TY - JOUR
AU - Campbell, Rachel
AB - 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.4 However, this does not detract from the magnitude of Corroboree’s critical reception, which was effusive and at times even ecstatic, and included commentaries such as “An Australian Art Is Born.”5 Corroboree is a representation of First Nations Australian people and culture in the form of a ballet, although it has been performed most frequently as an orchestral suite. The word “corroboree” is thought to have originated in the Dharug language and it is used widely in Australia to mean a First Nations dance performance with song and rhythmic accompaniment. Antill was all but unknown as a composer in 1946 when Eugene Goossens made a “Celebrity Conductor” tour of Australia for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. During the tour, Goossens put out a call for an Australian orchestral composition to perform in Australia and then “take back to America” with him, to program in his regular post with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Corroboree, the piece he ultimately chose, was one that satisfied some of the hopes he had expressed to the local newspapers, which described him as being “anxious to take back with him a really representative Australian composition, typical of the day ‘and not reeking of Victorianism.’”6 At forty-five minutes duration Goossens felt the work to be unsuitable for performance in an orchestral concert, so he created a sixteen-minute suite by making several cuts, including reducing its original seven movements to four. He arranged performances in London and Cincinnati in 1946, and to fly Antill to the London performance a last-minute subscription fund was put together by a Sydney newspaper, the Daily Telegraph.7 Antill’s London activities were covered in enthusiastic detail by the Australian papers, and he was met by a group of press photographers when he returned home.8 The Corroboree suite was subsequently performed in Amsterdam, Sweden, at the London Promenade Concerts, by the Berlin Philharmonic at the Edinburgh festival, in Tokyo, Rome, and Toronto, and then in 1965 in Manila, Hong Kong, and Liverpool. A transcription recording conducted by Adrian Boult for the British Broadcasting Corporation was made during Antill’s 1946 visit to London and then distributed to radio stations around the world. There are records of broadcasts in the Netherlands, Tokyo, New York, Chicago, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and multiple recordings of the work were programmed regularly on Australian radio from 1946 to the 2000s.9 Goossens made two especially prominent recordings, the first in Sydney in 1950 for His Master’s Voice, and the second, coupled with Alberto Ginastera’s Panambí Suite, in 1958 with the London Symphony Orchestra on Everest.10 The latter received wide international circulation, and its crimson cover, featuring a generically exotic image suggesting a shrunken head with a mélange of Papua New Guinean and African adornments (notably, not Australian), became a visual reference for Antill’s piece for many music lovers (fig. 1).11 Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide 1958 Cover image, Corroboree and Panambí: Suite from Ballet, London Symphony Orchestra, cond. Eugene Goossens. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide 1958 Cover image, Corroboree and Panambí: Suite from Ballet, London Symphony Orchestra, cond. Eugene Goossens. The full ballet version was mounted in Sydney in July 1950 after a proposed London season fell through. Billboard magazine reported “Aussie Ballet Fans Go for ‘Corroboree.’”12 The ballet then toured Australian state capitals as well as Launceston and Broken Hill in 1951 for the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Federation of Australia, and it was seen by thousands of people, attracting massive press attention everywhere it went.13 A smaller production—accompanied by a tape recording instead of full orchestra—was performed over one hundred times within the state of New South Wales in 1954. In view of Corroboree’s position in Australian music and its history of international performances, it is remarkable how little musical analysis it has received.14 Aside from cursory ascriptions of “primitivism,” there has been almost no consideration as to how its musical representations are realized, and why so many settler-Australian commentators found it to be a plausible portrayal of Aboriginality. Corroboree has often been the subject of study by cultural historians and dance scholars.15 But what has been lacking is detailed musical analysis and assessment of resultant implications for the work’s representational politics. Such an analysis is useful, not only for an understanding of the semiotics and politics of this historically significant piece but because it can point to potential interpretations of works informed by similar representational politics, especially in settler societies. Perhaps even more important, Corroboree has implications for analyses of musical primitivism more broadly, since so many references to this regime of representation within the musicology of classical music either assume that particular musical gestures connote primitivism or tend to subsume primitivism within the category of musical exoticism. In contrast, this analysis of Corroboree foregrounds the issue of representational primitivism by situating the work’s most prominent musical features in relation to genealogies of eighteenth- to twentieth-century ideas of the earliest stages of human musical development. This article, therefore, addresses the following questions: What was it about Corroboree’s musical language that led to interpretations of primitivism? What is the conceptual basis for the idea of primitivism as it has been applied to Corroboree and how does this relate to wider discussions of primitivism and exoticism in music? To what extent can Corroboree’s musical gestures be situated within specific ideas of the musically primitive that were circulating in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How do Corroboree’s aesthetics relate to primitivisms within influential twentieth-century artistic and musical movements? As will be shown, neither Antill’s stated aims nor Corroboree’s cultural context demonstrate the impetus toward cultural renewal or reinvigoration evident in the aesthetics of most primitivisms within modern art and literature. Rather, its major functions and motivations stem from what the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has identified as “settler primitivism.”16 For Thomas, primitivist production characteristic of settler societies has tended to represent and appropriate indigenous references with the aim of creating a sense of identity and belonging for the settler nation. In his words, “The deep association between indigenous people and the land provided strong and condensed reference points for a colonial culture that sought both to define itself as native and to create national emblems.”17 Crucially, this means that the way primitivism frames its subjects as temporally prior to the perspective of so-called civilized observers has the effect of symbolically casting indigenous people and culture into the ancient past, figuring them as ancestral to the settler–colonial nation and thus superseded by it. This is a pronounced aesthetic distinction from the better-known primitivisms associated with formal innovation in modern art and the revitalization and renewal of culture in works such as Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) and Sergei Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite (1915).18 Settler colonialism is a term applied to the type of imperialism that involves the dispossession and replacement of indigenous peoples with large numbers of settlers and the acquisition of indigenous land. It has tended to be seen as an ongoing process in countries that include the United States, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. This type of colonialism is distinguished from that which emphasizes resource extraction and the use of native labor that was, for example, carried out by the British in India.19 Recently, various nations in Latin America, including Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay have also received analysis in relation to settler-colonial paradigms, and arguments have been made for their inclusion in studies of settler colonialism, even if some aspects of their politics and historical processes may be viewed as distinct.20 Multiple musical works originating from these settler nations fall within the ambit of settler primitivism, and many of them date from the first half of the twentieth century. While Antill’s Corroboree is the sole focus of this article, it is worth mentioning other primitivist works that represent indigenous peoples and cultures as a gesture of national identification. These include Arthur Farwell’s Navajo War Dance No. 2 (1905), Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Uirapurú (1917/1934) and Amazonas (1917), Alberto Ginastera’s Panambí (1936), Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonia India (1936), and Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá (1937) and La noche de los Mayos (1939). These pieces may be conceptually grouped together on the basis that their principal impetus is identification with a specific indigenous culture. This is in contrast to the more general motivation within wider movements of modern art and literature to effect cultural renewal through contact with something raw, vital, and ancestral to the life-worlds of “over-civilized” and potentially decadent Westerners. Nikolai Roerich’s statements about Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, for example, were concerned with regaining elemental immediacy and wholeness in the face of over-rarefied intellectualism, even if the route to this vitality was a specifically Slavic nationalist one.21 A common element across settler primitivisms and most of those within modern art is the concept of a remote past, despite that the lives of many people categorized as “primitive” were coterminous with those of the intellectuals or artists doing the categorizing.22 In this sense, primitivism is usually predicated on the idea of cultural and human progress and a gradation or binary opposition between “savagery” and “civilization.”23 Although there were primitivist gestures within ancient cultures,24 the concept has been most widely influential in the era of the Four Stages Theory of human history—the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—and then through Social Darwinism and cultural evolutionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The most common schema of the Four Stages Theory measured human progress in technological and economic terms in which the beginning stage of mankind was viewed as a state of “savagery,” at which point people were hunter-gatherers.25 The next stage saw progression to pastoralism or “barbarism” with animals as property, then to agriculture or civilization and the ownership of farmland. The final stage was that of the modern West and the development of commercialization.26 In the nineteenth century, Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer further intensified this model by applying the concept of linear evolution and they specifically racialized human progress in theories now known as scientific racism. Various peoples around the world were thought to have reached certain stages but only Europeans had achieved the final stage.27 Colonists of European origin, including those in settler societies, were for the most part categorized at the pinnacle of human progress, despite periodic anxieties about the impact of distance from the sources of “civilization” in the metropole and the potentially degenerative effects of the tropics on European racial stock.28 Within these European-derived conceptual models, primitives were therefore either the Stone Age ancestors of modern humans, or “tribal” peoples living in Africa, the Americas, or Oceania, or to some extent folk cultures internal to Western nations.29 Primitivism may therefore be a term used in multiple, often interlocking ways to refer to different cultures, peoples, attributes, and processes. In view of this complexity, it is worth surveying some of its uses in musical discussions in order to account more precisely for how primitivism operates as a representational category in Corroboree. In practice, the ideas of primitivism and the primitive have been used in music in four major ways that bear relevance to an analysis of Corroboree. First, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings in evolutionary theory, Social Darwinism, music history, and comparative musicology speculated and theorized music’s early origins and also described the musics of peoples understood as primitive in relation to Westerners.30 Second, the descriptor “primitive” has been viewed in a related way and generally used as an adjective to describe a property of musical gestures considered to be simpler, cruder, or more basic than those of the usual musical idioms of the place and time in which the work was composed. Such descriptions are found, for example, in the literature on musical exoticism to identify the means through which composers have represented the Other, for example, the idea of “primitive harmonies.”31 Third, and again in a distinct but related manner, primitivism is a term for a category of representation in which specific musical techniques or topoi portray peoples or cultures understood as primitive. This includes, for example, designations of The Rite of Spring or Villa-Lobos’s Uirapurú as works of musical primitivism. Fourth, and lastly, the term primitivism is used at times to refer to what was regarded in the early twentieth century as a geographical category of culture, one that encompassed specific peoples that Europeans spuriously categorized as “primitive,” usually Africans, Native Americans, and the indigenous peoples of Oceania. This term was used in contrast with “Oriental,” which referred to the cultures of Asia and the Middle East.32 Musical features associated with the representational category of primitivism—the third use of the term listed above—include some outlined by Richard Taruskin as characteristic of The Rite of Spring: Stravinsky’s radical simplification of texture, his static, vamping harmonies, and his repetitive, ostinato-driven forms, were the perfect musical approach to the primitivist ideal.33 Similarly, in a classic dissertation on musical exoticism, Miriam Karpilow Whaples used the fourth sense of primitivism to note that the musical representations of “savages” (mostly Native Americans) that she examined from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to involve “monophony, drone basses, and repetition … [and] extravagant chromaticism in rich harmonic texture” as well as “the equation of primitive with European folk-simplicity.”34 What will be apparent from this particular set of primitivizing musical features is that they are a subset of those that commentators have analyzed as characteristic of musical exoticisms. Simplified or bare textures, harmonic stasis or the use of pedal points or drones, repetition, and ostinatos, especially rhythmic ostinatos, as well as chromaticism—including “constantly shifting harmonies” and “complex and inherently undefined chords or chords that are cacophonous and cluster-like”—have been itemized by Ralph P. Locke as among those used to evoke “an exotic locale or culture,” particularly when they are combined.35 Whaples’s inclusion of “European folk-simplicity” further accords with Locke’s and others’ observations of the importance of modes and pentatonicism in exoticizing representations.36 Musical exoticisms have thus quite commonly involved primitivizing gestures in the second sense mentioned above: the use of simpler or more basic gestures than those of usual idioms. Such gestures have often been read as representing the culture being depicted as deficient, barbarous, or inferior.37 W. Anthony Sheppard has noted that primitivism (and Orientalism) “should be viewed as subspecies of exoticism,” or at least that they are usually seen that way, and he was likely referring to representations of Oceanic, Native American, African, or Stone Age peoples, that is, in the third and fourth senses listed above.38 However, the relationship between exoticism and the set of broader ideas of primitivism in music involves some more complexity. While the nature of that relationship may not be settled in this relatively short paper on Antill’s Corroboree, a few brief points indicate its entangled quality. As Sheppard has alluded elsewhere, and as anthropologist Johannes Fabian influentially argued in 1983, anthropologists conceptualized relations between peoples of the world as temporal relations. Fabian noted that this was a view in which the inhabitants of various regions tended to be understood as less developed than Westerners, and that this effectively rendered geographical relations and relations of ethnicity as relationships of time.39 The temporal shift that underpins most primitivisms has already been outlined above, but the overarching parameters of the Four Stages Theory and cultural evolutionary thinking placed all cultures at a lesser stage of development than the West and as relatively more primitive. For instance, Asia, the Middle East, and Greek and Roman classical antiquity were categorized either as “barbarous” or at early stages of civilization.40 Notionally, all Western-originated exoticism takes place within an overarching framework of primitivizing temporality. In practice, however, composers such as Claude Debussy regarded music such as Javanese gamelan as possessing greater sophistication than much European classical music,41 and Olivier Messiaen’s Sept Haïkai (1962) involved an exotic engagement characteristic of the postwar avant-garde that emphasized the complexity of non-Western music. Clearly, exoticism is not always primitivist in the sense of simplification or crudity. Primitivism often involves exoticization. As Marianna Torgovnik observed, “Us/them thinking structures all discourse about the civilized and the primitive,” and the primitive is an “exotic world.”42 And although modernist primitivism has tended to posit monogenism through universal processes of human evolution, and therefore a dimension of human commonality, the location of some peoples in the past and others in modernity is a strongly Othering gesture. Fabian reasoned that “anthropology’s efforts to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of difference as distance.”43 This is particularly the case in Antill’s Corroboree, and in settler primitivism more broadly, since settlers enact identification with indigenous people while simultaneously emphasizing what they perceive to be the profound distance and difference between their life-worlds. There are aspects of identification as well as differentiation and repudiation in settler primitivisms. The imbrications of primitivism with exoticism and the potential for conceptual slippage between them, in addition to the commonality of specific musical gestures to both modes of representation—many of which are in evidence in Corroboree—raises the issue of what is meant when the work is categorized as primitivist. It was received as such from 1946 to 1965 when it was performed frequently, and it has been described as “primitive,”44 as having an “abrasive ‘primitivist’ idiom,”45 and compared with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in academic writing.46 The following reading of the work will relate prevalent musical features of Corroboree to some of the ideas of the musically primitive found in the first category of the use of the term set out above. That is, the third sense of the term—a specific case of representational primitivism—will be analyzed in relation to the first sense: descriptions of the musics of peoples who were understood as primitive and theories of music’s origins in European writings on Social Darwinism, music history, and comparative musicology. Corroboree’s primitivism will therefore be situated in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual genealogies of early stages of human musical development.47 This approach seems useful, because in the vast literature on musical exoticism as well as the significantly fewer discussions of representational primitivism, the potential for musical gestures to evoke ideas of the primitive in the specific sense of early human development has been more often assumed than interrogated. The major exceptions are Richard Taruskin’s and Glenn Watkins’s analyses of The Rite of Spring.48 However, the former was appropriately framed in relation to specifically Slavic traditions and Watkins’s tends to be grounded mostly in reception. Many discussions of musical primitivism have indeed approached the topic almost entirely through the lens of reception.49 Others, especially those surrounding Black performance in France and Germany, tend to emphasize analysis of representation in relation to aspects of performance other than music, or focus on the relationships of music with other art forms, or eschew detailed musical discussion.50 In the context of these writings, an interpretation of the musical gestures of a specific work in relation to theories of early human musical development addresses a gap. In a number of ways Corroboree’s semiotics do intersect with those of musical portrayals and understandings of Black people, and the relevant literature will be referred to in the following. Further features of Corroboree will be analyzed here intertextually, and some of Antill’s statements about it will be outlined, as well as dominant understandings of Aboriginal people in the period and in sources that Antill read. Composition, Context, Choreography, and First Nations Music At the time of Corroboree’s composition and first performances, First Nations Australians were widely regarded as among the most primitive people living on earth.51 They were understood as living remnants of humanity’s ancient past, and Australia itself was viewed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “the Asylum for Flora and Fauna of past ages,” a place where modern man could encounter human and biological relics of a distant originary time.52 J. G. Frazer, for example, wrote in 1899: “Central Australia was the place where the scientific inquirer might reasonably expect to find the savage in his very lowest depths, to detect humanity in the chrysalis stage.”53 This is, of course, now known to be a damaging and racist fiction, and it has frequently been acknowledged that these types of conceptual schema provided invaders and settlers with rationalizations for the dispossession and murder of indigenous peoples.54 Antill’s statements from around the time of Corroboree’s first performances demonstrate that he viewed Aboriginal people in exactly these terms as the earliest and most “primitive” of people. He completed the piece in May 1944, and by September 1946 he had produced an explanatory document titled “Corrobboree [sic]: A Ballet Suite for Orchestra” that was circulated to journalists and others to provide information about the work.55 In this text he described Aboriginal people as “the world’s oldest race,” said they were “still living in the Stone Age,” used “only the most primitive instruments,” and were “at one with nature.”56 Antill repeatedly identified the initial impetus for the writing of Corroboree as his experience of seeing a live corroboree performed for tourists at an area of Sydney called La Perouse sometime between 1919 and 1921.57 He subsequently researched Aboriginal culture by visiting Sydney’s Mitchell Library to read several anthropological studies.58 These included Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen’s The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People, based on fieldwork they had conducted with the Arrernte people of central Australia from the 1890s to 1920s, and A. W. Howitt’s The Native Tribes of South-East Australia of 1904.59 It is notable that Antill undertook a method typical of his era in researching the works of non-Indigenous scholars rather than consulting with Aboriginal people in order to gain knowledge, let alone permission to write a ballet. This accords with the impetus of anthropology in modernist primitivisms observed by writers such as Michael Bell.60 It is also notable that in Antill’s research and in his statements about the ballet he did not recognize distinctions between Aboriginal nations, instead adopting a homogenizing view that assumed a continent-wide pan-Aboriginality that “erased differences” between First Nations identities.61 While Antill’s own statements about Aboriginal people tended to the condescending rather than the derogatory, he operated firmly within the dominant conceptualizations of his era. Spencer and Gillen’s writings on the Arrernte were particularly important in the history of anthropology and in relation to the concept of a universal primitive mind. Their books influenced the theories of Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud (especially in Totem and Taboo of 1913), and the anthropologist and folklorist J. G. Frazer, who had actually arranged the publication of Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899).62 Spencer had been trained as an evolutionary biologist and applied a “Darwinian biogeographical scheme” to his fieldwork.63 J. G. Frazer and many others’ interpretations of Spencer’s work were also dependent on frameworks of human stages and human progression.64 It is notable that this and Howitt’s similarly evolutionist The Native Tribes of South-East Australia were being superseded or at least challenged by other anthropological paradigms by the time Antill was reading them, including reconstructed evolutionism and Franz Boas’s anti-evolutionism, and therefore understandings of the potential for temporal relationships between different peoples of the world were not uniform in this period.65 However, the evolutionist underpinnings of the primitive proved difficult to remove, and Fabian’s criticism of the denial of coevality dates as late as 1983.66 What is important is that the texts that Antill consulted as he wrote Corroboree propagated the view of Aboriginal Australians as the most primitive and ancient living people, within an evolutionist framework. Corroboree is, as noted, a 45-minute work for large orchestra that is divided into seven contrasting movements. Its length, the diversity of its musical language, and the density of some of its orchestral textures may have been contributing factors in relation to how little detailed musical analysis it has received, despite its historical importance. Prominent musical features of the work will be described below, but first, a discussion of the origin, balletic program, elements of the ballet productions, and relationships with Aboriginal musics. At the time of Corroboree’s enthusiastic reception in Australia, it was not widely known that the work had been intended as a children’s piece during its first stage of composition. The main set of undated compositional sketches bears an inscription addressed to what Antill, having grown up in the era of the segregation of Aboriginal people, clearly conceptualized as a non-Indigenous audience: “Therefore I dedicate this work to the Children of Australia. Trusting that they … may be encouraged to study further and appreciate the lives … of these true Australians.”67 There is an interesting tension between the reception of Corroboree as a milestone in national “maturity” and some of the more naive gestures that stem from its beginnings as a work for children. As for Antill’s other aspirations in writing the piece, Corroboree has frequently been interpreted as having broadly nationalist aims, and there are statements from the composer soon after its premiere that support that interpretation.68 Furthermore, the 1930s and 1940s in Australia had seen increasing interest in the appropriation of Aboriginal culture as a route to national identity.69 Corroboree is therefore congruent with the nationalist dimension of settler primitivism. The conceit of the ballet as a presentation of a corroboree as well as its specific dramatic and programmatic dimensions were mostly derived from Antill’s reading of Spencer and Gillen’s The Arunta. Antill said that he was depicting a “play about” corroboree performed for entertainment rather than a sacred ceremony.70 He had read about central Australian totemic identities in The Arunta and the action of the ballet involves a pageant-like sequence of particular totems performing at various times, as is evident in the movement titles shown in Table 1. The emphasis on totems accords with their dominance in Spencer and Gillen’s interpretation of Arrernte society.71 Antill may have selected totems to appear in the piece with a view to their potential for musical interpretation, as he responded in some sections with imitations of animal movements and birdsong. His 1946 explanatory account of the work justifies this via a primitivist trope, the claim that Aboriginal people are “master[s] of mimicry and burlesque, and the ‘play about’ corroboree usually takes the form of most realistic imitations of humans and animals.”72 The musical character of most of Antill’s imitations is highly naive. Although the work did take on characteristics that moved away from its origin as a work for children, especially in the first and last movements, naive sections remain, such as the imitation of kangaroos hopping at the beginning of the fourth movement—“Kangaroo Men Pay Homage to the Rising Sun”—and the low passage for bassoon and contrabassoon that Antill labels “Grandfather Frog” (third movement, “A Rain Dance,” mm. 73–85). Others are less naive, such as the birdsong in the oboe that Antill conceptualized as the sound of an extinct “Thippa Thippa bird” in the second movement.73 Table 1. Corroboree list of movements. I Welcome Ceremony: Witchetty Grub men assisted by members of the Emu Totem. II Dance to the Evening Star: by the Thippa Thippa and Bell Bird people. III A Rain Dance: by the Frog Totem assisted by Fish men. IV Spirit of the Wind: demonstrated by the Snake Totem. V Homage to the Rising Sun: Kangaroo men. VI The Morning Star Dance: by the Hakea flower Totem. VII Procession of Totems and Closing Fire Ceremony: in which representatives of the Lace Lizard, Cockatoo, Honey Ant, Wild Cat and Small Fly Totems participate. Much usage of Boomerang, Spear, and Fire Stick. I Welcome Ceremony: Witchetty Grub men assisted by members of the Emu Totem. II Dance to the Evening Star: by the Thippa Thippa and Bell Bird people. III A Rain Dance: by the Frog Totem assisted by Fish men. IV Spirit of the Wind: demonstrated by the Snake Totem. V Homage to the Rising Sun: Kangaroo men. VI The Morning Star Dance: by the Hakea flower Totem. VII Procession of Totems and Closing Fire Ceremony: in which representatives of the Lace Lizard, Cockatoo, Honey Ant, Wild Cat and Small Fly Totems participate. Much usage of Boomerang, Spear, and Fire Stick. Open in new tab Table 1. Corroboree list of movements. I Welcome Ceremony: Witchetty Grub men assisted by members of the Emu Totem. II Dance to the Evening Star: by the Thippa Thippa and Bell Bird people. III A Rain Dance: by the Frog Totem assisted by Fish men. IV Spirit of the Wind: demonstrated by the Snake Totem. V Homage to the Rising Sun: Kangaroo men. VI The Morning Star Dance: by the Hakea flower Totem. VII Procession of Totems and Closing Fire Ceremony: in which representatives of the Lace Lizard, Cockatoo, Honey Ant, Wild Cat and Small Fly Totems participate. Much usage of Boomerang, Spear, and Fire Stick. I Welcome Ceremony: Witchetty Grub men assisted by members of the Emu Totem. II Dance to the Evening Star: by the Thippa Thippa and Bell Bird people. III A Rain Dance: by the Frog Totem assisted by Fish men. IV Spirit of the Wind: demonstrated by the Snake Totem. V Homage to the Rising Sun: Kangaroo men. VI The Morning Star Dance: by the Hakea flower Totem. VII Procession of Totems and Closing Fire Ceremony: in which representatives of the Lace Lizard, Cockatoo, Honey Ant, Wild Cat and Small Fly Totems participate. Much usage of Boomerang, Spear, and Fire Stick. Open in new tab A major character in the ballet is the Medicine Man who is the leader and coordinator of the corroboree as well as being a member of the “Council of Old Men,” and these terms and concepts were also taken from Spencer and Gillen. There is additionally a figure entirely of Antill’s invention, a “tribal jester.” The most prominent ballet productions of Corroboree were presented in Australia in 1950–51 and 1954, and the former was based on Antill’s scenario. Both used a set design by William Constable consisting of a striking three-dimensional rock formation and low hills upstage, and multiple critics felt that this anchored the action effectively in the central Australian outback (fig. 2).74 Both productions used a combination of modern dance, classical ballet steps, and movements based on the choreographers’ impressions of various Aboriginal dance styles. In both ballets, the dancers wore brown body stockings or leotards and leggings, and their bare feet and hands were painted brown or black. The earlier production used headdresses and grotesque papier-mâché masks, whereas in 1954 the dancers’ faces were painted brown. Many of the costumes in both productions included additional cloth or chenille trims and head and arm decorations imitating Indigenous Australian body painting and adornments of feathers, leaves, hair, and fur.75 There were also props imitating spears, totems, and sacred items. A selection of the costumes and props of both ballets were based on secret-sacred Arrernte designs and body decoration. The cultural owners of these designs do not want most non-Indigenous people to see the originals, nor the photographs of them in Spencer and Gillen’s books, nor illustrations of them that Antill made in the original Corroboree manuscripts.76 It is therefore prudent to refrain from reproducing the majority of the photographs of the productions, except where it is certain that images do not include or were not based on secret-sacred designs, or where it is known that they were derived from Indigenous performance genres that are public and not secret.77 (figs. 3–4) Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide John Antill (center) looks over the mini-stage set designed by William Constable with technical stage director John Clugston (left) and Bim Hilder, scenic artist. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales on 388/box 004/item 105. Courtesy ACP Magazines Ltd. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide John Antill (center) looks over the mini-stage set designed by William Constable with technical stage director John Clugston (left) and Bim Hilder, scenic artist. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales on 388/box 004/item 105. Courtesy ACP Magazines Ltd. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Ivan Ives, “Preview Corroboree ballet,” 1950. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Ivan Ives, “Preview Corroboree ballet,” 1950. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Ivan Ives, “Preview Corroboree ballet,” 1950. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Ivan Ives, “Preview Corroboree ballet,” 1950. The 1950–51 production was choreographed by the twenty-seven-year-old Australian Rex Reid, and that of 1954 by North American choreographer and “ethnic dancer” Beth Dean.78 In the first production, Reid followed the majority of Antill’s plans for the ballet’s action, which consisted of a theatrical pageant performed throughout the night and into the dawn. Reid had not seen live First Nations dance performances, but he incorporated actions suggestive of activities he imagined central Australian people might enact, such as hunting and digging, and imitations of the movements of emus and kangaroos. He was put into contact with anthropologists and watched some of C. P. Mountford’s films made in central and northern Australia.79 Despite evidence to the contrary, it states in the program that Reid had “made no attempt to imitate aboriginal dancing; rather, he has given us his interpretation of the corroboree in stylized dance form, which suits the requirements of Theatre.”80 Dance commentators have described Reid’s choreography: the first gesture is one of the best-known movements in First Nations Australian dance: “Many of the movements chosen incorporate the shaking of the knees in second position plié, leaps with flexed feet, ‘kangaroo’ squat jumps and the use of angular arm movements parallel to the floor, often with the fingers shaking.”81 There were also “hops and twirls, waving arms, snake-like movements of the body, crawling, marching, actions that imitate the movements of animals and birds (including a frog-like hop), and other actions that show humans engaged in simulated hunting activities. In terms of spatial design and grouping, it is often simplistic.”82 Beth Dean’s research for the second ballet production was designed to distinguish her work from what she framed in multiple writings as the inadequacies of the first Corroboree.83 She and her husband, Victor Carell, spent eight months in central and northern Australia in 1953 observing dance in Aboriginal communities. Much was made of this trip in publicity and in the printed programs distributed at performances, and Dean claimed that “as far as has been theatrically possible, authentic dance steps, movements and patterns of the Aborigines have been used.”84 Like Reid, she included steps imitating animal movements; for example, she described the Kangaroo Totem as “bound[ing] forth, feet high up in front, in continuous leaping and then glid[ing] softly forward, in typical fashion of a kangaroo foraging for food.” She also included women’s dances, a men’s “high knee-action stamp,” and imitations of hunting activities.85 She felt that she had made “a translation of the conventions of one culture into another.”86 However, dance critic Michelle Potter, who viewed 1994 video footage of a re-creation of Dean’s Corroboree, observed that “a significant proportion of the individual steps in Dean’s piece are based on the vocabulary of ballet and modern dance.”87 Dean did apparently utilize solos, duos, and trios more effectively than Reid, and the other major new element was a scenario by Victor Carell that saw Dean dance the lead role of a teenage boy being initiated into manhood, loosely based on a Warlpiri initiation ceremony that Dean and Carell had observed in 1953.88 The music of Corroboree imitates a small range of sounds from Indigenous Australian musics and includes the use of two Aboriginal instruments, the clapsticks, called “trora sticks” in the score, and in the last movement, the bullroarer, a piece of wood attached to a string and swung around. There is an imitation of a didjeridu by the bassoon in the first and last movements, although the chromatic descent and chromatic alternation between two notes a semitone apart (G, A♭) gives a general impression of the instrument’s low and murky sound and mostly does not imitate its musical use in northern Australian traditions (see ex. 1).89 Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, bassoon, mm. 29–32. All excerpts from this work: © Copyright Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Print rights administered in Australia and New Zealand by Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, bassoon, mm. 29–32. All excerpts from this work: © Copyright Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Print rights administered in Australia and New Zealand by Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd. Used by permission. All rights reserved. On several occasions Antill said that after witnessing the tourist corroboree at La Perouse in the early 1920s he had notated some of the melodies and rhythms and used them in Corroboree. However, his statements on this subject when taken together are inconclusive and contradictory, and it has usually been assumed that no Aboriginal musical material was quoted.90 There is one short passage in the final movement consisting of repetitions of a four-note motive that he called an “Aboriginal tune” in a radio script dating from the mid- to late 1950s.91 The corresponding passage from the final movement is given in example 2 for reference. The first four notes of the melody were notated on the script in the rhythm in which they first appear. As is apparent, they are then repeated multiple times in changing rhythmic patterns. It is notable that another motive written on the same script that Antill identified as having the same origin has not been found in the work (A♭, E♭, D♭, and E♭). The relationship of these motives with the music that Antill heard in the early 1920s therefore remains ambiguous.92 Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, string and wind reduction, mm. 265–68. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, string and wind reduction, mm. 265–68. In other respects, Corroboree’s connections with actual Indigenous Australian musics hinges on how much of it Antill had been able to hear before he wrote the work. The question is an open one, but it may not have been very much. He had, of course, witnessed people performing at La Perouse. Recordings had been played at lectures in several Australian state capitals in the 1920s and 1930s, and there were a couple of radio broadcasts in the early 1940s, although Eugene Goossens had heard Indigenous music on his 1946 Australian tour only by visiting E. Harold Davies in Adelaide to listen to Davies’s wax cylinder recordings of Arrernte songs.93 Antill did read some descriptions of Aboriginal musics in a range of relatively old texts such as those by A. W. Howitt and Isaac Nathan.94 His notes contain an interesting phrase copied out of Howitt’s book, “rhythm strong and irregular—double and triple suddenly,” which may have contributed to Corroboree’s asymmetrical meters in the second movement (⁠ 54 ⁠) and movement four (⁠ 78 ⁠).95 The relatively minor nature of these connections between Corroboree and Aboriginal musics reinforces the degree to which the piece is a product of Antill’s perceptions and fantasies of Aboriginality, rather than musical imitation. This is significant given that audiences generally found the work to be an authentic and successful musical representation. Antill himself indicated firmly that Corroboree was an interpretation of Aboriginal music and culture, rather than an attempt to imitate. Although this kind of statement is a trope of Western creative independence when appropriating other cultures, the way Antill expressed it elucidates his compositional attitude. In the explanatory document referred to earlier, Antill wrote, “I have endeavoured to preserve, within the confines of our present day orchestra, the spirit of our native race through the medium of their expressive ceremonial dances.”96 Some ten years later, probably around 1956, he emphasized again in a radio talk the way that the music of Corroboree was his interpretation of Aboriginal performance: A corroboree has almost the quality of a nightmare. Yet at the same time, you feel a tremendous awe at watching a ceremony that was born in the beginning of history, some twenty thousand years ago and yet while still timeless, describes the basic elements of life. It is almost the same experience you feel when watching the stars on a clear night, they are remote and yet we are still part of them. I had to make my listeners feel the atmosphere of the corroboree, to make him feel the awe that I mentioned, the timelessness, the horror of the whole ceremony. In fact I had to reinterpret the whole primitive scene through my eyes, and through the resources of a modern symphony orchestra.97 Antill’s use of the words “awe,” “timelessness,” “beginning of history,” “horror,” and “primitive” indicate aspects of his musical aims and the nature of the representation. The Musical Primitivisms of Corroboree Many of Corroboree’s musical gestures are congruent with principles found in nineteenth-century writings on early stages of human culture and music making. One of the touchstones of the primitive was the idea of simplicity; for instance, Herbert Spencer argued that human development saw progression from simplicity to complexity.98 There are multiple elements of Corroboree that may be read in relation to simplicity, although a more frequent trope in discussions of “primitive” music was the associated pejorative one of monotony.99 Simplicity and monotony have been conveyed by composers of primitivist music through a lack of variety in elements such as the array of pitches, and via means such as harmonic stasis, pedal points or drones, or large amounts of repetition or ostinatos. More than half of Corroboree consists of passages of harmonic stasis based on pedal points or ostinatos. Antill himself described the accompaniment patterns of Corroboree’s third movement, “A Rain Dance,” as “monotonous.” The passages in question exhibit musical simplicity achieved with a bare texture, a limited number of chords (three), and a correspondingly extreme degree of repetition. In the passage in example 3, everything in the texture except the melody contributes to the formation of two parallel alternating chords, and a passing chord in parallel between them on the last eighth note of each bar. Compounding the effect, the passage is a lengthy one, of twenty-four measures duration (mm. 98–121; from timecode 1:01).100 This chordal ostinato pattern accompanies a vibraphone solo and the structure of the chord is quintal (027). Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, third movement, mm. 98–99, reduction of mm. 98–99. Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, third movement, mm. 98–99, reduction of mm. 98–99. The same pattern recurs in another long section, on different bass notes, with intensified, dissonant quintal chords produced by the addition of further intervals of perfect fifths to a total of five pitches in each chord (02479). A reduction of mm. 194–222 (from 3:03) is shown in example 4. In a radio broadcast Antill said of these passages of parallel chords, “Notice the monotonous, throbbing accompaniment.”101 Example 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, third movement, mm. 194–95, reduction of mm. 194–95. Example 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, third movement, mm. 194–95, reduction of mm. 194–95. Parallel chords such as these have been associated with the idea of a “primitive and unvaried form of harmonic writing” in commentaries on musical exoticism.102 Corroboree features multiple brief passages of parallel chordal movement especially in the fourth movement, “Spirit of the Wind.” The longest of these consists of augmented triads rising by semitone over two octaves, mm. 71–82 (from 1:52). The manner in which the “monotonous” chords in the third movement are articulated and reiterated multiple times is characteristic of some well-known primitivist works; example 5 involves a single chord treated this way. Michael Pisani has described such configurations as “pulsing chords” and “tom-tom effects.”103 Since the chord is held static for a period and articulated repeatedly in a regular pulse, the harmonic stasis emphasizes the rhythmic dimension of the pitched instruments and transforms pitched material into percussive. There is a succession of such passages in the section in the final movement at the end of the “Procession of Totems,” before the “Fire Ceremony” begins. Antill labeled the first instance “All totems raised, ‘WHA WHA’ upraised spears and boomerangs,” mm. 281–88 (from 5:59), shown in example 5. The repeated string chord here is fifth-based and highly dissonant (0156) and provides a harmonically static background to a rhythmically augmented version of the “Uplifting of Totems” melody, which itself consists of a primitivist three pitches. Further examples of passages using chords in the strings in this manner are found over the next hundred or so bars: mm. 297–312 (from 6:32), mm. 341–56 (7:53), mm. 408–23 (9:52). Such a texture is also characteristic of the opening of George Antheil’s techno-primitivist Ballet Mécanique (1925) and parts of The Rite of Spring, although Stravinsky often syncopates the chords. Antill syncopated this type of texture only briefly in the “Cockatoo” section of the Procession in the final movement, measure 76 (from 0:57). Example 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, brass and strings mm. 281–88; “pulsing chords” with “uplifting of totems” melody. Example 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, brass and strings mm. 281–88; “pulsing chords” with “uplifting of totems” melody. Corroboree is saturated with ostinatos. Hubert Parry had written in his “universal” music history, the Evolution of the Art of Music of 1896, that “savages” often “contrive little fragmentary figures of two or three notes which they reiterate incessantly over and over again. Sometimes a single figure suffices.”104 Several decades later the critic Ernest Newman described contemporary Russian nationalist composers including Stravinsky in similar terms, writing that their “familiar faults” included the short-breathed phrase, the limited mental outlook, the endless, tiresome repetition of the same little figures … incessant repetition of the same figure is the mark of the savage or the child in music.105 The connotation of monotony is evident here again. Antill similarly believed that repetition was an important feature of Aboriginal music making even if he expressed it more relativistically when he wrote: “By our standards, they appear to repeat unceasingly.”106 He responded by shaping each of Corroboree’s movements around the basis of one or more distinctive, repetitive rhythms that he described as “persistent rhythmic figure[s].” Some are pitched and some are unpitched; example 7 is one prominent example.107 In the first, fourth, and last movements, the ostinatos persist for very long passages. In the first movement, the “Welcome Ceremony,” two percussion patterns are stated throughout almost the whole movement and almost always occur simultaneously. As shown in example 6, the lower is for bass drum, and the other for Antill’s version of clapsticks, the “trora sticks.” The ostinato from movement four, “The Spirit of the Wind,” is shown in example 7. It similarly persists for most of the movement, being absent only in the introduction and just before the movement’s climax (and the climax itself consists of the ostinato motive fortississimo in octaves, measure 116). Movement four is a rondo and its contrasting sections are partly distinguished by statement of the ostinato in the snare drum rather than as a pitched motive. Example 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, measure 1, trora sticks and bass drum. Example 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, measure 1, trora sticks and bass drum. Example 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, fourth movement, measure 10 timpani, ostinato. Example 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, fourth movement, measure 10 timpani, ostinato. Longer ostinato patterns are used in the final movement, such as the four-measure ostinato for snare drum and tom-tom that lasts through most of the Fire Ceremony section, for ninety-two measures, from 444 to 535 (from 10:53; ex. 8). This has a military and forward-driving character and both this figure and the other four-measure percussion ostinato in the final movement (bass drum, mm. 198–245, from 3:25) are in four with the character of a march, articulating the Procession of Totems. Example 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, mm. 444–47, snare and tom-tom, ostinato. Example 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, mm. 444–47, snare and tom-tom, ostinato. The short motive that recurs most frequently in Corroboree is that of the Medicine Man, shown in example 9, which functions sometimes as a leitmotif and at other times as an ostinato. It is prevalent throughout much of the first movement after being introduced in the double bass at measure 29 and then recurring every four measures between mm. 29 and 34, mm. 56–90, and mm. 116–24. At the first point it is introduced—which is also the moment of the first entry of the didjeridu imitation—Antill indicates that it embodies “Movements by the Medicine Man.”108 In a subsequent passage, mm. 131–47, its three notes are cycled through repeatedly in quarter notes in the timpani as the “Medicine Man Performs His Tricks.”109 It returns again every four measures in mm. 269–305. Example 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, measure 29, double bass, Medicine Man motive. Example 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, measure 29, double bass, Medicine Man motive. The Medicine Man motive is also the basis for one of the two main themes of the final movement, quoted above in example 5, the “Uplifting of Totems” melody. This theme consists of the three pitches of the shorter motive descending and ascending repeatedly in different rhythmic patterns. “Uplifting of Totems” recurs frequently through movement seven, deployed twice in sections that build tension by means of statements of the theme on a sequence of pitches at decreasing intervals of time: on D (measure 210, from 3:49), F (m. 218), A♭ (m. 226), C (m. 234), D# (m. 238), F# (m. 240), A (m. 242), B♭ (m. 244), then at fortississimo on B (m. 246). This final statement on B reaches the pitches at which the motive appeared in its Medicine Man guises. “Uplifting of Totems” is subsequently harmonized with parallel fourths, fifths, and octaves (mm. 269–80), then rhythmically augmented and stated in octaves, fortississimo (measure 281, then measure 297 from 6:32). The finale of the movement, which is the point at which the bullroarer enters (measure 540 from 13:35), repeats the sequence of statements on different pitches. For the theme’s climactic statement, from measure 580, it is inverted in the brass at quadruple forte, and again harmonized by perfect fourths, fifths, and octaves, recalling film cues from Westerns signifying Native American people. In the program note for the first performance of the suite of Corroboree, and for many subsequent performances, Antill wrote, “As may be expected, the emphasis is on rhythm and percussion.”110 This is a statement that points to an understanding that Antill thought was so obvious it needed no explanation. It is likely that he was referring to a view of the origins of music that was circulating in the nineteenth century that rhythm developed before pitch. This was only one theory among several, and there were alternative views of music’s origins in impassioned speech or in birdsong, for example.111 However, the figuring of rhythm and percussion as primitive was certainly widespread enough for Antill and parts of his audience to have encountered it. For example, the English writer John Rowbotham schematized musical development into stages, the first of which was “The Drum Stage” and the second “The Pipe Stage.”112 Friedrich Rochlitz, writing in 1800, said that “primitive peoples … have absolutely no real tonal [harmonic and melodic] art nor any feeling for it, but rather only rhythm, and feeling only for that.”113 In 1802 Heinrich Christoph Koch wrote: “The principal marks of the music of a still primitive people, [were] tumultuousness and extremely perceptible representation of rhythm by monotonous percussion instruments.”114 The Austrian writer Richard Wallaschek argued emphatically in his 1893 publication Primitive Music that the drum was not the oldest or simplest instrument, but mostly retained the idea that rhythm was the basis of music.115 Ronald Radano has shown that rhythm became racialized as African by at least the early twentieth century, especially within American culture, and there is much evidence in French jazz reception that the “primitivism” of jazz was understood to hinge on an emphasis on rhythm.116 Interestingly, in England and to some extent France in the wake of the reception of The Rite of Spring, rhythm was cast as primitive and Russian, although at other times The Rite of Spring itself was understood (apparently even by Debussy) as part of a Black trend in art.117 As Nancy Berman has written, “Primitivism’s primary musical sign was understood to be rhythm.”118 As noted, long passages of harmonic stasis emphasize rhythm as a consequence of holding pitch still, as to a lesser extent do parallel intervals and chords, or movement between chords of the same type. There are also multiple passages in Corroboree in which the texture is particularly bare, for instance, where it is made up solely of ostinatos, pedal points, melodies, and short flourishes, and chords are either absent or entirely static. A typical example is music around the bassoon’s first didjeridu imitation in the first movement. Many years after composing Corroboree, Antill said in a broadcast for his seventieth birthday: “The rhythmic background of Corroboree is so strong. Corroboree really is rhythm more than music—anything musical.”119 For nineteenth-century writers on “primitive” musics, a lack of emphasis on pitched material and supposed lack of sophistication in its use were versions of a larger sense of perceived deficiency in relation to what they valued most about Western music. Alexander Rehding has observed that Europeans tended to conceptualize the nature of their own music in terms of harmony and polyphony, to the extent that song, rhythm, and noise were consequently Othered as primitive in various ways.120 As C. F. Michaelis concluded in his 1814 analysis of travelers’ accounts from various places including Africa, the South Pacific, and Asia: We usually find the feeling for harmony and melody developed among these people in proportion to their greater or lesser general development, and their music more or less simple, crude, and wild.121 Similarly, musical progress tended to be racialized in nineteenth-century France and defined in terms of harmony, and the supposed deficiency of Middle Eastern music in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts was associated with a lack of polyphony as well as harmony.122 These were not monolithic views, since some nineteenth-century writers, including Richard Wallaschek and Julian Tiersot, were aware that there were so-called primitives, such as Congolese, Kanaks, and Tahitians, who made harmonies in their musics.123 Nevertheless, the dominant lines of thinking were that not only was an emphasis on rhythm often linked with an idea of an earlier stage of musical development, but the very principle of deficiency was a framework through which to make overarching conclusions about the music of non-Europeans and music’s early stages. When it came to composers writing music that stemmed from these views, Locke has summarized relevant compositional approaches in his work on exoticism. In the context of the views of music’s early stages just surveyed, his description also applies fittingly to representational primitivism, which is an intention on the composer’s part to deprive the music of the structural and stylistic features typical of Western art music. In particular, the composer avoided those features that tended to be accorded high aesthetic value and intellectual status, such as flexible phrase structure, smooth and goal-oriented modulation techniques, full four-part writing (with voices moving and resolving in ways prescribed by composition treatises) and clear large-scale formal shaping.124 Corroboree’s bare harmonies, bare textures, and emphasis on rhythm may be interpreted in relation to this principle of deficiency. Many of the melodies in the work additionally seem oppositional to a sense of classical balance; rather, they tend to be chromatic, and contain large, sometimes dissonant leaps and unpredictable meanderings upward or downward. The vibraphone melody that is accompanied by the “monotonous” pulsing chords in “A Rain Dance,” third movement, is a pronounced example (from measure 102, 1:10). Another that exhibits similar features is that of the bass clarinet in the sixth movement, “The Morning Star Dance” (mm. 5–10, from 12:00), shown in example 10. Example 10. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, sixth movement, mm. 5–10, harp and bass clarinet at pitch. Example 10. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, sixth movement, mm. 5–10, harp and bass clarinet at pitch. The music in this passage sounds like gentle, wrong-note dance music, largely due to the major second intervals in the harp. A principle related to deficiency that has repeatedly been invoked to explain musical gestures in exoticizing representations has been that of the “wrong-note” style or, as Mary Hunter analyzed it, “deforming the familiar to evoke the exotic.”125 Jonathan D. Bellman and Locke have relatedly itemized “shocking and ungrammatical harmonic gestures”126 and “weird chords” among the markers of exoticizing music.127 Although Corroboree’s harmonic language certainly performs such exoticization, its liberal use of dissonance and the prominence of cacophonous sounds or noisiness are features that are especially characteristic of primitivist representations of the first half of the twentieth century, including Panambi, The Rite of Spring, and the Scythian Suite. The quality of noisiness was another trope in writings about the music of “primitives”; Charles Burney, for example, asked, “Why are the inhabitants of three fourths of the globe still content, and even delighted with no better than noise and jargon?”128 In the late eighteenth century Johann Nikolaus Forkel wrote that in the most primitive communities, sound and noise were treated and thought of as if they were music.129 There are many examples of similar statements, such as Franz Joseph Sulzer’s description of Janissary music as “noisy caterwauling.”130 Corroboree’s large percussion section, orchestration in clashing layers, and frequent high-pitched woodwind shrieks may be situated in relation to these ideas of primitive noise, but there are genealogies of dissonance that are further relevant. Some of Corroboree’s dissonant chords were evident in musical examples already quoted, from the biting (0156) of movement seven to the relatively gentler quintal sonorities (027) and (02479) of “The Rain Dance.” One of the most prominent dissonant configurations throughout the work is (016), a trichord that Taruskin described as “the Rite chord” due to its prevalence in The Rite of Spring.131 Elsewhere it has been called the Viennese trichord due to its favoring by Second Viennese School composers. Presumably, the recurrence of (016) contributed to the repeated comparisons in Australian musicology of Corroboree with The Rite of Spring,132 although Corroboree lacks the better-known work’s octatonicism and complexity of rhythmic technique. In the opening “Welcome Ceremony,” a succession of (016) trichords that recur several times through the movement were labeled as “smoke signals” by Antill (starting at 1:20), and these are accompanied by shrieking thirty-second note chromatic ascents in the piccolo and noisy glissandi in the upper strings. The reduction of the chords is shown in example 11. Example 11. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, mm. 37–39, reduction. Example 11. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, mm. 37–39, reduction. Corroboree’s frequent unresolved dissonances, colorful orchestration, and liberal use of percussion were likely among the factors that led the work to be interpreted as achieving a desirable modernism by writers on Australian music in the 1960s and 1970s. Eugene Goossens stated in press conferences that “Corroboree was by far Australia’s most important contribution to modern music.”133 Relatedly, in many early twentieth-century contexts primitivism has tended to index the modern.134 Yet within the hundreds of articles and reviews of Corroboree appearing in Australian newspapers from 1946 to 1965, only a handful characterize the work as modernist in any way.135 It was much more often received in terms of primitivism and exoticism, described for example as “strange and exciting music,”136 “a stirring atmosphere of barbaric ritual … [with] primitive abandon,”137 and as having “much weird atmosphere.”138 Furthermore, Antill’s works after Corroboree were eagerly awaited but their tonal and modal language often disappointed commentators, who branded him old-fashioned. For example, James Murdoch wrote in 1972 that “Antill is a conservative. He deplores most of the directions twentieth-century music has taken.”139 The status of Corroboree as an outlier from Antill’s other music foregrounds interpretations of the work in representational terms within lineages of primitivism. Genealogies of dissonance that associated the musics of non-Europeans with paganism and the supernatural are therefore arguably more relevant than the ethos of innovation characteristic of some twentieth-century modernisms, and this is in keeping with Thomas’s analysis of settler primitivism. The representational use of dissonance as a marker of the exotic originated in the seventeenth century in what has been called the European Age of Exploration, when one of the major aspects of Christians’ perception of the peoples they encountered outside Europe fell within the framework of paganism.140 Olivia A. Bloechl has argued that Native American people and cultural practices, for example, were “marked … as a deviation of the divine order.”141 Furthermore, such practices carried an association with a range of people and behaviors on the margins of European society: with madness, demonic possession, and the supernatural.142 In nineteenth-century music, supernatural forces were frequently evoked with tritones and diminished seventh chords, and the prevalence of melodic and harmonic tritones in Corroboree is readily apparent. The nineteenth-century Australian composer Isaac Nathan actually associated Aboriginal performance with nineteenth-century music that evoked the supernatural in a book, The Southern Euphrosyne (1848), which Antill read as part of his Corroboree research. Nathan opined that Indigenous Australian traditions of body decoration rendered Aboriginal people “looking more like demons that human beings” and commented that such performances were “easy to imagine if you’ve seen the ‘incantations scene’ from Der Freischütz.”143 The final section and climax of the last movement of Corroboree was imagined by Antill as a “Fire Ceremony” and he quoted a passage from Baldwin Spencer’s Wanderings in Wild Australia in the preface to the manuscript score and in other descriptions of the work.144 The passage ends with the following description, “The showers of sparks falling in all directions & a mass of howling, dancing men, with their bodies grotesquely bedaubed, formed a scene that was little short of fiendish.”145 Antill composed two passages of diminished seventh chords in the “Fire Ceremony,” the first at its opening, mm. 424–35 (from 10:19), and another based on that, mm. 516–35 (ex. 12). Both are constructed around an E pedal point, and further dissonances are added to the diminished seventh chords. The tremolo, trills, and harp glissandos in these passages contribute to the supernatural atmosphere. Example 12. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, mm. 424–47, 431–35, reduction. Example 12. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, mm. 424–47, 431–35, reduction. The majority of Corroboree’s sonorities are quintal. The diminished seventh chords of the “Fire Ceremony” are examples of a small number of brief passages consisting of tertian-based harmonies; others include the Lydian celeste chords in the second movement, mm. 20–22, and the seventh chords in the fourth movement, mm. 83–90. The pervasiveness of quintal harmony in Corroboree lends a relatively bare or stark tone in comparison to tertian-based sonorities, especially in the context of Antill’s other music, which is mostly tonal or modal. Most of Corroboree’s harmony is built around perfect fifths, a sonority that had been used to signal the primitive in Orientalizing depictions and in music about European peasants, Indigenous Americans, and other “noble savages.”146 Additionally, some of the nineteenth-century theorizing around the origins of music had proposed that fourths or fifths were among the first intervals that humans had used; Hubert Parry, for example, wrote that “one of the two was probably the interval which primitive savages endeavored to hit in their first attempts at music.”147 The harmonic theorist Vincent Persichetti even proposed that one of the origins of quartal or fourth-based harmony in twentieth-century music may have been organum.148 Antill’s harmony is interpreted here as a development and extension of connotations of the musically primitive and ancient. The melodies through Corroboree that are harmonized in parallel fourths and fifths are more straightforward presentations of a musical topic. Melodies doubled in parallel fourths or fifths had become widespread by the 1930s in film music and Tin Pan Alley songs. This feature was used systematically in association with China, Japan, and Native Americans.149 Its origins lie at least as far back as art music composers’ settings of Native American melodies (for example, by Arthur Farwell and Harvey Worthington Loomis) in the early years of the twentieth century, and in pieces such as Debussy’s Pagodes (1903) from about the same time.150 The echoes of medieval organum caused some commentators to read it as an evocation of a sense of ancientness perceived in these cultures, and its presence at the end of the second movement of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite (from rehearsal number 32), for example, creates just such an atmosphere. In the “Procession of Totems” section of the final movement each of the “totem” groups raises its symbolic objects in succession to the sound of melodic parallelism in fourths and fifths. Statements alternate between brass, and woodwind and strings. The first melody is the “Aboriginal tune” quoted in example 2, followed by five statements of the “Uplifting of Totems” melody. The first of these is scored for brass, mm. 269–72 (from 5:37), shown in example 13. Such melodic parallelism in the brass strongly recalls cues associated with Native Americans in movie westerns. In some subsequent statements Antill varies this topic by voicing some of the parallel fourths and fifths in contrary motion with the melodic line, and that is also the case in the climactic iteration of the melody in augmentation and inversion at the end of the piece, mm. 580–88. Example 13. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, mm. 269–72, scored for brass. Example 13. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, seventh movement, mm. 269–72, scored for brass. If the musical representations in the first and final movements of Corroboree fall within the ambit of savage primitivism, the second movement, in contrast, puts forth a gentle, pastoral primitivism that alludes to the idea of Aboriginal people as close to nature. The movement opens with a sustained open fifth A–E in the strings, accompanying a cor anglais melody imitating birdsong (mm. 1–5). There are passages of parallel fifths in the celeste (mm. 8–12) and parallel fourths and fifths in the strings (mm. 10–13, 32–37, and 41–44). The melody in the first violins progresses through two pentatonic collections in mm. 14–16 (ex. 14) over A–E in the celeste: the collection A–C–D–F–G from the fourth beat of measure 14 to the end of the third beat of measure 15, and then G–A–B–D–E from the fourth beat of measure 15 into the fourth beat of measure 16 (plus one anomalous C).151 The open fifths and fourths and the pentatonicism recall some musical representations of Native Americans as well as others relating to Indigenous Australians.152 Example 14. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, second movement, mm. 14–16, violin 1, pentatonic collections. Example 14. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, second movement, mm. 14–16, violin 1, pentatonic collections. Though aspects of Corroboree’s representational politics are bound up in ideas of musical deficiency or deviancy in comparison to European norms of harmony and counterpoint, there is one contrasting passage that uses the esteemed contrapuntal technique of canon in invertible counterpoint as an analogue of ancient wisdom. The canon occurs at the point in Corroboree’s first movement that Antill labeled “Incantation of Council of Old Men,” mm. 77–92 (from 2:14), shown in example 15. In other words, it is a representation of Aboriginal chant, and the melodic lines are all descending in imitation of a widely recognized category of Indigenous Australian melody. The passage is a canon at the unison and octave in four parts, and the invertible counterpoint is all correct in an eighteenth-century sense except that it begins with parallel fourths or, when inverted, parallel fifths. As such, it has similar connotations to the learned topic of eighteenth-century music, with an initial primitivizing inflection. Example 15. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, mm. 77–92, woodwind, canon in invertible counterpoint. Example 15. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, mm. 77–92, woodwind, canon in invertible counterpoint. The Australian composer Clive Douglas wrote an earlier orchestral “Corroboree” (1939) that used a cakewalk rhythm.153 Antill, too, evoked American music in a manner that may be read as linking Aboriginal Australians with African Americans. Multiple commentators have heard the aeolian trumpet theme from the first movement that Antill labeled as the music of the “Witchetty Grub totem” as “jazzy” or alluding to jazz idioms (mm. 65–72, from 1:53).154 The first three measures are shown in example 16, along with the chordal ostinato and A–E strings pedal that are always associated with this melody. The theme begins with a classic ragtime syncopation pattern. Though most of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial theories about Aboriginal people viewed their heritage as distinct from that of Africans, there were some instances in which types of commonality were inferred.155 Sometimes Aboriginal people had been viewed through stereotypes of minstrelsy, for instance.156 Example 16. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, mm. 65–68, trumpet and strings. Example 16. Open in new tabDownload slide Antill, Corroboree, first movement, mm. 65–68, trumpet and strings. The final section of the work also presents links to racialized sound and sensation. Antill’s choreographic outline for the “Fire Ceremony” finale indicated “Absolute frenzy to bar 600. Concluding bar—prostration.”157 Although this was partly based on the dramatic image of the Fire Ceremony that Antill selected out of Spencer’s book, it also accords with much wider ideas of the primitive. The idea that “savages” experienced sensations far more intensely than so-called civilized people had wide currency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arthur de Gobineau put forth the idea that whites had “inferior sensuality and intensity of sensation” but were of higher intellect, and he fantasized about the artistic genius that might result from racial mixing.158 Friedrich Rochlitz argued specifically in relation to music that rhythm’s effects on primitive and “uncultivated” people was much greater than art music’s effects on the civilized.159 Much later, English writer Constant Lambert was troubled as to whether composition would be threatened or enhanced by what he called “the barbaric and vital Negro element” in popular song and jazz.160 Others were concerned similarly by the developments that Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring seemed to imply in art music, for instance, in a review that described its “maelstrom of rhythm, immensely vital and dominating, as remorseless and as irritating to the nervous system as the continuous thudding of a savage’s tom-tom.”161 Ideas of racialized, overstimulating rhythm were also circulating in Australia in the multiple polemics against jazz in the 1920s and 1930s and in a statement by the composer Fritz Hart, who was originally English but lived in Melbourne from 1909 to 1937. This particularly repugnant declaration was quoted in an interview in 1927, in which Hart said he was utterly opposed to the spirit of jazz, and the hysterical, sensational, Negroid element that permeates so much modern art. … He takes Stravinsky as an example of a composer who was great up to a certain point and then, as in The Rite of Spring, was content with primitive rhythms that had the power, akin to the beating of drums by Negroes, of rousing a civilized audience to frenzy.162 Antill’s “Fire Ceremony” finale mostly consists of layers of ostinatos, pulsing chords, high woodwind, string, and celeste trills, chromatic scales in parallel thirds, and melodies cycling through statements on sequences of different pitches. When combined with the crescendo poco a poco from mm. 540–71, as well as uniform eighth notes in the bass drum and cymbals, and rolls in the timpani, snare drum, and tom-toms, the result is a climactic buildup to a very loud texture of pulsing sound. Goossens described it as “one of the most exciting passages I know of in contemporary music.”163 Antill included an additional effect in this passage, the bullroarer (from measure 540, 13:35), an instrument found in many parts of the world but which is secret and sacred in Arrernte culture.164 It adds another layer of continuous noise and an unusual physical element in live performance as it is swung around. Conclusion This analysis demonstrates that Corroboree engages a range of musical gestures associated with ideas of the most primitive and ancient musics, and thereby constructs First Nations Australians as the most primitive and ancient living humans. As noted, this is a damaging and derogatory conceptualization that accords with the anthropological texts that Antill read when researching his composition. Though the discursive worlds of both exoticism and primitivism are thoroughly imbricated in Corroboree, as they are elsewhere, a reading that foregrounds representational primitivism is achieved through situating the work’s musical gestures within conceptual genealogies of music’s earliest stages. Many of Corroboree’s musical gestures bear commonalities with those of well-known works of modernist primitivism such as The Rite of Spring, Scythian Suite, Béla Bartók’s Allegro Barbaro (1911), and Leo Ornstein’s Danse Sauvage (1914), as the many comparisons of Corroboree to The Rite of Spring attest.165 As such, many of settler primitivism’s musical signifiers exhibit interchangeability with those of modernist primitivism, since both evoke the early stages of humanity. Similar interchangeability between representations of different cultures and groups of people has been observed across musical exoticisms.166 There are exceptions to such interchangeability across primitivisms, however: one prominent example that diverges from settler primitivism is Stravinsky’s renewal of musical language in The Rite of Spring via the abstraction and extension of elements of Slavic folk music, including through juxtaposition, verticalization, and transposition of melodic segments, and folk-like partitions of the octatonic scale.167 These kinds of procedures situate The Rite of Spring within modernist primitivism’s concern with formal innovation. Differences between the artistic attitudes of modernist primitivism and settler primitivism tend to lie, first, in modernist primitivism’s ethos of innovation and, second, in its emulation of primitive qualities, that is, its aesthetic project of reinvigoration and renewal through simplification and desire for elemental wholeness. And if modernist primitivism involves a degree of emulation of the primitive, settler primitivism enacts both identification and repudiation through emphasis of difference. Exoticism is therefore highly relevant to settler primitivism as settler artists desire and appropriate the long-standing relationship of the Indigenous with the land, while simultaneously emphasizing the settlers’ perception of difference. Benedict Anderson, Daniel M. Grimley, and other writers have emphasized the dual temporalities of nationalism. As Anderson wrote: “If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past.”168 For settler Australians in the mid-twentieth century, experiencing a national identity crisis as a result of the devolution of the British Empire, two hundred years of colonization seemed to lack the requisite temporal depth and Aboriginal culture provided a “lost sense of time.”169 However, the radical primitivisms of anthropology and other settler representations additionally framed Aboriginal people as belonging firmly to the nation’s past, superseded and replaced by the settlers in modernity. Antill came to maturity in the period of segregation and the “zenith of extinction discourse” in the 1930s, when settlers believed that Indigenous Australians were a dying race.170 It was also no accident, as James Clifford has written, that artistic primitivism emerged in the period of high colonialism, and Corroboree was conceived in Australia, a dominion within the world’s largest Empire.171 It was the most prominent Australian musical work in the first half of the twentieth century, until the mid-1960s, when Peter Sculthorpe emerged and took his early compositional bearings from its representation of Aboriginality.172 Rachel Campbell is a Lecturer in Musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, Australia. She has published articles on the music of Peter Sculthorpe and John Antill, as well as entries in Grove Music Online. Her research is focused on Australian music in the context of Australian cultural history. Email: rachel.campbell@sydney.edu.au Thank you to Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. and Hal Leonard for giving permission to reproduce the examples. Footnotes 1 Andrew D. McCredie, Musical Composition in Australia (Canberra: Advisory Board, Commonwealth Assistance to Australian Composers, 1969), 10. 2 James Murdoch, Australia’s Contemporary Composers (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1972), xi. 3 Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967), 152. 4 Peter Tregear, “Marshall-Hall as an Australian Composer,” in Marshall-Hall’s Melbourne: Music, Art and Controversy, ed. Thérèse Radic and Suzanne Robinson (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012), 199–207; Rachel Campbell, “Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda Period 1954–1965: Music, Nationalism, ‘Aboriginality’ and Landscape” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2014), 2–24. 5 W. Wagner, “An Australian Art Is Born,” The Canon 4, no. 1 (1950): 5; Rachel Campbell, “‘The Whole Work Is Full of Primitive Rhythms’: The Folk-Primitivist Origins of Peter Sculthorpe’s Nationalist Music,” Musicology Australia 91, no. 1 (2019): 36–37. 6 “Eugene Goossens Comes to Melbourne,” The Argus, 19 July 1946, 4. 7 “Fund to Send Aust. Composer to London,” Daily Telegraph, 10 October 1946, 5. 8 “Composer Back Home,” Daily Telegraph, 13 February 1947, 5. 9 “Composer Back from London,” Daily Telegraph, 7 February 1947, 10; Klaus Pringsheim to William James, 3 August 1954, National Archives of Australia SP724/1, 9/7/11; “What’s New in Music,” New York Times, 11 October 1959; WNYC, New York Times, 19 January 1962, 48; WNYC, New York Times, 11 November 1964, 87; “WEFM Forenoon Concert,” Chicago Tribune, 14 May 1968; “BBC Figures in a Landscape,” The Guardian, 10 May 1988, 40; Patricia Brown, “John Antill,” in Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century, ed. Frank Callaway and David Tunley (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), 44. 10 Corroboree: A Ballet Suite for Orchestra, ABC. Symphony Orchestra, cond. Eugene Goossens (HMV Ed.1193/4, 1950); Corroboree and Panambí: Suite From the Ballet, London Symphony Orchestra, cond. Eugene Goossens (Everest SDBR 3003/LPBR 6006, 1958). 11 I am grateful to ethnomusicologist Michael Webb for comment on the image. 12 “Aussie Ballet Fans Go for ‘Corroboree,’” Billboard 62, no. 29 (22 July 1950), 44. 13 Campbell, “The Whole Work Is Full of Primitive Rhythms,” 36–37. 14 For the most substantial analysis of key areas and themes see David Symons, Before and After Corroboree: The Music of John Antill (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 40–68. 15 See, for instance, Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970 (Fremantle, Aus.: Fremantle Press, 2008); Anna Haebich and Jodie Taylor, “Modern Primitives Leaping and Stomping the Earth: From Ballet to Bush Doofs,” Aboriginal History 31 (2007): 63–84; Amanda Harris, Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930–1970 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Victoria Haskins, “To Touch the Infinity of a Far Horizon: A Transnational History of Transcultural Appropriation in Beth Dean's Corroboree (1954),” Australasian Drama Studies 59 (2011): 23–38; Suzanne Spunner, “Corroboree Moderne,” in Modern Frontier: Aspects of the 1950s in Australia’s Northern Territory, ed. Julie T. Wells, Mickey Dewar, and Suzanne Parry (Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press, 2005), 143–64. 16 Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 12–13. 17 Ibid., 12. 18 See Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 849–74. 19 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 1999), 1–2; Lucy Taylor, “Four Foundations of Settler Colonial Theory: Four Insights from Argentina,” Settler Colonial Studies 11, no. 3 (2021): 344–65. 20 Richard Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (2007): 269–89; Peter Baker, “Unsettling the Language of Settlement: Imaginaries of Race and Experiences of Settlement in Contemporary Bolivia,” Settler Colonial Studies 11, no. 3 (2021): 366–85; M. Bianet Castellanos, “Introduction: Settler Colonialism in Latin America,” American Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2017): 777–81. 21 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:849–54, 866. 22 The terms “primitive” and “primitivism” will mostly be used here without scare quotes, despite the erroneous and offensive nature of the concepts when applied to human life. Scare quotes tend especially not to be used when the term specifies a category of representation. However, they are occasionally used when people or cultures are referred to as “primitive” in order to emphasize the spurious nature of the concept. 23 Marianna Torgovnik, Gone Primitive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3–8. 24 Michael Bell, Primitivism (London: Routledge, 1972), 1. 25 The number of stages in this teleological theory could vary; four was the most common in the Scottish Enlightenment but some writers proposed as few as three, or as many as ten. See Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 54. 26 Gelbart, Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music,” 50–54; Gregory D. Smithers, “The ‘Pursuits of the Civilized Man’: Race and the Meaning of Civilization in the United States and Australia, 1790s–1850s,” Journal of World History 20, no. 2 (2009): 251. 27 Nicholas M. Evans, Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s (New York: Routledge, 2015), 28, 35. 28 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 66–68, 70–73. 29 Gelbart, Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music,” 11, 57–60. Primitivism has also been applied to “mad” people, women, or popular culture in general. 30 For example, Herbert Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music,” in Progress, Its Law and Cause (New York: J. Fitzgerald and Co., 1882), 258–67; Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1788); Richard Wallaschek, Primitive Music: An Enquiry Into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instruments, Dances, and Pantomimes of Savage Races (London: Longman, Green, 1893). 31 Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49; Miriam K. Whaples, “Exoticism in Dramatic Music, 1600–1800” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1958), 114. 32 Mark Slobin, quoted in Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, “Introduction,” in Western Music and Its Others, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1. 33 Richard Taruskin, “A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and ‘The Music Itself,’” Modernism/Modernity 2, no. 1 (1995): 19. 34 Whaples, “Exoticism in Dramatic Music,” 258–59. 35 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 51–54. 36 Ibid., 51. 37 Mary Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio,” in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 53; Richard Taruskin, “‘Entoiling the Falconet’: Russian Musical Orientialism in Context,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 3 (1992): 261. 38 W. Anthony Sheppard, “Exoticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 797; W. Anthony Sheppard, “Exoticism,” Oxford Bibliographies, 2016, accessed 12 March 2021, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199757824/obo-9780199757824-0123.xml. 39 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 16; W. Anthony Sheppard, “Global Exoticism and Modernity,” in The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. Philip V. Bohlman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 606. 40 Gelbart, Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music,” 59–60. 41 Annegret Fasuer, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 198. 42 Torgovnik, Gone Primitive, 4, 8. 43 Fabian, Time and the Other, 16. 44 Campbell, “The Whole Work Is Full of Primitive Rhythms,” 36–37; Rhoderick McNeill, “Corroboree and Appropriation,” unpublished paper, 1. 45 David Symons, “From European Romantic to ‘Wild Colonial Boy’? John Antill and Post-Colonial Australian Opera,” in Opera, Emotion, and the Antipodes, vol. 2, ed. Jane W. Davidson, Michael Halliwell, and Stephanie Rocke (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2021), 6. 46 Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Lyrebird Press, 2016), 76. 47 A prominent method of unpacking compositional exoticism has been to compare musical representations to the descriptions of the musics that travelers and other writers encountered in the relevant time period. I am following this strategy, though in relation to more restricted ideas of the primitive circulating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including discussions based on travelers’ accounts, and with greater emphasis on theories of early human musical development. See Whaples, “Exoticism in Dramatic Music,” and Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century.” 48 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, vol. 1; Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 1994). 49 For example, Ted Gioia, “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth,” The Musical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (1989): 130–43; Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz Age Paris, 1900–1930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Jonathan O. Wipplinger, The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017); Nancy Berman, “From Le Sacre to Les Noces: Primitivism and the Changing Face of Modernity,” Canadian University Music Review 20, no. 1 (1999): 9–21; Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde, 1910–1925” (PhD. diss., McGill University, 2001); Rachel Howerton, ‘“Primitive Sounds’: An Examination of Conflicting Discourse in the Early British Reception of Igor Stravinsky’s Russian Ballets,” Journal of Musicological Research 38, no. 2 (2019): 117–36. 50 Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); James Donald, Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Blake, Le Tumulte Noir. 51 Bain Atwood, “Introduction,” in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, ed. Bain Attwood and John Arnold, special issue, Journal of Australian Studies 35 (1992): i–xvi. 52 John Rowbotham, A History of Music, vol. 1 (London: Trübuner, 1885–87), 21. 53 J. G. Frazer, “The Origin of Totemism,” Fortnightly Review (1899): 648, quoted in Henrietta Kuklick, “‘Humanity in the Chrysalis Stage’: Indigenous Australians and the Anthropological Imagination,” British Society for the History of Science 39, no. 4 (2006): 542. 54 James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 196–97; Olivia A. Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xv, 10–11, 25–26; Thomas, Possessions, 259; Evans, Writing Jazz, 35; Smithers, “The ‘Pursuits of the Civilized Man,’” 251. 55 Antill, “Corrobboree: A Ballet Suite for Orchestra,” 1946, Papers of John Antill, MS 437/8a/9 Box 14, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA). For dating, see Rachel Campbell, “The Genesis of John Antill’s Corroboree,” Context 45 (2019): 8n35. 56 Antill, “Corrobboree,” 4. 57 Campbell, “The Genesis of John Antill’s Corroboree,” 4. 58 Ibid., 8. 59 Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People (London: Macmillan, 1927); A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London: Macmillan, 1904). 60 Michael Bell, “Primitivism: Modernism as Anthropology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 354–56. 61 Lynette Russell, Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Constructions of Australian Aboriginalities (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2001), 1–3. 62 Torgovnik, Gone Primitive, 7–8; Kuklick, “Humanity in the Chrysalis Stage,” 535, 540, 542. 63 Kuklick, “Humanity in the Chrysalis Stage,” 540. 64 Ibid., 541–42. 65 Ibid., 556, Torgovnik, Gone Primitive, 8. 66 Torgovnik, Gone Primitive, 8; Fabian, Time and the Other. 67 Campbell, “The Genesis of John Antill’s Corroboree,” 12–13. 68 Ibid., 16–17. 69 Thomas, Possessions, 119. David Symons has labeled the engagement and appropriation of indigenous Australian culture in music from the 1930s “Jindyworobakism,” after a literary movement of a similar period. However, none of the associated composers identified with that movement, even as the rise of interest in Aboriginal-derived subjects was widely evident in design and visual art. Thus the term is not adopted here. David Symons, Australia’s Jindyworobak Composers (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021). 70 Antill, “Corrobboree,” 1. 71 Campbell, “The Genesis of John Antill’s Corroboree,” 11. 72 Antill, “Corrobboree,” 1. 73 John Antill, “Discovering Music,” undated text of radio broadcast, Papers of John Antill, MS 437/7/2 Box13, NLA, 3. 74 For example, Tom Breen, “Corroboree Is Spell-Binding Work of Beauty,” The Sun, 4 July 1950, 16; E. A., “Australian Ballet of Genius,” Sydney Morning Herald, 4 July 1950, 5. 75 See Haebich, Spinning the Dream, 332–33. 76 Campbell, “The Genesis of John Antill’s Corroboree,” 9–10. 77 The costume designer for the 1950–51 productions, Robin Lovejoy, indicated that his costume for the cockatoo did not correspond to the Arrernte cockatoo totem markings. Rene Fabian, “For years the bone has been pointed at it but at last the … Corroboree goes on!” A.M. Australian Monthly (July 1950), 10. Some of Spencer’s photographs have been vetted by Arrernte cultural owners, including those relating to public corroboree genres, such as those published in Philip Batty, Lindy Allen, and John Morton, eds., The Photographs of Baldwin Spencer (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2005), see esp. vii and 28–30. 78 For a discussion of the traditions in which Beth Dean’s work may be located, see Amanda Harris, “Pan Indigenous Encounter in the 1950s: ‘Ethnic Dancer’ Beth Dean,” Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 3 (2017): 328–45. 79 Rex Reid, interviewed by James Murdoch, Trove: National Library of Australia, 14 and 18 March 1986, accessed 12 March 2021, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-215764314. 80 Arts Council of Australia, Corroboree program, Theatre Royal, Adelaide 1951, Papers of John Antill, MS437/17/5, Box 27, NLA. 81 Stephanie Burridge, “Dreaming of the Future: The Emergence of Bangarra Dance Theatre,” Australasian Drama Studies 41 (2002): 80. 82 Michelle Potter, “Making Australian Dance: Themes and Variations,” Voices 6, no. 2 (1996): 16. 83 Beth Dean and Victor Carell, Gentle Genius: A Life of John Antill (Arncliffe, N.S.W.: Akron Press, 1987), 110–11. 84 Royal Gala Season Opera and Ballet Program, 8–13 February 1954, Papers of John Antill, MS 437/17/5, NLA. 85 Dean and Carell, Gentle Genius, 131–32. 86 Beth Dean, The Many Worlds of Dance (Sydney: Murray, 1966), 25. 87 Potter, Making Australian Dance, 17. 88 Spunner, “Corroboree Moderne,” 155. 89 Antill labeled this “The Didjeridoo” in the choreographic outline in the front of the Corroboree manuscripts. It should be noted that the prefatory material to both manuscripts contains reproductions of images of secret, sacred designs that the Arrernte owners have indicated should not be seen by uninitiated men or by women or children. See Campbell, “The Genesis of John Antill’s Corroboree,” 9–10. The Choreographic Outline is reproduced in Symons, Before and After Corroboree, Appendix 2. 90 See Campbell, “The Genesis of John Antill’s Corroboree,” 14–16; Symons, Before and After Corroboree, 53. 91 Antill, “Discovering Music,” 4. 92 La Perouse is Dharawal country but since Aboriginal people from many different regions lived there, it is not possible to know whether Antill saw a Dharawal performance. 93 Henry Tate, “Aboriginal Music: Its Artistic Possibilities,” The Argus, 30 June 1923, 7; “Musical Aborigines: A Missionary’s Appreciation,” The West Australian, 3 May 1932, 14; Ian Burk, “A. E. Floyd and the Promotion of Australian Music,” Context 33 (2008): 94–95; “Music for Boys Not ‘Sissy,’” News (Adelaide), 1 July 1946, 3. 94 Isaac Nathan, The Southern Euphrosyne and Australian Miscellany (Sydney: Isaac Nathan, 1848). 95 See Campbell, “The Genesis of John Antill’s Corroboree,” 9; and Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, 419. 96 Antill, “Corrobboree,” 4. 97 Antill, “Discovering Music,” 2–3. Antill’s emphasis. 98 Bennett Zon, “The ‘Non-Darwinian’ Revolution and the Great Chain of Musical Being,” in Evolution and Victorian Culture, ed. Bernard V. Lightman and Bennett Zon (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 200. 99 See, for example, Herbert Spencer, Progress: Its Law and Cause (New York: J. Fitzgerald & Co., 1882), 262; Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 12, 36, 38; Whaples, “Exoticism in Dramatic Music,” 105. 100 Time codes for a widely available recording of Corroboree are provided: John Antill: Corroboree, An Outback Overture, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, cond. James Judd, Naxos 8.570241, 2008. 101 Antill, “Discovering Music,” 3. 102 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 122. 103 Michael Pisani, Imagining Native America in Music (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 74, 86, 253. 104 Hubert Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music (London: Keegan Paul, 1896), 6. 105 Ernest Newman, Testament of Music, ed. Herbert Van Thal (New York: Putnam, 1962), 221–22, quoted in Howerton, “Primitive Sounds,” 132. 106 Antill, “Corrobboree,” 4. 107 Ibid., 5–6. 108 Antill, Choreographic outline. 109 Ibid. 110 Program note to Sydney Symphony Orchestra, cond. Eugene Goossens, 18 August 1946, Papers of John Antill, MS 437/17/3 Box 27, NLA. 111 Parry, Evolution of the Art of Music, 4–5; Zon, “The ‘Non-Darwinian’ Revolution,” 198. 112 John Rowbotham, A History of Music, vol. 1 (London: Trübner, 1885–87), 1. 113 Friedrich Rochlitz, Für Freunde der Tonkunst (Leipzig: Carl Knoblauch, 1824),199–200, quoted in David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture 1770–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 39–40. 114 Heinrich Christoph Koch, Musikalisches Lexicon (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1964), 776, quoted in Gramit, Cultivating Music, 37. 115 Wallaschek, Primitive Music. 116 Ronald Radano, “Hot Fantasies: American Modernism and the Idea of Black Rhythm,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 459–62; Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre, 133–45. 117 Howerton, “Primitive Sounds,” 118; Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre, 66, 174. 118 Berman, “From Le Sacre to Les Noces,” 11. 119 John Antill, “A.B.C. Guest of Honour” broadcast script, 14 June 1974, Papers of John Antill, MS 437/7/2, Box 13, 2, NLA. 120 Alexander Rehding, “The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 2 (2000): 360. 121 Christian Friedrich Michaelis, “Über die Musik einiger wilden und halb cultivirten Völker,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 16 (1814), 509, quoted in Gramit, Cultivating Music, 38. 122 Jann Pasler, “Theorizing Race in Nineteenth-Century France: Music as Emblem of Identity,” The Musical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2006): 496; Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style,” 49. 123 Pasler, “Theorizing Race in Nineteenth-Century France,” 468–69; Rehding, “The Quest for the Origins of Music,” 359. 124 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 123. 125 Whaples, “Exoticism in Dramatic Music,” 158; Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style.” 126 Jonathan D. Bellman “Musical Voyages and Their Baggage: Orientalism in Music and Critical Musicology,” The Musical Quarterly 94, no. 3 (2011): 424. 127 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 55. 128 Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, vol. 1 (London, 1789), 703, quoted in Philip V. Bohlman, “The European Discovery of Music in the Islamic World and the ‘Non-Western’ in 19th-Century Music History,” Journal of Musicology 5, no. 2 (1987): 147. 129 “Indeed, they consider every sound to be music.” Johann Nikolaus Forkel, A General History of Music, vol. 1 (1788–1801), Section 3. 130 See also Locke, Musical Exoticism, 56; Radano, “Hot Fantasies,” 464–66, 468; Franz Sulzer, Geschichte des transalpinischen Daciens (1781), 164, quoted in Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style,” 50. 131 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:939–41. 132 Covell, Australia’s Music, 2nd ed., 76. 133 “‘Corroboree’ For British Orchestra,” Telegraph (Brisbane), 27 August 1946, 9. 134 Archer-Shaw, Negrophilia, 16–19. 135 For instance, Curt Prerauer, “An Antill Causes an Earthquake,” Tempo, October 1946. 15; Frank Murphy, “Celebrity Concert,” The Advocate, 18 November 1948, 18. 136 T. S. M., “Antill’s Ballet Suite Given Warm Reception,” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 1945. 137 “Antill’s Music Is Genuine Work of Art,” Daily Telegraph, 19 August 1946, 4. 138 “Ballet Suite ‘Corroboree’ Gains Favour,” publication unknown, 19 August 1946, Papers of John Antill, MS 437/14/2, Box 22, NLA. 139 Murdoch, Australia’s Contemporary Composers, 9. 140 Pisani, Imagining Native America, 28. 141 Bloechl, Native American Song, 38. 142 Ibid., xiv, 37–38, 45–46, 58–67. 143 Nathan, Southern Euphrosyne, 100. 144 Baldwin Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia (London: Macmillan, 1928). 145 Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia, quoted in John Antill, Corroboree manuscript, Papers of John Antill, MS437/8a/1, Folder MSR, NLA. 146 Pisani, Imagining Native America, 64, 227, 238; Claudia Gorbman, “Scoring the Indian: Music in the Liberal Western,” in Western Music and Its Others, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 236. 147 Parry, Evolution of Music, 17. 148 Vincent Persichetti, Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice (London: Faber, 1962), 93. 149 Pisani, Imagining Native America, 228; Locke, Musical Exoticism, 360. 150 Pisani, Imagining Native America, 228–31. 151 I am grateful to Lewis Cornwell for analysis of the pentatonic collections. 152 Pisani, Imagining Native America, 118; and, for example, Mirrie Hill’s music for C. P. E. Mountford’s documentary Aborigines of the Sea Coast, Australian National Film Board, 1950. 153 John Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia 1836–1970 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999), 267. 154 Symons, Before and After Corroboree, 53; McNeill, “Corroboree and Appropriation,” 1. 155 Smithers, “Pursuits of the Civilized Man,” 254. 156 Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage 1788–1914 (Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press, 1990), 100. 157 Antill, Choreographic outline. 158 Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur inégalité des races humaines, in Oeuvres, vol. 1 (1853; Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 342–43, quoted in Pasler, “Theorizing Race in Nineteenth-Century France,” 470. 159 Cited in Gramit, Cultivating Music, 40. 160 Constant Lamber, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline, 3rd ed. (New York: October House, 1967), 189, quoted in Locke, Musical Exoticism, 243–44. 161 The Times (London), quoted in Howerton, “Primitive Sounds,” 128. 162 Louis Essen, “The Composer in Australia: A Talk with Fritz Hart,” The New Triad, 1 December 1927, 24–25. 163 “Sydney Man’s Ballet Suite Praised by Goossens,” Sydney Morning Herald, 14 August 1946. 164 The bullroarer used on the James Judd Naxos recording is not a central Australian secret sacred instrument, but an unrestricted Maori bullroarer. New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, personal communication, 2018. Its presence in Corroboree remains, however, a representation of a sacred instrument. 165 This goes back to the first set of reviews of the suite’s premiere in 1946, when the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s reviewer joked that the audience must have thought that Goossens had “accidentally mixed up some pages of Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring” with the Antill score.” B. C. P. “Antill’s Music Is Geniune Work of Art,” Daily Telegraph, 19 August 1946, 4. 166 For example, Derek Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” The Musical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (1998): 312, 326; Whaples, “Exoticism in Dramatic Music,” 11. Locke’s catalogue of exotic style markers is dependent on such interchangeability. See Locke, Musical Exoticism, 52–55. 167 Taruskin demonstrated Stravinsky’s transformation of folk principles through transposition, juxtaposition, verticalization, etc., in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:923–48. 168 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 11; Daniel M. Grimley, Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity (Woodford, UK: The Boydell Press, 2006), 12–13. 169 James Curran and Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 20–21; Andrew Lattas, “Primitivism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Australian Popular Culture,” in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, ed. Bain Attwood and John Arnold, special issue, Journal of Australian Studies 35 (1992): 56. 170 Ian McLean, “Turning Point: Art and Aboriginal Australia in the 1930s,” in Brave New World: Australia 1930s, ed. Isobel Crombie (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2017), 128; Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011), 22. 171 Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 196–97. 172 Campbell, “The Whole Work Is Full of Primitive Rhythms.” © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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TI - Primitivism and Settler Primitivism in Music: The Case of John Antill’s Corroboree
JF - The Musical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/musqtl/gdab022
DA - 2022-01-29
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SP - 190
EP - 234
VL - 105
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DP - DeepDyve
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