If they can’t be indigenous, they may try to be primitive: Rachel Campbell, ‘Primitivism and Settler Primitivism in Music: The Case of John Antill’s Corroboree’, The Musical Quarterly, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

If they can’t be indigenous, they may try to be primitive: Rachel Campbell, ‘Primitivism and Settler Primitivism in Music: The Case of John Antill’s Corroboree’, The Musical Quarterly, 2022

06Feb22

Excerpt: For several decades after its 1946 premiere, John Antill’s Corroboree was widely regarded as the work that defined Australian music and “Australianness” in music. As a government publication put it in 1969, “Antill … had to bear the distinction and notoriety of being hailed as the creator of Australian music.”¹ James Murdoch opened his 1972 book Australia’s Contemporary Composers with the claim that it was “generally agreed” that his subject, “creative music” in Australia, “began in 1946 with the performance of Corroboree.”² For the commentators of the 1960s and 1970s, Corroboree was the work that brought a belated modernism to Australian composition.³ Such a historiography has since been challenged and recognized to be a product of 1960s compositional modernism itself.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

%d bloggers like this: