G’day, mate!
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” the focus is on Australian music that incorporates authentic instruments of the indigenous peoples.
It’s possible that no composer has embraced the didgeridoo to quite the extent of Peter Sculthorpe, who lived from 1929 to 2104. Sculthorpe, in his maturity Australia’s most prominent composer, was occupied with environmental concerns, such as preservation of wildlands and climate change, and possessed an overt sympathy with aboriginal culture.
He composed 18 string quartets. Four of them have a part for didgeridoo. His String Quartet No. 12, completed in 1994, is inspired by Ubirr, a large rocky outcrop in Kakadu National Park in northern Australia, which houses some of the best and most varied aboriginal rock paintings in the country.
John Antill’s ballet, “Corroboree,” from 1944, was one of the first attempts to incorporate authentic aboriginal elements into modern classical music. Corroboree is the anglicized word for an aboriginal ceremony involving singing and dancing, in order to communicate “dreaming stories” about journeys and actions of ancestral beings which will continue to have consequences in the future.
Antill attended one of these sacred ceremonies in Botany Bay in 1913, the same year as the debut of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Antill later denied any previous knowledge of Stravinsky’s ballet, even at the point he came to write the work 30 years later.
In addition to the use of the didgeridoo, the orchestration also includes a part for bullroarer, a kind of blade on a long cord that when swung in a large circle makes a roaring vibrato sound.
“Corroboree” received its first complete recording on the Naxos label in 2008. That’s the version we’ll hear, though in terms of unbridled primitivism, it’s difficult to match the suite, as recorded by Sir Eugene Goossens and the London Symphony Orchestra, back in 1958. If you like what you hear, definitely seek that one out.
I hope you’ll join me for this musical walkabout through the Australian outback. “Didya Hear the One About the Didgeridoo?” Tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
To get you in the mood, here’s ten hours of didgeridoo music:
And a demonstration of the bullroarer:
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