Primitivism and Settler Primitivism in Music: The Case of John Antill’s Corroboree

Abstract

John Antill’s Corroboree (1944) was the most prominent Australian musical work of the first half of the twentieth century yet it has received little musical analysis, especially in terms of how it constructs a representation of First Nations Australians. This paper demonstrates that Corroboree exhibits a range of musical gestures associated with conceptual genealogies of early human musical development and thereby foregrounds a reading of the piece as an example of musical Primitivism. Primitivism itself is shown to be in complex relation with musical Exoticism. Further, Corroboree’s primitivist aesthetics and politics are in some respects distinct from works of modernist Primitivism such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in that the former tends to eschew both an ethos of innovation as well as emulation of the primitive. Similarly, it is not so much a response to a disillusionment with modernity nor to a societal diagnosis of decadence or alienation. Rather, it accords more with an idea formulated by the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, “settler primitivism”, that refers to instances of Primitivism in settler societies in which settler artists represent or appropriate a specific indigenous culture as a gesture of national identification. Settler primitivism tends to present Indigenous people as located in the ancient past, providing a lineage for the “young” settler colonial nation, symbolically vacating the land for the settlers, and associating them with modernity. https://academic.oup.com/mq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/musqtl/gdab022/6517202?guestAccessKey=f0ba8a6e-c908-4ed6-a232-0e0460a99857