Peter Sculthorpe's Irkanda period, 1954-1965: music, nationalism, 'aboriginality' and landscape

Abstract

Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda Period, 1954-1965: Music, Nationalism, ‘Aboriginality’ and Landscape Peter Sculthorpe began writing what he considered to be truly Australian music in the mid1950s. Many audience members, critics and culture industry personnel also heard it as Australian. Sculthorpe’s place in Australian music has subsequently been very prominent, beginning in the early 1960s during his Irkanda period. The period takes its name from his works Irkanda I - IV, their name borrowed from an Aboriginal word meaning “scrub country” that Sculthorpe variously translated as “the huge scrub-country of Central Australia,” “an austere and lonely place” and “a remote and lonely place.” This thesis is a study of the Irkanda-period works on which Sculthorpe’s initial reception was based: the origin of his dominant nationalist project, of significance in both his oeuvre and the history of Australian music. These musical representations of aspects of Aboriginal ‘folklore’ and central Australian landscapes have received significant popular and academic attention. However, many accounts have been shaped by what is identified as a culturally nationalist historiography evident in much of the commentary on Australian music and culture from the mid1960s. This thesis addresses some of the distorting effects of this historiography, through biographical analysis, music analysis and source study. An overarching aim is to analyse the music and reception of Sculthorpe’s Irkanda works in detail to address the question of what it was that audiences found plausibly Australian about them. Sculthorpe’s Irkanda music draws on longstanding representational traditions in classical and entertainment genres of musical exoticism, landscape, and ‘primitivism.’ His work is strongly connected with contemporary non-indigenous Australian cultural expressions of landscape and ‘Aboriginality.’ The relationship of his work with these contexts is explored, as is the nationalist basis of his music and its context within wider Australian and transnational cultural traditions. Keywords Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda Period, 1954-1965: Music, Nationalism, ‘Aboriginality’ and Landscape Peter Sculthorpe began writing what he considered to be truly Australian music in the mid1950s. Many audience members, critics and culture industry personnel also heard it as Australian. Sculthorpe’s place in Australian music has subsequently been very prominent, beginning in the early 1960s during his Irkanda period. The period takes its name from his works Irkanda I - IV, their name borrowed from an Aboriginal word meaning “scrub country” that Sculthorpe variously translated as “the huge scrub-country of Central Australia,” “an austere and lonely place” and “a remote and lonely place.” This thesis is a study of the Irkanda-period works on which Sculthorpe’s initial reception was based: the origin of his dominant nationalist project, of significance in both his oeuvre and the history of Australian music. These musical representations of aspects of Aboriginal ‘folklore’ and central Australian landscapes have received significant popular and academic attention. However, many accounts have been shaped by what is identified as a culturally nationalist historiography evident in much of the commentary on Australian music and culture from the mid1960s. This thesis addresses some of the distorting effects of this historiography, through biographical analysis, music analysis and source study. An overarching aim is to analyse the music and reception of Sculthorpe’s Irkanda works in detail to address the question of what it was that audiences found plausibly Australian about them. Sculthorpe’s Irkanda music draws on longstanding representational traditions in classical and entertainment genres of musical exoticism, landscape, and ‘primitivism.’ His work is strongly connected with contemporary non-indigenous Australian cultural expressions of landscape and ‘Aboriginality.’ The relationship of his work with these contexts is explored, as is the nationalist basis of his music and its context within wider Australian and transnational cultural traditions.