and biological and, to a lesser extent, social sciences, and while it resembles the latter in some respects it does not resemble the former much at all. Ours is an interpretive pursuit more than a theorising one, and even the social sciences are now coming around to this point of view about themselves. We do not use the experimental method, we do not test hypotheses in a rigorous way (although we do ask questions), and we do not attempt to predict future events. It could even by argued that we have no theoretical or conceptual centre, only a common subject – music. The term musicology achieved currency when the scientific paradigm reigned supreme in the world of intellectual discourse. Science achieved spectacular results, in a materialist sense, but it also led, it should be noted, to spectacular disasters. Nevertheless, other fields of scholarly pursuit tried to bask in the glory of the successful paradigm, and one way to do it was to adopt a scientific-sounding name.

 

The central problem of adopting the name musicology is that it had the effect of creating an exclusive club. In the United States the result was the effective exclusion of anyone who did not have a post-graduate degree from a recognised university music program, and who carried out research on music other than the Western classical mainstream (it took some time before American music of any sort was included in the discourse of the American Musicological Society).  Musicology became the captive of Western historical music researchers. Hence the establishment of the Society for Ethnomusicology, a motley collection of anthropologists, folklorists and disgruntled musicologists who had a scholarly interest in various traditions of the rest of the world’s music, including the non-elite musical traditions of their own society. This division is not only American, of course, as is evident in the split between the International Council for Traditional Music and the International Musicological Society.

 

Another way in which the title musicology tends to result in exclusion is that its scientific sound implies difficult technical skills that have to be mastered before understanding its discourse. I am not talking here about the skills needed to master musical notation or musical performance, since there are many musicians, professional and amateur, who feel alienated from musicology because of its scientific-sounding name. In fact there are few if any exclusive technical skills needed for music research beyond the normal skills of other fields of humanistic research and a modicum of musicianship including the ability to read music notation. (I have to say, however, that I do find the work of music analysts/ theorists somewhat daunting.) As a result of this exclusiveness and the marginalising effect of the term musicology, outsiders have very little idea of what we music researchers actually do and how it can enhance the musical life of the community.

 

When MSA became a truly national organisation in the 1970s it set out to be inclusive rather than exclusive. It has largely achieved this goal, despite having the same fault lines as in the communities of music researchers in Europe and the United States. Fortunately, our common aim of understanding and appreciating music as a universal human phenomenon has held us together. However, the separate organisation for the study of popular music indicates a measure of failure which occurred partly, I believe, because of our name. Interestingly, the Society for Ethnomusicolgy seems to have avoided this split by readily incorporating the study of popular music into its conferences and journal and, I understand, forming a separate section within the Society. Perhaps here in Australia the horse has already bolted, but there may be opportunities for us to work jointly with the Australasian chapter of IASPM. Meanwhile, as a community of scholars it is important for our Society and its members to endeavour to be inclusive rather than exclusive, to look for opportunities to work collaboratively across different areas of music research rather than always working independently in our own narrow corners, and to reach out to others who may be interested in our work if they knew what we did and if we gave them half a chance.

 

At one of the first MSA conferences I attended (perhaps the first) a session was devoted to the evils of certain kinds of music. The argument was mounted that music could be judged not only aesthetically but also morally, or that an aesthetic judgement is also a moral judgment – I am not quite sure now of the details of the argument. The main target was rock music, that is that rock music is inherently evil. I have a vague recollection that some jazz was also condemned as morally reprehensible. Now I disagree with the sentiments expressed in some of the lyrics of rock music, and generally speaking rock is not my favourite genre of music (although I do admit to having some sentimental favourites from years ago). Most rock songs, let’s face it, are old-fashioned love songs, and although they might be a bit spicy for our liking they do not actually hurt anyone (morally that is – they probably hurt people’s ears). Some rock songs contain social and political messages that one might agree with or not, and a few are decidedly obnoxious. But rock music has constituted the preferred music of a lot of people over a long period of time and to dismiss it all as evil is to ignore an important aspect of the musical life of our community.

This address was not intended to be only a plea for the inclusion of popular music in our research and in our Society. My purpose is to encourage research in all kinds of music and to urge against judgementalism. All music has something tell us – about the attitudes of older or younger generations, about the values of other cultures, about our own past. By digging below the surface we may discover hidden truths about ourselves or others, and so contribute to the richness of our understanding of our common humanity. Human beings are seemingly infinitely variable – individually, socially, culturally – and the music they create provides a key to the appreciation of this variation.

 

We must be confident of the importance of the work we do, conscientious in the thoroughness f our doing it, and bold in the presentation of our ideas. Our aim should be to help all people understand and appreciate and value the significance of their own musical experience. We are not the arbiters of taste; we are the explicators of musical experience. We serve humanity through music.

 

This conference is about “crossing boundaries”. MSA has a history of crossing boundaries, but as soon as you cross one boundary another one appears. We must be ever vigilant in detecting boundaries so that we can mount determined campaigns to cross them. It’s a bit like Mao’s perpetual revolution: it’s scary to some, it challenges people’s privileged positions, it keeps us all on edge. But it’s the way forward, otherwise we will stagnate, we will become irrelevant to the cultural life of our country, our region, our world.  Let us keep boundaries in mind and be on the lookout for ways to cross them over the next few days and in the years ahead of us.

 

And what’s in a name? For my money, the best name suggested in those extraordinary exchanges via the SEM Subscriber’s List was ‘The Society for Music’. Well, perhaps we need a few boundaries, so why not add ‘research’ on the end and ‘Australian’ at the beginning: ‘The Australian Society for Music Research’.

Stephen Wild

 

Thanks to Stephen Wild for the use of this address, decision to publish which in No. 51 of the Newsletter predates the current discussion of the Society’s name change.  The second keynote address of the Adelaide conference, that given by Prof. Dr. Eva Rieger (Bremen), will be appear in volume 22 of Musicology Australia.

Ed.

 

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FORTHCOMING CONFERENCES

      Wagga Wagga Weekend Weekend (WWWW)
     Sydney 2000
     Conference on 19th Century Music, London

WAGGA WAGGA WEEKEND WEEKEND
(WWWW)

‘Conversations About Music Research’

 

Members are requested to refer to the last MSA Newsletter (No. 50, February 1999), or the MSA website for full details of our September Wagga Wagga Weekend Weekend.  In this issue I want to add a few important additional details to those given in February:

·    All accommodation arrangements should be made directly with the Riverine Club which is the venue for both the study activities and accommodation (phone 02 6921 2031: Mrs Bee will probably answer the phone).

·    Accommodation will be held at the Riverine Club until 21 August, when it will be opened to all comers. As this is also the weekend of the Wagga Wagga Jazz Festival, accommodation will be at a premium. Please book now.

·    During the period 17 August to 4 September I’ll be out-of-town (as they say). During this time my colleague Tony Hepworth will receive registration forms and issue receipts. National Secretary John Phillips (jphil@chariot.net.au, or phone 08 8395 5332) will handle any questions you may have. Otherwise you may leave a message on my voice mail, or email me, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

·    On the (optional) Friday evening members can choose between music at the Wagga Wagga Jazz Festival, or a concert by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Brass Ensemble at the Sacred Heart Church, Kooringal, in a Wagga Wagga Pro Musica / Musica Viva Australia concert.

·    We can look forward to a first-class study weekend, tailored for music researchers of all interests but especially aimed at students and their supervisors, enhanced by the historic ambience of the Riverine Club, and spiced up by a little music.

Roland Bannister, Convenor

Ph. 02 6922 5120   Fax 02 6933 2888

rbannister@csu.edu.au

 

wagga wagga weekend weekend Details

 

Dates:    Friday 10 (optional), Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 September 1999

 

Venue:   Riverine Club, Cnr. Sturt and Tarcutta Streets, Wagga Wagga, 2650,

                ph. 02 6921 2031, for both study activities and accommodation.

 

Principal times:

                8.00 pm Friday: National Committee Meeting

                9.00 am Saturday: Registration

                1.30 pm Sunday: Annual General Meeting

               

         See program next page for more details

 

Accommodation

Accommodation is available on both Friday and Saturday nights. $40 per person per day in single rooms, $22.50 for twin share (find your own partner) (b and b); Entertainment: WWWW coincides with the annual Wagga Wagga Jazz Festival, and a concert by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Brass Ensemble. Members can attend either on the Saturday evening (there will be an admission charge at both); Dinner: at the Wagga Wagga Commercial Club: about $16 plus drinks; Registration fee: regular members $20, students and unwaged $10.

 

Program for the Wagga Study Weekend

 

FRIDAY 10th September (optional except for National Committee Meeting)

7.00–10.00 pm      Check into Riverine Club accommodation.

7.00 pm till late      Wagga Wagga Jazz Festival at Romano’s Hotel.

8.00 pm                 MSA National Committee Meeting

 

SATURDAY 11th September

9.00 am                Registration and check into Riverine Club accommodation

9.30 am                Opening Ceremony

                             Including Indigenous Welcome and Official Opening.

10.00 am              Conversation 1

                             Experiences in music research (topics could include projects in
                             progress, projects recently completed, projects in the planning
                             stage)

11.00 am              Morning tea

11.20 am              Conversation 1 continues

12.30 pm              Lunch (at various nearby food outlets)

2.00 pm                Conversation 2

                             Topics to be decided as part of Conversation 1 (topics could

                             include theoretical frameworks, method, writing, publishing)

4.00 pm                Afternoon tea

4.30 pm                Guided tour and history of Riverine Club / or musical item

5.00 pm                Rest

6.00 pm                Walk to Commercial Club for dinner

6.30 pm                Dinner: Commercial Club

8.00 pm                Jazz and a Jug: Romano's Hotel, OR

8.00 pm                SSO Brass Ensemble at the Sacred Heart Church, Kooringal.

 

SUNDAY 12th September

9.30 am                 Conversation 3: Topics to be decided as an outcome of Conversation 2

11.00 am               Morning tea

11.20 am               Conversation 3 continues

12.30 am               Weekend Weekend conversations conclude

1.30 pm                 MSA Annual General Meeting (all members invited).

 

Roland Bannister

 

Please note that a registration form for the Wagga Weekend has been enclosed with this Newsletter, along with notice of ballot papers for, the Annual General Meeting and Constitutional Amendments currently under discussion.

 

All members are warmly encouraged to have their say on these important issues!

Ed.

 

Year 2000 conference marks out the common ground

 

The recognition that music is inextricable from the culture that produces it is the point of closest contact for the disciplines western historical musicology, ethnomusicology and popular music studies.

The exploration of this common ground is the overarching theme of the 23rd National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia (MSA) being held jointly with the 17th Annual Conference of the New Zealand Musicological Society (NZMS) in Sydney from Thursday 27 April to Sunday 30 April next year.

Entitled “Music as Cultural Interpretation”, the 2000 conference is being organised around three sub themes:

·       Cultural Interpretations of Music

·       The Contribution of Musicology to the Study of Popular Music

·       Research in Indigenous Performance: Current Issues

 

Professor Susan McClary of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has been invited to be a keynote speaker for the opening Cultural Interpretations of Music section of the program. Professor McClary, who specialises in the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres, also has been invited to deliver the inaugural Alfred Hook Memorial Lecture for the University of Sydney Department of Music, which is hosting the conference.

 

Professor Rob Walser, also from UCLA, has been approached to be a keynote speaker for the Friday popular music session. Professor Walser is a leading musicological writer on popular music, specialising in American music, especially jazz. New Zealand musicologist and editor of the NZMS journal, William Dart, will be a second keynote speaker in the popular music session.

 

The Saturday indigenous performance section of the conference will be based around a panel session with four invited speakers: Professor Marcia Langton, who is Ranger Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of the Northern Territory and Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies; the Senior Curator of Aboriginal Art at the Museum of Australia, Djon Mundine; the Director of the Festival of the Dreaming, Rhoda Roberts; and, Research Consultant on Aboriginal Music, Linda Barwick. Professor Langton was on the negotiating team for the first native title agreement with the Keating Government.

 

Conference convenor, Associate Professor Allan Marett, said it was planned the Saturday program also will include a performance by a group of Warumungu women from Tennant Creek, who will sing their Munga Munga song series.

 

“The day will be about music and dance, probably mostly from the Australian indigenous perspective, but there also is the possibility of papers being submitted on subjects relating to other indigenous musics of the Pacific, including New Zealand and Papua New Guinea,” Associate Professor Marett said.

 

“For the conference as a whole we are interested in papers that are informed by some measure of cultural interpretation, but on the other hand we are not seeking to exclude studies that are concerned with technical matters of performance or the analysis of notated music.

 

“The intention is to emphasise the common ground between western historical musicology, ethnomusicology and popular music studies within a framework that is broadly inclusive,” Associate Professor Marett said.

 

All conference venues will be in the Seymour Centre, a theatre complex in which the University of Sydney Music Department is located.

 

Call for Papers

Although there will be space for free papers, preference may be given to submissions adhering to one or other of the conference’s themes. Abstracts should be sent to:

 

                Sally Macarthur

                C/ - Jacqui Harrison

                Department of Music

                J09 University of Sydney NSW 2006

                Ph: (02) 9351 4790 Fax: (02) 9351 7340

                E-mail: jacqueline.harrison@music.usyd.edu.au

 

Last date for paper submissions: 1 December 1999

The normal paper length will be 20-25 minutes

 

Further information may be obtained from members or the organising committee or the administrator:

                Jacqui Harrison

                Department of Music

                J09 University of Sydney NSW 2006

                Ph: (02) 9351 4790 Fax: (02) 9351 7340

                E-mail: jacqueline.harrison@music.usyd.edu.au

 

Convenor: Allan Marett - allan.marett@music.usyd.edu.au

Deputy Convenor: Nicholas Routley - nicholas.routley@music.usyd.edu.au

Program: Sally Macarthur - s.macarthur@uws.edu.au

Secretary: David Cashman - dcashman@mail.usyd.edu.au

Treasurer: Natalie Shea - nshea@mail.usyd.edu.au

Accommodation and travel: Kathy Marsh - kmarsh@mail.usyd.edu.au

New Zealand Co-ordinator: Warren Drake - w.drake@auckland.ac.nz