Adelaide Study Weekend 2001

Report on Musicology Australia

Miscellaneous Notices

Deadline for Newsletter contributions

For No. 54, March 2001 issue:

monday, 26 February 2001

Editor, Newsletter

John A. Phillips

1209 Lower North East Road

Highbury SA 5089

Ph./Fax: (08) 8395 5332

E-mail: jphil@chariot.net.au

Thanks to all contributors, to Jennie Shaw for proofreading and KwikKopy Unley, SA, for their assistance in the production of this issue.

About thirty years ago Peter took his family for a boating trip on the River Thames in England. His daughter Katy, then aged nine, fell in, and although she was already a good swimmer she seemed to be struggling, as she was in her pyjamas which were billowing about her, and which she was embarrassed to take off as there were people on the banks of the river. Peter handed the tiller to the twelve-year-old Martin, dived in after her without a moment’s thought, and guided her to the bank. When they were safely back in the boat Jean said ‘You didn’t even throw off your sweater and shoes!’ To which Peter replied, ‘No—but I did take out [of my pocket] my Bayreuth Festival tickets’.

I’ve told this story because it encapsulates Peter’s total devotion both to his family and to music. The singer Beverley Bergen, one of Peter's ex-students from Dunedin days, expressed this joint devotion in another way, by referring to Peter as a ‘cultural father’. In his professional life, as in his family, he nurtured. He nurtured students and musicians with encouragement, practical advice, and intellectual insights, whether composers, performers or musicologists, and he constantly persuaded us to cross the boundaries between these disciplines. He also nurtured his students, like family members, through sickness, and those who were unlucky enough to suffer severe illnesses were lucky enough to have experienced Peter’s unstinting care in this respect too. He even nurtured musicology at a distance, as a member of the editorial board of the Melbourne University postgraduate journal Context, who have sent a tribute today.

He was a true teacher. Let us reflect how rarely it is nowadays that a teacher is so deeply mourned by his disciples as Peter is. So many of us here today were his students or colleagues, or musicians whom he has guided and inspired. We are part of a huge generation of musicians now bereft of our cultural father.

To return to the boating incident, I think we can see his work as in many ways a kind of rescue operation. He rescued us firstly from all kinds of intellectual rigidity, intellectual aridity, intellectual absolutism. He resisted the dogmatic tendencies of analysis; the sterility of positivism; any kind of intellectual activity which takes refuge in fixed positions. His intellect was passionate and curious—he wasn’t interested in system-building. He said ‘We can only have insights’—no grand overviews for him. Peter’s mind moved; it was never content to stay in one place, it always sought to make connections between things.

Secondly, he rescued us from Eurocentricity. Always a passionate apologist for the scholarship undertaken in Australia and New Zealand, he encouraged the study and practice of music from outside the Western tradition. He dates the expansion of his own horizons in this regard, his ‘epiphany’, to 1954, when, as a lecturer in the newly founded Department of Music here in Sydney, at the suggestion of Donald Peart he undertook the supervision of Trevor Jones’ thesis on Australian Aboriginal music.[1] Later, at the University of Otago, now professor, he supervised Mervyn McLean’s thesis on Maori music. Both these people have since become leaders in their field. As professor in Sydney his first appointment was to establish a post in ethnomusicology which has fostered, through the person of Allan Marett, the study of Aboriginal and Japanese music here. Not content, characteristically, to encourage others to study such music, he took up the sitar himself. Indeed, with his talent for mimicry, he even mastered the Indian accent to go with it.

A third rescue operation he attempted—well, as you know, throughout his life Peter wrote many occasional pieces and other compositions. One such was the Fanfare for the University of Sydney for two trumpets, of 1977. Of this piece he wrote: ‘The [Stravinskyan] wrong notes signify that I do not always agree with Sydney University’s policies (e.g. the outrageous growth of administration in proportion to academic staff). Musicians are meant to pick up this wrong-note disapproval, but the Commissars, so to speak, are supposed just to hear the innocent tunes.’[2] So a third rescue operation was launched, from the increasing shackles of university administration which he characterised thus: ‘...we live in a world...where creative people are subordinated to a largely anonymous management, scholars subordinated to administrative bullies, vivacity and beauty [of] thought subordinated to mere information.’[3]

The Stravinsky reference is to the two-trumpet fanfare at the end of Petrushka which according to Stravinsky represented the clown thumbing his nose at the public. Peter’s intimate knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, individual composers in the Western tradition was enormously wide, embracing Perotin, Dufay, Mozart, Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg and far more. But in his later years it was Stravinsky’s lucid, terse, epigrammatic, imaginative, unsentimental music which particularly appealed to him. We shall soon hear Stravinsky’s clarinet pieces, which I suggest we hear as a tribute to Peter’s infectious engagement not just with Stravinsky’s music, but with that of all the countless others as well.

All these rescue operations were necessary because Peter believed that music is essentially a civilising force. Something everyone noticed about Peter was that no matter how horrendously busy he was, he always had time to listen to his students and colleagues. He was always more interested in talking about musical issues than attending the next committee meeting or dealing with administrative paperwork, and so would simply stop and talk. That, it seems to me, is the sign of someone deeply civilised.

Everything he did was tempered by his irrepressible wit. We can all remember his one-liners. To defuse the tension in the most fraught situations, such as having to announce yet more budget cuts, his favourite remark was ‘It’s a game, innit?’ Her was a natural egalitarian, almost ashamed of his hereditary peerage; less so perhaps of his AM; even a PhD seemed to him, at the time he was up at Oxford after the war, to be ‘vulgarly ostentatious’[4] so he took a B Litt. instead. He always treated his colleagues as equals. He’d go to the concerts we gave, as well as student concerts, and write notes for discussion with us. If he couldn’t talk to us immediately afterwards, he’d ring up, apologise for taking our time, and ask us questions, raise connections, which showed that he had brought all his intellectual curiosity to bear while he was listening. He was a great supporter and patron of Winsome Evans’ Renaissance Players. Arriving from Dunedin in Sydney as Professor in 1975, with scores of performances as a conductor to his credit, including several operas, he had the humility to sing tenor as a founding member of the Sydney Chamber Choir, and let me, then a complete rookie, direct it.

The title of the last academic paper he gave (as we must sadly now refer to it) was ‘Only Connect’. This story illustrates the kind of improbable connections he was capable of making.

In Dunedin Peter used to start his first lecture to the first year students by playing a cigar-tube, into which he had cut some holes, as a nose-flute. Later on, his wife Jean gave him an electric razor as a birthday present. He went and shaved with it, and an hour later still hadn’t come out of the bathroom. The next time he had to give the opening lecture to first year he produced this razor and proceeded to demonstrate the harmonic series on it. No student who heard that lecture has forgotten it.

I have not Peter’s powers of connection, and can’t quite see how this might connect with his oboe playing.

I would like to conclude with three short quotations, sentences Peter wrote about other people but which so well apply to him himself. Just a month ago his friend and colleague from Dunedin, the composer Jack Spiers, died. Peter wrote a piece for viola solo to be performed at his funeral, and also his eulogy, in which he said of Jack: ‘His was a contribution too large even for those familiar with it to encompass.’[5] In ‘Only Connect’ he wrote of Donald Peart: ‘in him the connection between scholarship and performance was white-hot.’[6] And again from his eulogy for Jack Spiers: ‘He combined the dual roles [described] by Plato, of practitioner and philosopher: the practitioner who can play with sensitivity, who can compose and make something new, can direct and conduct and shape...and the philosopher and scholar, he who is wise about music, he who can understand it, from its inchoate form as vibrations to the most complex and passionate of...structures.’[7]

But above and beyond this, he was a great teacher, a cultural father. When Ockeghem, the teacher of Josquin’s generation of musicians, died in 1497, Josquin expressed the feelings of his generation in a chanson Nimphes des bois which will shortly be sung by the Sydney Chamber Choir. Addressing his musician colleagues from all countries, Josquin exhorts them, in sentiments we may share completely with regard to Peter, to

He then lists several contemporary composers—and we may think of the vast number of composers whom Peter has influenced—and goes on:

[1] Peter Platt, ‘Only Connect’, paper given at the MSA conference Music as Cultural Interpretation, Sydney, April 2000 (shortly to appear in Musicology Australia), p. 5. The title is a quotation from
E. M. Forster's Howard’s End (Penguin Modern Classics 1969), p. 174.

[2] ‘Only Connect’, p. 1.

[3] Peter Platt, Jack Spiers the Musician, eulogy on the death of Jack Spiers (unpublished), p. 2, July 2000.

[4] ‘Only Connect’, p. 4.

[5] Jack Spiers the Musician, p. 2.

[6] ‘Only Connect’, p. 3.

[7] Jack Spiers the Musician, p. 1.

The following pieces of music and a poem were played and read immediately following the eulogy:

I imagine that most of us can look back on our careers and point to two or three people who have had a lasting influence over us. For me, Peter Platt was one such person. It was nearly fifty years ago when what knowledge of music I had was largely derived from being a student at the Sydney Conservatorium where musicology and its broad implications were then unheard and undreamt of. I desperately wanted to know so much more about music, but a degree at Sydney University was impossible for me, as I was then a full-time music master at a Sydney high school, bonded to the State Education Department for five years. Part-time studies in the Department of Music were then not available. My only chance was an external degree at an English university for which one simply sat the examinations when—and if—ready. It was Peter Platt to whom I turned for private tutoring, and in the years that I was preparing myself for the degree he began to prise open my mind and let in a flood of ideas that have fertilised my thinking ever since. Perceptive and creative, disciplined yet free-thinking, Peter’s musical intellect was strikingly different from anything I had ever encountered, and of course his ever-youthful enthusiasm carried all before him. At that time he was just starting lessons on the oboe (with the brilliant Ian Wilson) so that—typically—he could more fully develop his musicianship and activities by taking part in performances of music both old and very new, for Peter’s interests and accomplishments were far-ranging. Combine this with a warm and engaging personality, as well as a great sense of humour—who could not fail to be inspired by such a man?

Way back in the early 1980s, when I first spoke to Peter Platt about my projected Zelenka study, he remarked: ‘He doesn’t sound like a man of the moment.’ It took years for me to verify the accuracy of Peter’s initial observation, and I often came to cite his assessment of Zelenka’s situation as a composer in Dresden. I appreciated Peter’s enthusiasm for finding solutions to the practical problems of music making on our various meetings in Sydney with baroque oboes in hand. The last time I spoke with him was at the MSA conference in Perth, 1999. At that time we began to discuss the possibility of setting up, on a state-by-state basis, an Australia-wide musicological study in which orchestral players of ABC orchestras during the 1950s and 60s would be interviewed by representatives from music institutions in each state. There was, we felt, an urgency to record the reminiscences of musicians who experienced the working conditions and the excitement of the music making of that era. It is doubtful that such a project will materialise without Peter’s guidance.

Peter Platt was the most inspiring of teachers. His encapsulations of composers’ lives, circumstances and styles, presented with conviction, warmth, and marvellous humour, were a revelation to students like myself who had been brought up entirely on the grade exams. In my day at Otago, when performance wasn’t an option as a major, ‘Prof’ saw to it that we (and the Dunedin public) experienced first hand in the A Cappella Choir vocal polyphony by Byrd, Victoria, Lassus, Palestrina, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky and many others. It was an exhilarating experience to be in the choir under Peter, and the musical training he gave and personal interest he took in his students shaped my career more than any other single influence. His broad musical horizons, scholarship, enthusiasm and wise counsel down through the years are a legacy to us all. He will be remembered with the greatest esteem and affection.

I was seven or eight years old, singing the round ‘Sweeeep’ and being an owl in Benjamin Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera. Prof Platt’s conducting captured us, as he invited everyone to find out how polyphony worked by making it. I was a 16-year old Scholarship [HSC] student when he invited me into the world of his favourite twentieth-century works, showing me turning points, and what he loved about them. He often said that he had never quite figured out how music worked. His greatness as a teacher was that he never tired of finding out how other people thought it worked.

This approach was new to Dunedin: till Prof’s arrival, music was what made ‘fingers work’. This new preoccupation with structures and moments and sonorities was exciting enough to keep out Dunedin’s piercing winter weather, which Prof went on to fill with winter residencies: the complete Beethoven sonatas, played by Istvan Nadas, a pupil of Bartok; a feast of violin music played by Ronald Woodcock. From medieval music to Webern and Lilburn—it was all transcribed, analysed, performed, listened to live, in the exuberant learning environment of the Otago Music Department under Prof Platt.

He believed in the value of everyone taking part in research, and the contribution everyone had to make. His delight in tasting the meaning of words was characteristic: ‘That’s not quite the word I want.’ Often there wasn’t a word so precisely poised between other words that it was what he wanted. But you got what he meant.

For Prof it was the evocative sound of a piano accordion floating over Lake Como, as a teenager, that awakened his curiosity about ‘what made music work’: an awakening of the connection between thinking and feeling that, in countless ways, he shared every day with his students and colleagues.

The start of this year saw the departure of our retiring president, Anne-Marie Forbes, to take up a Lectureship in Music at the University of Tasmania. A long-standing and enthusiastic member of the Queensland Chapter, Anne-Marie’s presence will be sorely missed by us all and we wish her every success in Hobart.

At the Annual General Meeting, held on 19 March over a very pleasant lunch at the University of Queensland, the following people were elected to the Chapter committee: Elizabeth MacKinlay (Chair); Dolly MacKinnon; Timothy Passmore Griffith; Simon Perry (Treasurer); Peter Tregear (Secretary); and Shirley Trembath. We are delighted that the committee continues to contain representatives drawn from the three main tertiary music schools in Brisbane.

The major event of the early part of the year was the visit of the distinguished Debussy scholar and performer Roy Howat to Brisbane. MSA members joined with Professor Howat in an informal supper before his guest lecture at the School of Music, University of Queensland, on the evening of 18 May.

A matter for some discussion earlier in the year, the Committee was delighted to note the recent advertisement by the University of Queensland of the position of Professor of Music at the School of Music; the appointment for which will undoubtedly further the practice and promotion of music research in Queensland. Preparations are already well under way for our annual Student Symposium, to be held on 15 October. It is hoped that this year the Chapter will be able to sponsor a modest publication of proceedings from this event.

The SA Chapter has continued to hold regular meetings at the University of Adelaide, in collaboration with the Elder Conservatorium—School of Performing Arts, and since late last year, seminar papers have been given by a wide range of visitors and chapter members. In November 1999, Stephen Whittington gave a lecture/recital at the Performing Arts Technology Unit on the late piano works of Morton Feldman; in March 2000, Michael Burden (Oxford) spoke on the staging of opera in eighteenth-century London; following the national MSA conference in Sydney in April, Jula Szuster presented her paper on the role of the violin in early seventeenth-century ensemble music and John Phillips his paper on the first published version of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony; in June Stephen Knopoff, Kimi Coaldrake and Fiona McGowan presented a panel discussion on current issues in ethnomusicology; while the 2000 state chapter AGM, held in August, included a lecture/recital by Lesley Lewis on Bach’s French Suites.

Following a suggestion raised at the last AGM of the SA Chapter, the Committee last year established a postgraduate musicology prize in memory of Naomi Cumming and her contribution to the discipline during her years in Adelaide. The first competition day has been scheduled for Saturday, 2nd December, and thanks to support from the Helpmann Academy, the chapter has been able to invite two guests to both speak and adjudicate at the competition.

In October 1999, the SA Chapter Committee made a submission and a representation to the University’s Review of Music Education and Training in South Australia. Although the recommendation of that review was for the establishment of a new, independent tertiary training institution, the review highlighted the importance of music research, outcome has been the proposed merger of the TAFE Flinders Street School of Music and the Elder Conservatorium, and appointment of a new Elder Professor of Music. It is our hope that this new institution will see the revitalisation of musicology within the University of Adelaide.

The affairs of the International Wagner Symposium, held in late 1998, were wound up earlier this year. The symposium made a profit of $2,000 which has been distributed equally between the Richard Wagner Society of SA and the MSA (SA Chapter).

At this year’s MSA National Conference, a forum on Australian Music Studies underlined the notion that the various organisations devoted to music research (such as the MSA and IASPM) would benefit from increased dialogue with each other.

It was only fitting, then, that this year’s Sydney Chapter Graduate Music Symposium (GMS), the principal event organised by the chapter for 2000, should encourage themes related to interdisciplinary approaches to research, picking up on the flavour of the National Conference. The 2nd September symposium, held at the University of Technology, Sydney, featured papers covering a diverse range of topics, from eighteenth century Italian vocal music to contemporary indigenous and popular musics, with session titles such as Quartets, Clusters and Complexities and Media and Recorded Popular Music.

The GMS was opened by keynote speaker Peter McCallum and as always, both formal papers and works-in-progress were welcome, giving research students the opportunity to present and discuss still-developing aspects of their research in a collegial atmosphere.

Held with the support of the IASPM, the GMS attracted abstracts from postgraduate students at the University of Sydney, the Conservatorium of Music, the University of Western Sydney, UTS and Macquarie University. The convening committee for the symposium consisted of Anne Power, Terry Clinton and Adrian Renzo.

The year 2000 is proving to be a busy and productive one for the Victorian Chapter. Planning is in full swing for next year’s National Conference to be held at the University of Melbourne, which promises to be extremely stimulating, with keynote speakers Kay Dreyfus, Tim Carter, Annegret Fauser and Richard Taruskin.

The Chapter Conference, AGM and awarding of the annual Musicology Award for the best student paper will take place at the Early Music Studio, University of Melbourne, on Saturday 18 November 9.30 am–5 pm. Abstracts of 150 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted to the conference convenor (Joel Crotty, 466 Belmore Road, Mont Albert, 3129, tel. 9890 2442) by 20 October. Registration is free and includes morning & afternoon teas (but not lunch). The conference will include the chapter’s AGM and election of office-bearers for 2001, and will be followed by drinks.

A very successful weekend conference entitled ‘Music’s Audience: Reading and Listening to Music in Australian and England, 1880–1930’ was held at Melbourne University on 12 and 13 August. Professor Stephen Banfield, Elgar Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham, delivered a thought-provoking keynote address on the failure of British music to develop ‘addressivity’ in the twentieth century, which raised a host of issues related to the theme of the conference. Seventeen papers where given over the two days, on topics ranging from music in Queensland Mental Institutions to the English critical reception of Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat. The first day of the conference finished with a most enjoyable performance, by students of the University, of Australian music from the turn of the twentieth century, culminating in the mercifully infrequent experience of musicologists singing, before a wonderful conference dinner.

Professor Banfield, who is the 2000 Miegunyah Fellow at the University of Melbourne, will also be delivering two public lectures: the Miegunyah lecture on ‘Sondheim’s Genius’ on Tuesday, 5 September, and the Grainger Lecture, entitled ‘Grainger the Edwardian’ on Tuesday, 12 September.

The Victorian chapter is also recognising the service of two fine Australian musicologists who have recently celebrated their seventieth birthdays: David Tunley and Andrew McCredie.

A concert of French music entitled ‘De l’air de cour au salon’ will be given in the Sharwood Room, Trinity College, Royal Parade, Parkville, at 6.00pm on Friday, 6 October in honour of David Tunley.

Melbourne and Monash Universities hosted an afternoon conference in honour of Prof. Andrew McCredie on Sunday, 3 September 2000 from 2pm in the Burchill Rooms at the department of Music, Monash University. A celebratory dinner took place afterwards at the home of Margaret Kartomi.

The WA Chapter has arranged three special evening lectures during 2000 in addition to the periodical meetings of the UWA School of Music Honours and Postgraduate Seminar to which MSA members are automatically invited. Two of the special meetings have been held and proved highly successful. The first meeting was on April 10 and the lecture was given by our chapter Vice-President, David Tunley. His topic was ‘A Musical Deluge—Paris in the Nineteenth Century’ and was based on his recent researches into music of the period which have led to several publications on, as well as scholarly editions of, nineteenth-century French vocal music.

The second meeting was on August 14 at which the guest speaker was the visiting Mozart scholar and pianist Robert Levin, who spoke about his recently completed edition of the Mozart Requiem in comparison to the ‘original’ Süssmayr completion and various other modern alternatives. The meeting was able to hear not only recordings of Levin’s very convincing solutions to some of the conundrums surrounding what Mozart might have done had he lived—and comparisons with Süssmayr and other editions—but also the arguments in favour of these, based on Levin’s deep and perceptive understanding of the bases of Mozart’s style.

The remaining meeting is scheduled for October 2 and the speaker will be Andrew McCredie, who will be visiting UWA en route to Munich from his six-month stay at Monash. The topic will be ‘Music in the Emigration During the Holocaust Period—With Special Reference to European Musicians in East Asia (including Australia)’. As the Newsletter goes to press this meeting has not yet been held but promises to provide a notable finale to the year’s programme.

Two MSA Chapter members—Suzie Wijsman and Robert Curry—will soon return to Perth following a trip to Poland where they have been researching what promises to be a major break-through in our knowledge of the early history of the violin family and the hitherto unsuspected prominence of Poland in this development. This research trip was the result of their winning an ARC Research Grant. The Chapter looks forward to welcoming them home and we anticipate an interesting meeting early in the New Year to hear of the outcomes of their researches.

It seems that while we plan to look forward, we’re always looking back. The initial focus of this report was to anticipate the Graduate Music Symposium in September and to provide an overview of the recent 23rd National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia and 17th Annual Conference of the New Zealand Musicological Society. Both plans take second place to the sad passing of Professor Peter Platt.

In a strange way, these things all come together. One of the highlights for many at the National Conference was the great pleasure of seeing Prof. Platt once again in full flight in a paper which he entitled ‘Only Connect’. He took his text from E. M. Forster’s Howards End: ‘Only connect! ... Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die’ (1910 [1969]: p. 174). Platt expanded on the notion, suggesting that in musicology we need the lot, including the beast and the monk. Inimitably, he foreshadowed the flavour of the panel discussion later in the conference on seeing beyond disciplinary boundaries. His discussion with his listeners, for this is what his paper really was, ranged over reminiscences drawn from the history of the Music Department of Sydney University. He shared his insights, his humour and his ‘carry-outs’ with a packed room and he worked the room with a sense of the theatrical. It was a wonderful memory to take away and to look back upon now. Vale Prof.

There is much to recall with relish from the conference. Susan McClary’s keynote address investigated the musical organisation of time during the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring the idea of time which pushes forward and time which takes pleasure in the present as culturally shaped and amplifying her presentation of these contrasts with engaging musical examples. McClary also gave the inaugural Alfred Hook Lecture during the Conference, discussing competing modes of subjectivity in the madrigals of Cipriano de Rore. Robert Walser and William Dart delivered keynote addresses on the contribution of musicology to the study of Popular Music. Walser’s paper exploring ten significant points about musicology touched on the split between musicology and ethnomusicology in other parts of the world, and argued that there can’t be autonomous pieces of music because there aren’t any autonomous people, using examples from the stylistic differences in trumpet playing between Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis that were brought about by amplification. (In this, his paper has kinship with an excellent chapter in Bruce Johnson’s The Inaudible Music, which looks at the impact of the microphone on jazz singers.) William Dart’s paper explored an emerging Kiwi vernacular in popular music, drawing examples from the album Sings Harry.

There was wide-ranging choice in papers on the first two days and a feast of Indonesian music in concert. There was Roland Bannister’s ethnographic research, ‘Music in the Immigrant Experience of the Italo-Australians of Griffith, NSW’, in which Bannister reported that while his project is context-sensitive ethnomusicology, it has much in common with oral history. There were three fine papers in Feminist theory: from Sally Macarthur’s research on Alma Mahler-Werfel’s songs, through Maree Macmillan’s comprehensive sweep of Lulu and Lola figures from Berg to Tykwer’s 1999 film Run Lola Run, to Helen Rusak’s exploration of Elena Kats-Chernin’s opera Iphis. There was an illuminating panel discussion which included Stanley Sadie’s discussion of his editorial role in the new New Grove, and John Whiteoak and Aline Scott- Maxwell’s foreshadowing of the completion of their mapping of music and dance in Australia. John Phillips added his fascinating research on Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony to this panel. There were papers by Carolyn Brennan and David Salisbury addressing Kelantan music from the north east of Malaya and Talempong music from the Minangkabau cultural tradition of Payakumbah, West Sumatra. There was Gary Tamlyn’s very neat clarification of Rock’n’ Roll’s stylistic origins and Adrian Renzo’s paper on the construction of ‘queer’ identity enacted at the level of the music itself.

The Symposium on Research in Indigenous Music opened the final two days. Marcia Langton and Djon Mundine raised important ethical issues which are still to be addressed. Langton pointed out that University Ethics Committees have not yet incorporated IATSIS guidelines and protocols. Mundine cautioned that intercultural events are fraught with dangers of misinterpretation. Their generous commitment to the best research outcomes was evident in their interactive participation in sessions and Langton’s introduction of the CD launch by the Mungamunga Singers and Dancers of Tennant Creek, a result of the research of Linda Barwick.

There were some exciting papers in this symposium. Peter Toner’s work-in-progress on different ways of singing the same song subject was a splendid introduction to the complexity of the researcher’s task in Yolngu music. Aaron Corn’s paper examined encroaching global marketing of the didjeridu and considered Yolgnu responses, endeavouring to retain the sacred value of the yirdaki. Liz Reed’s paper on the Alice Springs-based rap group NoKTuRNL posited that the band’s lyrics and performances provide a map of issues: place, race, identity and history. Maroochy Barambah discussed and demonstrated contemporary contexts of traditional song. Jenny Newsome and Jardine Kiwat outlined the creative teaching methodologies at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music.

There were also non-indigenous themes pursued on these final two days. Jennifer Royle gave a paper on Australian commemorative music from the three International Exhibitions held in Sydney and Melbourne between 1879 and 1888. Joel Crotty presented an interpretation of music as time capsule through a comparison of Antill’s Symphony on a City (1959) and John Peterson’s Port Kembla (1998). Anne Power explored fragmentation of identity in two recent music theatre pieces: Colin Bright’s The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and Martin Wesley-Smith’s Quito. Felicity Andreasen reported on her research into the integration of home culture and school culture, with reference to Pacific Islander students. She argued that the teaching challenge is to reach the place where different does not mean ‘less than’ and where different curricula enlarge the scope of the structures of Anglo-Australian institutions and identity.

The success of the conference was a tribute to convenor Allan Marrett, deputy convenor Nicholas Routley, chair of the programme committee Sally Macarthur, with Adrian Renzo, Natalie Shea, Kathy Marsh, Kirsty Beilharz, Franca Tamisari, Ian Maxwell, Terry Clinton and Sally Treloyn.

Saturday, 11 November to Sunday, 12 November 2000

9.15am Welcome, indigenous welcome; opening address from the Dean, Prof. Robert Constable (tbc) and tribute to Em. Prof. Peter Platt

10.00–11.00am ‘Teaching musicology to performance students’ Discussion led by Rosalind Halton

11.30am–12.30pm Continuation along various branches of the theme ‘Only Connect’, including the future of musicology teaching and what is understood by it, at tertiary and pre-tertiary level. Ethnomusicology perspective led by Allan Marett (Sydney University)

1.30–3.30pm ‘Functions of music criticism’ (Peter McCallum, Sydney Conservatorium, to lead discussion)

4.00–5.30pm ‘Music and technology’ (Nathan Scott, Newcastle University, has been invited to lead discussion; GianFranco Ricci has also been invited)

2.00–4.00pm Choral concert by the Hunter Singers, MCA recital, conductor Kim Sutherland, including premiere of a newly commissioned work by Stephen Leek, with Adam Wills (conducting, Hons.)

4.00pm onwards Informal goodbyes at the Brewery for those not in a hurry to leave

Venue will be the Conservatorium of Music, University of Newcastle, Auckland Street, Cooks Hill, Newcastle. This is close to Civic Station, and walking distance from the Radisson Hotel and Junction Motel, as well as close to Darby Street, famous for its fine, affordable restaurants. Accommodation should be booked independently by delegates. We recommend the following:

· The Junction Motel, tel. 02 4929 6677 (five minutes walk from the Con; was called Bimet Lodge until last year)

· Centennial Apartments, tel. 02 4926 3463, fax 02 49 26 3801 (58 Parry St, Cooks Hill, also five minutes walk from the Con, has suites with two double-bed rooms and kitchen/lounge for current price of $110/night)

The Cyprus Musicological Society wish to announce the First International Conference on Music Performance and Aesthetics, to be held in Nicosia, Cyprus, 15–16 December 2000.

The conference will deal with any kind of music performance and the aesthetics of that performance. Ethnomusicologists, musicologists, music educators, performers and composers are all welcome to contribute. Please send proposals and feel free to forward this information to colleagues.

The 24th National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia will be held at the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, in April 2001.

Plans for the conference are proceeding at a great pace, keynote speakers are attracting considerable attention and inquiries about the conference are coming from outside Australia as well as from within. An exhibition at the Grainger Museum based on Grainger’s work on early music is planned, as is the launch of the late Naomi Cumming’s book at the conference.

Many people have already approached us with ideas for themed sessions and we would like to encourage others to do so as well. These do not have to relate to the conference themes per se, although many of the ones already submitted do. We are planning to have more time for discussion after the papers and, to encourage discussion, papergivers will submit their papers to chairs one month before the actual conference for circulation among other speakers in their session.

A conference page will soon be set up on the MSA website, and will be updated as information comes to hand. We encourage you to refer to the website in the first instance, and we will try to undertake as much correspondence as possible by E-mail. Documents will always be available in hard copy on request.

The MSA invites researchers in all disciplines to submit proposals for papers on any aspect of music as it relates to the conference themes listed above.

In recognition of the Centenary of Federation, papers that relate to Australian Music and Society will be welcomed.

Proposals for individual papers must include an abstract of 200 words.
Individual papers are limited to 20 minutes.

The conference organisers also invite free papers from individuals or group submissions on a common theme.

Group submissions on a common theme could be given either as a round table (with maximum 90 minutes) or as three to four papers. Proposals for group submissions must provide the name and contact details of the organiser and a list of committed participants, and include a separate abstract for each of their contributions.

Kerry Murphy, Conference Convenor:
k.murphy@music.unimelb.edu.au
C/- Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne VIC 3010. Fax 03 8344 5346

Please include with your abstract (on separate page) your name, E-mail address, postal address and phone or fax contact.

For further information contact the Conference Administrator Elizabeth Kertesz by E-mail at ekertesz@unimelb.edu.au

‘CREATING MUSICAL FUTURES:

The first National Conference of the National Committee of Tertiary Music Schools (in Australia) will be hosted by Southern Cross University at the Byron Bay Beach Club from Saturday June 30 to Monday July 2, 2001.

Innovative and imaginative formats for presentations are encouraged. There will be 30 minutes for each presentation, 20 minutes for the presentation itself and 10 minutes for discussion. Proposals should be in English and be no more than 300 words in length. They should also include institutional affiliation (if any) of the author(s) and should be submitted only in the form of an E-mail message (not as an attachment) to: hannan@scu.edu.au.

Contact information: Associate Professor Michael Hannan, Program Leader, Program in Contemporary Music, School of Contemp. Arts, Southern Cross University, PO Box 157, Lismore 2480; tel. (02) 6620 3807, facs. (02) 6622 7968. Program website: http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/carts/contmusic/.

The Thirteenth National Conference of the Australian Society for Music Education will be held at the University of Adelaide, July 6–10, 2001. The theme will be ‘Adelaide 2001: a Musical Odyssey. A journey of discovery in music education’.

· Dr Frances Rauscher (Psychology Department, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh), specialist in cognitive development

· Professor Bennett Reimer (Formerly at Northwestern University, Chicago), author of A Philosophy of Music Education (Prentice Hall, 1970/1989)

· Professor Miraca Gross (Director of the Gifted Education, Research, Resource and Information Centre at the University of New South Wales, Sydney), leading authority on the education of gifted and talented children

· Dr Martin Comte, formerly Professor of Music Education and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Education at RMIT University, Melbourne; Dr Comte will be presenting the Jacinth Oliver Memorial Address

Closing date for applications for Papers, Workshops, Research Posters and Performing Groups is 1 November 2000. Guidelines for applications are listed in the ‘Call for Presentations’ brochure to be found on the conference website: http://www.asme2001.mtx.net

Conference Secretariat: Plevin & Assocs., PO Box 54, Burnside, SA. 5066. Tel.: 61 8 8379 8222; Fax: 61 8 8379 8177; E-mail: plevin@camtech.net.au.

Conference Convenor: Jenny Rosevear, Elder Conservatorium, Adelaide University. E-mail: jrosevea@pa.adelaide.edu.au

The SA Chapter, in conjunction with the Elder Conservatorium—School of Performing Arts, will host the 2001 MSA Study Weekend and National AGM at The University of Adelaide, Saturday–Sunday, 22–23 September 2001.

The study weekend has been timed to coincide with the opening of the first Australian production of Parsifal, featuring 1998 Adelaide Ring conductor Jeffrey Tate, director Elke Neidhart and Danish tenor Poul Elming in the title role.

The study weekend will not be dedicated specifically to Wagner or opera, however. Provisionally entitled ‘The Performer and the Scholar’, the theme of the Study Weekend has been chosen to lead on from one of the themes of the Melbourne conference’s program, and provide an opportunity to explore more deeply the interrelationships and issues existing between current musical scholarship and the broader field of musical performance, both in this country and internationally. An internationally renowned musicologist has been invited as guest speaker for the weekend.

The 2001 AGM is provisionally scheduled for the Sunday afternoon. Further details and registration forms will be included in the March Newsletter; updates will be available on the web as they come to hand.

For those interested in attending, SA State Opera’s four performances of Parsifal will take place on September 22, 26 and 29 and October 2, from 4.30 pm. Ticket sales have already opened and demand is high, so if you wish to book, please do so via BASS nationally, on 131 246. The SASO website, http://www.saopera.sa.gov.au has further details.

Volume 23 will appear in December of this year, and will feature, as announced, a new format and cover design. It will open with an obituary to the late Peter Platt and will also contain his last paper ‘Only Connect’, which is, in every sense, an historic piece of scholarship. The volume will include articles on Beethoven and melodrama, Percy Grainger and the importance of race as an influence on his music, and aspects of patterning in Japanese narrative music. Susan McClary offers some intriguing insights into the organisation of musical time in her paper ‘TempWork: Music and the Cultural Shaping of Time’, delivered at the MSA conference in Sydney in April. Book reviews cover publications on Australian music history, Benjamin Britten, ethnomusicological fieldwork, jazz and editions of Renaissance and Baroque music. As ever, there is something in Musicology Australia for everyone.

Please note that articles intended for publication in vol. 24 (2001) should be submitted no later than 1 April 2001 to allow due time for the peer review process.

The copy deadline for reviews was Friday 15 September. Reviews received after this date will be published in vol. 24 (2001).

The following books have been received for review. If you’d like to write a review of one or more of the following, please let me know.

Gage Averill, A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997

Richard Ingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998

Steven N. Friedson, Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuku Healing. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996

Andrew Midian, The Value of Indigenous Music in the Life and Ministry of the Church: The United Church in the Duke of York Islands. Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1999

Michael Nyman, Experimental Music, Cage and Beyond (2nd edition) (with a Foreword by Brian Eno). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Please note that these registers will be posted on the website from now on. If you have not already submitted details, please do so by Friday, 29 September (please see back of this volume for the appropriate information and form).

If your university, place of work of organisation seeks publicity or advertising for courses/events/publications, then Musicology Australia is a good place in which to do so. Please contact me should you wish to insert an advertisement. Our rates are competitive and negotiable.

Paul Watt, Editor, Musicology Australia, pwatt@cup.edu.au, 57 Forster St Heidelberg VIC 3081.

From early 2000 at Monash our former Department of Music has been afforded a much higher status in the university, i.e. that it is now known as the School of Music—Conservatorium with some new staff appointed and its performance, musicology, ethnomusicology and composition programs expanded. Currently over 55 postgraduate students are enrolled.

Andrew McCredie and David Tunley are both turning 70 this year and given their important role in establishing and promoting the development of musicology in Australia, the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Music with Monash University's School of Music—Conservatorium are organising celebrations for them. Andrew McCredie’s birthday was celebrated with sessions of musicological papers by former and current students, and a dinner on Sunday 3rd September. David Tunley’s birthday will be marked by a concert of works he edited and a dinner on Friday 6 October.

In March of this year, the Council of the University of Adelaide endorsed a set of principles for the development of a Memorandum of Understanding between the University and the State Government. The principles included the understanding that the Elder Conservatorium and the Flinders Street School of Music would merge as part of Adelaide University and that the merged School would offer a single suite of degree and sub-degree programmes across a range of musical sub-disciplines and styles. The discussions relating to implementation of the merger have now begun in earnest with the formal start of the new school expected in January 2002. As part of the process, the Elder Chair of Music has been advertised and it is hoped that the new appointment will begin in Adelaide by January 2001.

While the staff of both schools recognised the difficulties involved, we are optimistic that this will be the best outcome for music education in South Australia.

Members will notice the new logo, which is appearing officially for the first time on this issue of the MSA Newsletter. The logo has been developed in response to concerns that the old version no longer reflected the progressive and up-to-date image the Society wishes to project, as well as to clarify the concept behind the original design, which was intended to represent a seated didgeridoo player.

This fresh incarnation of the MSA’s logo has been developed by Theo Politis of Metrographics, Canberra, over a two-year period of consultation with the national executive and national committee. We thank Theo and the many committee members involved for the great patience and insight which has gone into this redesign. We trust now that this bold new image will meet with the approval, indeed delight, of Society members as it goes out to meet the world!

In response to the change of membership year to 1 July, now coinciding with the financial year, the MSA Newsletter will also be published one month later, in September and March of each membership year. It is hoped that this schedule will better tie in with the semester dates of the Australian academic year.

Jaki Kane, as Registrar of Graduate Theses in Music, maintains the Society’s database, which is no longer published in Musicology Australia, and is currently being transferred to the Society’s website.

Please send forms to: Jaki Kane, MSA Registrar of Graduate Theses in Music, fax (02) 6248 0997, E-mail Jaki.Kane@anu.edu.au, or post to Jaki Kane, Canberra School of Music, GPO Box 804, Canberra ACT 2601.

SUBMISSIONS TO REGISTERS

This is to remind members to submit details of their publications during 2000 (calendar year) for inclusion in the Register of Members’ Publications, which currently being transferred to the MSA’s website. Also due are details of undergraduate theses in music completed during 1999. Details should be sent directly to the MSA’s Website Coordinator:

Brett Chapman, 144 Bellevue Avenue, Rosanna VIC 3084

E-mail: Brett.Chapman@riotinto.com

Members are requested to submit new or revised details on a copy of the form available by clicking on the link below.

If your thesis is currently listed as ‘in progress’ but you have subsequently been awarded your degree, please notify us. If you are aware of theses currently in progress but not listed in Musicology Australia, please give a copy of the form to the relevant person. This is especially important for theses being completed in non-music departments such as anthropology, sociology, history or cultural studies.

· Tim Carter (Royal Holloway, University of London)	(tba)
· Kay Dreyfus (Monash University, Melbourne)	‘Alma Moodie and the landscape of giftedness’
· Annegret Fauser (City University, London)	‘Alterity, Nation and Identity: Some Musicological Paradoxes’
· Richard Taruskin (University of California, Berkeley)	‘Stravinsky and Us’

National Committee 1998–2000

Committee Members

Membership Secretary

Website Coordinator

CONTENTS

monday, 26 February 2001

Saturday, 11 November to Sunday, 12 November 2000

‘CREATING MUSICAL FUTURES:

SUBMISSIONS TO REGISTERS

Register of Graduate Theses-in-Progress