Australia’s Jindyworobak Composers: (Routledge Research in Music)

Australia’s Jindyworobak Composers examines the music of a historically and artistically significant group of Australian composers active during the later post-colonial period (1930s–c. 1960). These composers sought to establish a uniquely Australian identity through the evocation of the country’s landscape and environment, including notably the use of Aboriginal elements or imagery in their music, texts, dramatic scenarios or ‘programmes’. Nevertheless, it must be observed that this word was originally adopted as a manifesto for an Australian literary movement, and was, for the most part, only retrospectively applied by commentators (rather than the composers themselves) to art music that was seen to share similar aesthetic aims. Chapter One demonstrates to what extent a meaningful relationship may or may not be discernible between the artistic tenets of Jindyworobak writers and apparently likeminded composers. In doing so, it establishes the context for a full exploration of the music of Australian composers to whom ‘Jindyworobak’ has come to be popularly applied. The following chapters explore the music of composers writing within the Jindyworobak period itself and, finally, the later twentieth-century afterlife of Jindyworobakism. This will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers of Ethnomusicology, Australian Music and Music History.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: The Jindyworobak composer: fact or fiction? Chapter 2: Alfred and Mirrie Hill Chapter 3: Clive Douglas Chapter 4: John Antill Chapter 5: James Penberthy Interlude: post-colonial Echoes and pre-echoes of Jindyworobakism Chapter 6: Peter Sculthorpe and the afterlife of Jindyworobakism Chapter 7: Jindyworobakism in global perspective

About the Author :
David Symons is Honorary Senior Research Fellow and part-time Senior Lecturer at the Conservatorium of Music, The University of Western Australia, Australia.

Review :
'[David] Symons offers fresh perspectives about the group of composers who, between 1930 and 1960, sought an Australian musical identity with reference to local landscape and First Nations culture as they understood it. ... The Jindyworobak movement in music has been one of Symons's regular concerns since the 1990s and his findings are brought together definitively in Australia's Jindyworobak Composers.' Musicology Australia