Explain How The Australian Landscape Contributed To The Discovery Of Musical Identity

How the Australian landscape contributed to the discovery of musical Identity in Australian composers

The Australian landscape has been a source of inspiration for many Australian artists and can be interpreted in many ways, some of them go to extensive lengths in order to interpret the nature of the land through their art, and this has resulted in a development in musical identity in Australia. This is more significant to first nation people as they lived in harmony with the land for many thousands of years before colonialism, and quite a lot of their recorded art has been inspired by their environment. There are two examples in this text that are both compositions from 20th century composers who have been inspired by their interpretation

There are many parts of us that help us find our identity, like our parents, our jobs and our life experience. When we experience music that we identify with and can relate to, it is a way of us experiencing our identity, for example a classically trained musician may ‘feel at home’ listening to Bach's music. When discussing national identity, the most recognisable example in music is a national anthem. We identify with the Australian national anthem because it's part of our culture, ‘it's the very way we identify our culture’(6). To use a more specific example, in Kathryn Fentons book discussing one of Giacomo Puccini’s Operas written in 1910, it was described to it’s American audience as an ‘attempt to gain American local colour and American feeling both spontaneously and by the use of various kinds of American themes.’(9) At the time, critics of the show ‘scoured the score for American musical material and had very strong reactions when they found them, they challenged Puccini's choice of sources and his methods of incorporating those sources into the score, at the heart of the critics’ concern lay the social identity of the communities whose musical materials Puccini had studied and interwoven into the opera’s musical fabric.’(9) This next quote is part of a debate between critics in order to ‘Arrive at a final answer to the

As a younger composer in Germany, Grainger would compose in a conventional style, however after being introduced to the Frankfurt group of elite composers in 1896 by one of their members Cyril Scott (3), Grainger would begin to develop his own compositional style. One of his most celebrated examples of his compositional method is ‘Hill Song No.1’. In some notebooks that survived from this time, Grainger himself had: “sketched some ideas for an 'Australian Bush Style' inspired by photographs of what he called 'raw' Australia and his memories of the country between Melbourne and Adelaide”(1.) Percy was clearly moved because of the way that he interpreted the visual aspect of the Australian outback as a child and although he was already rejecting the classical European method of composition, this feeling would undoubtedly inspire him to write Hill-Song No.1, that was described by english music critic Wilfred Mellors as his 'most radical attempt to create music totally aboriginal, independent of a priori rules and regulations'. (1) This piece flows in a continuous and often randomly seeming way, he puts in best in one of his program notes: “My aim is to let each phrase grow naturally out of what foreran it & to keep the music continually at a white heat of melodic