The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960 by Rhoderick McNeill (review)

These are tough times for symphony orchestras around the world. In a now famous address delivered to the League of American Orchestras in June 2011, their President, Jesse Rosen, declared a ‘Red Alert’ for the industry. More recently, a survey by Ricky O’Bannon at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra analysed the programming data from twenty-one major American orchestras for their 2014–15 seasons and found, among other things, that the average date of composition of a piece being performed was 1886 and that the percentage of works being performed by American composers was 11 per cent (Ricky O’Bannon, ‘Orchestra Season by the Numbers’, Bsomusic.Org, http://bsomusic.org/stories/the-2014-15-orchestra-season-by-the-numbers.aspx (accessed 26 Feb. 2015)).

While the six major state-based symphony orchestras that make up the backbone of the Australian orchestral scene are not under a comparable level of existential threat as some of their US counterparts, their programming suggests even less confidence in the artistic or commercial viability of repertory by local composers. The Australian Music Centre, which promotes and represents Australian composers, found that in the period 2009–11 less than 5 per cent of the music performed by these orchestras was Australian (Matthew Westwood, ‘Australia’s Composers also Deserve a Hearing’, The Australian, 5 Aug. 2014, www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/music/australias-composers-also-deserve-a-hearing/story-fniwj43s-1227013175724 (accessed 26 Feb. 2015)). Few Australian musicians, let alone audiences, however, would naturally associate the symphony with their music history. If that is at least in part because of a lack of common knowledge about what repertory might actually exist, it is an omission that The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960 aims to correct. As stated in the introduction, this book is the first attempt at a ‘systematic exploration of the symphony in Australia’ (p. xi). Until now it has been all too easy for musicologists and artistic directors of orchestras alike to assume that the Australian symphony was either a small and unimportant category of Australian music, or that any symphonic repertory currently languishing unloved in archives, libraries, and personal collections in Australia must languish chiefly because it is a ‘justly neglected masterpiece’. McNeill’s book boldly suggests otherwise.

We find, in fact, that such prejudice is principally the child of ignorance. To be sure, the symphony was not only of European origin, it spoke of and to an essentially European experience. McNeill quotes the Australian musicologist Therese Radic, then a student at the Melbourne University Conservatorium, who recalled that her class there in the 1950s had come to assume that not only were all composers foreign, they were also all dead (p. 31). David Tunley had also been right to observe in 1978 ‘that music-making (in its widest sense) in Australia was modelled, long after frontier ways had given place to a more urban sophistication, upon traditions inherited from Britain, more especially from Late Victorian England’ (David Tunley, ‘Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century: A Background’, in Frank Callaway and David Tunley (eds.), Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century (Melbourne, 1978), 1–6 at 1). Certainly, those who might search such repertory for a uniquely Australian sound expressed in orchestral form will do so largely in vain. But McNeill’s study reminds us that by the end of the nineteenth century the symphony had also become a genuinely international medium, albeit with all manner of local variantsçnot least in Britain, where composers like Vaughan Williams and Holst were pushing past Victorian musical fashions with some success.

That there seems at first hearing to be less of a push towards really innovative forms and sounds in the symphonic music that was composed in the newly federated colonies of Australia is not necessarily because, as McNeill claims, there was a ‘lag of decades between the major revolutions in European modernism and local musical compositions’ (p. 2); by the early...