Internet Induced Changes in Music Consumption Patterns

Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and

Communication

Proceedings of the 2004 IASPM Australia New Zealand Conference, held in

conjunction with the Symposium of the International Musicological Society, 11-16

July, 2004

Edited by Denis Crowdy

Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 1

Proceedings of the 2004 IASPMANZ Conference

Melbourne, 2004, held in conjunction with SIMS

Denis Crowdy (editor)

2 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication

©2005 International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Australia New Zealand

branch

Cover image: Fanny Cochrane Smith

ISBN 0975774700


Contents

Editor’s Introduction 5

Notes on Contributors 7

Passing The Torch: Commemorating the Songs of Fanny Cochrane Smith 11

Judy Jacques

And We Marched to the Tune of the Gumleaf Band … But to Whose

Tune Did We March? 21

Robin Ryan

Finding a Space for Pop in the Music of Multicultural Australia 41

Aline ScottMaxwell

Complexity, Simplicity and Poetic Invention in Antônio Carlos Jobim's

“Águas de março” (Waters of March) 54

Peter Freeman

Playing Tricks on the ‘Magic Men’ of PNG (Sanguma) 65

Denis Crowdy

Internet Induced Changes in Music Consumption Patterns 75

Marjorie Kibby

Ambience As Redemption In Australian Film: The Sound Design Of Chopper 83

Mark Evans

Covers and Kids: How Kermit the Frog Made Me Want to be an Academic. 91

Liz Giuffre

Diaspora and the Politics of Authenticity 99

Bruce Johnson

Towards A Film Industry Model of Management 109

Guy Morrow

‘Nation, Gender and Musical Stereotypes in Irish Music’ 125

Helen O’Shea

James Brown – Popular Music’s Most Influential Idiot? 139

John Scannell

From ‘Helped’ to ‘Helper’ – the ‘Atrisk’ Child and Altruistic Musicmaking. 149

Susan West and Susan Garber


Editor’s Introduction

The 2004 IASPMANZ conference was the second year we joined another organisation to

become part of a much larger conference. The usual IASPMANZ approach is to run a

separate conference without parallel sessions, meaning all participants have the opportunity to

hear all papers, a feature lacking in the large number of parallel sessions held in Melbourne.

This makes these proceedings all the more valuable, collecting IASPM work together in a

more cohesive form. The conference call for papers requested papers falling roughly under

the rubrics of commemoration, collaboration and communication, and I have attempted to

organise the papers in this volume with that in mind.

Denis Crowdy, December 2005


Notes on Contributors

Denis Crowdy

Denis Crowdy is a lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Music Studies at Macquarie

University, Sydney. His research focuses on popular music in Melanesia; principally Papua

New Guinea. He is also coeditor of Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into

Contemporary Music and Popular Culture.

Mark Evans

Mark Evans is a lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Music Studies at Macquarie

University, Sydney. He is also coeditor of Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into

Contemporary Music and Popular Culture.

Peter Freeman

Peter Freeman is Associate Lecturer at the School of Music, The University of Queensland.

He lectures in the fields of popular music and music technology and has research interests in

popular musicology, rhythmic nuance and the music of Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos

Jobim. He is also a professional jazz bass player.

Liz Giuffre

Liz Giuffre is a Masters student at Macquarie University, a popular music journalist and (non

practicing) singer and musician. Her areas of interest include audience studies, recent

Australian music, popular music practices and music media.

Bruce Johnson

Bruce Johnson is Professor, School of English, University of New South Wales, prolifically

published in literature, popular music, cultural history and acoustic ecology, including the

Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz, contributions to major reference works in Australian

popular music. He is also an arts administrator, broadcaster, and an active jazz musician.

Judy Jacques

Judy Jacques is an independant singer and writer, renowned for her work in jazz and

improvisation. Judy taught at the Victorian college of the Arts Melbourne, and performed at

the 1997 Edinburgh Festival. Her regular visits to Tasmania's Furneaux group, resulted in the

album Making Wings(2002), which won the 2003 Bell Award for Best Australian Jazz Vocal

Album.

Marjorie Kibby


Marjorie Kibby is a senior lecturer in Communication and Culture at the University of

Newcastle, Australia. With publications on internet culture and popular music, she has, in

recent years, combined these interests to engage in detailed research into the impact of the

internet on popular music. Her research comes from a cultural studies perspective, with a

focus on the meaning and practices of everyday life. The current research therefore, has the

objective of understanding how online music forms are used, and of analyzing the social and

political context in which online music exists.

Guy Morrow

Guy Morrow lecturers in music production, music theory and arts management and is

currently completing a PhD that concerns contemporary music management practices in

Australia. He has published articles on a range of topics, including; music management; the

music industry and the impact of the Internet; country music in Australia; tribute bands;

disabled people’s use of new technologies; and the music for the opening ceremony of the

Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. He is also a drummer and guitarist and has recorded and

performed professionally in various contemporary styles. He currently plays in and manages

the rock bands: Dion Jones & The Filth and Coverdrive. Guy also plays live percussion with

DJs Scott Pullen, Michael Lloyd and Jim Sheedy.

Helen O’shea

Helen O’Shea’s PhD thesis ‘Foreign Bodies in the River of Sound: Seeking Identity and Irish

Traditional Music’ theorised national and personal identifications through performing Irish

music, both historically and among contemporary musicians in Australia and Ireland. She is a

research associate in the School of Social Sciences, Victoria University, Melbourne.

Robin Ryan

Robin Ryan researches Indigenous and sacred music. She wrote the first Master’s thesis on

urban Australian Aboriginal music through Monash University, followed by a PhD on gumleaf

playing. Robin is currently an Honorary Research Associate of the Department of

Contemporary Music Studies, Macquarie University, New South Wales.

John Scannell

John Scannell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Communications at the

University of New South Wales, where he tutors on new media theory and web design. He

finds academic inspiration in his continuing engagement with popular music, most notably the


work of James Brown and contemporary dance and electronic music which can be seen to

draw on Brown's foundational rhythmic innovations. He's also rather keen on Gilles Deleuze.

Aline Scott Maxwell

Aline ScottMaxwell is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of

Music, University of Sydney, and the School of Music, Monash University. She is coGeneral

Editor of the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia (Currency House, 2003).

Her research interests include Indonesian music, Australia's musical engagement with Asia

and+the music of Australia's migrant communities, especially the Jewish, Italian and

Indonesian communities.

Susan West

Susan West convenes the Music in Primary and Secondary Schools program at the Australian

National University and is Director of the Centre for Community Music Education. She has

designed and developed innovative music education programs based on a social model of

inclusive musicmaking. These programs include the HandinHand outreach program that

now involves schools and children across the ACT, and the School Singing Program, a

professional development program for classroom teachers.


Passing The Torch: Commemorating the Songs of Fanny Cochrane

Smith

Judy Jacques1

I dream and wake and no time passes between night and morning. I

write and sing and walk and dreams come. I walk with a tape recorder

in my pocket and record open thoughts and snatches of songs,

crouching under rocks for shelter from the wind and I am in heaven. I

am filled with the island and the voices from the past. In time,

Flinders Island showed me something of itself, I breathed it,

whispered and sang with it, and in time I found my place there.

(Jacques, personal journal, nd)

In commemorating the songs of Fanny Cochrane Smith, which are among the first to be

recorded in Australia2, I needed, above all, to respect their utmost importance to the Palawa,

the Indigenous people of Tasmania. It was they who authorised my revival of Fanny’s songs,

they who graciously approved and accepted their inclusion in my 2002 CD, Making Wings.

The key people I must acknowledge from the outset are, namely, Fanny’s great granddaughter

Enid Dillon, senior Elder the late Ida West, the late Japananka Errol West, Fanny’s descendent

Debra Chandler, ATSIC Commissioner Rodney Dillon, and Curator of Indigenous Studies at

the Hobart Museum and Art Gallery, Tony Brown, who also granted permission for me to play

an original recording of Fanny Cochrane Smith during my 2004 SIMS presentation.

This project has been researched, and permission sought, since 1998. It represents a personal

journey which ultimately led me into a symbolic process of Reconciliation, encouraged by the

words of my own ancestors as well as my meetings with Palawa people, in particular Senior

Elder Ida West, who used to say, “We have to go to bad places to try to heal, and you must do

the healing. But it takes all colours to do it.” And the poem by Japanangka Errol West that so

eloquently reads: “There’s noone to teach me the songs that bring the moon bird, the fish or

1 See http://www.wilddoghill.com.au

2 Fanny’s recordings predate those of Bessie Smith, the ‘Empress of the Blues’, who has informed jazz

musicians for generations. Bessie’s first recording, made in 1923, was one of the first of an African

American woman to become a huge commercial success.


any other thing that makes me what I am”3.

FANNY COCHRANE SMITH

Fanny Cochrane Smith was an Aboriginal woman born in captivity at Wybalenna on Flinders

Island, the largest island in the Furneaux Group, Bass Strait, Tasmania, in 1834. Her birth

took place during the most tragic period of her people’s history when the remnant mainland

people who had been ‘rounded up’ by ‘The Conciliator’, George Augustus Robinson, and

relocated to Flinders Island, had survived.

Fanny’s Aboriginal mother, Tanganutura, came from Cape Portland in NorthEast Tasmania,

and Fanny herself believed that Nicermenic, from Robbins Island in North West Tasmania,

was her father. Although the theory that Fanny was the last survivor of the Tasmanian

Aboriginal race still remains in the balance today, there is no doubt that she outlived her good

friend Truganini – who for many years was believed to be the last of her race – by 29 years.

Fanny successfully negotiated two worlds. She married English sawyer William Smith at

Oyster Cove in 1854 and taught their eleven children traditional skills such as hunting, basket

weaving and shell necklace making. Fanny was granted land by a Parliamentary Committee in

1884 and 1889 respectively, and was held in high esteem by the community of Nicholls

Rivulet, where she used her barn as an improvised concert hall (Longman, 1960: 85). Fanny

also sang regularly in the little church built on her land and in 1899 she sang at a special

concert held in her honour in Hobart (see Lehman, 2000: 561). She died in 1905, and many of

today’s Aboriginal Tasmanians are her rightful descendents.

Horace Watson, a keen amateur anthropologist who had attended Fanny’s concert in Hobart,

contributed two of the earliest wax cylinders made in Australia when he recorded her speech

and singing for Hermann B. Ritz’s study of Tasmanian speech. The phonograph recordings

were made in the rooms of the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1899, and at Barton Hall in

Sandy Bay, Hobart, in 1903 (Moyle, 1969: 1).

As an important component of my Making Wings album, I bring a contemporary

interpretation and new way of preserving two songs from Fanny’s repertoire, namely Bird

Call Song and Spring Song.

MY PERSONAL JOURNEY

The music that caught my passion, at fourteen years of age, was the jazz and gospel music of

3 See West (1984: vvi).


New Orleans, USA. The blues and gospel singers and the shared language of improvisation

told me that music can be as spontaneous as lively conversation. That music was also an

introduction to race relations and the politics of slavery and oppression of AfricanAmerican

culture. As a young singer I couldn’t get enough of this music which connected deeply with

community and history, the joyful gospel songs of celebration, blues, and the field shouts of

desire for emancipation from cotton pickers and farm workers.

I adhered passionately to the jazz and folk sensibility, which made inevitable the journey I

have embarked upon as I search for expression that truly connects with my understanding of

what it means for me to be a fifth generation Australian. In 1997, a renewed curiosity about

my own ancestors led me to Tasmania. This search was fuelled by memories of my Tasmanian

Jacques/Green grandparents, who would not speak of their past. In short, after John James

Jacques arrived in Hobart as a convict in 1835, some of his children became whalers, then

coastal traders on boats that sailed around the Bass Strait islands. They were followed by a

generation of lighthouse keepers. I read everything I could find on the history of Tasmania

and noted pointsoffit with my family and their connections.

It was, of course, impossible to ignore the tragic Indigenous history of the island. I had seen a

display on Fanny Cochrane Smith and her songs at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in

the early 1970s, and, more recently, I was reminded of the wax recordings by an ABC radio

program. I made fresh enquiries. Through The Aboriginal Education Advisory Council

(TAEAC) in Tasmania, the path led to Tony Brown, who sent me a copy of Fanny’s recordings

and of Alice Moyle’s paper Tasmanian Music, an Impasse? (1968). Brown also sent me

Moyle’s transcription of Bird Call Song, which was not included in her paper.

I made my first of many trips to Flinders and Cape Barren Islands in May 1998, meeting up

with Indigenous Education officer Royce Archie. Following that visit, I was invited to spend a

week working as ArtistinResidence at the Flinders Island District High School, creating,

performing and recording stories and songs with the children. I taught the younger children at

the school to sing Bird Call Song and walked with them through the bush listening and

singing back to the birds.

In 2000 I spent a long winter in an isolated shack on a Flinders Island beach, working on what

was to become Making Wings. During that time, I became involved with the community by

contributing vocal workshops for the Identity Distinct Project leading up to the Flinders Island

Wind Festival. Throughout this period, I sent tapes of my original songsinprogress to Tony


Brown, to be passed on to appropriate members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Two

of these songs, Wybalenna Prayer and Bird at the Kissing Gate, came directly from what I

had experienced at the old Aboriginal settlement Wybalenna. Here I had recorded to tape my

feelings and reaction to such a place in the form of vocal improvisation. The song Wybalenna

Prayer came from these improvisations, and the Bird at the Kissing Gate gave permission for

me to be there. I made a declaration to the bird and to the wind that I would bring something

back to this sacred place4.

Voices from the Past

The song and the title for Making Wings was inspired by a passage in Ida West’s

autobiography Pride against Prejudice (1984), namely that “some old one[s] made wings to

fly back” (80), ie those captured and removed to Flinders Island by George Augustus

Robinson, in a bid to relieve desperate homesickness for their Tasmanian tribal homelands.

Those words affected me deeply and I began to imagine how the old ones would have made

wings, finally expressing what I felt in a song. I consulted with Ida West, and in December

2001 I went to Hobart to meet with her face to face for the first time. Ida believed

wholeheartedly that the way forward was through Reconciliation, by seeing both sides of our

histories. Her final dream of establishing a Peace Garden at Wybalenna Chapel, exemplified

that noble spirit. The Garden is now complete and consists of a sculptured table in the

grounds, with her words inscribed on the top. I donate all royalties from Bird Call Song and

Spring Song to the Peace Garden Fund.

Throughout my extended periods on Flinders Island, fragments and voices from the past made

it clear to me that I was writing songs for healing, voices and stories from both sides of a hard

history. I had found a poem called Lightkeepers Lament at the Furneaux Museum, Emita. It

was written in 1896 on Deal Island by sixteen yearold Thomas Archibald Brown who was

born on Goose Island (1880) and drowned in a freak accident ten years after he wrote the

poem. I discovered that Thomas was my grandfather’s cousin and while the poem was

poignant and well written, I felt it wouldn’t fit with my songs. But Thomas’s voice just

wouldn’t go away and finally I awoke one morning with a melody line, which obviously

belonged to his poem. Three years later I found his grave on Inner Sister Island, a remote and

4 Making Wings ultimately won the Best Vocal Album category at the Bells Inaugural Australian Jazz Award

held in Melbourne on 28 August 2003. See Ryan (2004a, 2004b) for scholarly critiques of the album.


largely uninhabited island to the north of Flinders Island.

The voice of Fanny Cochrane Smith was another constant reminder that there was a world of

difference between my romantic feelings about the islands and the reality of what they meant

for her people. Fanny introduced her Spring Song in full and proud voice as a celebration, a

renewal that has the capacity to heal. I wanted to bring this sense of celebration to my song

cycle Making Wings. It made me want to honour Fanny’s songs and to bring “the sound of the

voice that is still”5 back into the wider community. But I didn’t know how to go about this as I

hadn’t previously considered the possibility of including Spring Song. Was permission

possible? Could I handle such a responsibility? For even if permission was possible, how

would I begin to approach the song anyway?

Tony Brown suggested I speak to Rodney Dillon about this, as his mother Enid Dillon has

authority as Fanny’s greatgrandaughter. I rang Enid, then sent her copies of my work,

including Bird Call Song. She gave her permission in writing, stipulating that “It must always

be said that the songs were hers [Fanny’s]”. I have visited with Enid in Nicholls Rivulet since

2001, and remain in close contact.

Reviving Bird Call Song

Bird Call Song was neither recorded by Watson nor referenced in Moyle’s papers. Terry

Crowley recorded Fanny’s granddaughter, Dot Heffernan, singing the song in Hobart in 1972.

He transcribed the words of the text phonetically and Moyle transcribed the music6.

Fanny heard traditional music frequently as a child at Wybalenna, in fact singing and dancing

were the principal amusements. Moyle (1968: 4) also assumes that some singing continued at

Oyster Cove, where Fanny was taken in 1847. But given her birth into a mixed race

community where she arguably absorbed the musical hybridities of hymns, folk and whaling

songs, the primary triad structure of Bird Call Song projects a typical westernised island

flavour. However, western traits in the wax cylinder songs do not in themselves discount

Tasmanian provenance.

I learned the song from the score sent to me by Brown and recorded it before I heard the taped

version by Heffernan, who had memorised the song taught to her as a child by her

grandmother. Heffernan sang it in a nursery rhyme or sailors' hornpipe style, at a much

5 An expression coined by Ritz (1908: 83).

6 I am grateful to Grace Koch at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

(AIATSIS) for her initial assistance and direction.


quicker tempo. She varied the pronunciation of ta tyi ma [tatayima] to ta chi ma [tachima].

I pronounce ta tyi ma differently to Heffernan and also vary the tempo and feel. I made the

decision not to rerecord the line, and I now sing tachima in live performance.

During the recording of Bird Call Song in my country studio, we changed the key for the final

take from A flat major to G major. We were almost at the end of the song, when a Tawny

Frogmouth sitting in the Red Box tree outside the studio started to sing its haunting call, a

comment perfectly in time and in tune. We continued to the end, but after the tape stopped

rolling, nobody spoke or moved. We still wonder if the tawny was in the tree just waiting for

us to get it in the ‘right’ key – the tawny’s of course7!

Internalising Spring Song

Moyle’s 1968 transcription of Spring Song (or Birds and Flowers Song) includes Fanny’s

translation. It is worth noting that, as a fresh seasonal cameo, Fanny’s spoken introduction has

been compared in sentiment to Gershwin’s Summertime8.

It's Spring time

The birds is whistling

The Spring is come

The flowers are all budding

The(red) fuschia it on the top

Birds are whistling

Everything is pretty

'cause it's Spring

(The birds are still dancing)

For the Springtime

It is known that springtime was an important season for the Tasmanians and if it could be

established that Spring Song was connected with Aboriginal rites of spring in Tasmania it

would follow the song would have been widely known on the island (based on Moyle, 1968:

34). H B Ritz, in his introduction to the study of Tasmanian Aboriginal speech (1909),

7 The soundtrack of Bird Call Song (Making Wings) furnished background music to an ABC television

documentary on the women’s shellmaking tradition of Flinders Island, broadcast on 6 October 2003.

8 See Bevilacqua (2002: 20).


suggested that Spring Song may have been an imitation of a piping crow or native magpie.

Moyle (1968) thought this was a plausible suggestion, considering the trills and other

coloratura effects in the song.

However, Moyle did not claim that the song was strictly traditional, in fact she suggested

crosscultural influences brought about by the sailing trade. In 1960 she concluded that

traditional Tasmanian song styles were widely varied after comparing the melismatic Spring

Song with a vastly different song that Fanny performed in a syllabic or socalled “corroboree”

style (1960: 73). Moyle categorised the song in legato style as it contained long phrases and

nonperiodic rhythm, with considerable ornamentation based around a triadic base. Indeed the

song’s structure reminded Moyle (ibid: 75) of some of the singing styles heard in north

easterly New Guinea and New Ireland9.

I learnt the phonetic text of Spring Song on and off, over a period of four years, while

remaining faithful to the original melody and decorations, but personalising the phrasing. I

repeat the last four bars, then the last three, because I find these lines so beautiful.

The process of internalising Spring Song was similar to when I was a young singer listening

for hours or days to old damaged 78 rpm records. I would listen over and over for any slight

nuances that would help to make sense of song lyrics. I got to the stage where I could almost

replicate the wax recording of Fanny’s song. However, imitation would not be a choice for me,

particularly as the language has not, to my understanding, been clearly defined and that made

it easier for me, ie to not sing in language that belonged to the ‘old people’. It was definitely

not my place and I doubt I would have made the decision to sing the song, had language been

defined. It was enough to hear Fanny speaking the meaning of her song as a song of birds and

flowers. The sound of the song was enough, and the intent was enough, as sound and

improvisation convey deeper expression than words. For me this is the most poignant song on

my album because of who and what it represents, my encounter with this Indigenous woman

9 I am working with Robin Ryan of the Department of Contemporary Music Studies, Macquarie University

Sydney with regard to this material and we have started to look into Moyle’s work a little more deeply. With

Moyle’s statement regarding northeasterly New Guinea song styles, Robin contacted Don Niles, Head and

Senior Ethnomusicologist, Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, Boroko, for comment. He replied, with

the greatest respect for the scholarly work of Alice Moyle, that “there appears to be nothing particularly

PNGsounding or looking about these melodies or their transcriptions. As Moyle notes, the outline of the

triad in the Spring Song does have some parallels in some music in the Islands region of the country here,

but otherwise the melodic movement is atypical” (email to Robin Ryan, 8 March 2004).


across time and space.

It was my choice to sing at a slower tempo, with more space between the phrases. This

allowed room for my accompanist Tony Gould10 to colour the song with his individual and

rich chord choices. It might help to understand that there was originally no written

accompaniment. Tony and I had discussed the preciousness of the song and on the day of

recording I was hoping that our interaction and spontaneity would make the song come to life.

It took enormous faith to actually be able to sing, to make the sound that could get close to

expressing the extent of what I understood of Fanny’s life and people through the fecundity

and beauty of Spring Song. I hear the hesitancy and honesty in my voice, and now feel proud

of that.

With the addition of Tony’s piano prelude and postlude, the duration of the song totals 3.49

minutes in comparison to the original 1.27 minutes. And by sheer coincidence, the piano used

by Tony was made in 1903, the same year that Cochrane Smith recorded the song.

Conclusion

The significance of this exercise to me is that I found a connection – as a musician – through

my forebears, into a shared history and culture. Risky business, but I felt it so important,

within the framework of my own work, to bring “the voice that is stilled”, two of the songs of

Fanny Cochrane Smith, to a new place within a contemporary context and within the

operating notion of Reconciliation.

Fanny Cochrane Smith will always remain a site of deep affection to her many descendents

and to the wider Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Even with permission, my decision to

include Spring Song had to be deeply considered over a long period of time. I felt the

importance of the song and the weight of responsibility of rerecording it. I knew that I would

need the strength of my conviction as not everyone would understand or necessarily agree

with my decision. But here was a sistersinger, born on Flinders Island, the last Indigenous

person to survive Oyster Cove, and the one Tasmanian whose songs and speech were

recorded. As the carrier of Spring Song, she has the capacity to renew, to complete the full

circle of healing. It was Fanny’s voice I heard at the end of a long winter’s journey.

10 Head of the School of Music, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, during the recording of Making

Wings.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bevilacqua, S (2002) ‘Fanny’s Fuchsias in Focus’, The Sunday Tasmanian, 13 October: 20

Lehman, G (2000) ‘Cochrane Smith, Fanny’, in Kleinert, S and Neale, M (eds), The Oxford

Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Melbourne: Oxford University Press

Longman, M (1960) ‘Songs of the Tasmanian Aborigines as Recorded by Mrs Fanny

Cochrane Smith’, Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania v94

Moyle, A (1960) ‘Two Native Songstyles Recorded In Tasmania’, Papers and Proceedings of

the Royal Society of Tasmania v94, Hobart

Moyle, A (1968) ‘Tasmanian Music An Impasse?’, Records of the Queen Victoria Museum

v26, Launceston

Ritz, H (1909) ‘An Introduction to the Study of the Aboriginal Speech of Tasmania’, Papers

and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania for 1908)

Ritz, H (1910) ‘The Speech of the Tasmanian Aborigines’, Papers and Proceedings of the

Royal Society of Tasmania for 1909

Ryan, R (2004a) ‘Enough to Warm the Sea: The Island Songs of Judy Jacques as Research

based Musical Production’, in Hayward P and Hodges G (eds), The History and Future of Jazz

in the AsiaPacific Region, Refereed Proceedings of the Inaugural AsiaPacific Jazz

Conference (September 12th14th 2003), Mackay: Central Queensland University Publishing

Unit (2004)

Ryan, R (2004b) ‘‘Singing Up’ the Bass Strait Islands’: [Review of] Judy Jacques – Making

Wings (CD), Wild Dog Hill Studios, 2002”, Island 96 (Autumn)

West, I (1984) Pride Against Prejudice: Reminiscences of a Tasmanian Aborigine. Canberra:

Aboriginal Studies Press

DISCOGRAPHY

Judy Jacques, Making Wings, Wild Dog Hill Studio, 2002

Fanny Cochrane Smith, wax cylinder recordings, Horace Watson for the Hobart Museum and

Art Gallery


And We Marched to the Tune of the Gumleaf Band … But to Whose

Tune Did We March?

Robin Ryan

This article commemorates the gumleaf band, a significant instrumental tradition of early

twentieth century Aboriginal Australia. It provides a succinct history of a gumleaf band

cultural system emerging as a byproduct of colonial disturbance to Indigenous society and

peaking as a lively means of musical and social expression in the 1920s and 1930s1. A focus

on the birth, growth and decline of the Wallaga Lake and Lake Tyers Gumleaf Bands

highlights their functions, collaborations, tours, visible exploitation by filmmakers, and role

in stirring up a martial spirit among troops departing for World War II. Commentary on the

influx of new cultural elements into gumleaf band repertoire, combined with the retention or

alteration of existing ones, takes into account some Indigenous responses to this process.

The research was vitally informed by the recollections of premier Aboriginal leafist Herb

Patten (b. 1943; Plate 1)2. Raised on fringe settlements in Gippsland, Victoria and Wallaga

Lake, New South Wales, Patten adopted gumleaf playing at about seven years of age in

emulation of his greatuncle Lindsey Thomas, and has played ever since. He enhanced the

delivery of this conference paper with live reconstructions of sacred and secular tunes learnt in

his youth, and to emphasise the social and political divide that existed in early and mid

twentieth century Australia, we examined the extent to which leafists were playing ‘Black

tunes’ under White regimentation, or – conversely – ‘White tunes’ under Black autonomy.

1 Australia’s vernacular model of partplaying on gumleaves has few internationally documented counterparts

save the cherry leaf bands of the Ecuadorian highlands, the ‘tree leaf’ ensembles of China, the partplaying

of leaves by German shepherds, or the Mayan leaf ensembles of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico (see Ryan,

1999b).

2 Patten is descended from the Brabuwooloong branch of the GanaiKurnai of Central Gippsland, the Ulupna

of the Murray River region, and the Wiradjurie of southern NSW. His CDs How to Play the Gumleaf

(Currency Press, Sydney) and Born an Aussie Son (Coral Music, Macquarie University, Sydney) were

launched in 1999 and 2002 respectively.


De-leafing the trees

The vernacular activity in question cannot be contained within a single discourse, since it is

recorded that between 18391850, South Australia’s first wave of Lutheran immigrants

accommodated gumleaf playing into the sacred musical tradition that they transplanted to

Hahndorf, near Adelaide (Brauer, 1938: 73). The colonisers and the colonised variously

carried and exchanged the basic skill of leaf playing, but the combined sampled feedback of

Indigenous Elders and musicians reveals a possessive attitude to gumleaf blowing as

Aboriginal cultural property. Their constructions of meaning for its origins and practice

furnish a set of cultural scenarios depicting people blowing leaves in cultural, spiritual and

recreational interaction with the environment (see Ryan, 1999b: 3967). Building on eleven

locations for a “folded leafwhistle” collated by Moyle (1974), the present author established

evenspread prevalence for Indigenous leaf playing in the southeastern crescent of the country

(Map 1).


White musicians have occasionally used the gumleaf as a secular band instrument; however

the concept of ‘the gumleaf band’ is one that has been mostly identified with Indigenous

practitioners given its historical role as a free substitute for mission organs, brass bands, and

so forth. Aboriginal gumleaf bands however eschewed the uniformity and codification that

characterised the amateur brass band movement represented throughout urban and rural White

Australia from the late nineteenth century (Whiteoak, 2003: 289). In fact, the gumleaf band

movement emerged as a partly camouflaged and assumedly (gently) coerced activity that


fostered its own legends on remote reserves that were rarely visited by nonAboriginal people.

One exception, the itinerant teacher Anna Vroland, noticed a gumleaf band at almost every

entertainment she attended in midtwentieth century Aboriginal Victoria (Vroland, 1951: 33).

It is known that Aborigines were often compelled to substitute western musical repertoires for

traditional ones when they came under the direct domination of the colonisers. Given this

predicament they skilfully incorporated hymns, spirituals, folk songs, music hall ballads and

blackface minstrel song into their own oral cultural worlds well before White Australians

deployed aspects of Aboriginal culture as national icons in popular culture. Depending on

denominational influence, bandsmen played European hymns, American gospel songs, many

forms of popular music, and even light classical music. But first let us examine some Indigenous

cultural influences on this activity.

1. Indigenous musical influences

The researchers Reay (1949) and Holmer and Holmer (1969) projected the gumleaf as a

“traditional” instrument of NSW. McDonald (1996) threw further light on the notion when he

researched the way Baanbai ‘clever man’ Frank Archibald (d. Armidale, 1975) and his wife

Sarah reared their family in the Northern Tablelands of NSW:

Every evening a large fire would be built, and singing and dancing

proceeded until the late and early hours. Corroborees were danced by

both men and women, Frank singing to Sarah’s clapstick

accompaniment, and European songs and dances were also

performed. Frank and Sarah both played the accordion, and some of

their children would accompany their tunes with music on bush

leaves. Besides corroboree songs and white folk music, the Archibalds

also taught their children “hymn songs” and didactic ditties, called

by them “little choruses”. (McDonald, 1996: 113)

This musical culture, whether in Indigenous or European form, was considered by the family

to be “genuine Aboriginal culture” because of its spiritual nature, a dynamic essence

emphasising the special means by which it was handed on from generation to generation (ibid:

114). At a more general level, the author’s research indicates that the gumleaf, as a natural,

plentiful, popular, and versatile accompaniment instrument, was often used to accompany

whatever was sung at Aboriginal gatherings, traditional or otherwise (see, for instance,


Tucker, 1977: 164). Techniques like sliding or gliding between notes, ‘wobbling’, and playing

the leaf ‘no hands’ were probably passed between generations of players, but not all were. For

example, Gumbainggir Elder Roseina Boston of NSW claims to have invented the ‘leaf

shivers’ that she executes in imitation of the cacophonous laughs and chuckles of her personal

totem, the Kookaburra (Gaagum) (see Ryan, 1999a: 7071). Boston has also revived, written

and recorded language songs that incorporate her gumleaf playing.

After Palm Islander Joe Geia introduced the popular North Queensland welcome song Yumi

Yumi Yari to Melbourne in the early 1980s, Patten added it to his leaf repertoire. However in

1995 the National Library of Australia sound archivist Kevin Bradley noted that the only

known recorded example of a traditional tune played on leaf was Gurrjinjanami, performed by

Norris Blair to the accompaniment of ukulele in Maryborough, Queensland3. The big picture

consistently indicates that the prevailing influences on gumleaf band repertoire were Western

sacred and secular musics, the former as a corollary of the Christianisation of Aboriginal people

beginning in the midnineteenth century, and the latter because of the Aborigines’ need or desire

to be entertaining to white, black or mixed audiences.

2. Christian musical influences

The earliest reference to a gumleaf band located by the author cites Salvation Army officers

recruiting 15 Aborigines to march in a socalled ‘Eucalyptus Band’ through Bordertown,

South Australia in 1892. Three blew gumleaves whilst others played drums, bones and triangle

(Temora, 1892: 7). While restricting traditional tribal activities, missionaries established brass

bands on wellendowed outposts, but on the rest of the frontier gumleaf bands mushroomed via

intermission activity such as dances, concerts, picnics and services. Gumleaf band playing

possibly acquired the properties of a ‘tradition’ because it was:

a shared, repeatable activity activated by a certain spiritual/emotional

power in the relationship network of those involved in its execution, a

power which was produced by, and in its turn, actively generated a

conscious desire for the activity and its relationshipnetwork to

persist. (definition after McDonald 1996: 116)

In the 1940s and 1950s the itinerant Mt Margaret Minstrel Band from the United Aborigines’

Mission via Laverton, Western Australia, played accordions, banjos, gumleaves, tambourines,

ukuleles, side drum and bass drum on their tours of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.

3 Bradley cited Blair, recorded by Holmer, 1964, but the author’s research puts the date to 1970.


Accordions, guitars and gumleaves were also played, for example, at Singleton Bible College,

NSW, Headquarters of The Australian Inland Mission. Hymns were sung several times a day

on missions, with gumleaves often supplying the main instrumental means of maintaining the

melody lines or adding harmony.

Although missionisation was generally forced, Ellis, Brunton and Barwick (1988: 16370)

argued that the Aboriginal peoples were receptive to sacred music because of its function as a

formal ritual communication with the powers of creation. They documented additive rhythms

and phrases and some nonEuropean intervals carried over into Indigenous variations of

western tunes. Adaptation of metre is illustrated by gumleaf duo Annie Mason and Cyril

Lindsay of Gerard Mission, Upper Murray River playing in parts (Ellis Collection, AIATSIS,

1962). Their sliding (gliding) form of partplaying permitted technical facility in the execution

of wide intervals, and – along with pulsating vibrato – it captured hymnody’s soulful

expression. In The Old Rugged Cross (1913), for example, they raised the pitch into a higher

key and adapted the metre from 6/8 to an irregular 3/4. The author also found slight alterations

to rhythm and phrasing in solo gumleaf performance.

3. Secular musical influences

Colonial era secular influences on detribalised music included solfa, theatrical entertainment

music, especially that of circuses, blackface minstrel and other travelling shows, reed and

brass band music, dance music, parlour song, music hall song, and the campfire music of

drovers and other rural workers (see, for example, Sullivan, 1988; Breen, 1989; and Ryan,

1999b). In support of Sullivan’s line of argument, evidence that gumleaf playing was used to

accompany stepdancing in the early twentiethcentury may be found in a description of a typical

Aboriginal wedding feast at Deniliquin, NSW (Tucker, 1977: 867) which, by deduction, took

place in the late 1910s.

Fringedwellers performed parodies of AfricanAmerican plantation slave dialect, music and

dancing as they identified with the displaced people represented in the socalled ‘coon song’

lyrics. During Patten’s childhood in the 1950s, many Aboriginal men aspired to be minstrels,

and in 1960s Aboriginal communities the centuryold Stephen Foster show song repertoire

still commanded evergreen status in stylistic backwaters that reflected entrenched

segregationist attitudes as much as isolation. Some gumleaf bands developed new musical


variants in their interface with white communities as hired performers at church services,

balls, concerts and weddings.

Case studies of specific leaf bands

Bearing these competing Indigenous, Christian and secular contexts in mind, a small

geographical sampling of the gumleaf band movement in the detribalised musical field is

mentioned below, beginning with northern NSW.

A leaf band operated at Karuah Mission (north of Newcastle) from at least 1919 and included

members of the Ridgeway family. In the 1920s, The Burnt Bridge Gumleaf Band of the

Kempsey district was conducted by Dainggatti descendent George (Possum) Davis. The

Bowraville Gumleaf Band began busking in the 1920s and toured southern Queensland. Their

programme included singers, shakealeg dances, a fiddler, and a mouth organist. A Tweed River

Gumleaf Band also played at a fundraising dance in Beaudesert, southeast Queensland in the

late 1930s (see Ryan, 1999b).

The Leaf Band Vaudeville Show based at Ulladulla on the southeast coast toured the state in

the early 1930s and, according to New Dawn (December, 1971: 12), their programme,

including hula dances, was typical of the entertainment of the day:

The audience would be whipped up to excitement pitch during the

show. Then the sessions would close with the song “The Battlefields of

Europe” [correct title “Break the News to Mother”, 1897]. The chorus

line “Tell mother not to wait for me, for I'm not coming home” would

always make the audience crumble. That is why the cast made it a

practice to pass out paper handkerchiefs to the audience as they went

into the hall.

The troupe’s instrumentalists played leaves, jewsharps, harmonicas and violins to create “a

fair razzamatazz”. This is a colloquial description of a 1920s jazz style incorporating

“novelty noise” effects such as growls, waawaas and wails, a factor that arguably popularised

gumleaf playing at the time. The Little brothers’ ‘corroboree’ contributions (traditional dances

with sticks and spears) were influenced by the lively musical tradition developed further south

at their home base of Wallaga Lake.

1. The Wallaga Lake Gumleaf Band of NSW

Now revered as the legendary ‘Mecca’ of gumleaf playing, picturesque Wallaga Lake lies in a


district where the Aboriginal peoples were already well outnumbered in their own territories

by the midnineteenth century (Cameron, 1987: 87). The earliest evidence for leaf playing in

the area was a campfire ‘corroboree’ performed by residents of Wallaga Lake Station on the

Bermagui Athletic Club ground in 1900. The performance was accompanied, in the words of

The Cobargo Chronicle journalist (20 April), by:

rude instruments, made from reeds and leaves of trees, and a

concertina led by an aged conductor who kept time by beating a

possum rug … there commenced the most fantastic shiverings and

twitchings of the lower limbs, in

perfect time … then followed by

‘tumblers’ in close imitation of circus acrobats. The dancers were not

dressed in native costumes, but all had quaint figures and stripes

painted on their bare limbs; and

the show gave one a fair idea of

what a corroboree of the old

tribal days would be like.

The far southeast coast Aborigines were ingenious in turning traditional skills to account

within the cashbased economy established by the settlers (Cameron, 1987: 80). The Gumleaf

Band played at football dances, and on the back of trucks at district shows, gymkhanas, and

sports picnics on the beach. They also performed traditional dances with sticks and spears in

addition to stepdancing, tapdancing, burlesque, clowning, singing, accordion and fiddle

music. Playing leaf ‘no hands’ was a common performance trait in minstrel standards

including Foster’s Swanee River (1851) and Old Black Joe (1860).

The Wallaga Lake leafists were descendants of the Yuin, Ngarigo or Dhurga, and most still

knew their language and lore. The mid1920s touring band included seven members of the

Thomas family, namely (Whaler) Bill, his brothers Max and Cecil, and his sons Arthur,

Ronald, Cecil, and (Guboo) Ted. Guboo (19092002; Plate 2) kindly informed this history on

the gumleaf band with whom he toured as a youth before becoming a renowned Elder and

activist4. The band’s conductor in the 1920s was fisherman John Campbell, who delivered

4 See Ryan (1997) for details of Guboo’s career.


brilliant leaf solos, played the drum, and imitated the spearing of fish on stage to music.

Campbell’s son Edward “shared the (kangaroo) skins” with Ernie (Friday) Hoskins, since one

doubleheaded drum per gumleaf band was enough to establish the beat. They used drumming

and partplaying on leaves to good effect as they simulated loud battlefield sounds in tear

jerking items such as Break the News to Mother (1897).

The renowned Elder Percy (Bing) Mumbulla (Mumbler; 19061991) could “send out a

powerful sound” on the leaf. Better still, it is claimed that his ‘sixth sense’ linked together all

the Aboriginal people along the coast, in fact everyone “sort of bubbled to see him” (Chittick


and Fox, 1997: 64, 79, 8485). The best dancer, the initiated Elder Percy Davis, loved the tune

Danny Boy (1913), and played the fiddle like a ukulele. The two Percys and Jimmy Little

(Senior) vitally enhanced the band’s ‘corroboree’ performances. Affectionately known as

‘Conkers’, Jimmy dressed up in tribal paint, played clapsticks, and sprang suddenly on stage5!

Effortlessly adapting items to suit different circumstances, the gumleaf band resembled a small

minstrel troupe as their performances were alive and wandering, carefree yet polished. They were

a dynamic catalyst for gumleaf playing, inspiring for one, the Lake Tyers Gumleaf Band of east

Gippsland, Victoria.

2. The Lake Tyers Gumleaf Band of Victoria

The Church of England Mission at Lake Tyers was founded in 1861 by John Bulmer for

members of the GanaiKurnai and Bidwell tribes. Pepper (1980: 103) wrote that the first

travelling gumleaf band reached Lake Tyers from NSW in 1917 and stayed around the district for

years. It was arguably the Stewart Brother’s Band from Muckin’s Point, Wallaga Lake, since

Christopher Stewart married Dolly Thomas of Lake Tyers. By 1918, a gumleaf band had been

formed to entertain tourists at Lake Tyers and its growing popularity was associated with the

flood of nationalism reflected in the popular tunes and entertainment of the day. On Boxing

Day 1925, for example, 500 tourists entered the reserve (Pepper, 1985: 243, 248).

In 1934, The Bulletin cartoonist Percy Leason commented that the Gippsland males were

making “uncanny use” of the gumleaf to play “our tunes, the latest airs of the gramophone

record” (1934: 5). One prominent leafist in the early 1930s band was canoe and boomerang

maker William Johnson, who still spoke his language. Renowned athlete Charlie Green (1884

1955) was the son of a talented violinist, whilst Julian (Dingo) Hood inherited his musical talent

from a mother who sang and played the organ at St Johns, Lake Tyers Mission (Pepper, 1980:

99).

The leaf bandsmen fulfilled tourist expectations fed by contemporary images of Aborigines in

popular culture during the previous decade. They performed a staple repertoire of hymns,

minstrel and other tunes, both as a complete act, and as an accompaniment to the Concert

Party. Swanee River (1851) and The Road to Gundagai (1922) were favourites, and they often

ended with The Maori Farewell (traditional) when they played their regular Saturday night

5 Jimmy’s brothers Jackie and Eddie occasionally toured with the band. Other Wallaga Lake bandsmen were

Andy (Digger) Bond, Jimmy Chapman, Max Harrison, Ned Hoskins, the brothers Charlie, Clem, and Costin

Parsons, Alfie Penrith; Harold Picalla, Albert (Pharlap) Thomas, and Alec Walker.


concert at Gordon Gilsenan’s farm on Bancroft Bay. Jimmy Scott led the hymns with his

beautiful singing voice and demonstrated the traditional fire lighting method (Landon and

Tonkin, 1999: 182).

Community worker Cora GilsenanWaters claimed that Joe Wandin could make the leaf sound

“like a solo violin, or a whole orchestra”, and that he often played The Old Rugged Cross in

parts with Foster Moffatt. She was also particularly taken with the imaginative harmonies woven

by the 1930s Gumleaf Trio comprising Laurie Moffatt, Ted (Chook) Mullett, and Campbell

Johnson6. Tourists sometimes made moonlight trips in a hired launch since the best place to

hear the leaf band was from the water. At one memorable religious service and bonfire held

above the cliffs at Lake Tyers House, the leafists, who stood perfectly still in a rowing boat,

played jazzedup versions of hymns, a performance described by boat operator Leslie Kruse

(Goding, 1990: 66) as “absolutely magical”. By all accounts the musicians embraced and

personalised the music they played, regardless of its orientation.

The naval doctor Captain Newman managed Lake Tyers Station from 1929 to 1931. Around

1930, he formed a minstrel troupe of leafists, dancers and singers to perform in Bairnsdale and

tour NSW (Pepper, 1980: 85). By 1938, the Lake Tyers Gumleaf Band had also toured the

majority of Victorian country towns7.

Tours of the Wallaga Lake Gumleaf Band

Precise dates for the Wallaga Lake Gumleaf Band’s many tours are still wanting, but it is fairly

well reported that from the midtolate 1920s, 14 members walked all the way to Melbourne.

The following account does not detail the entire odyssey but rather provides a sample of the

activities the band is reputed to have engaged in whilst they were away from home, based on

descriptions provided by Guboo Ted Thomas, and supplemented by Morgan (1994), Bradley

(1995), and Chittick and Fox (1997).

After giving their initial performance at Murrah, NSW, the bandsmen moved down the coast,

often sleeping under bushes and spearing fish which they cooked on hot coals. As well as

performing in halls en route, they worked casually on farms and later at the Yallourn

coalmines. The Black Police escorted the Wallaga Lake contingent onto Lake Tyers

Aboriginal Station, where they delivered a concert and joined forces with the local gumleaf

6 Personal communication from Cora GilsenanWaters, 22 July 1994.

7 Personal communication from Lakes Entrance historian Jack Whadcoat, 15 January 1995.


band. On reaching the city, they stayed with the Clarke family in Fitzroy and commenced a

residency at the Palais Royal, St Kilda. Dressed in suits, they complemented items performed

by a dance band by playing waltzes and numbers for the Barn Dance for a fee of five pounds a

tune. The gumleaf band also participated in a Bendigo brass band meet, performed a

corroboree in Dandenong, and marched down Swanston Street playing for the Labour Day

March before they headed north to Cummeragunga on a round trip back to Wallaga Lake.

On one of their late 1930s tours, the Wallaga Lake Gumleaf Band were reportedly stranded in

Cummera’ after their truck was bogged in a ditch and some girls filled the petrol tank with

sugar in a concerted attempt to prevent the men from leaving8. The band stayed on for many

years, some of the group marrying and raising families there (Jackomos, 1971: 33). Watched by a

huge turnout of Echuca residents, they led the Aboriginal street procession of decorated floats

held to mark the coronation of King George VI at the Cummera’ settlement on 12 May 19379.

They also joined forces with the resident Cummera’ Concert Group to tour the Goulburn

Valley and Riverina, performing sacred and secular songs at wartime charity concerts in halls

and streets, and entertaining at district regattas and fancy dress balls (see, for instance,

Jackomos and Fowell, 1991: 170).

Smaller postwar leaf ensembles operated at Wallaga Lake throughout the 1950s and 1960s

(Ryan, 1999b: 1467), and to mark the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972,

Guboo Ted Thomas organised the Wallaga Lake Dreamtime Festival at which he and Percy

Mumbulla performed Swanee River and other numbers on leaf (Chittick and Fox, 1997: 176).

A decade later, in 1982, Brunton witnessed gumleaf duo Alec Walker and Clem Parsons playing

popular tunes as rounds, whilst they danced and foottapped simultaneously (Breen, 1989: 22).

Patten reinvigorated the far southeast coast leaf tradition during his residencies there in 1994,

1998 and 1999.

White appropriation of Aboriginal gumleaf bands

Moving on from the bands’ tourist functions, the following section draws on audiovisual and

documentary evidence to establish sociopolitical cameos of their broader roles in mainstream

society.

8 Personal communication from AIATSIS film archivist Michael Leigh, 7 February 1994.

9 Personal communication from Yorta Yorta descendant Ken Briggs, 12 January 1996.


1. The Opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge

Whilst exerting a monocultural hold over race relations in the 1930s, the Australian

Government sometimes opportunistically showcased remnant traditional aspects of

detribalised Aboriginal culture. In between their tours, some Wallaga Lake men formed part

of an Indigenous troupe selected, instructed, and paid to march across Sydney Harbour Bridge

at its opening on 20 March 1932 (Dawn, October 1962: 2). The pageant was preceded by a

Captain Cook float featuring an Aboriginal warrior brandishing a spear, and the marchers

themselves wore warpaint and kangaroo skins10. A dozen, including Percy Mumbulla, played

leaves in a performance variously described as “the greatest hit of the Aboriginal

entertainment for Sydneysiders”, and “a symphony orchestra among gumleaf bands” (Dawn,

October 1962: 2; Chittick and Fox, 1997: 54). Guboo, for one, accepted the compliments in

the spirit in which they were delivered.

2. Gumleaf Bands in Australian Cinema

As part of a picturesque mode which operated in the 1930s, portrayals of gumleaf bands by

writers, photographers and film entrepreneurs emphasised their social removal from white

audiences. For example, Ken Hall’s film The Squatter's Daughter (1933) begins with a eulogy

by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and a rousing rendition of Elgar’s patriotic British anthem

Land of Hope and Glory (1902) behind the titles. At a formal indoor party on his country

station, an elderly grazier introduces “a surprise in the form of a real live gumleaf band!” One

suspects, judging by their inert stance, that the eight leafists were “flowerarranged” before the

shoot at Cinesound’s Bondi Studio. They look so illatease that the camera zooms onto the

rhythmical tapping of someone’s big toe.

The Australian Western Rangle River (1936) opens with a gumleaf band playing European

folk tunes under riverside suckers. Suddenly, the leafists scatter as property overseer Dick

Drake cracks his whip at them in a White supremacist manner. Since both films were shot on

location in NSW, the leafists almost certainly included men from Wallaga Lake, but they

remain nameless in the credits. Neither do sources detail their remuneration. Later, during the

1950s, nonAboriginal actors received up to 67 times as much as Aboriginal actors filmed in

Australia (Schlunke, 1994).

10 Screensound Australia A0012; C1159 (1932).


3. The World War II Gumleaf Band

In the mid1940s, 37 Lake Tyers men volunteered for the army and 26 trained at the Caulfield

Racecourse depot. After they and the bagpipers played the top number, Roll out the Barrell

(1934), a gumleaf band was quickly positioned on the tray of a military truck to perform

outside Melbourne Town Hall and Flinders St Station. In the words of Aboriginal ex

serviceman George Birkett (in Jackomos and Fowell, 1993: 25), the eight who joined the

AIF’s 4th Training Battalion at Bonegilla Military Camp:

were mostly in their late thirties, some even in their late forties. They

formed a Gum Leaf Band, and when we went out on the route march

through Albury and the surrounding districts, everyone turned out

because we had this terrific band. And we marched to the tune of the

Gum Leaf Band.

The band also entertained at functions and marches through Ararat and Ballarat with a

repertoire that included Capriccio Italien, Opus 45 by Tchaikovsky as well as popular war

time songs11. While they were stationed at Bonegilla, many of their families left Lake Tyers

and moved to Melbourne (Jackomos, 1993: 14). Patten, incidentally, has played the war songs

ever since he gave his first public performance at eight years, and on his CD Born an Aussie Son

(2002), he simulated the sound of the Bonegilla Gumleaf Band via multitracking.

Since brass, military and pipe bands were used in the recruiting drives of 194042 in a

dramatic attempt to expand the defence forces as a result of the Japanese entering the war, the

use of the gumleaf band cannot be viewed solely as ‘exploitation’. However, in proving their

capability as a regimented band, the leafists suffered from their own sense of subservience to

Western military power. At the end of a year’s service, they had still received no military training,

apart from drill (Bradley, 1995), and were discharged to Lake Tyers feeling as though they had

been “used up as a promotion”(4). Even those Aboriginal men who did serve overseas returned

to face the contempt of a political and legal system that rendered them ineligible for the

remuneration paid to White returned servicemen (based on Jackomos and Fowell, 1993: 25; Hall,

1989: 201).

The urban Aboriginal leaf tradition

By the end of the war the main Victorian locus of Aboriginal gumleaf playing was now

11 See Cinesound Review 448 (1941).


Fitzroy in Melbourne which had become home to many Aboriginal families from Gippsland,

the Riverina, and the Western District. The sound of Sankey hymns and wartime songs played

on the gumleaf by the likes of Pastor (later Sir) Doug Nicholls (19061988) emphasised a

particular historical moment in the process of musical change manifest in the lives of these newly

urbanised peoples. A Harp and Gumleaf Orchestra had performed at the 102nd Anniversary of

Melbourne’s Birthday on 31 May 193712, and in 1949, Bill Onus organised a “Corroboree”

Season at Wirth’s Olympia, where the Melbourne Concert Hall now stands. On 18 April, The

Age critic described Chook Mullett’s Gumleaf Band13 rendition of Roll out the Barrell as being

“only moderately ancient”(3), but The Argus reviewer commended the allAboriginal pageant

for an “interesting mixture of vaudeville and native ritual”(2). At this time, Bill and Eric Onus

performed evergreens such as My Mammy (1921) in leaf duo, and leafists from the Aboriginal

Football Team were in demand at weddings, dances and cabarets (Jackomos, 1971: 34).

Aboriginal buskers often played the gumleaf (Whiteoak with Ryan, 2003: 102). For example,

Hector Bull of Lake Tyers (b. 1884) played Tipperary (1912) outside Young and Jackson’s

Hotel, Melbourne for years, and in 1951 his barefooted brother Bill was sentenced to jail for

“soliciting alms” as he played gumleaf hymns on Princes Bridge. Barrister Frank Galbally

lodged an appeal in a prime historical example of an injustice experienced by an Aboriginal

Australian revealing a growing awareness of such injustices by other Australians. Bill Bull

died in custody in June 1954 and a gumleaf trio played Abide With Me (1861) as his coffin was

lowered under a gumtree at Fawkner Cemetery (Thorpe Clark, 1965; Anderson, 1995; and

Broome, 1996).

Tourists still entered Lake Tyers during the 1950s, and a leaf trio was still active there in 1969.

Six Aboriginal competitors occasionally participated in the Australian Gumleaf Playing

12 At this event, members of the Melbourne Aboriginal community and their kin who formed the

Cummeragunga Choir performed Billy Go Bangalee (a Victorian version of a 1930s twoup song from

northern NSW), some English songs, AfricanAmerican spirituals, and the Aboriginal language songs U

Burra Gah and the Burra Phara (Bora Pharoah, a hymn based on an AfricanAmerican spiritual translated

into Yorta Yorta in the late 1800s). The ensemble also undertook a concert tour of Victorian country towns

and a series of radio broadcasts (Attwood, 2003: 7274).

13

On identifying the performers from Cinesound Review 0942 (1949), Patten opined that the women were co

opted to ‘fake’ playing leaves while the men carried the sound, faking having been a common procedure in

vaudeville and circuses.


Competition held annually in Maryborough, Victoria from 19771997. In a context where the

musical genres performed were almost exclusively western, some elements of their performance

behaviour could be traced back to the gumleaf band tradition (Ryan, 1999b: 197). They

contributed a few Indigenous country music staples in addition to western repertoire, but the

constraints and conventions of the western adjudication process exposed them to a subtle loss of

cultural and musical distinctiveness (Ryan, 1999a: 67).

CONCLUSION

The cultural activity of gumleaf banding was an inexpensive proposition for Aboriginal

musicians who were the subjects of Christian evangelisation and their repertoire was

predominantly shaped by western sacred and secular forces. Bands were catalysts for gregarious

socialisation in detribalised communities as missionaries networked throughout southeastern

Australia. The larger bands became visible during the 1920s ‘noisy jazz’ era, and film

entrepreneurs appropriated gumleaf bands in the 1930s.

The present study traced the autonomous leaf playing tradition at Wallaga Lake, NSW back to

1900 and extended knowledge of the touring band’s localised form of musical practice over a

period of nine decades. Performers maintained an Indigenous cultural flavour via traits such

as clapstick accompaniments, kangarooskin drumming, and ‘painting up’. Moreover, a visit

of some Wallaga Lake leafists to Lake Tyers Mission was the catalyst for the formation of the

first Lake Tyers Gumleaf Band of east Gippsland, Victoria to occur around 1917 in a

missionary context. Popularised as a tourism ploy for two and a half decades, the Lake Tyers

Gumleaf Band’s ‘tune’ was almost exclusively ‘White’ and so was the regimentation. The men

forged a strong sonic presence in Melbourne amongst troops departing for World War II. Eight

leaf bandsmen played tirelessly at Bonegilla training camp, and once again, the ‘tune’ the

troops marched to was ‘White’.

Over the period discussed, both black and white fringe musicians played the gumleaf, but the

musical ‘gesture’ of gumleaf playing and banding remains distinctly Indigenous in the popular

imagination of black and white Australia. The music itself was very much shaped by White

mission influences and also by what was considered to be most entertaining to paying

audiences. Yet as they brought their own energy to the stage, the breadth and catholicity of the

genre was such that over a few decades Indigenous gumleaf band musicians were able to

indelibly inscribe this music as their own for all time.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author is grateful to Herb Patten and the late Guboo Ted Thomas for their lively

contributions to this paper, and to Cora GilsenanWaters, Major Bob Hall, and John and Joyce

Whiteoak for extra insights. Thanks to Gary Swinton for cartography.

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Cameron, S (1987) An Investigation of the history of the Aborigines of the far south coast of New South Wales in the nineteenth century, Unpublished BLitt thesis, Australian National University, Canberra

Chittick, L and Fox, T (1997) Travelling with Percy: A South Coast Journey, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press

Ellis, C, Brunton M, and Barwick, L (1988) ‘From the Dreaming Rock to Reggae Rock’ in McCredie, A (ed), From Colonel Light into the Footlights: The Performing Arts in S.A. from 1836 to the Present, Adelaide: Pagel Books

Goding, A (1990) This Bold Venture: The Story of Lake Tyers House Place and People, Melbourne: self published

Jackomos, A (1971) ‘Gumleaf Bands’, Identity v1n1, July. Perth: Aboriginal Publications Foundations

Jackomos, A and Fowell, D (1991) Living Aboriginal History of Victoria: Stories in the Oral Tradition, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press

Jackomos, A and Fowell, D (1993) Forgotten Heroes: Aborigines at War from the Somme to Vietnam, Melbourne: Victoria Press

Landon, C and Tonkin, D (1999) Jackson’s Track: Memoir of a Dreamtime Place, Melbourne: Viking


Leason, P (1934) ‘Introduction’ to The Last of the Victorian Aborigines, published in conjunction with an exhibition of portraits held at the Atheneum Gallery, Collins St, Melbourne, September 1934

McDonald, B (1996) ‘The Idea of Tradition Examined in the Light of Two Australian Musical Studies’, Yearbook for Traditional Music v28

Morgan, E (1994) The Calling of the Spirits, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press

Moyle, A (1978) Aboriginal Sound Instruments and Companion Booklet, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies

Pepper, P (1980) You Are What You Make Yourself, Melbourne: The Hyland House

― (1985) (with T. de Araugo) The Kurnai of Gippsland v1, Melbourne: The Hyland House

Ryan, R (1997) ‘Ukuleles, Guitars or Gumleaves? Hula Dancing and SE Australian Aboriginal Performers in the 1920s and 1930s’, Perfect Beat v3n2

― (1999a) ‘Gumleaf Playing Competitions: Aboriginal and NonAboriginal Performance Styles and SocioCultural Contexts’, Perfect Beat v4n3

― (1999b) A Spiritual Sound, A Lonely Sound: Leaf Music of Southeastern Aboriginal Australia, 1890s1990s, Unpublished PhD thesis, School of Music Conservatorium, Monash University, Victoria

Schlunke, K (1994) ‘Imaging the Imagined: Stories of Jedda’, paper presented at Creating a White Australian Dreamtime: the Cultural Heritage and Politics of the 1950s, Charles Sturt University, Albury, 6 February 1994

Sullivan, C (1988) ‘Nontribal dance music and song: from first contact to citizen rights’, Australian Aboriginal Studies n1

Temora (nom de plume) (1892) ‘The Eucalyptus Band: It Fetched the Crowd’, The War Cry v10n1

Thorpe Clark, M (1965) Pastor Doug: The Story of an Aboriginal Leader, Melbourne: Rigby

Tucker, M (1977) If Everyone Cared Sydney: Ure Smith

Vroland, A (1951) Their Music Has Roots, Autograph in Melbourne University Library

Whiteoak, J (2003) ‘Pity the Bandless Towns: Brass Banding in Australian Rural communities Before World War Two’, Rural Society v13n3

Whiteoak, J with Ryan, R (2003) “Busking” in Whiteoak, J and ScottMaxwell, A (eds), Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, Sydney: Currency Press

DISCOGRAPHY

Boston, R, Aunty Rose and the Gumleaf, Girrgee Murnnin, Valla, NSW, 2002

Ellis, C,A. Mason and C. Lindsay (gumleaf duo) perform The Old Rugged Cross,Fieldtape recorded 13 December at Gerard Mission, SA (AIATSIS, Ellis Collection 3324), 1962


Holmer, N, Norris Blair performs “Gurrjinjanami” on leaf, Field tape recorded at Maryborough, Queensland (AIATSIS 4387, Track B), 1970

KLFM Bendigo, Australia Remembers the Black Diggers 19391945, broadcast commemorating ‘Victory in the Pacific’ (50 Years of Peace) on 15 August, 1995

Patten, H, Born an Aussie Son, Coral Music, DCMS, Macquarie University, NSW, 2002

FILMOGRAPHY

All examples held at Screensound Australia, Canberra

Australian Movietone A0012; Opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge, C1159, Movietone News, 1932

K. Hall (dir), The Squatter's Daughter, Cinesound Productions Ltd, 1933

Cinesound Review 488, Aborigines are True Soldiers of the King, 1941

Cinesound Review 0942 (1949), Native Talent in Aboriginal Corroboree 1949 Style,1949

Zane Gray (story); C. Badger (dir), Rangle River,Columbia Pictures, 1936


Finding a Space for Pop in the Music of Multicultural Australia

Aline Scott-Maxwell

Over the last two and a half decades the music of nonAnglo migrants in Australia has

attracted the attention of researchers, folkcollectors, broadcasters, concertpresenters, world

music performers, ‘art music’ composers seeking to extend their forms, and others. Books

and articles, dedicated radio programs, concerts, festivals and recordings are exposing the

breadth of cultural diversity within Australia’s borders and the musical impact of postwar

migration for a wider Australian public. These mediations have, however, generally focused

on or presented only a very limited range of the musics created, performed and listened to by

Australian migrants and their children, that is, those musics that are indigenous to or strongly

rooted in traditional homeland cultures. Migrant communities and their musiccultures have

been revealed primarily as repositories of musical ‘otherness’, articulated more by ethnicity

and tradition than modernity and other globalising forces, and isolated from – and seemingly

uninfluenced by – Australia’s musical ‘mainstream’, especially, the world of mainstream pop.

One cogent example is the research and writing commissioned for the recently published

Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, for whom the general editors were

myself and John Whiteoak (Whiteoak & ScottMaxwell, 2003). The migrantrelated content

of this reference book comprises over 80 entries and articles of 500 to 5000 words each on the

music and dance of 55 mainly geographicallydefined migrant or ethnic groups, plus various

other associated topics such as ‘Accordion’, ‘Buddhist music’, ‘Folk and multicultural

festivals’ and ‘Improvising’.

In our editorial conception for the Companion, we were keen to represent migrant music

cultures, not just as ghettos or islands of transplanted traditions, but as sites of cultural

tension, resistance and change with ongoing yet fluid relations to mainstream Australian

music culture as well as a source culture and a diasporic culture. We therefore sought to

include all types of migrant musical activity, including the pop and rockstyles produced and,

especially, consumed by migrants and their children. Our objectives were conveyed to the

contributors who were commissioned to write these articles via written guidelines and follow

up oral communications. The contributors were themselves a diverse group. They included –

besides scholars and academics – practitioners and community representatives of various

sorts. Yet, regardless of provenance, the copy that was submitted focused almost exclusively


on traditional music and dance, or genres with vernacular roots or markers of some kind. Pop

and rock genres, especially those exhibiting no readily discernible traditional music elements

or signs of ethnic ‘difference’, were ignored or mentioned only briefly in passing and editorial

intervention, including interpolation of data, was often required to present a more inclusive

view of the music and dance associated with particular groups1.

This focus on ‘the traditional’, or the traditionallyinflected, tends to be replicated not only in

most other writing on the subject but also in the migrant music broadcast on radio and the

performances staged for the general public by local socalled multicultural arts organisations

and festivals. ‘World beat’ and creative fusions are acceptable to radio and concert audiences

but less ‘rootsy’ rock and pop styles performed or created by nonAnglo Australians are not2.

There is a selectivity at work here that privileges the less familiar and denies – and thereby

renders invisible – what is most related to mainstream, everyday popular culture. This

produces a distorted and rather essentialised representation of migrant musiccultures that

both exoticises them and serves to distance them from nonmigrant music culture. It also

reinforces notions of multiculturalism that revolve around emblems of difference.

This paper, then, is concerned with the musical ‘zone of invisibility’ that I shall refer to as

migrant pop and rock, with a focus on pop. The approach I take is twofold. In the second

section of the paper I will briefly consider two examples of migrant pop in Australia that have

come out of my research into the music of the Italian and Indonesian communities. My

intention is to show how nonAnglo migrants may perform their ethnicity and their identity

through styles of music that do not sound or appear ‘ethnic’ in any obvious way. The

examples also demonstrate that it is not enough to look for markers of ethnicity or signs of

connectedness to tradition in such things as instrumentation, techniques, structures, or song

lyrics. We, as observers, must shift our gaze to other areas, especially the manner and context

of the music’s production and reception3, and the microstructures of the music in

performance.

The first half of the paper focuses on the notions and processes that have functioned to

exclude migrant rock and pop music from public attention beyond the specific audiences it

1 The processes involved in generating this material and the ethical, political and other issues that arose are

discussed in ScottMaxwell (2001).

2 To hear this music on radio, one must turn to programs that are broadcast by and for individual ethnic

communities on such stations as 3ZZZ and 3CR in Melbourne or SBS radio nationally.

3 Lam makes a similar point in relation to socalled AsianAmerican music (1999: 47; cited in Wang, 2001: 441).


serves, and have also excluded them from the scholarly discourse that has developed around

music, migration and multiculturalism in Australia. The specific aim here is to consider some

of the reasons why migrant pop has been ‘selected out’ from discussions, presentations and

other mediations of migrant music. These reasons will be discussed in terms of three broad

categories: ideologies, methodologies and authenticities. This section of the paper draws in

particular on my editorial experience of commissioning, and collaborating in, the production

of entries and articles on migrant music for the Currency Companion from contributors with

diverse backgrounds and relationships to the communities and music concerned. These

contributors included ethnomusicologists, performers, folk collectors and stakeholders from

within particular migrant communities4.

Ideologies

Ideologies often underpin particular perceptions and conceptions of music and this is no less

the case in mediations of migrant music. Avoidance or dismissal of migrant pop, in particular,

frequently has an ideological basis. Those who exclude pop forms in their mediations of

migrant music adopt perspectives and approached based on various, although not mutually

exclusive, ideological positions.

Ethnomusicologists have traditionally dominated the field of scholarly research and writing

about migrant music. The discipline of ethnomusicology first emerged in the early to mid

twentieth century largely as a byproduct of late colonialism, which brought Western scholars

into close and extended contact with nonWestern musics and musicians. Ethnomusicology’s

preoccupation with and, indeed, dependence on ‘difference’ in music – described by Radano

and Bohlman as a ‘disciplinary dilemma’ (2000: 9) and enshrined in its very name –

continued as it developed in the postwar period around fieldworkbased research in other

cultures, generally third world countries or premodern communities whose music was

substantially unaffected by Western music and musical practices. This preoccupation has

persisted even as the discipline has embraced new fields of enquiry in the last few decades.

One of these, the music of minority ethnic or migrant groups within Western societies, has

brought the site of fieldwork very much closer, but even here, I suggest, the ethnomusicologist

has remained an outsider and an observer of ‘others’ and their musiccultures.

4 Examples from the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia cited in this paper are described in

general terms only in order to avoid identifying particular authors, cultures or communities.


Notwithstanding ethnomusicology’s turn to more dialogic and reflexive fieldwork

methodologies, evidenced in publications such as Shadows in the Field (Barz & Cooley,

1997), a focus on difference in the music of migrant or minority ethnic groups and on

‘place’based notions of culture precludes consideration of migrant musics and musicmaking

that engage willingly with or relate closely to socalled mainstream culture.

As an example, I can refer to my own research in the Jewish and Indonesian communities. The

subject of the latter has primarily been a Sydneybased hybrid world music band of

Indonesian and Australian membership that overtly incorporates elements from diverse

Indonesian traditional forms. In the case of the former, my initial interest was in Jewish

professional musicians working within mainstream musical forms and institutions, but the

difficulties I experienced with this topic – many of them related to issues referred to in this

paper – led me to welcome with relief an opportunity to research Australian klezmer bands5.

Other cultural ‘outsiders’ who contributed to the Companion included performers and folk

collectors or folklorists. Their various perspectives on migrant music generally revolved

around a reverence for traditions of the past and, respectively, the orallybased performative

and transmission processes that sustain them. Great respect for the carriers and aesthetics of

particular musical traditions often coupled with an ideological concern with organic (as

opposed to commerciallydriven) processes of change meant, however, that pop styles were

largely anathema to them. For example, one such contributor refused categorically to mention

the hiphop that was a significant and even vernacularised cultural expression for the second

generation youth of one migrant group. It was considered that even passing acknowledgement

of this music in the article demeaned the major performative traditions of this community and

insulted the master musicians who strived to maintain them. Another traditionfocused

perspective that, in effect, excludes migrant pop is that of the nonmigrant musicians who

form ‘multicultural’ fusion bands. These musicians simultaneously exploit and showcase

migrant traditions themselves by combining or juxtaposing musical elements from diverse

traditions and even collaborating with traditionallyskilled migrant musicians. The term ‘new

traditions’, employed and possibly coined by Bill O’Toole, a musician and founder of one of

these bands, Sirocco, represents an attempt to conceptualise, historicise and validate this late

20th century phenomenon (O’Toole, 1998).

Yet other Companion contributors were members of the communities they wrote about and

5 This research is contained in ScottMaxwell (1998, 2002a & 2003a).


therefore stakeholders in their community’s musicculture and how it was presented to and

represented in the wider Australian public. Some of them viewed the pop or rockoriented

styles that the younger members of their community tended to favour as undermining or even

jeopardising the more traditional forms that that they sought to safeguard and maintain. These

are forms that represent powerful symbols of past origins and present community

‘cohesiveness’. This was even though, as Bohlman points out in relation to ‘ethnic music’ in

North America, their symbolic importance derives from their present context rather than their

original social function (2001: 277).

For other contributors, reluctance to acknowledge pop styles was more to do with such things

as their commercial orientation and therefore their perceived lack of cultural integrity and

authority. One contributor demanded the removal of an existing entry because it discussed a

hybridised commercial style that originated from the contributor’s country of origin being

performed by nonmigrant professional musicians long before migration from the country in

question, thereby supposedly misrepresenting its culture(s). The contributor’s aversion to this

commerciallydriven, albeit highly popular, musical style was compounded by an ideological

commitment to and advocacy of a genre that symbolised resistance to the forces of oppression

in the country from which he had migrated.

Methodologies

Specific problems of methodology provide another reason why migrant pop and rock tends to

be ignored in research and writing, in particular. Where, for example, music is created locally

as part of youth culture – performed by and for a young generation at parties, clubs, specially

organised events, or just at home – gaining access to these social environments can be a

problem, especially for the mature researcher. Moreover, in such contexts, youth subculture

itself may be as important for identity formation as ethnicity (Wang, 2001: 456). Deciphering

subcultural codes becomes particularly difficult when the primary language and culture differ

from the researcher’s. Access is much easier when the music is presented or heard at larger

communityorganised celebrations or on community radio. Sometimes bands make CDs,

although distribution is usually limited and local. However, migrant pop never reaches the

wider public domain of multicultural festivals and concerts, which by definition present music

that fulfills public expectations of multiculturalism.

A more profound methodological problem that is illustrated in the examples below is how to


analyse or even just talk about music that is typically described as an imitation or, at best,

variant of mainstream western pop or rock. The challenge is to meaningfully articulate

musical and performative features that are most easily defined in terms of similarity rather

than difference, while not being deflected by the music’s familiarity – or perhaps, and more

significantly – its very ordinariness. Issues of aesthetics and personal taste may intervene in

the analytical process. As Frith notes, to deny the significance of value judgments in popular

culture and in popular culture studies is to be hypocritical (1996: 16).

Authenticities

The everyday, mainstream characteristics of this type of migrant music are not therefore just

an issue for its empirical analysis but also for how it is constructed. Unable to strongly

differentiate or justify it musically, we categorise it by the ethnicity of the musicians6. Yet it

lacks the perceived authenticity of traditional ‘ethnic’ musics, or of ethnically ‘rooted’ world

music or world beat. The requirement of authenticity by consumers of world music has been

noted by various popular music scholars, including Taylor (1997) and Mitchell (2001). In his

study, Global Pop, Timothy Taylor distinguishes three strains of authenticity that are ascribed

to the music of others: authenticity of primality, by which he means its perceived ancient or

premodern origins, authenticity of emotionality, in the sense that the music is interpreted as

spiritual, and authenticity of positionality: that is, it is real rather than produced (1997: 218).

In relation to the third of these, Taylor notes that while world music musicians cannot by

definition be ‘sellouts’ to mainstream commercial interests, they may be seen as having sold

out to mainstream music (1997: 23). Derivatives or copies of mainstream pop or rock are

sometimes glossed positively when they are faithful covers or, in particular, clever tributes but

the type of imitation of which nonAngloAmerican popular music is more frequently accused

is that of a kitschy or bad, ‘inauthentic’ imitation. This is especially the case for pop and soft

rock forms, where potentially redeeming transgressive or empowering qualities are not

generally apparent. Mitchell notes in relation to Southeast Asian pop, for example:

its unashamedly commercial properties are too anxietyprone for the

world music listener seeking musical authenticity … and [it] is often

dismissed outright as too kitsch and shallow to warrant serious

consideration. (2001: 19)

6 Regarding this point, see also Taylor (1997: 17).


Yet avoidance of this type of nonAnglo American music by scholars, in particular, ignores a

large and arguably significant field of popular music production and consumption which

embraces many distinct expressive forms and through which individual and collective

identities are often constructed and negotiated7. To demonstrate this, I turn now to two

contrasting examples of Australian migrant pop.

Peter Ciani’s Italian-Australian pop

Peter Ciani is a Sydneybased singer, songwriter and prolific recording artist whose music and

career I have documented and analysed elsewhere (ScottMaxwell, 2002b and 2003b). He

migrated to Australia in 1961 and his professional performing and recording career over the

subsequent four decades has engaged both the Italian community and a wider Australian

audience. Since the late 1980s, he has also reached an audience in Italy through tours,

television appearances and recordings. His recorded output over this period comprises over 50

singles and 30 albums and he also claims copyright to over 300 of his own songs.

Ciani’s vocal repertoire belongs broadly to a tradition of Italian song called canzone, or

popular song (ScottMaxwell, 2002b: 389) and includes both songs he has written − with

lyrics in Italian or English − and covers. The latter range from commercial Neapolitan songs

and Italian popular song hits of the type that are showcased at the annual San Remo Song

Festival, albeit mostly from earlier decades, through to Italianthemed and other American

pop standards. But, regardless of the language he sings in and the provenance of the song,

sentimental or romantic ballads with a middleoftheroad, pop sensibility predominate. A

stylistic description of Ciani’s own songs might point to their fairly predictable melodic

contours, symmetrical wellbalanced phrases, simple though effective harmonic vocabulary

and professional backing arrangements, which often use lush synthesised instrumentation and

funky rhythmic vamps.

Ciani’s music is not strongly marked by ‘difference’. Musically, its most distinctive and

arresting quality lies in Ciani’s performance, in particular, his vocal delivery, which is smooth

and restrained but makes expressive use of timbre, embellishment, and rubato. The Italianness

of his music is of course most evident in songs sung in Italian. But even those of his songs

7 There is an equivalent tendency in western popular music studies to avoid mainstream, middleoftheroad

pop as a subject of research in favour of genres that are considered more richly coded or culturally ‘charged’

and therefore of greater intrinsic interest as musical or popular culture phenomena.


with English lyrics contain, I argue, elements that are strikingly contrary to AngloAmerican

Australian pop. Besides his residual Italian accent, these include his particular use of vibrato,

the intensity of his expressive style, his clear diction, the clarity of the lyrics in the musical

texture and their strongly sentimental character.

Peter Ciani’s diasporic transnational identity is played out in both his songs and the trajectory

of his career. He achieved some mainstream success in the 1960s and 1970s through his

recordings and TV and radio appearances, but the government’s adoption of a multicultural

policy from the late 1970s led to a celebratory form of multiculturalism which recognised and

supported cultural diversity through music and other cultural forms that overtly flagged their

ethnicity, thus marginalising Ciani’s particular style of Italian music. Partly in response to

this, he has resorted to a more explicitly Australian style and lyric, and many of his

compositions of the last decade have a subtle country music flavour and strongly patriotic

content, as in his songs This Beautiful Country and Spirit of Australia8. However, he also

increasingly composes songs on Italian themes for his Italian audiences in Italy, Australia and

elsewhere. On the one hand, Peter Ciani has sought through his career and music to transcend

the limitations of minority ethnic status but, on the other, he has also not been able to escape

his Italian heritage and has, especially latterly, embraced it. His music, his use of two

languages and his binational career and audiences speak to and articulate this dilemma of

dual identifications. Yet his lyrics, his language, his overall repertoire, his arrangements, and

the many inflections in his vocal style make his music as ‘Italian’ as other forms of Italian

music in Australia.

Indonesian Pop and Rock in Melbourne

A contrasting example of migrant pop is found within the Indonesian community, specifically,

the pop and rock bands formed by Indonesian youth9. A large number of the young Indonesian

musicians who play in or associate with these bands are in fact students rather than migrants:

part of an evergrowing Indonesian population seeking an Australian education. They

8 For further regarding these, see ScottMaxwell (2003b).

9 One local Indonesian musician claimed (in November 2004) that there are 32 such bands in Melbourne, but it

is a very fluid scene and bands are sometimes formed for particular occasions or events, such as a ‘battle of the

bands’ competition that was held on 6 August 2003 at De Biers Bar and Club as part of a music event called ‘7

Beats and Counting’. This event is documented in the August and September 2003 editions of Ozip, a

Melbourne Indonesian community magazine.


therefore represent a subset of the Indonesian community, both because of their citizenship

status and for other reasons, but many aspire to find jobs and stay in Australia on completion

of their studies and members of these bands include permanent residents and Australian

citizens as well as those on student visas10.

The bands have a standard contemporary music lineup – vocals, guitar, bass, drums,

keyboard – and claim between them a range of styles including pop, rock, reggae, metal and

funk. All these styles are represented in the rich spectrum of popular music found in

Indonesia, but it is notable that none of the young Melbourne bands subscribe particularly to

dangdut, a longstanding and, originally, lowerclass identified vernacular genre that continues

to be highly popular in Indonesia11. They play covers or arrangements of songs by currently

popular Indonesian groups and occasionally western groups according to genre and also, in

some cases, their own songs with lyrics in Indonesian, English or both12.

One of the few Indonesian bands in Melbourne to have made a CD – albeit just a demo – is

Summerset. The ten tracks on their album (titled tHe StOrY cOnTiNuEs…) are all composed

by band members and, notwithstanding the band’s name and album title, only three out of the

ten have English lyrics. As with Peter Ciani, this is not music that is particularly marked by

difference. Summerset’s leader described to me what they do as ‘explorative pop’ and claimed

Indonesian bands, Dewa and Padi, as influences. Stylistically, the music on the CD lies

consistently towards the pop end of the poprock continuum, whereas Dewa’s and especially

Padi’s alloriginal material is much more varied13. Summerset’s songs have some distinctive

features, but their overall style is in fact fairly typical of the genre known as pop Indonesia

10 According to 2005 Immigration Department statistics cited in The Age (22 January 2005: 9) a substantial

proportion of Australia’s new permanent settlers are young people who originally came to study, with

Indonesians comprising a significant portion of them. However, the Indonesian community in Australia has

always included many temporary residents, some of whom have contributed significantly to its musical life.

11 See Wong & Lysloff (1998), Lockwood (1998) or (though more outdated) Hatch (1989) for some general

accounts of styles and genres of Indonesian popular music, including dangdut. Aspects of the independent hard

rock scene known as musik underground, which encompasses metal and its offshoots, punk, reggae and other

hardcore genres, are discussed in Sen & Hill (2000: 177181), Walech (2003), and Baulch (2003).

12 English words and expressions are in fact a part of contemporary colloquial Indonesian, especially as spoken

by young Indonesians in Jakarta. See the discussion of language choice in underground music in Walech

(2003), which also refers to more general issues of language use in Indonesian popular music.

13 A live performance I attended included a greater range of styles, including a dangdut song.


(Indonesian pop)14. They use cleanly defined melodies, sweet clear vocal timbres that

sometimes incline to breathiness (especially the male vocalist), straightforward metres and

rhythms, and lyrics that deal almost exclusively with youthful love. Tempos are moderate to

slow. Harmonic (and melodic) materials are drawn from the western harmonic system and are

generally simple, except for occasional harmonic progressions and chord extensions that could

be described as ‘explorative’ within a pop context. There are also occasional moments of

funkbased rhythm. The band’s overall sound is clean, the musical textures are quite sparse

and the arrangements are simple, although this is probably as much to do with limited

resources and musical experience as anything else.

It is in fact possible to distinguish this or other brands of nonvernacular (and nonhybrid)

Indonesian pop – whether produced in Australia or in Indonesia – from, say, AngloAmerican

Australian or European pop by sound alone, and discuss these differences in musicological or

popular music industry terminology. This is notwithstanding commonly encountered views

like: ‘In overall sound, Indonesia’s mainstream pop strikingly resembles its Western

equivalent’ (Wong & Lysloff, 1998: 106). The use of Indonesian, regional Indonesian

languages or (Indonesianflavoured) English in song lyrics, besides carrying important social,

cultural and other meanings, is a highly significant sonic component of Indonesian pop or

rock and, moreover, has distinctly different resonances in the Australian context.

However, difference – or Indonesianness – is also located and, I suggest, more usefully

discerned in this music’s production and social dynamics. These bands tend to be quite large

with anything from 4 up to 8 members and they often contain more than one vocalist who may

sing in unison, divide up the vocal part between them, provide backing harmonies, or even

change places with one of the guitarists or the keyboardplayer, as occurs in Summerset

performances. There is also considerable interchange of membership between bands. This

fluid band membership and structure is just one dimension of a collectivist approach to music

making that characterises not only these bands but many other forms of Indonesian music and

musicmaking. A defining characteristic of most of Indonesia’s vast array of traditional music

forms is their flexibly collective ensemble basis in which musical roles, and even those of

musicians and dancers, are interchangeable. The strong, group focus of the Melbourne bands

14 See Yampolsky (1989) and Hatch (1989) for further on this genre. Hatch’s subdivision of Indonesian pop as

light (pop ringin), medium (pop tengah) and heavy (pop berat) is now outdated.


extends to the larger social and cultural scene of young, middleclass, urbanised Indonesians

in Melbourne that these bands come out of and interact with.

The musicians in these bands also perform their identity through their music, both practically

and symbolically. It affirms for them the importance of the group and their sense of belonging

within it, and it also allows them to engage directly with, recreate and participate in their own

youth culture away from the source of that culture: Indonesia. Indonesian pop, rock or metal,

while it might seem derivative to us, is as significant an emblem of identity and origin for

them – where they come from and who they are – as for example gamelan music might be for

an elderly Javanese. And when bands such as Summerset perform the occasional dangdut

song – which, as previously indicated, is a genre that does not on the whole speak to or for

this particular group – it has a strongly symbolic function in signaling Indonesia in the

broader, national sense and thereby reinforcing national identifications.

Conclusion

An important role remains for researchers and others who seek to locate and mediate

continuity of countryoforigin musical traditions and their transformations within Australian

migrant communities, whether via oral transmission or other means. Yet, the examples

presented here demonstrate that such endeavours need to be far more inclusive than has

generally been the case. Mediations of migrant music tend to emphasise the musical diversity

that exists between cultures, but fail to recognise or acknowledge the diversity that is also to

be found within them. Moreover, the pop and rock forms heard on community radio,

recordings, videos and other media, whether created locally or in the homeland, are a very

important part of the sound world and lived experience of many migrants in Australia.

Migrant pop may be inauthentic from a world music perspective but, in a sense, it can have an

unselfconscious authenticity that some other musics which are more overtly ‘ethnic’ do not.

Instead of demonstrating authenticity through emblems that flag a world of the past, migrant

pop is ‘real’ in the sense of being of the present, or of relatively recent times. It draws on

musical materials from and engages with the contemporary globalised culture that surrounds

it, it is meaningful to those who produce and consume it and it is also a significant expression

of the migrant experience.

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Complexity, Simplicity and Poetic Invention in Antônio Carlos

Jobim's “Águas de março” (Waters of March)

Peter Freeman

Antônio Carlos Jobim (1927–1994) has been called the greatest of all the contemporary

Brazilian songwriters—the ‘Gershwin’ of Brazil. Like Gershwin, he wrote both popular and

serious music and was a skilled piano player. His songs have made a lasting impression

worldwide, to the extent that many are now standards of the jazz music repertoire. Jobim’s

melodic and lyrical sensibility is enhanced by his inventive and peculiar harmonic idiom. This

idiom, not the norm in either popular or art music, is characterised by dissonant and highly

coloured chords that sound entirely natural and fit effortlessly into a personalised musical

context.

‘Tom’ Jobim, as he was called by his friends, was formally trained in classical music and was

well acquainted with the works of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky,

and also the techniques of 20th Century serialism. His most important musical influence,

however, was Heitor VillaLobos, whose works combined influences from classical, native

Indian, folk and popular Brazilian styles. In the early 1960s Jobim became the most important

identity in the creation of the new, internationally recognised, popular music style called

‘Bossa Nova’. Jobim’s musical works reveal a wide range of stylistic influences—from French

impressionism, samba rhythms from Rio and Bahia, American Tin Pan Alley songs, twelve

tone serialism, and from popular Brazilian music composers such as Pixinguinha, Ary

Barroso and Dorival Caymmi. He also composed largerscale, orchestral works such as

Sinfonia do Rio de Janeiro (1954), Brasilia: Sinfonia da Alvorada (1960), film scores and

other orchestral pieces such as the tone poems Saudade do Brasil and Arquitetura de morar

(1975).

The jazz critic Leonard Feather once remarked that Antônio Carlos Jobim's song Águas de

março (Waters of March) had the most difficult harmonic structure of any popular music and

proclaimed it “among the top ten songs of all time” (Holston, 1995: 56). Águas de março is all

the more remarkable because Jobim wrote not only the music but also both the English and

Portuguese text for the song. The complicated harmonic structure of Águas de março is

counterbalanced by a melody built on a simple, twonote motive. The essence of Jobim’s


compositional strategy was simply to vary the rhythm and phrasing of the melody, relating

this closely to the lyrical content of the song, and to set this within a repetitive, fourmeasure

harmonic structure. Even without musical accompaniment Jobim's text constitutes an

impressive and skilful piece of poetry. His words fall effortlessly into a constantlychanging

rhythmic architecture, and evoke compelling images of everyday life such as “a truckload of

bricks in the soft morning light” and “the sound of a shot in the dead of the night” (Chediak,

1994: 27).

Jobim was very particular with the words he chose for this song and went to great effort to

ensure that they were well integrated with the animated rhythm of the melody. He chose

words that were concise, stark and evocative. He used these words to suggest, rather than

describe familiar events, items and ideas. His phrasing was short and economic. He also

avoided using adjectives, subjunctive tenses and participles, and built the song using a series

of short lyrical and musical statements complete in themselves. He also referred to water in all

its forms—from rain drops to a river—describing in words and music the extent of nature’s

transformation as the song developed.

In 1974 in New York, sometime after he had completed the initial Portuguese version of the

song, Jobim decided to write an English version. Most of his previous songs had been

translated by others and some of these translations had not pleased him:

I've never been satisfied with American versions of my lyrics, because

they weren't exactly translations. People just wrote them without

knowing what they were talking about. So I decided to write the

English lyrics myself. (Jobim 2000: 26)

Not content with entrusting the translation of the text to anyone but himself, Jobim restricted

his selection of English words to those with one syllable having AngloSaxon roots, avoiding

as much as possible any words with Latin roots.

Águas de março

É pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho

É um resto de toco, é um pouco sozinho

É um caco de vidro, é a vida, é o sol

É a noite, é a morte, é o laço, é o anzol

É peroba do campo, é o nó da madeira

Waters of March

A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road

It’s the rest of a stump, it’s a little alone

It’s a sliver of glass, it is life, it’s the sun

It is night, it is death, it’s a trap, it’s a gun

The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush


Caingá, candeia, é o matita pereira... A knot in the wood, the song of a thrush...

The structure of this song does not follow the typical ballad structure of verse, chorus, verse

(i.e. strophic). Instead, it is built using short musical phrases or blocks that are repeated

throughout the song. Each melodic phrase represents a certain momentary direction and these

are strung together to give the appearance of a changing melodic stream. Built on the text, the

melody can be thought of as a set of short phrases, based on the twonote motive e1 to c1 with

each phrase outlining a distinctive melodic path which ends on the first beat of the measure on

the note, c1 (or occasionally c2). These phrases are set out in Example 1 in order of appearance

in the song, not in any hierarchical order. In fact, because of the nature of the architecture of

this song these phrases could appear in almost any order and still maintain the appearance of a

preconceived musical progression.

Phrase 1

Phrase 2

Phrase 3


Phrase 3 (extended)

Phrase 4

Phrase 4 (extended)

Phrase 5

Phrase 6 (first six measures only)

Example 1. Antônio Carlos Jobim, Águas de março, the set of constituent melodic phrases.

These phrases are designed to be interchangeable and can be linked in virtually any order

without melodic (or harmonic) discontinuity. The Portuguese version of the song, for

example, begins with phrase 1 followed by phrase 2 repeated seven times, then followed by

phrase 3, then phrase 1, phrase 2, phrase 3 (extended), phrase 4 (extended) and so on as seen

in Example 2. In other words, the musical phrases act as autonomous building blocks which

go together to create the song. Despite the independence of these phrases, the strong musical


connection with the lyric is maintained because the lyric itself is segmented and consists of

descriptive single words and short phrases which allude to the overall sentiment rather than

tell a story.

Example 2. Antônio Carlos Jobim, Águas de março, opening sequence of melodic phrases.

The entire song can be represented as a sequence of selected melodic phrases as defined in the

table shown in Example 3. In this diagram each block contains a phrase number representing a

measure of the song.

5

1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

12

3 3x 1 2 3 3x 3x 3x20

4x 4x 4x 4x 4x 4x 4x 2

28

1 2 2 2 3x 3x 3x 3x36

4 2 2 2 1 2 2 2

44

3x 3x 3x 3x 4 2 2 252

(2) (4) 4 4 1 2 2 2

60

4x 4x 4x 4x (1) (2) (3) (3)68

(3) (3) (3) (3) (2) (2) (2) (1)

76

(2) (2) (2) 3x 3x 3x 3x 4x


84

4x 4x 4x 1 2 2 2 3x

92

3x 3x 3x 4 5 4x 4x 1100

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 4

108

5 4 5 6 6 6 6 6116

6 6 6 6 6 6 6 (1)

124

end

Example 3. Antônio Carlos Jobim, Águas de março, overall sequence of melodic phrases

(Portuguese version) (“x” indicates the extended variation of the phrase).

The appearance of the above chart suggests there is little sense of development throughout the

song because of the seemingly arbitrary selection of melodic phrases. In the first part of

Águas de março, melodic phrases are often repeated, giving an almost minimalist impression.

Any sense of development is sustained more by the continuity of text than by musical devices,

and the awareness of progression is not always obvious.

The harmonic accompaniment, however, is nowhere near as unpredictable as the organisation

of melodic phrases would suggest from Example 3. In fact, Jobim constructed the song using

fourmeasure structural harmonic blocks assembled independent of the supported melody. The

simplicity of the melodic phrases supports this compositional method. Almost any of the four

measure harmonic blocks harmonise with any combination of the six melodic phrases. The

fourmeasure harmonic blocks are outlined in Example 4, with a dash indicating the transition

from one measure to the next.

Block A: C9/6 – C/B – Am6 – Fm6

Block B: C9/6 – G 7(#11) – Fmaj7 – Fm6

Block C: C9/6 – Gm7(9)/C – F#m7( 5) – Fm6

Block D: C6 – Gm7,C7 – D7 – Fm6

Block E: C – Cm7 – D7 – Fm6 (or D /C)

Example 4. Antônio Carlos Jobim, Águas de março, chord sequences within the fourmeasure,

structural harmonic blocks.

The layout of the fourmeasure harmonic blocks as they appear throughout the song is

outlined in Example 5.


5

A

8

B 12

C

16

C

20

C

24

C 28

A

32

C

36

C

42

A 44

C

48

A

52

D

56

A 60

C (+ 3 measures)

67

(A)

71

B

75

A 79

C

83

A

87

A

91

E 95

E

99

A

103

C

107

C 111

D

115

D119

E

123

end

Example 5. Antônio Carlos Jobim, Águas de março, the sequence of fourmeasure, structural

harmonic blocks throughout the complete song.

A comparison of this structure with the arrangement of melodic phrases shown in Example 3

indicates that the melody is constructed virtually independent of the chaconnelike harmonic

accompaniment as there is little if any correlation.

In many ways it is the last thirteen measures (111–123) that give greater insight into the

mechanism of the song than anything that is revealed within the body of the song. From

measure 112 there is a falling chromatic line that extends almost an entire octave from b 1 to

c1, voiced in the upper notes of the chords at the start of each measure.


Example 6. Antônio Carlos Jobim, Águas de março, final measures 111–124 (Jobim 2000:

51).

An analysis of the complete score reveals that the sequence comprising the first four notes of

this descending chromatic line, b – a – a – g, can be found in every repeated fourmeasure

block throughout the song. To correspond with the chords shown in Example 4 the note

sequence needs to be offset (or cycled) by one to read g – b – a – a . The subsequent

chromatic sequence comprising the notes g – f# – f – e can also be found in all of the

corresponding chords within the fourmeasure blocks of the song (with the exception of block

B, Example 4). It would appear, therefore, that Jobim used this chromatic sequence of notes to

determine the nature of the harmonisation for every chord within each fourmeasure block and

that this chromatic sequence is therefore the key to the structure of the whole song. The

harmonic context of the fournote sequences is most obvious in the final twelve measures.

This is shown in the harmonic reduction (Example 7) where both fournote chromatic

sequences are shown relative to the longer chromatic line from b 1 to c1.


Example 7. Antônio Carlos Jobim, Águas de março, harmonic reduction final measures,

showing the function of the chromatic sequences b – a – a – g and g – f# – f – e.

In many ways the extended chromatic line outlined in the final measures, and the shorter

descending chromatic lines of the two sequences heard throughout the piece highlight a

semantic association with a large flowing, slowly descending volume of water. Taking the

water association further, the song starts with two notes, the descending motive e1 to c1, the

regular repetition of this motive adding to the allusion of the sound of rain drops. As the song

develops, the twonote motive mutates rhythmically rather like the indeterminant and

constantlychanging path of a stream of water. The effect of the melody darting out to make a

statement then rapidly returning to rest on c1 creates an effervescent, buoyant mood, while the

allusion of a steadily flowing stream with raindrops intermittently falling in it is underscored

by a c pedalbass note in the last twelve measures and finally ends with an imposing, slowly

moving descending melodic figure reminiscent of a large river – a collection of all that has

come before it. The text also enhances the water metaphor by first mentioning singular small

objects – “a stick, a stone”, moving on to larger objects with watery correlations – “a fish, a

flash, a silvery glow”, through more obvious associations – “the car that got stuck in the mud,

the river bank talks of the waters of March” and builds to the final elation – “It’s the end of all

strain, it’s the joy in your heart”. These programmatic associations are interwoven throughout

the song while it remains framed by the simple twonote motive e1 to c1 that is restated at the

conclusion of the song as two single, exposed, notes repeated in a higher octave—a sonic

reminder of the origins of the Waters of March.

Bibliography

Cabral, S (1997) Antônio Carlos Jobim: Uma Biographia, Rio de Janeiro: Lumiar Editora

Cabral, S ‘Tom: Revolution with Beauty’, Bossa Nova Songbook v4, Rio de Janeiro: Lumiar Editora: 14–17Castro, R (2000) Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music that Seduced the World, trans. Lysa Salsbury, Chicago: A Capella Books

Chediak, A(1994) Tom Jobim Songbook v2, Rio de Janeiro: Lumiar Editora

Delfino, J (1988) Brasil Bossa Nova, AixenProvence, France: Édisud

de Souza, T; Cezimbra, M and Callado T (1995) Tons Sobre Tom, Rio de Janeiro: Revan

Fisk, E (1983) ‘The King of the Bossa Nova: Spotlight on Antônio Carlos Jobim’, Guitar Review v55

Holden, S (1988) ‘Jazz: Jobim and Bossa Nova’, Guitar Review v72


Holston, M (1995) ‘Saying Goodbye to Antônio Carlos Jobim’, Americas (English Edition) v47n2Jobim, A and Jobim, P (2000) Cancioneiro Jobim: Obras Completas 1971–1982 v4, Rio de Janeiro: Jobim MusicWheaton, J (2001) “Antônio Carlos Jobim: Melodic, Harmonic and Rhythmic Innovations”, Jazz Research Proceedings Yearbook 2001

Discography

Antônio Carlos Jobim Águas de março from Antônio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina: Elis and Tom

Verve, 1974

Antônio Carlos Jobim Águas de março and Waters of March (1972) from Jobim: Antônio Carlos Jobim

Verve, 2000


Playing Tricks on the ‘Magic Men’ of PNG (Sanguma)

Denis Crowdy

The band Sanguma formed in 1977 at the then new National Arts School in Port Moresby,

Papua New Guinea (PNG). Sanguma’s music is a fusion of jazz/rock and various elements of

traditional PNG music. Throughout the 1980s they toured the US, New Zealand and

Australia, and performed in Japan and Germany. In July 1987 they were in Melbourne, with

The Age newspaper publishing an article and photo on the front page (Flanagan, 1987).

The article points out that the band had been performing for ten years by that stage, and was

“born ...out of an awareness that such music, and the ancient culture it represented, was at risk

of being lost in a single generation” (Flanagan, 1987, p.1). Preservation, recontextualisation,

the unstoppable “will of change” are the other main themes that emerge briefly in the article.

This trip coincided with the beginnings of a more commercial interest in ‘tribal’ and non

Western popular musics labeled world music. It also predated collaborative projects such as

that undertaken by Not Drowning, Waving, and David Bridie with various PNG musicians,

notably George Telek1. Sanguma’s activity continued through the 1990s after a hiatus of

several years, weaving a parallel, intertwining history with the continued rise of world music

in the West. Sanguma recordings can’t be found in this market however, a matter to be partly

explored today.

By the end of the 1990s, world music had generated considerable discourse in

ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural studies and anthropology. Characterisation

of this was presented to attendees at the 1999 IASPM conference in Sydney, in a paper by

Steve Feld read by Tony Mitchell2, and later expanded and published in Public Culture (Feld,

2000). Feld offers two tropes evident in narratives running through the discourse on world

music; anxious, and celebratory:

Anxious narratives sometimes start from the suspicion that capitalist

concentration and competition in the recording industry is always

productive of a lesser artistry, a more commercial, diluted, and

sellable version of a world once more “pure,” “real,” or less

commodified. This suspicion fuels a kind of policing of the locations

1 See Hayward (1998) for a detailed examination of such collaborations.

2 Feld could not attend the conference due to personal reasons.


of muscial authenticity and traditions. It questions whether world

music does more to incite or erase musical diversity, asking why and

how musical loss is countered by the proliferation of new musics.

(Feld, 2000:152)

And:

In response, celebratory narratives counter these anxieties by

stressing the reappropriation of Western pop, emphasizing fusion

forms as rejections of bounded, fixed, or essentialized identities. That

is, celebratory narratives of world music often focus on the production

of hybrid musics. They place a positive emphasis on fluid identities,

sometimes edging toward romantic equations of hybridity with overt

resistance. (ibid)

He then explores world music as “a contact zone of activities and representations” centred on

the music of Deep Forest.

While I was excitedly discussing this article at the UPNG Music Department, a teaching

colleague from the Solomon Islands casually remarked that one of his relatives was the

original singer of the field recording which later was used by Deep Forest for the song A

Sweet Lullaby. It fascinated and certainly angered me that the members of Deep Forest,

luxuriously ensconced in their European urban jungle, had such a distant connection with the

origins of the song. It provided an instant and personally felt example of schizophonia,

another important concept in relation to world music discussed by Feld, drawn from the work

of Murray Schafer (Feld, 1994; Schafer, 1980), one in which the power differentials were

almost impossibly in favour of Western industry against island community.

Quite separately, after completion of research on Sanguma for a thesis, I returned to Feld’s

article and realised the same ideas were evident. This paper plots the celebratory and anxious

narratives evident in a particular thread of Sanguma’s activity, concluding that such narratives

were a critical part of a wider cultural discourse, circulating well before the term world music

had gained currency.

Nascence

During the years immediately surrounding PNG’s accession to independence in 1975,

indigenous cultural producers focused much of their energy on establishing and developing art


forms representative of a newly independent population. The National Arts School was part

of this. In its earliest days it had a flexible approach to intake; demonstrable talent being the

main criteria for entry. Much of the early artistic activity was relatively informal; students and

staff gathered together to work on a variety of collaborative projects.

One of the first music staff, Sandra Krempl, describes the ethos surrounding early

experiments in musical fusion:

When I first saw the students in the National Arts School they were

“learning” to play somebody else’s music and they were learning to

write in somebody else’s music style. (letter to the author from

Krempl, 12 January, 2004)

Another staff member, film maker Les McLaren who had been in PNG since 1970 and had

considerable experience documenting traditional music and culture describes the formative

stages:

The music students had grown up on Elvis, the Beatles, and

Creedence Clearwater Revival; at the time, Disco was big. The

students seemed to have only a cursory knowledge of their own

regional musical traditions, and little interest in them. We went on

excursions to the Sogeri plateau to harvest bamboo for flutemaking.

We explored a potted history of Western rock music via the blues and

the black history of the USA. Considering those evolutions, it seemed

only a short step to experiment with a deliberate blend of traditional

PNG musical instruments and forms with those of the West. (McLaren,

2003, p. 878)

Anxiety about popular music

The task of the NAS was to develop relevant, contemporary culture for Papua New Guinea as

an independent nation. Existing contemporary music at the time – stringband and rock

groups, for example – were clearly not regarded as appropriate. Krempl expressed a view that

contemporary popular music was imitative of overseas forms:


Despite a rich and diverse [sic] musical tradition, there is now a low

standard of music in cultural and educational life in Papua New

Guinea, epitomised by young who [sic] imitate poor quality imported

music. (KremplPerreira, 1984: 17)

In an interview with Les McLaren, he described the concern that young people were largely

playing ‘derivative’ musics, avoiding any direct musical connections with traditional music

styles (interview, 23 December, 2003). Another staff member, Ric Halstead, also reinforced

the existence of these views with his comments that: “overall the students are encouraged to

be creative and not to simply imitate the music of others” (Halstead, 1980b: 26). This was

placed amongst ideas of musical loss and preservation:

The festival will be a unique opportunity to hear village musicians

performing true traditional music and may be the last time such an

opportunity exists as much of Papua New Guinea’s traditional music

is dying out. (Halstead, 1980a: 40)

This sense of loss and rapid change was based in experience, as McLaren points out after

describing an extensive project recording traditional music throughout PNG in 1975:

A sense of social change was palpable, however. From commercial

enterprises in the highlands to the radical ideals of the Kabisawali

movement in the Trobriand islands, a constant theme emerged–of

young people breaking with traditions. Our own curiosity about

kastom seemed to be validated by older people in these communities,

who were lamenting the pace of change. This perceived dichotomy

between modernity and tradition framed our approach to filming, so

that we eschewed anything that looked nontraditional. (McLaren,

2003: 85)

These views were enthusiastically continued and developed by the members of Sanguma.

Much later, founding member of Sanguma Tony Subam, for example, expressed concerns

about young people being strongly influenced by the media with a fashionable “in” sound

(and predominantly Western influence) developed and pushed by local commercial recording

studios and radio stations. John Blacking, in a report to UNESCO on cultural development in

PNG, also reinforced the threat of a cultural flood from overseas, amongst some rather odd

comments about the NAS music department given its success locally and overseas at the time:


It is perhaps unfortunate that the few students who have so far taken

the music course have not proved to the authorities that music has any

output and that it has an essential role to play in education, especially

when the country is being flooded by cassettes of foreign music of

variable quality. (Blacking, 1984:4)

Although such subjective assessments are open to criticism themselves, the underlying tone of

anxiety about the threat of cultural imperialism and loss of musical diversity and uniqueness

provided an ideological platform for Sanguma as actively providing some cultural resistance,

celebrating PNG diversity and uniqueness and opposing imitations of overseas styles.

The response

Sanguma managed the selection of musical symbols in a number of ways to meet such

challenges. Choice of instrumentation is one of the clearest set of selections. After the voice,

the most widespread and common instruments in popular PNG music in the late 1970s were

acoustic guitars and ukuleles. These are probably the least used instruments in the Sanguma

repertoire. This is surely no coincidence in a band that explored a tremendous variety of

timbres, including keyboards, brass, wind, electric guitar and bass, and a wide variety of

traditional instruments. The absence of the acoustic guitar and ukulele and the incorporation

of traditional instruments (amplified to allow the same presence as others), and the use of

relatively exotic (to a PNG audience) Western instruments such as the saxophone, flute and

trumpet, are selections that clearly mark out an artistic direction different to any other

ensemble in PNG.

Their style featured flexible formal structures; not the usual strophic forms of pop music, but

sections with fluid, textbased rhythmic patterns and subsections. The chants and text occupy

the initial dominant elements of organisation, with accompaniments moulded, often through

complex metrical groupings, appropriately. Freedom of expression and again flexibility in

form is evident in the overall structural principle of presentation of the opening material, then

contrasting middle sections allowing room for improvisation. It is this feature, more so than

harmonic or melodic material necessarily, that marks the oftstated link with jazz/rock fusion.

All of their publically released recorded musical output involved recordings of live material—

be it live in a studio or on stage. Performance and associated intragroup and groupto

audience communication was a significant feature of the band. Although adept in the use of


various music technologies, music as an event involving dance, commentary, movement and

the extramusical energy often a part of live performance was crucial.

The overseas style influences used by Sanguma bears some similarity to the choice of

instrumentation. The relatively niche style of jazz/rock fusion was used, rather than current

popular overseas styles such as rock, pop and disco. This is hardly surprising in relation to the

comments discussed earlier on derivative musics and the concerted effort to avoid direct

imitation of those forms seen to be swamping the market. Nevertheless, this created issues of

accessibility to both local and overseas audiences, perhaps tipping their activity more to being

an art music than a popular music. If Sanguma’s style has more in common with art music

than popular music (although one would have to question the relevancy of the separation at

all) then they were making a cultural space to fit into as they went—there was no preexisting

genre/context into which they easily fitted. The group essentially broke up in 1989, after a

range of concerns by various members with management, not least of which was that band

members were not earning a living after a decade of touring and recording.

Reformation, Yothu Yindi, recording

Sanguma reformed in 1994 to support Yothu Yindi who were to perform in PNG in February

1994. There was a good deal of interest surrounding Yothu Yindi’s trip to PNG, as they were

clearly one of the most major groups to visit. Mainstream overseas bands were, and still are,

rare events for PNG audiences. Minor acts from Australia were regularly featured at cultural

shows, but often these groups were billed well beyond their status in their home country.

There was also considerable interest surrounding Sanguma’s reformation and performance,

given their five year break. The most striking comparison of the gig was the notable style

difference between Sanguma and the more rockoriented Yothu Yindi. Clearly also was the

knowledge amongst the crowd that PNG had been blending of traditional and modern for well

over a decade through the work of Sanguma and subsequent bands at the NAS.

Two band members then asked to join Yothu Yindi; one continues with them to this day—Ben

Hakalitz, who lives in Cairns. This threw Sanguma’s plans for a while but they decided to go

ahead with a recording at Pacific Gold Studios. Recorded from 1994 to 1997 using the studio

after hours, the album was not released, with studio owner and executive producer Greg Seeto

stating dissatisfaction with a number of rhythm (drum) tracks, an opinion not unanimously

shared by members of the band.


Soundtrax

During the period of recording the studio album at PGS, plans were underway to shoot

a(nother) film version of Robinson Crusoe near Madang. Starring actors Pierce Brosnan (US)

and William Takaku (PNG), news of the location generated considerable interest throughout

PNG. Sanguma recorded a number of additional tracks to those planned for their album with

the intention of submitting them to be considered as composers/recording artists for the

soundtrack of the production. The tracks were submitted, but Sanguma did not obtain any

offers of such work. PGS continued to sit on the album.

A couple of years later, In 2001, while working in Sydney, I received a phone call from a

producer associated with NightLight Music, a company producing the Soundtrax Music

Library, who was seeking contact information for members of Sanguma. Soundtrax was on

the verge of releasing a volume of sample tracks designed for the postproduction/soundtrack

market titled Pacific Rim—Volume 1 The Antipodes. The company had dealt with Greg Seeto

in attaining the original audio, but were concerned that they had not dealt directly with the

actual musicians themselves. Even more fortunately, the Music Department I work in was

organising for Subam to travel to Sydney to participate in a small colloquium being held to

discuss music in the region, so we were able to organise Subam to travel to the Soundtrax

studios and meet those involved.

The CD is marked as not for sale to the general public; it must be ordered specifically from

Soundtrax, and usage of the material is licenced to the company. The copyright statement

reads:

All tracks published by the SoundTrax Music Library (APRA)

Unauthorised public performance, broadcasting and copying

prohibited. All usage or rerecording must be licenced from The

Soundtrax Music Library or its appointed Authorised Agents

worldwide. Not for sale to the general public. (from back CD insert

on Pacific Rim—Volume 1 The Antipodes)

There are eleven tracks of Sanguma’s music on the CD; several versions of four songs. All

four songs are registered with APRA with Sanguma (NZ) marked as copyright holders and

performers. The different versions of the songs are remixes, some with vocals, some without.

After Subam had met with Soundtrax staff and negotiated copyright over the Sanguma tracks,

it emerged that Greg Seeto had independently negotiated access to the Sanguma recordings


with Soundtrax. That Seeto had not contacted Sanguma over this concerned both Soundtrax

and Subam. Subam contacted other members of the band who felt similarly. From Seeto’s

point of view, however, the situation can be interpreted simply as a business arrangement. He

owned the tapes given that Sanguma had not paid to record in the first place. The tracks were

originally intended for soundtrack usage. There was no copyright law in place in PNG.

Several aspects of the behaviour of Seeto and Soundtrax stand out as questionable at best,

however. Sanguma members had no idea about the use of their music until Soundtrax

contacted Subam. By that stage, the CD was ready for duplication; there was little if any

chance of not using the tracks (the CDs had been duplicated or were in the process of being

duplicated at this stage), just a matter of assigning copyright. Whether Sanguma liked the

idea or not, the possibility that their music could be used, licensed to a company in Australia,

for soundtracks, jingles and so on was almost completely out of their control. Legal action

would have been complicated because of the international nature of the relationship between

PNG musicians, a PNG studio and an Australian company, and was completely out of the

question financially for the band.

To date, band members have not received any royalties.

Conclusion

This certainly seems to hint at an anxiety Frith discusses in his article ‘The Discourse of

World Music’ and the potential of:

the lurking problem of cultural imperialism, the suspicion that what

“world music” really describes is a double process of exploitation:

Third World musicians being treated as raw materials to be processed

into commodities for the West, and First World musicians... putting

“new life into their own music by working with artists like Ladysmth

Black Mambazo, Youssou N’Dour and Celia Cruz” (Frith, 2000: 308

9)

He then suggests that part of the reason for this is the idea that:

World music labels are highly informative about the musical source of

their releases, about local musical traditions, genres and practices,

but they are highly uninformative about their own activities—the

process through which music from Mali reaches a record store in

Middlesborough is not explained. (ibid: 309)


Feld’s piece, of course, does exactly this, and ends in a particular anxious lullabyinspired

metaphor about capitalism, globalisation and music.

This small part of Sanguma’s story – irrespective of other issues (national culture production,

authenticity, relevance to a PNG public amongst others) – clearly maps a more latent example

of how music might reach us in Melbourne from Port Moresby3 . In this case, Feld’s tropes

are evident in an active musical politics by music educators, musicians, journalists, and

others; it is not just more recent academic discourse. Anxiety about the impact of Western

popular music shaped active musical response celebrating PNG’s heritage and newly granted

independence.

That Sanguma’s most recent engagement with the commerce of world music in the West is so

fraught with power imbalances and absence of control reinforces the deep anxiety, indeed the

need for such anxiety, in reporting the inside detail of how music can make it from ‘other’

source to Western consumer.

Finally, Frith ends his piece with:

here we have the final irony: academic music studies look to world

music for clues about the postmodern condition, for examples of

hybridity and lived subjective instability, but to understand this

phenomenon we also have to recognize the ways in which world music

has itself been constructed as a kind or tribute to and a parody of the

community of scholars. (Frith, 2000: 20)

For the moment I will put aside the obvious concern that if world music is such a tribute and

parody of scholarly activity, one would hope similar inequities and wrongs were not evident in

detailed examinations of how academics bring source information to publication. More potent

is the continuing need to anxiously explore the industrial processes covered by the veneer of

globalisation as a celebratory narrative hiding the deep inequities that continue to exist under

that most hybrid, subjectively unstable and postmodern condition we call world music.

Bibliography

Blacking J (1984) ‘Papua New Guinea: Cultural development’, Unpublished Assignment report for UNESCO

Feld S (1994) ‘From schizophonia to schismogenesis: On the discourses and

3 I say might, as the only publically available PNG material in Melbourne record stores emanates from a successful and fair

collaboration, more from the efforts of the musicians involved than the system behind it though I suspect.


commodification practices of “world music” and “world beat’’’, in Keil C and Feld S (eds.), Music Grooves, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Feld S (2000) ‘A sweet lullaby for world music’, Public Culture v12n1

Flanagan M (1987) ‘Tribal music survives, with a touch of jazz’, The Age, 24 July, p. 1

Frith S (2000) ‘The discourse of world music’, in Born G and Hesmondhalgh D (eds.), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Halstead R (1980a) ‘Sanguma: A unique group’, PostCourier, 25 April, p. 40

Halstead R (1980b) ‘Sanguma adapts to keep in touch’, PostCourier, 9 May, pp. 26–7

Hayward P (1998) Music at the Borders: Not Drowning, Waving and their Engagement with Papua New Guinean Culture (198696), Sydney: John Libbey

KremplPereira S (1984) ‘Developing a school of music for Papua New Guinea’, Printed by the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, Port Moresby

Mclaren L (2003) ‘Explorations and experiments’, Meanjin v62n3

Schafer R (1980) The Tuning of the World: Toward a Theory of Soundscape Design, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press


Internet Induced Changes in Music Consumption Patterns

Marjorie Kibby

The project begun by the broadcast media and the recording industry to ensure that we shall

have music wherever we go has been exponentially accelerated by the development of

networked technologies. Beginning perhaps with the Dancette record player and gaining

impetus with the Sony Walkman, technology has increased the flexibility and individuality of

the methods and mechanisms through which music can be experienced. A decade before MP3

and file sharing Frith commented on “the changing place of music in leisure generally ...

music is being used differently and in different more flexible forms” (1987: 73). Discussing

home taping, Frith recognised that the youth market, in particular, was looking for flexibility

in format, variety in content, and increased personalisation of their music compilations.

In recent years we have read of the decline in CD sales and the blame for this directed towards

the downloading of illegal files from the Internet. However dissatisfaction with the CD as the

primary mode of music experience has been evident for some time as a broad set of cultural

factors have changed the role of music within everyday life – the Internet just happened to

offer a solution to consumers who already had a problem.

As music has become an increasingly integral part of contemporary social life, its role has

shifted to that of background support. There has been a significant shift from music as an

individual experience to music as an ambient state. Though music is all around us, music

consumption has become part of a general atmosphere of consumption, where it is just one

more consumer item to be used in the ongoing project of identity construction and

maintenance. While music has become an increasingly important part of the infrastructure of

capitalist society, and is now an essential crutch to all manner of acts of consumption (DeNora

and Belcher, 2000), this development has actually served to weaken the music industry, as

popular music is decreasingly valued for itself, but is, instead, increasingly valued more for

the ways in which it is consumed in relation to other things. Music consumption is now less

an end in itself than a partner of clothing, sport, media and other objects through which young

people in particular manage their identities. Music is less a valued product than something

that happens as you skate, drive, shop or text friends, surrounding you with an everchanging

identity aura.

A number of factors were involved in this shifting of music to an ambient role. The first was


the growth of dance music and club culture. In dance clubs the music producers are relatively

anonymous (Hesmondhalgh, 1998) and individual tracks and artists are mixed by DJs, losing

their individuality. It is not so much the artists who produce the music but the DJs that play

the music, and the clubs within which the music is played, or the locations in which the clubs

are based, that are elevated to the status of stars. The music commodity is not something that

can be taken home and placed on the shelf, as the real cultural capital attached to the music is

earned through actually being there. The predominant mode of dance music consumption is

as a collective experience within a public space. This inverts the practice within the music

industry where the live music is used as a hook, a promotional and marketing tool to support

the sale of recorded music. The live experience is the product. Moreover, with dance music,

the music itself is just one aspect of the experience; part and parcel of the consumption of

dance music is the physical and immersive experience of the club dance party or rave.

Similarly the increase in popularity of Hip Hop saw recorded music being used as the raw

material from which to construct a musical experience, rather than as the end point of music

consumption.

Another factor is that the consumption of music is increasingly being linked to other kinds of

media, where the music is valued less for its own qualities than for its association with other

phenomena. Songs and artists are less likely to be recognised in their own right but as the

theme from the current blockbuster. Television programmes that involve viewers in the daily

lives of the musician, or set artists in competition against each other signal a significant

increase in CD sales, often outstripping the sales of artists being promoted through

conventional marketing channels. The individual artist and their music however, become an

accompaniment to, and a reminder of, the televisual experience. Ironically, the perceived

advantages of cross selling music on the back of other cultural artefacts was one of the main

drivers behind the construction of the large media conglomerates that many of the leading

record companies are now a part (Sadler, 1997). In hindsight, it may have contributed to the

decline in the demand for music as a standalone product.

A third factor is the way in which popular music no longer commands the attention of

consumers in the way that it perhaps once did. In the immediate postwar period, popular

music underwent a significant period of growth as it developed alongside the cultural

construction of the teenager. The industry would lose significant numbers of consumers as

they aged and popular music became less of a central dynamic in their lives. And while they


were, for a while, replaced by new generations of music consumers, there is evidence to

suggest that, for a number of reasons, the ability of music to command the disposable income

of those between the ages of 14 and 24 is ebbing away rapidly. The most simple explanation

for this is that other, newer media and consumer electronics industries have begun to compete

for this market segment, so that the amount of money young people have to spend on music

has been reduced accordingly. New passions, be it computer games, mobile phones, or even

the Internet itself, have all attracted expenditure that, in many cases, was previously spent on

music.

A final factor has been the development of networked technologies and of a particular culture

of consumption that accompanied the increasing use of the Internet in everyday life. The

carefully constructed record collection with detailed liner notes and displayable cover art is

becoming little more than a quaint anachronism. Today’s music consumers are more likely to

have a fat, gloveboxsized folder of anonymous CDROMs or a number of moodindexed

playlists stored on their iPods. “Affective investments in particular bands, releases, tracks have

been replaced by a sort of musical ‘affluence’ where the size and currency of the collection is

valued, rather than the constituent components of the collection” (Kibby, 2003).

The Internet’s first civilian uses were based in collective efforts, and content was freely

available to all users. Commercialisation came later. This development history “bred an

entitlement philosophy in Internet users” (Segal, 1996:97). Internet users gained the

impression that whatever they wanted was out there, available at no charge. From its

beginning the Internet facilitated the sharing of files, text, graphics, software and music, and

music consumers quickly discovered the benefits of music file sharing. Peertopeer music

offers a music consumption experience that is close to surround sound. It is free, and it is free

in huge quantities. Endless numbers of tracks and styles and eras are available. Within an

environment that was already devaluing the individual artist and song, this availability is

inevitably changing consumers relationship to music, with many “downloading music in an

obsessive manner, without identifying with it or experiencing a passionate attachment”

(Kasaras, 2002).

The Internet has brought about a number of changes in the way that music is consumed and

music distribution has been at the forefront of the commercialisation of the Internet. Factors

that have led to the proliferation of music marketing and distribution on the Internet could

include the parallels between Internet and music consumer demographics – in general they


both tend to be young, welloff, computer literate. Also, the ability to separate the product

from a physical form and distribute it as files gives music an Internet advantage over some

other consumer products. Comparatively low product costs for music limits risks for both the

consumer and the seller, and also stimulates impulse buying. And the music market is a

competitive one with a large number of both buyers and sellers.

The Internet, as a mechanism for distributing information, services and goods that goes way

beyond what is traditionally seen as ‘marketing’, is set to cause profound changes in the music

market, changes which may be replicated in markets for other products. The ‘Internet Nirvana

Theory’ of intellectual property described the Internet as an arena of free exchange in which

everyone wins. Creators, distributors and service providers were seen to gain a huge new

revenue stream with reduced overheads and worldwide markets. Consumers would find

innumerable choices at low cost as the Internet became a vast intellectual commons in which

nothing is rare or hard to find, and every scrap of human culture is transcribed and made

available to all.

The imposition of Old Economy principles and controls on the Internet in recent years has

dimmed the prospect of an Internet Nirvana, however we have seen an Internet driven

increase in flexibility in the roles of creator, publisher, distributor and consumer which has

resulted in increased choice for music consumers.For the music consumer, the Internet brings

the promise of increased and less expensive access to interesting and desirable content,

ranging from live concert archives to searchable databases of historical material. And music

itself – the core music consumable – is available in such a variety of ways and forms that we

are assured of having music always online.

We are seeing access to a greater range of music as sources other than the major labels

become accessible to everyone. Independent musicians can sell their own music from their

websites. Internet based companies offer online space to unsigned musicians, overcoming

some of the problems of online marketing and promotion. Music variety will likely increase in

the future combined with lower prices, as consumers take advantage of shopping agents and

global secondhand stores. Even bootlegs, which were once the province of a few enthusiasts,

are now advertised on the web and exchanged for Bs & P (Blanks and Postage). Digital

copying has enabled the establishment of vines, where bootlegs can be recopied by receivers

without significant loss of quality.

A decoupling of the music from its physical form has allowed the development of a wide


range of music playing devices so that music is consumed in a wide range of formats. Kodak’s

MC3 camera plays music while you are waiting for the critical photographic moment. Palm

Pilots fill in the gaps between appointments with downloaded tracks. Mobile phone ring tones

are the fastest growing segment of the music market as young consumers have shown that they

are prepared to spend to have the latest signature tune on their phones.

Starbucks on trendy Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California was the first to offer

a fully integrated café/online music store. Ten more in Seattle will provide individual music

listening stations with downloading and CDburning capabilities this month. Starbucks plan to

have more than 1,000 locations up and running by the end of 2005. Coffee drinkers won’t just

choose their coffee from a selection of dozens, they accompany the experience with a

personalised soundtrack and take that music with them when they leave.

The Internet has also facilitated an unwrapping and rewrapping of parcels of music in

response to individual consumer demands. Very little market research addresses consumer

satisfaction with CDs as a music product. However, focus groups conducted with groups of

first year university students suggest that young consumers in particular think that CDs are too

expensive and that record companies are ripping them off; they don't like being forced to buy

tracks that they do not want, in order to own the tracks that they like; many prefer a mix of

artists rather than a whole CD of the same performer; some do not want the case and cover

and resent having to pay for them, some want their music in chunks longer than the fifty

minutes or so of the average CD; many feel that they get insufficient information about the

artist and the track before they have to make the decision to buy. Overall the feeling was: ‘this

is not a product I want, and it costs more than I think I should have to pay’.

While there are still music consumers who are prepared to pay premium prices for firstclass

content, those looking for disposable music are insisting on cheaper and cheaper prices.

Online retailers are able to differentiate their pricing temporarily and/or qualitatively. Tracks

may be dearer while on the charts, for example, cheaper in the first week of release, dearer

with a bonus included, cheaper with limits on playing time. While a number of companies are

offering music by subscriptions, to date the limitations on what consumers can do with the

files they have subscribed to have restricted the growth of the service.

Personalised web radio stations allow consumers to select music personalised to their taste

through a rating system. Software is now available to capture and copy streamed files, so the

restrictions on services such as PressPlay are perhaps just a challenge to the determined


consumer. With the development of wireless broadband, the possibility exists to tap into your

personalised station from a range of personal devices.

Network technology has also brought about an increased role of consumer information

exchanges in marketing music. Music consumers have been shown to be deliberately seeking

information to enhance their experience of the music they listen to. Much more detailed

information from a wider variety of sources is currently available via the Internet. Over 90%

of respondents to a survey of music consumers revealed that they used the Internet to search

for music information.

The new model underlying music information communication on the Internet is ‘many to any’

– consumers provide commercially oriented content as a service to other consumers. In this

new model, mediated environments are created by participants and then experienced by them.

The Internet frees consumers from their traditionally passive roles as receivers of marketing

communications, gives them much greater control over the search for and acquisition of

information relevant for consumer decision making and allows them to become active

participants in the marketing process.

The first source of information is the consumer his or herself, as web browsing and searching

is tracked and consumer preferences estimated based on the basis of this information. Web

sites are also able to provide instantly updated ‘mostpopular’ statistics, and information of the

‘people who bought this also bought that’ sort. Increasingly commercial sites are facilitating a

process where consumers market to each other. Amazon has reviews of particular items, lists

of musthaves contributed by visitors, and guides to artists and genres submitted by other

consumers. Fans and dedicated consumers also seek each other out in discussion forums

where they shares musical tastes and provide reviews and recommendations.

Electronic marketplaces seem to favour buyers, and customers have significant power to drive

a movement towards valueadding to music products. Companies seem to adopt valueadding

in stages, progressively developing improved customer relationships by delivering value using

targeted methods. The online environment supports value adding in a number of ways;

providing additional information, linking products, enabling interactive experiences,

facilitating community building and so on.

Breen argued in the mid 1990s that the music industry has been close to crisis for a long time.

Peertopeer MPs may have been blamed for the crisis but the Internet merely uncovered the

problem – it did not create it. However, Peertopeer filesharing user numbers seem to have


reached their peak. Kazaa numbers have dropped from a high of 35 million in June 2003 to 20

million this year. Other popular services have also lost significant numbers of users. Legal

download services are beginning to gain a foothold with a reported 5.3 million regular users

of Musicmatch, and 2.3 million for iTunes.

Record label executives use statistics on the songs traded on peerto peer networks to help

them pick which singles to release and to persuade radio stations to give new songs airplay.

Some promoters go a step further and advertise CD releases on filesharing networks. Artemis

records distributes selected artists songs with play restrictions on Kazaa and other file sharing

networks, hoping that after hearing the track a few times for free they will pay to have it for

keeps. After years of sticking fingers in the dyke holding back online music, the record

companies seem to have recognised that cheap or free ephemeral personalised music is the

way of the future.

Digital music that can only be played on a computer has limited appeal. However, in the next

few years, going to the mall to pick up the latest compact disc by the newest band or pop star

will be a thing of the past. As wireless devices grow less expensive and consumers become

more comfortable buying online, traditional methods of music delivery will become obsolete.

By forgoing pressing, trucking, and warehousing discs as well as avoiding other costs

associated with merchandising, tomorrow's musicians will get their songs to the public

quicker. By using online playlists to accumulate, store and sort music collections consumers

will have almost unlimited access to music of their choice. In the future, wireless broadband

Internet will make music into nearly a pure service industry.

Bibliography

Breen, M (1995) ‘The End Of The World As We Know It: Popular Music’s Cultural Mobility’,

Cultural Studies n9: 486504

DeNora, T and Belcher, S (2000) ‘Musically Sponsored Agency in the British Clothing Retail

Sector’, Sociological Review n48: 80101

Frith, S (1987) ‘The Industrialisation of Popular Music’ in Lull, J (ed) Popular Music and

Communication, London: Sage

Hesmondhalgh, D (1998) ‘The British Dance Music Industry: A Case Study Of Independent

Cultural Production’, British Journal of Sociology n49


Kasaras, K (2002) ‘Music in the Age of Free Distribution’, First Monday v7n1

http://firstmonday.org/issue7_1/kasaras/index.html

Kibby, M (2003) ‘Shared Files’ M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6, April

http://www.mediaculture.org.au/0304/05sharedfiles.html

Sadler, D (1997) ‘The Global Music Business as an Information Industry: Reinterpreting

Economies of Culture’, Environment and Planning A 29, 19191936

Segal, A (1996) ‘Dissemination of Digitised Music on the Internet: A Challenge to the

Copyright Act’, Computer and High Technology Law Journal n12


Ambience As Redemption In Australian Film: The Sound Design Of

Chopper

Mark Evans

This paper argues that the predominant sound design of Chopper is based on the use of

ambience1, atmospheres and effects; or in terms of recent Australian film sound, on the sound

of redemption. That is, redemption in the sense of deliverance and liberation; a liberation from

Australian soundtracks that bombard the audience with an aural intensity (most often a

recorded music intensity) that supposedly matches the drama/violence on screen. In Chopper

the soundtrack is freed to operate with subtle and carefully premeditated nuances. The use of

such subtlety not only enhances the often very disturbing action of the film but also

contributes substantially to the character development of the main protagonists within the

movie. The soundscape of Chopper may initially appear minimal yet, as will be demonstrated,

the sonic landscape is a complex web of sound effects, ambient noise, background

conversations, dialogue, atmospheres and ontheair sounds.

My aim today is to highlight key scenes within the film as markers of general sound design

philosophies, paying particular attention to layered ambience as a compositional device. But

first a brief contextualisation of the film.

The Chopper Milieu

The film Chopper is based on the life of Mark Brandon Read, a notorious criminal

colloquially known as ‘Chopper’2. Read was born in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1954 and was

first arrested at the age of 17. Read went on to spend 23 years of his adult life in prison,

convicted variously of attempted kidnap (of a County Court judge), wounding with malicious

intent, shootings, assault and arson. He was also acquitted of a murder charge on the grounds

of selfdefence. Read himself suffered numerous beatings, was stabbed, and had his ears sliced

1 Ambience is used here not as a synonym for ‘atmospheres’, as is often the case in film sound, but as a

deliberately created sonic milieu. This environment, constructed at low volume levels and often placed in the

background of the mix, has a direct lineage to the work of Brian Eno (and others) who pioneered the

Ambient music genre in the 1970s and 1980s (Hayward, 1998: 32ff).

2 Different theories abound over the origin of this nickname, one of the most favoured being that it comes

from Read’s trademark of cutting off people’s toes. Read himself traces it to when his ears were cut off (at

his own bequest) in Pentridge prison.


off in prison. His flamboyant character and public exploits made him a favourite subject for

the Australian media. On release from Pentridge Prison in 1991, Read published his first book

From The Inside: The Confessions of Mark Brandon Read (G. Allen). This colourful account

of his life story became a best seller and, nine books3 later, Read has sold more than 300,000

copies and become one of Australia’s most successful authors4.

Pulsating Pentridge

Turning now to the representation of Chopper within the film, and what becomes immediately

apparent is his caged duplicity. Chopper’s caged environment is initially invoked through the

clever manipulation of dialogue emitted via a television, that spoken outdoors, and that

spoken within a prison cell. The scene cuts between Chopper recording the television

interview outside in the prison yard, and him watching the broadcast interview on a small

television in his cell with two guards. As they watch the program Chopper interjects

comments and questions to the guards. The sound of Chopper’s voice is manipulated to suit

the visuals, with a tinny representation of his voice coming out of the television, a voice thick

with reverb (as a result of the concrete walls) in his cell, and a supposedly more realistic voice

in the prison yard. At this early stage of the film, Chopper’s voice is mediated, bounded,

constructed and, perhaps most importantly, different. The different effect of filtered sound is

thrust on the audience raising questions about which represents the more ‘real’ sound. Which

will be the voice that the audience can trust? The mediated sound of television news and

current affairs, packaged, edited and presented by respected community voices, often invokes

authority, yet Chopper’s realtime commentary on his own television appearance immediately

calls into question the place of his mediated communication throughout the movie. What is

evident at this early stage is that all of Chopper’s dialogue is caged. Whether he is outside in

the prison yard or inside his cell, his voice does not possess the freedom his dialogue would

have us believe he enjoys. He is bounded by the walls of the prison, by cell walls and gates.

His voice emanating from the television is edited by others, and transmitted via trebly

speakers that denude the strength of his voice. The constraints of his sound, and that of those

around him, is the dominant sonic premise on which the soundtrack is built.

The sonic environment of Pentridge Prison involves the nearconstant drone of television

3 Not including the children’s book authored by Read, entitled Hooky The Cripple (2002: Pluto Press).

4 Read continues to enjoy ‘celebrity gangster’ status, featuring on the cover of The Bulletin’s expose into

Australia’s underworld war which, at the time of writing, had involved 22 deaths (Shand, 2004).


and/or radio in the background of the mix, usually broadcasting greyhound racing or other

sports coverage. This combines with the constant murmur of voices, shuffling of feet, rattling

of keys and locks etc, to create an unsettling audio atmosphere for the film. The anonymous

acousmatic5 prison banter distracts the audience and occasionally the protagonists, as threats

and alliances develop. Background sounds are filtered, contained and ambiguous. There is

also a considerable blending, even bleeding together, of these sounds of prisoners, guards,

radios, televisions – the aural concoction becoming indecipherable and, by implication,

potentially explosive. The overall impact of this sound offers a slightly mysterious and very

intimidating context for the action. Prisoners appear simultaneously oblivious to the noises

surrounding them yet overtly conscious of who is where, doing what, to whom. This subtly

suggests differences in sensory phenomena: the eyes may be shut or distracted but the ears

never close. Such a construction of sound layers was carefully designed, according to the

film’s sound designer Frank Lipson:

We went to great lengths in creating the atmospheres in the gaol. We

spent three days at Pentridge prison with a small group of ex

prisoners, where we recorded many different tracks for background

use. Our reason for recording there rather than in a studio was to get

the right atmosphere for the prisoners who were performing. We also

recorded activity tracks, race calls and general yelling out etc.

(interview with Frank Lipson, 2003)

Due to the constancy of sound within the prison, and the rises and falls in its intensity, the

gaol appears to ‘throb’, to have its own life6. This ‘throb’ connects prisoners together and

follows them into the free world. Characters become demarcated by their ability to move away

from this sonic environment. The scene that best illustrates this is when Chopper, on release

from prison, goes to visit his prison attacker (and former friend) Jimmy Laughlin to clarify

whether Jimmy is planning to kill him or not.

In Jimmy’s House

Jimmy’s apartment, aside from the many visual and social representations presented, contains

a sonic environment analogous to that of prison. Once again television is present in the scene

5 Chion (1994: 7173) uses this term to discuss sound that is heard but not visualised on screen.

6 For further reflection on the construction and use of such an organic sound design, see Evans (2004).


although greyhound races on screen are not initially matched with audible sound. As with the

prison setting, there are numerous voices in background which, despite their placement in the

sonic mix, are nonetheless quite obtrusive. Phrases such as, “I’m sick of the sight of you!”

pierce through the domestic soundscape of the apartment. Displaced from their point of origin

these verbalisations become sonic markers of the emotion and intensity present at this point in

the narrative, despite the relative visual calmness. Other more nondescript terse interchanges

and verbal tones7 fill out the background of the soundscape.

The key moment within the scene has a direct link to those acts of violence that were depicted

in prison. As Chopper reaches the climax of his nervous anxiety and aggression towards

Jimmy, ultimately pulling out a gun and threatening to shoot Jimmy, a kettle in the kitchen

reaches boiling point. The piercing whistle of the kettle synchronises with Chopper reaching

his boiling point, demonstrating sonically his inability – or at least intense internal struggle –

to control himself and not resort to extreme violence. Coinciding with this, arguments and

accusations from other apartments build in volume and intensity as Chopper holds the gun to

Jimmy’s head. The tension and drama of this scene is preempted by baby cries and deep sub

sonic throbs. Overall the scene reflects once again the dominance of atmospheres and effect

sounds in creating suitable accompaniment to violent and distressing diegesis.

Ambient Stabbings

During Chopper’s stabbing of Keithy there are various tinkles, voices and echoes present,

although the voices of Chopper and Keithy dominate the soundscape. The group of other

prisoners present, like the audience, are merely spectators to the ‘theatre’ unfolding before

them. Tension and violence are portrayed via heightened foley effects8, which also contribute

to the oppressiveness of the environment, every sound expanded and suffocating the aural

environment. For example, the accentuation of cigarettes being lit and inhaled ‘draws’ the

audience into the impending violence. The constant sound of keys jangling in the background

also raises the tension of the scene by positing questions about the guards’ whereabouts. As

Keithy is stabbed, the television commentator9 – to this point merely a contributor to the

7 Kozloff (2000: 516) usefully notes that the way dialogue is spoken is often more insightful than the words

used.

8 Gerard Long was Foley Artist for the film, with Steve Burgess Foley Recordist and Mixer.

9 Interestingly the commentary itself is rather nondescript. It would appear to be sporting commentary of

Australian Rules Football yet, despite being mixed extremely loudly at the moment of the stabbing, the sound


ambient murmur – is mixed much louder in the sound mix to reflect the climax of the

onscreen action, coinciding neatly with the stabbing as the highlight of the cinematic action.

The heightened squelching and slopping of Keithy’s blood, prominent in the mix, highlights

the violence and visceral nature of the act. Meanwhile the dripping tap that has been present

in the background of the mix throughout the scene increases slightly in tempo, both propelling

the drama of the scene and indicating the impending termination of Keithy’s life.

Notably, the ambient sounds so prevalent throughout the prison only retreat when the scene

changes to show detectives interviewing Chopper in the prison warden’s office. The outside

world, where actors must face consequences, is devoid of the paranoia and ambience and

constancy of the prison world. Such absence of familiar ambience discomforts Chopper,

whose character thrives on a mesh of sound denoting the presence and activities of other

people, on the inseparable blend of truth and fiction, and on security found in densely layered

soundscapes. To escape this, his narrative on how the incident unfolded involves a visual and

sonic flashback to the scene, where he is able to use those visual and sonic layers that best suit

his version of the story. Without the murkiness of the prison world, and its sonic

undercarriage, Chopper’s ability to reconstruct events, and himself, would be greatly

diminished.

This sonic undercarriage is also used to show Chopper’s dominance and level of control

within various scenes. The density of the ambient soundtrack creates opportunities for clarity

and fuzziness as required. Such is the thickness of this soundscape that definition between

soundtrack elements can also become blurred, as Lipson noted:

The scene where Chopper gets stabbed by Jimmy in the [indoor]

exercise yard is entirely sound effects based, although one could

easily assume that what you are hearing is music … There were

several instances in Chopper where this [blurring between music and

effects] was the case. (interview with Lipson, 2003)

Such a blurring is only possible due to the thickness of the ambient sound layered throughout

this scene, and much of the film. Much of this layering of ambience and effects occurs at an

almost subconscious level, influencing the mood of the film and the audience’s relation to the

characters (particularly Chopper). As Lipson noted, “There are several scenes where we edited

is melded with Chopper’s yell, deep bass sounds, and the overriding effects sound of the stabbing itself

making it largely indecipherable.


small metallic pings on Chopper’s eye blinks … [They are] almost subconscious sound effects

but effective nonetheless” (ibid). The effects of these pings could vary dependent on the

viewers’ awareness of them. Certainly they add an intensity to Chopper’s character,

highlighting the heightened subtleties we are led to believe he perceives. Somewhat

alternatively they also provide a release for the viewer, the high treble sound adding a

comedic, almost cartoonish, lightness to his persona.

Subtle manipulations of the soundtrack provide dominance and control for characters, without

the need for obvious bursts of prerecorded music to guide the audience. The lack of pre

recorded music keeps the viewer immersed in the diegesis longer, effectively maintaining the

discomfort of viewers through their suspension of disbelief, with no music to jar them away

from the context being constructed. Furthering their discomfort is the subjective positioning

this creates, with no sonic breaks available to objectify the diegesis or present it from another

angle, the audience become bound to Chopper’s interpretation of events and even his

experience of them.

Conclusion

Popular music tracks or songs, especially those normally marketed on CD soundtracks, are

largely absent from Chopper. More importantly music is largely absent from the violence of

the film. Yet the film is not marked by silence. Rather it communicates a complex matrix of

layered foley, atmospheres and sound effects, culminating in a disturbing, yet richly

rewarding, sonic experience. In this way, rather than stipulating an intended audience reading,

the absence of music allows the violence and deception of Chopper to critique itself.

The final scene of the film represents the most salient, and indeed silent, sonic commentary

on the film and Chopper’s character in particular. Following the shooting of Sammy the Turk,

and the associated trial, Chopper is imprisoned and watches himself represented on a current

affairs television program that profiles his misdemeanours and character. It is this scene that is

cut into the opening scene discussed above, except here the viewer has had the entire movie to

assess Chopper’s bravado, and to ascertain whether the voice emanating from the television or

the one speaking to guards within the cell, is the most appropriate sonic representation of his

character. After watching himself on television in the company of two friendly guards, the

guards are forced to reluctantly shut him in at lock down. As the door to Chopper’s cell is

closed, the particularly thick atmosphere track disappears and the ambience subsides. Chopper


is left alone, the ambience has diminished, the effect is gone. Chopper has come full circle in

his journey. Able to comment on his own life, to confess (albeit elaborately) his sins, we hear

more than we see that redemption has come to Chopper, and silence can finally reign.

[Many thanks to Jerome Madulid, Gareth McCarthy, Zane Pearson and Dan Freeman for their

various engagements with the sonic world of Chopper.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chion, M (1994) Audio Vision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press

Doanne, M (1980) ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’ in Weis, E and Belton, J (eds) Film Sound: Theory and Practice, New York: Columbia University Press

Evans, M (2004) ‘Mapping The Matrix: Virtual Spatiality and the Realm of the Perceptual’ in Hayward, P (ed) Off The Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Film, Sydney: John Libbey and Perfect Beat Productions

Hayward, P (1998) Music at the Borders: Not Drowning, Waving and their engagement with Papua New Guinean Culture (198696), Sydney: John Libbey

Kozloff, S (2000) Overhearing Film Dialogue, Berkeley: University of California Press

Read, M (1991) From the Inside: The Confessions of Mark Brendon Read, Melbourne (Victoria): G. Allen

Shand, A (2004) ‘Monsters Inc.: How Melbourne Became No. 1 With A Bullet’, The Bulletin, 24/2

Smith, J (2001) ‘Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema’ in Wojcik and Knight (eds) Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, Durham and London: Duke University Press


Covers and Kids: How Kermit the Frog Made Me Want to be an

Academic.

Liz Giuffre

The central theme to this paper, which I feel is particularly appropriate at the moment given

the recent media mania about the 50th anniversary of Rock and Roll, concerns western popular

music, nostalgia and value. To inform this, I’ve looked at a couple of key theories, mainly the

issue of popular music and generational identity, and popular music and memory. My aim is

to test the way audiences react to two recordings, an original and a cover recording of the

same song, identifying through their answers what criteria they consider important when

comparing the two.

The two papers I’ve focused on approach the same topic from different perspectives, but in

many ways unearth similar patterns. The first, Schulkind et al, 1999, looks at popular music as

a way of measuring memory retention over time. Specifically, how long can an older adult

recount the memory of a song, and to what degree is this memory retained. The second,

Burns, 1996, is an account of memory and music from the perspective of a Baby Boomer

academic looking back at music that was significant to him in his youth.

While both of these studies revealed a number of interesting relationships between music

memory, and I acknowledge that the different purposes of these studies sometimes makes

them difficult to compare absolutely, a significant pattern arose in both papers. This pattern is

the strength of memories made in a listener’s teenage years. The cognitive scientists,

Schulkind, Hennis and Rubin, played a range of songs from the 1930s to 1970s to two groups

of listeners, a group of 6570 year olds and a group of 1821 year olds. Their test was for types

of “autobiographical memory”, that is, crudely paraphrased, a system whereby a cue such as a

word or song was played to retrieve a larger memory for the listener. Schulkind and colleagues

found that the younger group was able to recount more overall than the older groups, however,

both groups recalled music that had appeared around the listener’s teenage years significantly

more than music they had heard at other times in their lives. In many ways the cognitive

scientists had expected this outcome, given previous studies and commonly accepted listening

patterns,

Previous work on lifespan memory of older adults revealed a


consistent pattern. Of particular interest is the fact that memory tends

to be best for events that occur in young adulthood… [Our]

experiment was expected to reveal a similar pattern, especially

because most people begin to lose interest in popular music after

young adulthood (Schulkind et al, 1999: 948).

A similar pattern was discovered by Gary Burns in the Journal of Popular Culture. His focus,

what he describes as “a growing ‘cult’ of the past in popular music” (1996: 129), centers

particularly around the Baby Boomer generation, people who were teenagers in the late 1950s

and 1960s. As Burns summarises, adults who grew up at this time were particularly tied to

popular music,

To the Baby Boom, popular music is history, both personally and

generationally. It provides solace from the pains of both the past and

present (Burns, 1996: 131).

Burns’ suggestion of the blurring of music and history is consistent with Schulkind’s

hypothesis of music triggering autobiographical memory in many ways. It highlights in

particular the significance of musical memories formed during a listener’s teenage years.

However, a number of factors which do not fit easily into the equation which must be

considered. For example, as a Baby Boomer, Burns describes listening to 1960s music again

in his middle age, with a sense of disappointment rather than retrieved youthfulness. With

particular reference to a relistening to the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction, he writes:

When we say a song has or has not ‘worn well’, or ‘aged well’, we are

evaluating the original text and all its subsequent ‘baggage’ in light of

our present position … As the listener becomes older and presumably

wiser, it is possible one begins to notice ‘Satisfaction’ is not a very

good song. A good performance and recording, yes, brimming with

snarl – but as a piece of songwriting, ‘Satisfaction’ is

undistinguished. One could excuse this in a hit from summer 1965, if

that were all the song is. But after the 500th hearing, the song’s flaws

become acutely noticeable. One asks, why did I like that song in

1965? (1996: 134).

Similarly, Schulkind’s study does not produce clear evidence that memories can be accurately

triggered and recovered through popular music. His older adult group, a generation older than


Burns, tended to recover only partial memories when promted by songs, and often these

memories were quite unspecific. As Schulkind et al reported,

For the older adults, every dependent measure correlated more highly

with the likelihood of being reminded of a general period, as opposed

to being reminded of a specific event (1999: 952).

Interestingly however, Shulkind and his colleagues found that younger adults retrieved

memories in the opposite way, connecting music with a “specific event” rather than a general

period. The reasons Schulkind and co suggest for this generational discrepancy are both

psychological and social. They acknowledge that an older adult’s “retention interval” may be

decrease with age, but also suggest “that music may have been more integrated into the lives

of the younger adult subjects” (ibid).

This idea, that younger people in the 1990s and 2000 may have been exposed to music in a

different way to those in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, is an important acknowledgement of the

shift in the popular music industry, and the shift in particular of its affects on audiences. As

Middleton described in 1990, the evolution of twentieth century popular music was something

of a ‘grapevine’ effect (1990: 127), developing across genres and continents as much as across

generations. With covers as a particular point of reference, Middleton asks “how many bands

learned Chuck Berry songs not from his records but the Rolling Stones’ ‘cover versions’?”

(Middleton 1990: 136), a question that acknowledges that the contemporary popular music

tradition has a number of entry points; that a listener or musician may not always discover

what was created first and work forward, but perhaps start at what was created last and work

backwards. His emphasis on covers and versioning in particular is important as it shows this

practice is often twofold; covers are at once a recreation of the old and useful tools for the

creation of something new.

Both Middleton and Burns have referred to the work of the Rolling Stones and their

contemporaries, music that was made in the 1950s and 1960s, and received by the Baby

Boomer generation as teenagers. This is a point of departure many academics have used to

demonstrate new listener expectations for popular music, particularly when this music is

delivered with covers. As Coyle (2002) explores, covers were only considered differently by

audiences after a major shift in the popular music industry, mainly the emergence of the

singer/songwriter in the 1950s, 60s and into the 70s. As Coyle describes,

No one in 1954 would have used the word ‘cover’ to mean what we


mean by it today … The notion of covering a song has changed

radically in meaning because the structure of the industry – the

relation of writers to performers to audiences – itself has changed

radically. (Coyle, 2002: 136)

This is to say, the rerecording of an existing song was not unusual in recorded popular music

previous to the 1950s, in fact it was very common. What was unusual was the emergence of

singer/songwriters like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, artists that embodied a new type of

authenticity in popular music by playing and performing their own creations in a unique style.

As Coyle continues, “In the 1990s, the discourse of ‘authenticity’ informs all musical idioms”

(2002: 141).

What I want to explore then is generational opinions of music, using covers as tools for

comparison. If we can assume different generations react to popular music in different ways,

with different expectations, when the same song is presented in different guises as a cover and

original, will generational audiences react in a particular way? As Middleton pointed out with

Chuck Berry and the Stones, the way audiences access a wider popular music catalogue is

often nonlinear, non chronological. So does this nature of access also affect audience

opinions? Basically, do audiences have a particular attachment to the recording they heard

first or in their most formative years?

The Test

My first inspiration for this study was personal experience. And this is where Kermit the Frog

comes in. Although a little earlier than my teenage years, some of my first and still influential

musical experiences were at the hands of Kermit and the Muppets, and particularly covers of

popular 1960s and 70s songs that were incorporated into the TV series and released as

albums. One in particular has always stuck with me, a recoding of Coconut featuring Kermit

the Frog on lead vocals. In particular, this song reminds me of dancing in the lounge room

with my sisters, probably between the ages of 5 and 15ish. When I got my first guitar at 12, I

taped the track from the record and would sit in my room trying to work out how to play it.

So, as daggy as it sounds, this was an important song for me, as a song introduced to me by

The Muppets.

Until reasonably recently, I actually didn’t even know the song had been previously written

and recorded by Harry Nilsson. Recorded in 1971, I first heard it in 1999 from the soundtrack


to the movie Reservoir Dogs (released 1993). Initially, my reaction to this recording was

disappointment. The parts I liked so much from the Muppets recording, the silly exaggerated

voices of the gruff doctor and the silly frog, were undone by this middleaged, stoned white

man (Nilsson’s original). To me it was really quite unbelievable; why would this guy have a

coconut rather than the Muppets? And why take it so seriously? Definitely this recording took

the fun out the lyric, taking it way too seriously for my liking.

This experience inspired me to test other covers, particularly as I found myself so strongly

defending the merits of a singing green piece of felt. So taking into account Burns and

Schulkind’s findings as well, I have put together a collection of four songs, a cover and

original recording of each, and am in the process of surveying different generational groups

about their reactions to them. Inspired by my connection to Coconut, I have also tested a little

outside the Baby Boomer/ 1990s teenager model, including covers and originals recorded only

a few years apart, as well as originals that had a particular resurgence just previous the

emergence of a new cover.

So far, responses have been interesting. Of 40 surveys handed out I have received almost 20

back, with many of these coming from an older listening group. And as expected, many of the

older listeners (50+), seem to prefer original recordings, recordings from the 1960s and 1970s,

to covers of the same songs recorded in the 1990s. I asked them to nominate initially how

many times they listened to each song, and if they recognised which was the cover or original,

or perhaps even owned either. Where the respondent recognised the song in either form,

descriptions such as “the original is a classic” have appeared frequently as an explanation of

which recording is preferred. In fact, the word ‘classic’ is used by respondents (without it

appearing in my questions) for over half of the surveys returned so far. As well, descriptions

relating to emotion were also often used, “the original is more powerful”, was quite common.

Where the respondent didn’t recognise the song at all, other factors such as instrumentation

and recording quality were used to describe preference, “one was a clearer recording”, etc.

After asking whether the respondents could nominate which of the recordings was the original

and whether the cover was worthwhile creating, interestingly almost all respondents said

covers were worthwhile, even if they didn’t particularly like the one they had just heard. As for

comparing the original to the cover, again descriptions tended to be highly emotive, “track 2

was crap”, “repulsive” and “tragic” were responses that were as unexplained as the term

“classic”, as if they would speak for themselves without need for elaboration.


Another factor that began to emerge was listening preferences of the person, which I suspect

may be more significant than age as the study progresses. Before listening to any tracks I

asked the respondents to nominate genres of music they liked and disliked, and this tended to

dictate how they reacted to the covers. That is, if a 50 year old hated ‘pop’, they may prefer the

cover of a 60s pop song done in a heavier style. Where the recordings were quite well known

performers as well (one recording was a cover by a very well known 70s artist then a very well

known 90s artist), respondents tended to side with the performer they preferred and were most

familiar with, irrespective of age. And this was often the 90s artist rather than the 70s artist,

who had continued to record up to the present day.

Conclusion

Without jumping the gun too much (this is a work in progress), I expect to find patterns a little

different to those exposed by the likes of Burns and Schulkind. For example, the early pattern

that emerged with relation to genre and listening experience is a significant site for further

study, that a listener can respond to genre before the song itself is something that has not

really been looked at in depth before. As well, if respondents have no knowledge of either

song, genre can inform their appraisal. I also find it interesting that despite fond and in depth

memories of originals (remember the emergence of the term ‘classic’ in so many

respondents), respondents so far have tended to respond reasonably to the practice of

producing the cover, even if they didn’t particularly like what was eventually produced. This

perhaps suggests another shift that is emerging in the way audiences respond to popular

music, perhaps the cult of singer/songwriter/authenticity is not as all encompassing as we

continue to assume. And this is after all, where I think covers can be important indicators. Just

as in the 1950s and 1960s they came into focus as something unusual when compared with

singer/songwriters, perhaps in the 1990s and beyond 2000 they can indicate a new

expectation, a removal of the hierarchy of authenticity created in the 1960s and 1970s

singer/songwriter boom, with authenticity now available thorough performative interpretation.

Bibliography

Burns, G (1996): ‘Popular Music, Television and Generational Identity’ in Journal of Popular Culture, v30n3

Coyle, M (2002): ‘Hijacked Hits and Antic Authenticity: Cover songs, Race, and Postwar Marketing’ in Beebe R et al (eds) Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture, Durham and London, Duke University Press


Middleton, R (1990): ‘I heard it through the grapevine’. Popular music in culture’ in Studying Popular Music, Open University Press, USA,

Schulkind, M et al (1999): ‘Music, emotion, and autobiographical memory: They’re playing your song’ in Memory and Cognition, v27n6)

Discography

Nilsson, H (1971) Coconut as reproduced on Reservoir Dogs (Movie Soundtrack), 1993, MCA.

Muppets, (1979) The Muppet Album, Astor Records (LP recording)


Diaspora and the Politics of Authenticity

Bruce Johnson

In 1830 near Camden New South Wales, armed troopers shot dead a transported Irishman

wanted for robbery and murderer. His name was Jack Donohoe, and shortly afterwards a song

circulated in which ‘Bold’ Jack Donohoe had become romanticised as an underdog murdered

by vindictive authorities, and/or as an Irishman hunted down by the British. It expressed the

lines of force of local colonial politics so powerfully that broadside copies were ‘sung to

pieces’ and the singing of the song in public houses was prohibited. It is likely that it was this

prohibition that led to its subsequent reconstitution as one of the standards in the Australian

folk song repertoire, The Wild Colonial Boy. However, this song appropriates other sources.

The lyrics are an adaptation of an Irish ballad called The Adventures of Jack O’Donohoe.

While retaining the Anglo/Irish antagonism, the Australian version makes a number of

adaptations to local conditions such as fauna, with references to dingoes and kangaroos.

Similarly, the song forms themselves transmigrated from Irish folk to Australian bush

ballade1.

The Wild Colonial Boy is a microcosm of the migratory dynamic in song. Forms and

sentiments have adapted themselves to a new locality and become part of the foundation of

what is regarded as an authentic national myth – the bush ballad – and an antiauthoritarian

opposition to a transplanted AngloAnglican class structure in which squatters, the

government and its instrumentalities are the enemy of the egalitarian ‘fair go’ and social

justice. Although appropriated from Irish sources, I have never heard this nineteenth century

example of musical diaspora referred to as a ‘debasement’ of an Irish original; rather, it has

become among the most ‘authentic’ of all Australian colonial folk songs. Similar observations

could be made of many in that repertoire, including even the music of the anthemic Waltzing

Matilda, which adapts a sprightly march Craigielee, attributed to Thomas Bulch (who in turn

adapted it from Scottish and Irish sources), to a melancholy elegy to a thief and suicide

(Magoffin, 1995: 11).

My next example of musical diaspora is Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1936). I believe we

would all recognise it, and the reasons include the extent of its cultural diaspora. It has been

1 See further, Anderson (2000:195200, 5679); Hughes (1987: 23743); Oliver, Johnson and Horn, (2003:

26975).


adapted to a range of purposes, from selling coffee to promoting the Sydney Olympics. It has

also been adapted to other genres, including techno/dance and rap in various countries. In

1990 the German group KMFDM released the album Naive, including the song Leibeslied

which incorporated a four bar sample from the ‘O Fortuna’ section of Orff’s composition.

Because of this, legal action led to the release being withdrawn from sale in 1993. Farther

afield, the Norwegian dance group Apoptygma Bezerk initially included the track Love Never

Dies on its 1998 release 7, but the track was deleted from later pressings because it sampled

the Orff composition. The same fate overtook the 1992 dance track O Fortuna by the Belgian

band Apotheosis, although it continues to appear on Amazon’s shopping list and US dance

club playlists (Amazon, 2004; Eternal Darkness, 2004). Closer to home, in 1996, the

Australian label Colossal Records released Excalibur, featuring the Italian group FCB, and the

CD included a dance/techno adaptation of the ‘O Fortuna’ chorus2.

The proceedings were summarised in Sydney Law Review by Anthony Hutchings, and there is

a condensed account by Sue Bunting in a publication by the University of Melbourne

(Bunting, 2001). The case was not a breach of copyright, since copyright provisions as set out

in the copyright Act of 1968, section fiftyfive subsection one, had been satisfied. However,

section fiftyfive subsection two declared that the licensing provisions did not apply “if the

adaptation debases the work” which is adapted. On these grounds the copyright holders,

Schott Musik International GMBH & Co, on behalf of Orff’s widow, took out a claim against

the record label, declaring the adaptation to be a debasement in the sense of ‘adulteration’.

Colossal records argued a different interpretation of ‘debasement’ – to devalue or lower in

estimation – and that the release had not done this. The court declared that debasement should

not be thought of as applying to the “honour or reputation” of the author, but to the effect on

the “integrity, value, esteem or quality of the work itself” (Hutchings 1997: 388). It found for

the respondents, so Schott Musik then took the case to appeal in the Full Federal Court where

two of the judges, Wilcox and Lindren, shifted the emphasis of debasement from the effect of

the adaptation on the reputation and value of the original, to the character of the adaptation

itself. They narrowed the test of ‘debasement’ to the question, is it “so lacking in integrity or

2 Thanks to Canadian researcher Karen Collins (email to the author 25 June 2004), USbased researcher Geoff

Hull (personal email, 24 June 2004), and University of NSW colleague Ian Collinson, for their assistance in

assembling the information about these releases.


quality that it can properly be said to have degraded the original work?” (ibid: 389). This in

effect views ‘debasement’ as the “complete distortion or mutilation of a previous

composition”, and “rejects community opinion as a legitimate site of analysis” in determining

the matter (ibid: 389). Judge Hill differed, wishing to diminish the subjective component of

this position, and proposing the criterion that “a reasonable person will be led to think less of

the original work” (ibid: 390).

While the respondents also won the appeal, the fact that the case was brought, and fought so

hard raises a number of instructive comparisons with The Wild Colonial Boy. These are both

examples of diasporic music reconstituting source material. Yet in one case the reconstitution

resulted in canonisation, in the other, demonisation. In one case, the adaptation to local

conditions is its greatest guarantee of authenticity; in the other, it is the sign of debasement.

There are further instructive ironies in the later case. It is interesting that in the prosecution of

the various pop releases for unauthorised appropriation of earlier work, no attention seems to

have been paid to the fact that the title of the FCB release refers to John Boorrman’s 1981 film

in which the Carl Orff music is part of the soundtrack. Thus, it is likely that for FCB, their

first contact with this highly peripatetic music was via a US film directed by an Englishman

on the subject of the diasporic and eclectic Arthurian cycle. Perhaps a piece of popular cuture

like film doesn’t warrant the dignity of a claim that it might have been ‘debased’.

Nor was it apparently noted that Orff based his own composition on medieval songs and

poems preserved in a thirteenth century manuscript discovered in 1803 in the Benedictine

abbey of Beuren in Bavaria. Their first editor, Johannes Schmeller, compiled them as songs

and poems entitled Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren), although the manuscript had

probably migrated from elsewhere. Did Orff have a copyright license on his source material?

Did he ‘debase’ the original? It is also notable that the medieval manuscript itself is a

polyglot collection of work from an international range of sources including France, England,

Scotland, Switzerland, Catalonia, Castille, and Germany, much of it from wandering clerics

known as Goliards. That is, ironically, the original Carmina Burana is itself a record of

inherently diasporic music. One song, Alte Clamat Epicurus, appropriates to salacious

purpose a Crusaders’ song by Walther von der Vogelweide (Clemencic, 1968: 3). Did its

writer have a copyright agreement? Did he ‘debase’ the original?

My first point here is that, as a sounded public expressive form, music has always been self

evidently and inevitably diasporic, in a way that is not necessarily true for visual forms like


print and painting. Sound is in motion. It is always diasporic. Music has to migrate, even if

only from one individual to another, and each migratory step changes it, even if not textually

(that is, a score can remain unchanged), then semiotically and phenomenologically: it means

something else and it feels different. As such, music has thus been an instructive and troubling

test case for the wholesale application of the discourses of integrity and authenticity as artistic

criteria. It is ironic, then, that in the notes by Rene Clemencic for the Harmonia Mundi

recording of the ‘original’ Carmina Burana, released through the World Record Club, there is

much emphasis on the strict reproduction of the “original expression”, and with “the greatest

possible authenticity” (Clemencic, 1968: 3). The title of the release itself, The Original

Carmina Burana, invokes the discourse of authenticity, even as the notes acknowledge that it

is close to being an oxymoron. Even the standard declaration on the label that “unauthorised

public performances, broadcasting and copying of this record [are] prohibited”, is a most

‘inauthentic’ manifestation of the spirit of completely free exchange within which these songs

developed and circulated. We can historically ‘authenticate’ the manuscript on which the

Carmina Burana are based, but when we allow that historical gesture to translate into an

artistic authentication of its contents, we are on the way to strange intellectual contortions.

The fact that the complex tensions in that situation have not been noted in connection with

Carl Orff and other appropriators of the music, reminds us of several salient points, the most

germane of which is that, sometime in or around the twentieth century, something obviously

happened to make this such a sensitive issue, as to completely reverse what might be called

the ethics of aesthetics. What made Carl Orff so special, that only at that point in the 700 year

history of appropriation, adaptation and arguably ‘debasement’ that shaped the music, did the

questions of authenticity and debasement arise? That is, what kinds of things changed

between the two moments? I suggest that the most important answer is that cultural diaspora

is now massmediated. The original demographic meaning of diaspora (people migrating) has

itself been appropriated by the discourses of art (culture migrating). This is not a problem

while the vehicles of cultural diaspora are people themselves – a goliard, a troubador, an

Elizabethan ballad maker, a gypsy musician ... all of whose music migrates in and with them.

But since the late nineteenth century, for the first time in human history, sound could be

detached from its source, preserved, infinitely copied as a commodity and cheaply circulated

and replayed. This is not news. But we often continue to conduct our cultural and aesthetic

discussions as though it had not happened. I suggest that the discourses which had hitherto


served to articulate and explain culture, have become as anachronistic as bleeding the sick

with leeches. In particular, terms like ‘authenticity’, ‘integrity’, ‘debasement’, ‘contamination’

– when deployed as artistic criteria – are interesting primarily as illustrations of how remote

such discourse is from its subject. And, I will suggest, even the term ‘diaspora’, which implies

migration from a single identifiable source, will also fail us in significant ways.

If we are looking for the most sensitive case study for this transforming moment in musical

diaspora, it happens to be jazz. There are several reasons. First, jazz was never decisively

scorebased (although of course it might incorporate scored material, and attempts have been

made to transcribe it as score). As such, it existed primarily as sound, and required only the

invention of the soundrecording to become globally accessible. In this, it foreshadows what

became the primary means of internationally accessing music in the twentieth century and

beyond: that is, directly as an acoustic experience rather than as a score. It is in this form that

the majority of twentieth century musics were disseminated: blues, folk, pop, rock, and of

course what we refer to as art or classical music.

Jazz of course is not the only unscored musical form, but it was the first music to be

internationalised in this way. The sound recording was patented in 1877, but the recording

industry globalised with impressive speed. In Russia record sales had reached twenty million

by 1915. The first Finnish records were produced in 1901, and by 1929, sales were over one

million in a population of only 3.4 million. In Japan that year sales reached ten million, and it

is estimated that between one third and one half of all households in North America and

Western Europe now owned a record player. In Australia in the early twenties imported

records were dumped at reduced prices, one label alone shipping in 100,000 records per

month. By 1925, when local production began, it was estimated that there were already one

million phonographs owned in Australia (Johnson, 2002: 367, and cited sources).

The globalisation of recording also meant the internationalisation of American music,

since the industry was controlled to a significant extent by the US. By 1910 the world’s

leading record companies were the US Victor Talking Machine Company and the

Gramophone Company (Hayes, Middlesex), which was half owned by Victor. Wherever

recordings penetrated, so did US jazz. Recordings were the main, if not the sole first exposure

to the music outside the US, and the reason that jazz circulated globally faster than any

previous music. As early as 1922 journalist Burnet Hershey chronicled his recent journey

around the world taking in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Orient, and reported that he found


jazz in every country (Walser 1999: 26).

In both the means and the speed of its circulation, jazz is the prototype of that model of

cultural diaspora that is absolutely distinctive to the modern era. It therefore is an extremely

instructive case study in the investigation of modern music and its discourses, and one of the

lessons it holds is that mass mediated diaspora has become the dominant shaping influence in

music, ironically giving greater expressive radius to the definition of locality. My argument is

that the character of the music was shaped by the diasporic process itself. Sound technology

was both channel and filter, determining which forms and examples of jazz would be

disseminated, depending on access to recording, marketing and distribution. With Paul

Whiteman’s massive record sales, one of his releases like (What are you waiting for), Mary?

(1927) helped to make him a major influence on the perception of what ‘jazz’ meant,

occluding the zerotolimited release on record of New Orleans and classic styles during the

twenties. Because of what was available on recordings, one of the most important figures in

Russian jazz, Leonid Utesov, took white vaudevillean Ted Lewis as his model. From Russia to

black Africa, a major jazz inspiration was Glenn Miller, largely because of the films Sun

Valley Serenade (1941) and Orchestra Wives (1942). The conditions of dissemination thus

determine which aspects of a tradition migrate, with performers later regarded as derivative

and peripheral exercising disproportionate influence. Nonetheless they had already become

crucial diasporic influences: their stature is not merely illusory. Uncomfortable though it may

well be for guardians of the jazz aesthetic, Glenn Miller’s band was more influential in

shaping the global jazz sound than, say, Jelly Roll Morton’s.

The jazz diaspora is thus a template of what has become the most general model of music

diaspora: that is, a negotiation between local cultural practices and global cultural processes,

between culture and mass mediations. In such negotiations, diaspora is the condition of the

music’s existence and character. Jazz was not ‘invented’ then exported. It was invented in the

process of being disseminated. As both idea and practice, jazz came into being through

negotiation with the vehicles of its dissemination, and with conditions it encountered in any

given location. Each diasporic site presented its own distinctive conditioning features,

including geography, topography, demography, and culture and history. In Finland, such

apparently nonmusical events as the civil war and the emergence into independence produced

lines of force relating to national identity and imperialist pressures from Russia and Sweden.

These reverberate within particular musical and cultural influences, in turn implicated in


attitudes to New World cultures. In Australia, the distinctive function of AngloCeltic

traditions in a ‘remote’ outpost of civilisation, the schematic social stratification

institutionalised in a penal settlement, the particular balance between English, Scottish and

Irish influences, the bush/city binary, and related gender issues – all these contributed to the

formation of a local jazz movement. In South Africa, the relationship between race and

urbanisation influenced jazz reception. In postrevolutionary Russia, a society with access to

the most extreme measures of cultural engineering was faced with resolutely unauthorised

popular tastes, a tension producing an approved proletarian jazz and a decadent bourgeois

form (see further, Johnson, 2002).

If the idea of ‘authentic’ musical culture has any meaning, it is to be found not in

sources and ‘original’ materials, but in their adaptation to local conditions. Consider a

selection of jazz performances from the 1930s: Muistan Sua, Elaine, Finland’s Leo Adamson

with The Ramblers (1931); Sponono by South Africa’s Jazz Revellers Band (1933); Forty

Second Street by Australia’s Jim Davidson’s Orchestra (1933). These very diverse pieces of

music were regarded as jazz by their practitioners and audiences, but of course bearing highly

audible marks of the distance they have travelled and their destination. Compare two more

jazz performances: Louis Armstrong, Potato Head Blues (1927); Bent Persson, Jimtown Blues

(1979). For jazz enthusiasts Persson’s work here would be considered more ‘authentic’ jazz

than any of the others, and indeed his intention was to reproduce actual solos by Armstrong in

1927, just as Clemencic sought to recreate the sound of the ‘original’ Carmina Burana. Now,

setting aside the pleasure provided by each (and as a trumpeter, I am pleasurably impressed

with Persson’s extraordinary approximation of the ‘classic’ Armstrong style), which of all the

samples I have listed are more ‘authentic’ manifestations of their culture? In what sense is a

Swedish trumpeter playing ‘authentically’ when he attempts to reproduce exactly the sound of

a fifty year old ‘improvisation’ from Chicago? Or, is it a case of deracination and

objectification? Is it so different from, say, an Australian Elvis impersonator? How does an

‘authentic’ recreation of Carmina Burana differ in artistic intent from a pop cover band or an

Abba tribute group like Bjorn Again? In seeking to abolish all traces of our own culture in the

attempt to be authentic, surely what is being projected is not an authentic original, but a copy,

even a forgery. I am suggesting that the most ‘authentic’ examples in the pieces I have listed

are precisely the ones that musical purists would most scorn or revile. What happened in each

of those cases was, I suggest, not a process of debasement, but of cultural authentication –


exactly what brought about the canonisation of The Wild Colonial Boy. Authenticity lies not

in form, but is linked to place and locality.

It is an axiom of cultural studies that cultural forms and meanings are socially constructed. We

cannot plausibly argue this if we then unreflectingly invoke essentialist notions like

‘authenticity’ as markers of value. Ultimately, the idea of ‘authenticity’ – so powerful in the

critical discourse of jazz in its native and diasporic forms – is of very little relevance in

understanding and evaluating those forms. Each established its own ‘authentic’ identity in the

convergence between music and place. With increasingly effective mediations, these diasporic

forms and discourses (how people played, what they valued) then rippled across the whole

field, including back to what is constituted as the centre. Ultimately, the source and the

diaspora fold into each other.

Jazz is full of such cases, and Australian jazz provides one of the most spectacular. The

Australian band led by Graeme Bell learned its music through the late 1930s and early 1940s

through a combination of recordings and the exchange of ideas with other musicians both

local and visiting. In 1947 they attended the International Youth Festival in Czechoslovakia,

where they were greeted as the first bearers of ‘authentic’ jazz. English and US reviewers

rated the Australian band as more convincing than many of their American contemporaries.

The Bell band founded the Czech jazz movement, an assessment that remains robust in the

Czech Republic today (Johnson, 2002: 502).

The case of the Bell band in Europe exemplifies the complexity of twentieth century musical

diaspora. Since jazz circulated around the globe it has challenged rudimentary notions of

cultural dissemination. Significantly it was among jazz writers in the 1930s that we encounter

the most strident arguments about the ownership of ‘authentic’ jazz. The reason is that such

ownership was so clearly passing out of their control and into public hands. Simple migratory

patterns based on movements between geographical centres and margins have become

hopelessly tangled. The advent of mass mediations has made unavoidable the proposition that

in cultural diaspora there is no ‘original’, no point of origin, merely a series of stopoff points

where music is endlessly recreated.

Bibliography

Anderson, H (2000) Farewell to Judges and Juries: The broadside ballad and convict

transportation to Australia, 17881878, Hotham Hill, Victoria: Red Rooster Press


Bunting, S (2001) ‘Music and Copyright: The Use of Expert Witnesses in Musical Copyright

Cases’, Review: The Centre for Studies in Australian Music, University of Melbourne, n14

Clemencic, R (undated, ca 1968) ‘Notes’ to the Harmonia Mundi recording of The Original

Carmina Burana, reprinted for the release by the Record Society of the World Record Club,

R.03244567

Hughes, R (1987) The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia,

17871868, London: The Harvill Press

Hutchings, A (1997) ‘Authors, Art, and the Debasing Instinct: Law and Morality in the

Carmina Burana Case’, Sydney Law Review v19 (September)

Johnson, B (2002) ‘The Jazz Diaspora’, Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (eds), The

Cambridge Companion to Jazz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Magoffin, R (1995) Waltzing Matilda, 18951995, Cooparoo Qld: Robert Brown & Associates

Moore, A (2002) ‘Authenticity as Authentication’ (given as Authentically as Authentication’

in the list of Contents), Popular Music v21n2

Oliver, P; Johnson, B and Horn, D (2003) ‘Migration and Diffusion’, John Shepherd et al

(eds), Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, v1, Media, Industry and

Society, London and New York: Continuum Press

Walser, R (ed) (1999) Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. New York, Oxford: Oxford

University Press

Websites

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com, 28 June 2004.

Eternal Darkness: http://www.eternaldarkness.org, 28 June 2004.

Discography

Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1936), Decca 458 178-2, 1966

FCB’s Excalibur (1996) Colossal Records

Jim Davidson Orchestra’s Forty Second Street (1933), reissued on A History of Jazz in

Australia, Australia’s Heritage in Sound AHS 05-2CDs

Bent Persson’s Jimtown Blues (1979) from Louis Armstrong’s 50 Hot Choruses For Cornet as

Recreated by Bent Persson, v1, Kenneth Records KS 2044, 1979

KMFDM’s Leibeslied from Naïve (1990)

Apoptygma Bezerk’s Love Never Dies from 7 (1998) Metropolis MET93

http://www.eternaldarkness.org/

http://www.amazon.com/


Leo Adamson with The Ramblers’ Muistan Sua, Elaine (I Remember You, Elaine), (1931) H-

O 23141; Reissue: Finnish Jazz 1929—1959, Vol 1, 1929—-1945, F[azer] Records 440302,

1994

Apotheosis’ O Fortuna (1992) Hot Productions/Indisc DID 128319

Rene Clemencic’s Original Carmina Burana, (undated, ca 1968), Record Society of the

World Record Club, R.03244-5-6-7

Louis Armstrong and the Hot Seven’s Potato Head Blues (1927), reissued on Time-Life

Records 1978

Jazz Revellers Band’s Sponono (Sweetheart) (1933) Columbia AE 45; Reissue: Marabi

Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville, cassette published with Ballantine,

Christopher, Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville, Johannesburg, Ravan

Press, 1993

Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra’s (What are you waiting for), Mary? (1927); reissued on

The Bix Beiderbecke Legend, Victor Black and White 731 036/037 (undated, ca 1965)

Filmography

Excalibur, dir John Boorman (1981)

Orchestra Wives, dir. Archie Mayo (1942)

Sun Valley Serenade, dir. H. Bruce Humberstone (1941)


Towards A Film Industry Model of Management

Guy Morrow

This paper concerns symbiotic relationships that have been formed between Australian music

management and production companies and major record labels in foreign territories. These

relationships are the result of the problems facing major labels in the new digital environment

and the challenges Australian music managers face when trying to break into foreign markets

from Australia. As many record companies downsize1 by employing fewer marketing and

promotion staff, and through outsourcing A&R to freelance producers, an interesting trend is

emerging within the music industry. Some management companies are effectively shadowing

record companies through the way in which they are beginning to fulfill many of the

responsibilities that used to belong to independent or major record labels. This is enabling

these companies, and the music managers who run them, to play a much greater role within

the music industry. The argument will be made that these companies are analogous to

production companies that exist within the film industry. In some situations, major record

labels are streamlining their operations by becoming funding operations that foster

relationships with music management companies; relationships that are similar to those

between large film studios and film production companies. Through this process, some

outside music management and production companies now have the responsibility for

developing and manufacturing the actual product. This model suggests that major labels will

become funding, marketing and distribution operations that will focus on producing brands

rather than products.

This trend can be located in an historical context. Throsby (2002) noted that there have been

important structural changes in the global music industry since the 1970s. He believed that the

independent distribution system that had existed for many years began to break down in the

1980s and this led to an increasing number of independent labels agreeing to be distributed by

1 According to IFIP data, world sales of recorded music fell 7.6% in value in 2003 and this fourth consecutive

year of falling record sales is attributed to the combined effects of digital and physical piracy and

competition from other entertainment products (2004). It is in this industrial context that in 2004 Sony Music

merged with BMG in order to generate $400m in cost savings. BMG chief executive Rolf SchmidtHoltz said

of the deal that : “If (Sony and BMG) stood alone, we would have to cut artist rosters and even closing

activities in smaller countries … This merger is the best guarantee that we can maintain a broad roster of

artists in the current environment.” (Groendahl and Caney, 2004: 1)


one of the major distributors. He noted that:

This trend has continued to the point now where many otherwise

independent labels are distributed by one of the major transnationals.

In fact it has been suggested that the independent record companies

act in a way that serves the potential interests of the majors. They are

generally involved in developing music outside the mainstream; if

their music is successful they may begin to pose a threat to the

majors’ market dominance. If so they may be absorbed by the majors

… the relationship between the two types of companies may be

thought of as symbiotic rather than oppositional. (ibid: 15)

The two music management and production companies that are the focus of this paper, Eleven

and Engine Room, have taken this already symbiotic relationship between ‘indies’ and

‘majors’ even further. Indeed, these two companies were not absorbed by the majors after

beginning as independent record labels in the aforementioned way, rather the music managers

who began these companies worked closely with major labels from the beginning. Although

the way these two companies operate is similar to the way independent record labels have

operated for many years, these companies are not miniature models of majors that are either

symbiotic or oppositional to the larger labels. These companies are in direct partnership with

majors through completely taking care of only some of the responsibilities that used to belong

to the major labels.

At its most extreme, this model would give musicians the freedom to make records on a

project by project basis by working with the most appropriate practitioners in a production

team, rather than them being signed to one indie or major record label for all of their projects.

The product of the team would then be signed to which ever record label was willing to work

with this company in order to market and distribute a readymade product. The musicians

would then be free to team up with whomever they pleased in order to produce their next

‘project’. The Australian music management and production company Engine Room is the

company that has gone the furthest down this path, while the operation of music management

and productioncompany Eleven represents a slighter departure from the norm.

(NB All comments attributed to Todd Waggstaff, Gregg Donavan, John Watson, Kim Thomas

are, unless otherwise indicated, taken from personal correspondence with the author in March

2002, November 2003 and from notes taken at the Australian branch of the Music Managers


Forum’s annual conferences in November 2002 and October 2003.)

Frustration and Inter-Company License Agreements

Australian music manager Todd Waggstaff2 claimed that he and music producer/songwriter

and Engine Room cofounder, Andrew Klippel, had worked with a number of different

Australian acts who were signed for the world from Australia. He noted that because these acts

had to go through the label to which they were signed, the artists’ products were not

prioritised, or even released in foreign territories. Waggstaff claimed that if an artist is signed

to a branch of a multinational record company in Australia, the fact that their recordings have

to enter foreign territories via the channels this company provides means that there is no

bidding war and no discovery process for the A&R staff in this territory. The foreign record

company’s employees are simply given a finished record with finished artwork and a finished

video clip. Waggstaff and Klippel started Engine Room in order to satisfy their desire to work

on recording projects that would definitely be released and prioritised in foreign territories.

They became frustrated while working with Australian artists who were signed to

multinational companies from Australia who would be blocked by the conventional inter

company arrangement. Waggstaff also claimed that it is not just a question of the discovery

process in that intercompany license agreements work against Australian artists who are

trying to access foreign markets. He stated specifically that:

The reason why you don’t get prioritised is that when the US company

releases an artist signed to the Australian company they have to pay a

fixed intercompany license rate, 30% is about the royalty they have to

pay, so if Warner Australia sign an artist and Warner America release

it, they have to pay 30% as the royalty whereas they pay 15% or 17%

for local American product.

Australian music manager John Watson also desired to work around the limitations that world

widedeals with major labels out of Australian cause. However, Watson’s label Eleven is quite

different to Engine Room because everything his label does is done in partnership with major

label EMI. Discussing the reason why he set up his new label, Watson noted:

What we found is that when we approached major labels with artists

2 Waggstaff has worked for Festival/Mushroom records, Roo Art records and has also managed successful

Australian band You Am I in Australia and in the US for a number of years.


and said that we wanted to sign for just this part of the world we were

told that it couldn’t be done. When we walked in and said that we’re a

label and we want a label deal for just this part of the world they said

“yeah that’s fine”, and so in that case we said “fine, we’re a label”.

Therefore the impetus for the creation of these unorthodox arrangements was the fact that

such intercompany license agreements hamper Australian managers’ attempts to break into

foreign territories. At times such deals render these attempts completely ineffectual. Although

these managers still wished to work with major labels, to meet their goals they needed to

change the nature of their agreements with the majors.

The ‘Products to Brands’ Paradigm Shift

The particular approaches that these two managers have employed effectively enable them and

their artists to maintain artistic control through the way in which they now, to differing

degrees, carry the financial and creative burden of actually producing the product. This

product is then licensed to various major record labels that primarily focus on marketing,

distributing and ultimately ‘branding’ this readymade product. This trend within the music

industry can be located within a larger trend that’s occurring within the capitalistic economy.

In this larger context, successful corporations are increasingly producing images of their

brands rather than products or ‘things’ and this has therefore shifted the emphasis from

manufacturing to marketing3. Klein (2000: 4) claimed that the formula of buying products and

‘branding’ them, rather than producing products and ‘advertising’ them, has proven to be so

profitable that companies are competing in a race towards weightlessness. This trend within

the larger capitalistic economy, of which the music industry is a part, is on the one hand

enabling Australian music managers such as Waggstaff and Watson to navigate around the

pitfalls of signing and developing Australian artists intended for the international market

place. While on the other hand, this trend is enabling various major record labels to become

‘weightless’ due to the fact that they are no longer burdened with the liabilities associated

with record production. In this case, the process of marketing or ‘branding’ has become their

focus.

This paradigm shift can be beneficial for the artists it affects. Watson’s label Eleven benefits

3 The marketing or ‘branding’ phenomenon has seen a 700% increase in US corporate sponsorship spending

between 1985 and 1998 (IEG Sponsorship report, December 22, 1997, and December 21, 1998 in Klein,

2000: 37).


the artists signed to it because they have more creative control over their products and also

because they receive more points4. When setting up Eleven, Watson was faced with a

potential conflict of interest. When a manager also becomes the owner of the record label or

production company to which their artists are signed there is the potential for this manager to

receive a label share of the artist’s royalties and other income as well as a manager’s share.

Rather than paying himself twice, Watson got around this inherent conflict of interest through

passing any potential benefits the new structure generated onto the actual artists:

From our point of view the ‘upside’ we feel that we offer to our

clients is as follows. Firstly, because they’re not paying a label share

they’re actually receiving a label royalty which is usually higher than

an artist’s royalty. So they’re actually making more per record

because the benefit we get from being a label is passed onto them and

the benefit that comes to us is generated because our commissions are

greater because we’re getting the same size slice of a slightly bigger

pie. The second benefit is that we have the control that we want over

the marketing and promotion of the records and certainly over the

A&R of the records as well … And finally, probably most importantly

from our stand point, it’s our profound belief that having a person

behind the desk in New York or LA or London with a direct stake in

your career is more likely to lead to your success internationally.

While Watson’s artists had a better deal and he was in an advantageous position because he

was commissioning the standard twenty percent of the artist’s income, which under the new

arrangement also included the label share of the royalties, Eleven still had the advantage of

being able to work through a major label’s marketing and distribution networks. Eleven’s

artists are also free to sign with whichever label they please in foreign territories. Watson and

his artists are therefore receiving the best of both worlds in that Eleven has access to the all

important marketing and distribution networks of a major label, because it is still closely

associated with EMI Australia, while the artists receive more money and retain a huge degree

of creative control.

4 Industry practitioners use the term ‘points’ to refer to what percentage of the royalties each individual

involved receives because one percent often represents, or has the potential to represent, a viable amount of

money.


Although Watson set up Eleven as an independent ‘music’ company, EMI invested in the

label. As manager of the successful Australian band Silverchair, a band whose original

recording contract with Sony music had expired, Watson was able bring the band in on the

deal and utilise them as ‘the carrot’ to the record company. He negotiated with EMI a deal that

stated that if they wanted to sign the band they would have to distribute and market the band’s

products, accept their terms with regard to creative control and invest in the label. In this way,

unlike Engine Room, Watson has aligned Eleven with one particular major label. This is how

Watson was able get around another conflict of interest that necessarily manifests itself when

managers also run their artist’s record company. Australian music manager Kim Thomas5

explained the tension and conflict that arises when one person fulfills both roles:

I actually find it difficult being the manager of the artist and running

the record label. The only way that I deal with that is I keep my

manager’s hat on and I stay over there as a manager and I treat my

other partners in the label as a record label. This is because for me it

doesn’t actually work because from a record label point of view there

are issues involved with marketing expenditure for example. The

record company will not want to spend the money whereas on behalf

of the artist you want the money.

Watson gets around this problem because Eleven is run in partnership with a major label and

this major label is responsible for the marketing expenditure, not Eleven. He stated:

It’s completely in our interest as Eleven to get EMI to spend as much

as possible on marketing our artists and we’re never backwards in

coming forward and asking them to spend more because it’s their

money not ours and it therefore doesn’t effect our income one bit.

Watson’s position as director of Eleven also had the potential to change the power dynamic or

relationship he had with his artists. This is because the relationships between an artist and

their manager and an artist and their record company are fundamentally different. Goodman

(1998) stated that, “a manager is employed and paid by the artist, while a record company

essentially hires – and as a rule owns the work of – the artist” (240). By becoming the record

company, Watson in a way reversed his relationship with his artists: instead of working for

5 Thomas runs Black Yak Records as well as Black Yak Management. The Australian bands The Whitlams,

iota and PreShrunk are signed to these companies.


them they work for him. Although a superficial assessment of Eleven would suggest that this

is the case, Watson is a manager who claimed that he has always understood the leverage that

he has had at his fingertips through being an artist manager, however. Watson believed that

although he is now the manager and the record company, the artists are still in charge because

they are the only ones who have that card to play. He pointed out that:

I think that ultimately the artist is in charge. I think that the artist

could say that they don’t want to make music anymore and then just

go home. I think that the artist doesn’t always act like they’re in

charge and it’s probably in the manager’s interest that that’s the case

often, but I think that when the biggest call comes the artist is the one

who ultimately has to make it. They can decide not to make a video,

they can decide not to go on tour.

It is clear that Watson believed that Eleven’s business model gave the artists the power to be in

charge of their own creativity and ultimately their own career trajectory. It may also be argued

that the paradigm shift from products to brands has led to the generation of a management and

production company that enables the people who love making music to get more involved

with making music, rather than the people who love making money getting involved with

making music. Donavan stated that:

Although I’d say that sure the production companies in the movie

world want to make money too but I’d dare say they got there because

they wanted to make movies, where as this is not always the case with

record company guys because they’ve come in from other industries

that their parent company owned and they restructure and relocate.

They really do just want to make money, they’re really not interested

in the art 99% of the time. They always employ someone to act like

they care – that’s what A&R guys are.

When artists are signed to a management and production company rather than directly to a

record company they belong to more of a supportive ‘artistic community’ and this suggests

that the negative ‘gangwarfare attitude’ that exists between many artists and bands may

become diluted:

You’re opening it up to a lot of collaborations and you’re creating a

community which is the idea of what it used to be. I mean that’s where


the term ‘stable’ came from. You never hear anyone using that

terminology any more. I mean those words came from the Motown

guys who really believed in the records they made. They were music

people. Most of the MDs back then were musicians with business

skills. You find a record executive these days who can strum one note

or play a beat – I’d be very surprised. But they’ve all got accounting

and law degrees.

Watson’s company is in line with the argument that major labels will change how they operate

through simply becoming distribution facilities much like the larger entities in the film

industry. In this particular case, rather than create content inhouse through using their own

A&R department, EMI and Watson have fostered a relationship together. EMI is willing to let

Watson and Eleven discover acts and develop them while understanding that their role will be

to brand these products and get them to people – whether through digital means or through the

distribution of physical product. However, unlike Engine Room, Eleven has not fully endorsed

a film industry model in which major film stars do not do long term deals with a particular

film studio. It is clear that the musicians signed to Eleven are not entirely free to make records

on a project by project basis in this way because Eleven is still attached to EMI.

Engine Room

Engine Room is more like a production company in the film industry than a record label in the

music industry. Engine Room manufactures records completely independently of a major label

and then they assign most of the rights to these products to various major labels in foreign

territories. The fundamental difference between Engine Room and Eleven is that Engine

Room is not aligned with one particular major label and is more like an independent record

label. Engine Room sign their artist’s publishing and recording rights for the world from

Australia and then arrange partnership deals that involve them assigning most of those rights

to which ever label suits the artist or to which ever label gives them the best deal. Like Eleven,

Engine Room maintain creative control. However, they maintain creative control through

investing the capital they need to make the records and videos themselves. This strategy

simultaneously puts them in a highrisk situation while also generating their main competitive

advantage. Because they themselves carry the financial burden of originating their artist’s

careers, major labels in foreign territories are more willing to sign their artists. Once Engine


Room produces the records and video clips they are taken directly to labels in the UK and the

US because these territories lead the worldwidepop music market. Waggstaff noted that:

We don’t take out artists and develop them here and then sign them

into an intercompany license agreement in this country, we take them

overseas and we end up being the middle ground. It’s more expensive

to sign an artist from us than it is to sign them directly, but then we’ve

taken the financial punt and have put up the first maybe half a million

dollars, so it takes the risk out of their equation … It decreases the

royalty you’d have to pay an Australian artist coming through an

intercompany license agreement and it decreases the risk that they

would have to take if they were signing a local band.

Engine Room is a 50/50 joint venture between music producer and songwriter Andrew

Klippel and James Packer6. Todd Waggstaff is the company’s manager. Waggstaff claimed

that he and Klippel have spent more time over the last decade working overseas than they have

in Australia and that this has given them a deeper understanding of what is applicable to

specific foreign territories. In a conventional record company, A&R staff and other employees

do not go straight to the public to sell new performers, the overall marketing process involves

these employees selling artists to their own company first, then to the trade and then to the

record buyers (Goodman, 1998: 281). Engine Room have effectively assumed the

responsibility of selling artists to record companies and Waggstaff claimed that the time he

and Klippel have spent working in foreign territories has given them an insight into how to

best cater for the subtle nuances of each major territory. He said that:

We choose artists who are great and who will hopefully transcend

current fashion. We’re not trying to guess what the current trend is,

but we do know what certain label’s preferences are, we know what

individual A&R people have signed in the past and what they have

been successful with. We know where there are holes in the repertoire

of certain labels that we could plug something into. So it makes our

pitch a little bit more precise in that we understand the market, we

understand why our artist is relevant to that market and we

understand why our artist is relevant to media in that market.

6 James Packer is the son of the Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer.


Within 12 months of Waggstaff and Klippel returning from Los Angeles and securing the

funding with Packer in a 50/50 joint venture, Engine Room, after developing and

manufacturing their records and videos, signed Holly Valance to London Warner, The Vines

to Capital/EMI in the US and the UK and Carla Werner to Columbia/Sony in New York. The

theory behind Engine Room is that once a few of their artists become financially successful

and they demonstrate their ability as a development and production company, the slightly one

sided assignment of copyright deals they have to agree to in order to work in partnership with

major labels will eventually be replaced with deals that are weighted in their favour. This

theory is based on the premise that the balance of power shifts with success. Fortunately, The

Vines and Holly Valance have become financially successful artists and their success should

lure other major labels into signing contracts that are increasingly weighted in Engine Room’s

favour. Waggstaff noted:

We’ll maintain more rights as we move forward … so that our

economic model is that we start out giving away a whole lot to

establish a track record and then as it moves over time we give away

less and less and in a few years time, rather than do a license deal, it

becomes a license of copyright, then it becomes a short term license

of copyright, then it becomes not a license of copyright, but a license

to distribute certain records and so it moves from a deal where all the

services of a record label outside A&R are performed by our partners,

then it moves overtime to one where we become a full service label

and we perform all functions other than the warehousing and

distribution to retail.

Therefore Engine Room is being built upon the promise of becoming a full service label.

While it appears that they have endorsed a film industry model through becoming a

management and production company that shadows various record companies, they are in fact

only using this strategy in order to lay the foundation for Engine Room to become a

conventional record company in its own right.

If Image is Everything Production is Nothing

Although Engine Room’s strategic plan suggests that over time the company’s evolution will

enable this entity to become a full service label, the company faces a number of threats. This


strategy may well lead to Engine Room becoming caught in a paradigm shift that involves

international record companies beginning to focus more on the marketing of ‘brands’ rather

than the manufacture of product. Although at first it appears that Engine Room have

successfully been able to work Australian acts in foreign territories and it seems that such a

model enables music managers to come the forefront of this sector of the industry; on closer

inspection it is increasingly clear that Engine Room may have just been burdened with the

liabilities associated with record production.

Klein (2001) claimed that the sports company Nike has become the prototype for the product

free ‘brand’. Nike outsources the production of its products to contractors who are located all

over the world7. Freed from the “chains of production” (Klein, 2001: 219) through employing

such an outsourced structure, Nike has an abundance of time and money to constantly create

and recreate the Nike brand image. Klein argued that in Nike’s case branding has replaced

production entirely and that the staggering success of this business model has led to a wider

acceptance of the business philosophy of nolimits spending on branding. This means that

increasingly there is no value in making ‘things’ anymore because value is added by careful

research, by innovation and by marketing (ibid: 217). The fact that Engine Room’s present

competitive advantage is that they take the first financial risk through manufacturing their

artist’s products themselves means that the advantage the record company involved has is that

the capital they would normally spend producing records can instead be allocated to the

marketing department. This would give this company a distinct advantage over their

competitors because in popular music “image is everything” (ibid: 217). If this outsourced

production structure and marketing focus proves to be successful then the majority of major

labels will have to follow this trend if they want to remain competitive.

The timing of this trend within other industries, and potentially within the music industry, not

only reflects branding’s status as the perceived economic cureall, it also reflects a

corresponding devaluation of the production process and of producers in general. If Engine

Room’s current business model became the main model that was endorsed in the music

industry because a series of music management and production companies successfully

employed this model, the competition between these companies would potentially lead to

them offering major labels the best deals possible at their expense. Not only would these

7 Klein argued that Nike lent itself to this business model because the company actually began as an American

import/export scheme for madeinJapan running shoes.


music management and production companies be burdened with the liabilities associated with

record production, the competition would mean that they would have to provide these records

at rock bottom prices. Through outsourcing manufacturing and focusing on brand

management, the record company would have a distinct advantage over the music

management and production company.

No Guarantee

The products to brands paradigm shift can be detrimental to the artists it affects. If other

companies were to follow Engine Room’s lead and were to emerge as entities that are

analogous to production companies in the film industry, the artists who signed to them would

not be able to get a guarantee from these companies that their work would definitely be

released. According to Donavan (2003), because Engine Room are making the records and

then they are looking for the marketing and distribution deals, their business model presents

their artists with a large degree of risk. Because they are not directly connected to one major

label as Watson’s company Eleven is, there is the potential that they will not be able to get a

marketing and distribution deal for some of the records they produce. Donavan stated that:

I would not want to sign a band to Engine Room whose going to make

a record for us that might not see a release. I’d want to know that if I

was going to sign my rights over to a record company that I was

definitely going to get a record out in the market place.

If Engine Room signing The Vines’ second album was as or more successful than their first

record, this act would become the company’s priority and they may not have the time to focus

on a particular new artist who would have put a life time of effort into their work but who all

of sudden could not attain a release agreement. According to Donavan (2003), all of a sudden

the word would start spreading that this particular artist cannot even get their first record

released and this artist would then be ten steps back from where they started. This is because

this artist would not be approaching other industry practitioners with a positive ‘story’.

Donavan said that:

As a business person, if someone comes to me and says “we had a

record a year ago but we serviced it to all the majors, we didn’t get a

licensing agreement, we still think there’s something we can do with it,

have a listen”. I’d be like “Oh dear – you’ve already tried – I wouldn’t


be that rude but I’d think that it’s a hard enough business as it is – I

need positive stories from day one.

From an artist’s perspective, Engine Room’s business model represents a risky situation.

Engine Room’s business model is also potentially problematic for their artists because the

growth this model generates is not organic. Their methodology potentially only generates

shortterm interest from the record labels they form partnerships with. Engine Room’s

business model is analogous to a production company in the film industry, a company that

would be free to be associated with any of the major film studios. It is therefore clear that

from the perspective of the record label Engine Room forms a partnership with the

arrangement may become problematic because this business model breeds disloyalty. A brand

(music or otherwise) is built over a long period of time. If a music management and

production company and their artists were free to work with major labels on a projectby

project basis, it is clear that any label that invests in these artists in order to further brand them

through their marketing and distribution campaigns is not necessarily going to be there when

the overall longterm branding campaign pays dividends. A production company model that is

analogous to certain production companies in the film industry may not work very effectively

in the music industry because music marketing campaigns often focus more on the artist as a

brand where as in the film industry a film’s title is often the focus and therefore this industry

better lends itself to companies that work on a projectbyproject basis.

Conclusions

This paper argued that a new trend and business structure is emerging in the music industry

that is analogous to the structure of some sections of the film industry. This trend involves

some music management and production companies beginning to shadow record companies

through the way in which they are beginning to fulfill many of the responsibilities that used to

belong to these larger companies. It was argued that the frustration various Australian

managers faced when attempting to work Australian artists in foreign territories due to inter

company license agreements and other factors provided the impetus for the creation of the two

companies, Eleven and Engine Room. The operation of these two companies was then placed

within the larger context of a conceptual paradigm shift that is affecting many different

industries. This paradigm shift involves successful corporations primarily producing brands as

opposed to products. Through focusing on branding rather than record production, this shift


would enable record companies to paradoxically become larger and more profitable through

downsizing. Indeed, contracting out the production of records and video clips to smaller music

management and production companies like Eleven and Engine Room may potentially enable

major labels to become weightless through endorsing a complete divestment of the highrisk

world of record production. It is clear that for this reason the more a music management and

production company operates like an independent film production company the more risk they

are burdened with.

Compared to Engine Room, Watson’s company Eleven represents less of a departure from the

norm and therefore this venture does not present the participants with as much risk. From an

artist’s perspective, Eleven’s business model is advantageous. Because Eleven is in partnership

with a specific major label, the artists signed to this company receive a guarantee that their

work will be released, they have more creative control and receive more points while still

having access to this major label’s marketing capital and distribution systems. These artists

are also still free to sign with whomever they please in foreign territories. From Watson’s

perspective as a music manager this arrangement takes care of the inherent conflicts of

interest that arise when the one person fulfills the role of band manager and record company

executive. In contrast to Eleven, Engine Room is more like a production company in the film

industry than a record label in the music industry. While Engine Room’s business model has

proven to be enormously successful at providing three Australian artists with the opportunity

to shine in foreign territories, this in turn providing this company with a foothold in order to

attempt to achieve its mission to become a full service label in its own right, Engine Room’s

focus on production suggests that this company may instead become problematically caught

up in the products to brands paradigm shift. Engine Room’s focus on the production of

commodities in order to generate their competitive advantage means that the advantage the

record company involved has is that the capital they would normally spend producing records

can instead be allocated to the generation of their own imagebased competitive advantage.

This would put them in a better position than Engine Room because the music industry is

partially an imagebased market. The products to brands paradigm shift could potentially lead

to competition between entities like Engine Room and this has the potential to devalue the

production process. Engine Room’s business model also provides their artists with more risk

because there is no guarantee that the records they produce will definitely reach the market

place. Engine Room’s strategy may also only generate shortterm interest from major labels in


their artists and may in fact breed disloyalty.

Bibliography

Goodman, F (1998), The Mansion On The Hill, New York: Vintage Books/Random House

Groendahl, B and Caney, D (2004) ‘Song swapping leads to BMG, Sony merger’: Reuters

IFPI (2004), ‘Global music sales fall by 7.6% in 2003 – some positive signs in 2004’, London: International Federation of Phonographic Industries Secretariat

Klein, N (2000) No Logo, London: Flamingo/Harper Collins

Throsby, D (2002) ‘The Music Industry in the New Millennium: Global and Local Perspectives’, unpublished paper prepared for the Division of Arts and Cultural Enterprise, Paris: UNESCO


‘Nation, Gender and Musical Stereotypes in Irish Music’

Helen O’Shea

Musical tropes signifying Irishness are now deeply embedded in western musical traditions.

They are also used in film music and advertising to denote a cluster of meanings associated

with Irishness. Since the early 1990s, two global commercial developments – the recording

industry’s ‘world music’ marketing category and the Irish theme pub – have reinforced this

musical stereotyping, which falls into two broad categories: the slow, melancholy music that

evokes sadness and spirituality, and the fast dance music associated with highspirited

earthiness.

Music offers experiences that enable us to place ourselves in particular imaginative cultural

narratives (Frith, 1996: 124). One of the most significant cultural narratives of the past two

centuries has been that of the political unity of the nation that rests upon the notion of an

ancient, continuous unified culture residing within specific geographical boundaries.

Nationalist movements throughout Europe constructed revised histories in order to establish

longstanding unified cultural identities and sought literary and artistic texts whose widespread

practice would then enact a national cultural identity. This notion of a homogeneous, shared

culture has since been discredited in favour of a position that recognizes that such identities

are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves

within, the narratives of the past (Hall, 1990: 225). Narratives of national cultural identity are

not fixed either, but change over time, according to contemporary priorities. The ways in

which these processes have operated in relation to music remain to a large extent under the

radar of contemporary analyses such as those in postcolonial studies, which focus more on

literary and visual arts. As I argue below, contemporary musical representations of Irishness

derive from colonial stereotypes and revaluation within Irish nationalist movements.

The soundtrack of the movie Titanic (Cameron, 1997) illustrates how these musical

representations of Irishness are now so deeply ingrained that they are used, not only to imply

Irishness, but to denote those qualities that ‘Irishness’ is assumed to incorporate. In James

Horner’s score, plaintive airs haunt scenes of premonition, tragedy and transcendence, while

vigorous dance music enlivens amorous adventures. A ‘high, lonesome’ voice (Celine Dion in

the title track, Norwegian Enyasoundalike Sissel in the score) with legato phrasing and

echoing the idiom of Irishlanguage seannós (‘oldstyle’) introduces quasiGaelic themes that


are then richly orchestrated using instruments associated with Irish music: the uilleann pipes,

the tin whistle and the fiddle. Titanic writer and director James Cameron alerts listeners to the

‘timeless quality’ achieved by this ‘soaring and transcendent sound using human voice …

combined with Celtic instruments like uillean pipe and pennywhistle to create lyrical and

haunting emotionalism’ (Cameron, 1998). Associated with the heroine Rose’s doomed

romantic love and with the splendour of nature, this melancholy music gives voice to the

emotional vocabulary of romantic love: yearning, ecstasy, loss, heartbreak, and spiritual

transcendence. In the world of the film, Rose represents the antithesis of the competitive,

masculine spheres of science and commerce: hers is a premodern realm ruled by the

emotions, nature, the spiritual, the irrational and the feminine.

In contrast, scenes in Titanic that focus on the workingclass artist–hero, Jack, are

accompanied by exuberant Irish dance music played on fiddle, whistle, uilleann pipes,

mandolin, guitar and bodhrán. These scenes emphasise the sensuality and impetuosity of

youthful love and include the scene Irish Party in Third Class, in which Rose and Jack dance,

drink, smoke and shout while a ‘band’ drawn from the ship’s Irish immigrant passengers plays

Irish dance music (Horner, 1998).

Together, the couple embody many of the myths we have inherited from the Romantic

movement: the transcendent power of nature, the moral superiority of the artist, the

importance of living an authentic life by valuing nature, the spirit and the emotions above

material and social success. This authenticity is associated with ‘premodernity’, a concept

about as precise as ‘the olden days’ in its propensity to change according to one’s vantage

point in time. Novelists George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, for example, writing in the second

half of the nineteenth century, placed the end of the age of innocence about two generations

before their own time. Titanic director James Cameron, looking back from the end of the

twentieth century to a world about to be swept into the vortex of the socalled Great War,

urges his audiences to ‘let the music take you back to that moment in history, that more

innocent and optimistic time’. (Cameron, 1998)

Irish music in the soundtrack of Titanic evokes two forms of authenticity: a transformative

authenticity of the body (signified by fast dance music) that is dramatically realised in the

leads’ courtship dance, chase and lovemaking; and an authenticity of the spirit and emotions

(signified by melancholy airs) exemplified by the bond that bridges their physical separation.

Both kinds of authenticity have been associated with the (Gaelic) Irish, corresponding with


the urban ideal of a ‘folk’ who are repositories of cultural traditions, and with Irish music,

most recently in its globally commodified context in the Irish theme pub, where melancholy

airs drift from the sound system at quiet times, while boisterous dance music and rollicking

ballads fire up patrons – like those in the bowels of the Titanic – to more vigorous drinking

sessions.

These musical tropes reinforce opposing stereotypes of the Irish (as exuberant and physical, or

as melancholy and spiritual) that have prevailed for many centuries. It would be a mistake,

however, to assume from their longevity the absolute nature of these musical connotations – to

assume that, because the (largely Anglophone) media use Irish music to signify a range of

characteristics, this is essentially the way the Irish are, or to assume that specific musical

tropes have a single universal meaning. To accept an essential causative relation between

musical structures and emotional structures is equivalent to accepting that racial stereotypes

accurately represent the collective characteristics of a ‘people’. In both cases, meanings have

been constructed within ideology.

Ten Little Title Tunes, Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida’s recent study of listeners’ associations

between, for example, music that is slow, legato, varies in volume, has a light bass line and is

performed on acoustic strings, piano, woodwind or voice is associated with concepts of

nature, the rural, tranquillity, reluctance, romance and the feminine. They found that music

perceived as ‘masculine’ was faster, with a more active bass line, more syncopated, with less

dynamic variation and played on brass and electric instruments, accompanied by chords on

brass, synthesiser or brass and associations with culture, the urban, action, conflict and

strength (Tagg, 2003: 669–73). These deeply conservative gender stereotypes indicate the

strength and consistency with which dominant ideologies inform our perceptions of music.

The consistency of listeners’ interpretations of musical stereotypes should not be taken as

evidence of any ‘natural’ equivalence between certain sounds and human emotions or values;

on the contrary, the notion that music is some kind of ‘universal language’ is fallacious.

Musical performance is nondenotative – that is, sounds in music do not in themselves invoke

specific things or ideas, as language does, but depend upon the signifying processes of

language in order to take on meaning, as John Shepherd and Peter Wicke argue in Music and

Cultural Theory (1997). In fact, it is because music is nondenotative that a range of meanings

can be assigned to it: to use Edward Said’s term, it is ‘transgressive’ in having the capacity to

cross over into, and become a part of, other domains that include class, gender relations and


nationalism (Said, 1991: ch 2). The stereotypes of Irishness constructed within colonial

discourse and revalued by anticolonial movements could be transferred to music, because

music is open to cooption by either hegemonic or counterhegemonic discourses (in this case,

both). In other words, music’s meanings are not ‘in’ the music but in us, the listeners. The way

we understand music is culturally specific, as demonstrated in another of Philip Tagg’s

research projects, in which not one of his respondents could correctly identified the common

theme of death in musical examples of various nonwestern origins (Tagg, 1993). That study

corroborates the view that music is always a social and discursive construction: that it does

not ‘reflect’ or ‘express’ social groups and their values. Rather, through historical and

discursive narratives these associations develop over time. Thus music may come to symbolise

a particular collective identity, as in the case of Irish music.

Each kind of music in Titanic carries out specific epistemological and ideological work. In the

case of the melancholy music associated with Rose, these significations are emphasised by

James Horner’s lush score, which, unlike the music in scenes like the Irish party, where it is

performed within the drama, works ideologically by creating ‘assimilating identifications’ that

‘draw perceivers into socially and historically unfamiliar positions, as do larger scale

processes of assimilation’ (Kassabian, 2001: 2). In the case of Rose’s melancholy music, those

positions are closely related to the ways in which the English colonisers of Ireland, the settled

Anglo–Irish with their ambivalent loyalties, and later also the Gaelic Irish, constructed

collective identities of an ‘Irish people’ that overlaid the country’s highly differentiated

religious, political, economic, regional and racial identities.

A new wave of English colonisers of Ireland in the sixteenth century, realizing that the Irish

were not going to adopt English customs and fearing cultural corruption of their own number,

had banned local practices including playing the harp, speaking in Irish, and wearing the

woollen mantle. Each of these practices represented what English intellectuals regarded as the

feminine Otherness of the Irish, just as English literary works of the time depicted the figure

of Ireland as a virgin inviting penetration by the coloniser (Parker, 1987). On the other hand,

when Henry VIII banned the harp from his court, it was because of its associations with anti

colonial resistance. In this way, Irish music historically has been an emblem of both the

passive qualities associated with a vanquished Irishry and with the potential for

insubordination or violence that threatened to subvert or even overthrow the conquerors. It is

not surprising, then, that the antiquarian music collectors of the eighteenth century and those


who followed them appear to have settled on a definition of Irish music as simultaneously

melancholy and uplifting, a legacy of colonial ambivalence toward the Irish.

Representations of the Irish as feminine and thus assumed to be weak and unworldly fitted the

aspirations of the English, and later the Anglo–Irish, to rule Ireland. Other equally

longstanding stereotypes constructed the Irish as brutal, apelike figures (this legacy retained

in ‘Stage Irish’ vaudeville characters) whose drunken, disruptive behaviour justified continued

English dominance. Both these stereotypes were transformed during the long process of

nationformation that began in the eighteenth century but was not realised until the twentieth.

As Irish historian David Lloyd proposes, when nationstates incorporate colonial stereotypes,

they revalue them in a dialogic inversion of imperial ideology (Lloyd, 1993). In this way, an

Irish cultural nationalist movement refashioned the colonial notion of Irish cultures as

feminine and weak into one that was noble and expressed the sadness of a defeated people.

Political nationalists later inverted the image of the Irish as brutal and barbarous to one in

which Irish warriors readied themselves to take over the colonisers’ role of defending the

nation (now represented as a mother, rather than a virgin).

From the end of the eighteenth century, cultural nationalists enlisted Irish musical texts to

symbolise cultural unity in a culturally divided Ireland. At that time, Ireland was an English

colony with its own parliament, from which the Catholic majority of the population was

excluded1. Members of the Anglo–Irish ruling class or Protestant Ascendancy, finding that

their political and economic interests had diverged from those of the central British

government, sought to identify themselves with the land they occupied. As part of this shift

from an ‘Anglo’ to an ‘Irish’ identification, amateur enthusiasts began to take an interest in the

history and culture of Ireland that predated an English presence.

A major figure in this movement was Edward Bunting, who transcribed and published music

from the last of Ireland’s itinerant harpists, who performed a repertoire deriving from the

music performed for the former Gaelic nobility. Like similar antiquarian enterprises in the

fields of literature, archaeology and philology, however, Bunting’s collections were selective

and furthered the political ambitions of his own social group, the disenchanted Protestant

middle and upper classes. Bunting believed the music revealed ‘the mental cultivation and

1 Under the socalled Penal Laws, Catholics were banned from voting or holding political office, government

employment, membership of the professions, land ownership (only five per cent of Irish lands were owned

by Catholics) and Catholic worship (this last was unevenly enforced) (Coohill, 2000).


refinement of our ancestors’ that was ‘unapproachably unique, so unlike any other music of

the nations around us’ (Bunting, c1969: 8) and (despite generations of oral transmission): ‘in a

perfect state from the earliest times’ (Bunting, c1969: 2).

This music was emblematic of a ruling class, however: it was not ‘folk’ music. In selecting

this limited repertoire, Irish cultural nationalists differed from their counterparts in other

emerging European nations. The collectors’ aim to reestablish a noble lineage of art music

reinforced the case of the Anglo–Irish gentry, as most suited to lead a future independent Irish

nation. Conversely, by overlooking contemporary popular cultural forms, they implicitly

consented to the colonial view of the native Irish as unworthy to lead a future nation.

Edward Bunting’s transcriptions formed the basis of a canon of Irish music regarded as

authentic and ancient, despite the alterations Bunting made in writing down and later editing

the performances he heard. Apart from the inevitable simplifications and inaccuracies

involved in transforming a musical performance into notation, Bunting also deferred to the

tastes and artistic conventions of contemporary Irish bourgeois society. He arranged the tunes

for voice or violin and keyboard and ‘improved’ some of the melodies from modal to diatonic

scales and added harmonic accompaniments for piano. Bunting and those who performed his

arrangements, however, accepted the (relatively recent) view that music is autonomous

(independent of social and ideological forces) and that a printed text provided the authority for

musical authenticity. Thus it was possible for them to believe that the symbolic meaning

assigned to ‘the original’2 was retained in the newly created musical artefact and transferred to

the new set of performers and listeners3. In other words, in performing this material, they

believed they were expressing essentially Irish qualities within the imaginative narrative of a

culturally united Ireland.

The most popular settings of Bunting’s collections were those of Thomas Moore (best

remembered today for the song ‘The Last Rose of Summer’), who adapted the airs to fit his

sentimental, patriotic verses in the Irish Melodies, which he published between 1808 and

1834. Moore’s lyrics evince a deep but pessimistic sympathy for the Irish cause: they weep

and sigh over Ireland’s hopeless suffering, dream of past glories and mourn their loss. Music

2 As Declan Kiberd observes, ‘the concept of an “original” comes into existence only after it has been

translated’ (Kiberd, 1995: 624).

3 The rise of printing was as important to music as to other aspects of nation building, especially in

transferring authority from the oral texts that had prevailed in premodernity to written forms.


is a balm to assuage grief and to keep alive in the ‘deathlike moan’ of the harp a memory of

‘noble pride, now turn’d to shame, And hopes for ever gone’4. Although regarded by Moore’s

contemporaries as expressing a noble patriotism, these are scarcely fighting words, but an

extension of the colonial view of the Irish and a version of Irishness that appealed strongly to

the Anglo–Irish ruling class.

Bunting disapproved of his contemporaries’ ‘drawling dead, doleful and dieaway manner’ of

performing the songs, contrasting it with the ‘spirited, animated and highly lively style’ of his

sources (White 1998: 43). He also objected to Moore’s cooption of Gaelic airs to impute a

national character narrowed to one of melancholy and complaint:

The world have been too apt to suppose our music of a highly

plaintive and melancholy character, and that it partook of our

National feeling at the state of our country in a political view, and

that three parts out of four of our tunes were of this complaining

nature. Now there never was anything more erroneous than this idea.

(from a draft of the preface to Bunting’s 1840 collection, cited in

White 1998: 43)

Bunting’s observation draws attention to the process of selection and the changing emphasis

in musical representations of Irishness at that time. Musical identities are always constructed

imaginatively, and within discourse. In this case, Irish music, thought to reflect the true nature

of Irish people, was being presented in a narrower, less ambiguous range, one that implied that

the Irish, as spiritual, melancholy and emotional, were incapable of either defeating the

English colonisers or of ruling a future Irish nation. In other words, it was a representation of

Irishness deriving from a colonial viewpoint.

A later generation of cultural nationalists mobilised this nostalgic view of Ireland’s lost

glories in the latenineteenthcentury Irish literary revival, in which was the central figure.

The main exponents were again Anglo–Irish intellectuals, including the poet William Butler

Yeats, along with members of an emerging urban Catholic middle class. Their project of ‘de

Anglicisation’ aimed to build a national Englishlanguage literature that drew on Celtic

mythology and Gaelic legends (rather than historical figures). As in Moore’s songs, their work

closely resembled colonial representations of the Irish as the feminine Other to the English.

Mathew Arnold encapsulated this discourse of Celticism in an influential essay, ‘On the study

4 The song quoted is Sing, Sweet Harp (see Moore, T 1963).


of Celtic literature’, in which he proposes that, by accommodating the appealing aspects of the

Celt’s culture, the English could retain their political hegemony (Arnold, 1973). His

characterisation of the native Irish as Other to the Teutonic English, as losers in war and

politics who possessed to a fault the ‘feminine’ qualities of emotionalism, sensuality,

aestheticism and spirituality (Cairns, 1988: 48), assumed a ‘positional superiority’ (Said,

1978: 7) that again implicitly boosted the case for an Anglo–Irish, rather than a Gaelic Irish,

leadership in the anticolonial movement.

In music, Celticism was manifest in a melancholy aesthetic attributed in part to the expression

of grief and loss by a defeated people (as argued by Bunting) and in part to their weakness in

the face of invasion (as implicit in the works of Thomas Moore). This aesthetic has continued

to inform understandings of Irish music and of Irish ethnicity and, indeed, has recently

resurfaced in the high, ethereal voices and mournful cadences of socalled ‘Celtic’ music5 and

in the ‘feminine’ scenes of the movie Titanic.

Nineteenthcentury women of the Anglo–Irish gentry played harp music from the revivalists’

texts, while playing the uilleann pipes became a popular pastime among men of that social

class (Carson, 1986: 14). Both the harp and the pipes are still regarded as quintessentially Irish

and are the instruments most heard in world music’s ‘Celtic’ category. Neither instrument fits

well with today’s group performance of dance music in bands and sessions, and the harp, and

to a lesser extent, the uilleann pipes, retain an association with the middle and upper classes.

This distinction also has a political history.

Returning to the steerage party on the Titanic … how did the Irish dance music thrashed out

by the steerage ‘band’ come to be ‘Irish’ and ‘traditional’ and how did they come to represent

the freespirited Irish as uninhibited pleasureseekers? As ‘diegetic’ (played by people inside

the filmworld) the music in this scene operates in a less coercive way than in scored scenes

and allows – and in this scene encourages – associations with the perceiver’s own world.

These produce what Anahid Kassabian terms ‘affiliating identifications’ that ‘open’ the

psychic field, rather than closing it down, as happens when that lonesome soprano steers our

emotions in Rose’s scenes in Titanic (Kassabian, 2001: 141). The thirdclass party scene is

much more fun. It is also unique in the film for its lack of historical accuracy: dancing, tune

combinations, instruments and ensemble are all anachronistic, in contrast to the painstakingly,

5 This aesthetic is illustrated by the recordings of Donegal singer, Enya, and in the Lament collection on Peter

Gabriel’s Real World label (1992). Holland: Real World Records Ltd; Virgin Records Ltd, CDRW 27.


hugely expensive reproductions in scenes set in first class. What it does closely resemble,

however, is what audiences would recognize as an Irish theme pub. Like these pubs, the film

capitalizes on Irishness as an emblem of the uninhibited high spirits that allow the heroine to

challenge convention and realize her true (authentic) self. In providing a musical celebration

of uninhibited fun, boisterous dancing and goodnatured brawling, the scene draws on another

stereotype of Irishness: the buoyant, resilient aspect of the ‘national character’ that Edward

Bunting found missing in drawingroom performances of the repertoire he had collected.

Bunting and his contemporaries had included only a very small proportion of dance tunes in

their publications6. Yet the dance craze that swept Europe towards the end of the eighteenth

century had enthusiastic participation among the Irish peasantry, as English geographer had

Arthur Young noted in 1780:

Dancing is very general among the poor people, almost universal in

every cabin. Dancing masters of their own rank travel through the

country from cabin to cabin, with a piper or blind fiddler; and the pay

is sixpence a quarter. (Young cited in Ó hAllmhuráin, 1998: 46–7)

The dancing masters taught mainly solo dances of their own invention, mostly in jig time until

late in the eighteenth century, when Scottish reels and English hornpipes began to circulate

widely. The dancing masters also popularised group dances like the minuet and stimulated the

early nineteenthcentury passion for setdancing (quadrille sets adapted to local steps, figures

and music) that had spread from France and England (Hall, R. 1995; Vallely 1999). This

meant that dance music and dancing at the beginning of the nineteenth century was

ambiguously ‘Irish’. More importantly, as a popular contemporary practice, it was still in a

process of changing and lacked the patina of age and associations with a bygone nobility that

the urban nationalists so admired. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, this

dance music came to be considered as quintessentially Irish, despite its evident hybridity.

In the midnineteenth century, popular Irish songs and dance tunes were adopted as the

vehicles for a more politicised nationalist movement. Incendiary patriotic ballads, typified by

the work of Thomas Davis, editor of the nationalist journal The Nation, were set to music

already familiar to the populace, the point being to ‘keep up their spirits, refine their tastes,

warm their courage, increase their union, and renew their zeal’ (Davis cited in O’Neill, 1965:

6 Breandán Breathnach claims that ‘Bunting’s three volumes did not contain a dozen dance tunes, and the

complete Petrie collection [of almost 1600 items] less than 300’ (Breathnach, 1977: 117).


3).7 In contrast to Moore’s effete lyrics, these nationalist balladeers emphasized what they

regarded as masculine traits (strength, courage, etc.) and figures such as the warrior–patriot

(Cairns, 1988: 49). Although nationalist representations of Ireland remained feminine

throughout the rise of this movement and the process of nationformation, the ideal nationalist

became a masculine figure capable of reassuming the role of national protector previously

played by the Anglo–Irish Ascendancy. This is an example of the revaluing of colonial

stereotypes – or colonial inversion – in the process of forming the nation–state (Lloyd, 1993).

Changed social conditions in Ireland following the midnineteenthcentury years of famine

saw the demise of the artisan musician and the dancing master and the expansion of amateur

musicmaking and house dances. Published collections of Irish music in the latenineteenth

century, although still bearing titles such as The Ancient Music of Ireland, now included an

increasing proportion of reels, jigs, marches and hornpipes (including many tunes from

England and Scotland) in addition to the older airs and harp tunes. The collections of Francis

O’Neill, a Cork musician who became chief of police in Chicago, assisted greatly in

integrating the dance tunes into the canon of ‘ancient’ music that was thought to reflect an

essentially Irish sensibility.

Within the political nationalist movement, the dance music – from around 1900 called ‘Irish

traditional music – became a masculine field, if ambiguously so. In the new Irish nation the

colonial stereotype of Celticism that had emphasised the archetypal feminine nature of the

Irish was overtaken by a more masculine stereotype. This inverted the colonial stereotype that

had depicted the Irish was as violent, drunken, irresponsible and seditious that had festered

through the centuries from the Elizabethan court to the bestial caricatures of Irish ‘types’

found in English political cartoons and on the vaudeville stage. Revalued, the national type

was bold, lively and masculine, as expressed in nationalist ballads like ’The Foggy Dew’,

which celebrates the 1916 Easter Uprising. These ballads employed mainly well known march

tunes, and to a lesser extent, dance tunes.

7 One of Thomas Davis’s most enduring songs, A Nation Once Again, remains a standard of today’s ballad

bands. The chorus looks to the day that ‘Ireland, long a province, be a nation once again’.


It has only been since the revival of Irish traditional music that began in the 1950s that the

dance music repertoire has been regarded as not only exclusively Irish, but capable of

expressing essentially Irish characteristics and thus symbolising ‘Irishness’. The rise of ballad

bands such as the Dubliners in the 1960s meant that by 1970 the international sound of Ireland

was a mix of political ballads and songs of the urban workingclass sung in a strong, bass

voice interspersed with fast and flashy dance tunes (‘Irish traditional music’) performed with a

swaggering masculinity. An alternative Irish sound came from the Chieftains, whose more

restrained performance and artmusic aesthetic fitted the concert hall, rather than the pub. The

Dubliners toured the world for decades and the Chieftains are still on the international concert

circuit, but in popular culture, and in the ‘world’ of the global Irish theme pub, the stereotype

of a bold, authentic, masculine Irishness signified by the ballad band retains greater currency.

In Titanic, Jack Dawson demonstrates the moral authenticity of being ‘true to oneself’. In the

steerage party scene, he exhibits the ‘natural’ virility and the unselfconscious authenticity that

urban intellectuals have associated with peasants and the working class and nationalists with

the patriot.


At the end of the eighteenth century, Anglo–Irish nationalists revived remnant Gaelic

aristocratic music to support their case to become Ireland’s future ruling class. A century later,

cultural nationalists used music as a vehicle for patriotic sentiments, and to construct the

founding myth of a continuous Gaelic culture, a myth that also underpinned the Irish

traditional music revival of the 1960s. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, Celticism’s

version of the Irish as sentimental and melancholy – the stereotype that encapsulates the

imagined qualities that inspired colonial love and domination – survives in artmusic

performances of songs by Moore and his many followers and in the musicindustry category

of Celtic music, an illdefined spectrum of musical practices that accompany a new version of

Celticism that infuses contemporary understandings of Irishness in fictional, textbook and

tourist industry representations of Irish music, in film scores and advertising. The version of

Irishness – the stereotype of the rowdy, unreliable, lifeloving larrikins which inverts the

colonial fear of Irish masculinity – is represented by the music of ballad bands in Irish theme

pubs in any part of the globe, with their repertoire of drinking songs and marchtempo ‘rebel’

ballads and highoctane dance music. Both kinds of musical representations of Irishness are

ubiquitous in popular culture and commerce. The next time a soulful soprano draws you into

her Celtic twilight or a ripping reel drives you to drink, spare a thought for the process that

created these musical caricatures.

Bibliography

Arnold, M (1973) ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ in R Super (ed) English Literature and Irish Politics, Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota Press

Breathnach, B (1977) Folk Music and Dances of Ireland, Dublin: Talbot Press

Bunting, E (c1969) The Ancient Music of Ireland: An edition comprising the three collections by Edward Bunting originally published in 1796, 1809 and 1840, Dublin: Waltons

Cairns, D and S Richards (1988) Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Cameron, J (1998) Liner notes to J Horner, Back to Titanic, New York: Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

Coohill, J (2000) Ireland: A Short History, Oxford: Oneworld

Frith, S (1996) ‘Music and Identity’ in S Hall and P du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage

Hall, R (1995) Liner notes to Irish Dance Music, London: Topic Records


Hall, S (1990) ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in J Rutherford (ed) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Kassabian, A (2001) Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music, New York and London: Routledge

Kiberd, D (1995) Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press

Lloyd, D (1993) Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the PostColonial Moment, Dublin: Lilliput

Moore, T (1968) [1879] Irish Melodies [with] Symphonies and Accompaniments by Sir John Stevenson, Mus. Doc., and Sir Henry Bishop, Dublin: Waltons

Ó hAllmhuráin, G (1998) A Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music, Dublin: The O'Brien Press

O’Neill, F (1965) [1907] The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems, Dublin: Waltons

Parker, P (1987) ‘Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon’ in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, New York: Methuen

Said, E (1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge

Said, E (1991) Musical Elaborations, New York: Columbia University Press

Shepherd, J and P Wicke (1997) Music and Cultural Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press

Tagg, P (1993) ‘”Universal” Music and the Case of Death’, Critical Quarterly, v35n2

Tagg, P and B Clarida (2003) Ten Little Title Tunes: Towards a Musicology of the Mass Media, New York and Montreal: The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press

Vallely, F (1999) The Companion to Irish Traditional Music, Cork: Cork University Press

White, H (1998) The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970, Cork: Cork University Press

Discography

Horner, J (1997) Titanic: Music from the Motion Picture, New York: Sony Music

Entertainment Inc.

Horner, J (1998) Back to Titanic, New York: Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

Filmography

Cameron, J (1997) Titanic, Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox


James Brown – Popular Music’s Most Influential Idiot?

John Scannell

The title of this paper is ‘James Brown – Popular Music’s Most Influential Idiot’? Although

cast aside any fear that I speak ill of the ‘Godfather of Soul’, as this is by no means meant to

be derogatory. On the contrary, this article proposes to illustrate how a certain type of naivety

was necessary to realise some of popular music’s most creative compositions.

James Brown possessed an uncanny ability to take musicians from disparate musical fields

and synthesise their talents into a cohesive ensemble. However, this is the musical legacy of a

man who by most insider accounts was considered a near musical illiterate. Hence what is

under debate here is the validity of any such notions of literacy or indeed any form of

‘common sense’, which are only preconceptions of inherited thought.

This is why the notion of ‘the Idiot’ is employed here to discuss Brown’s musical innovation.

My usage of the term has a very particular derivation, taken as such from the work of the

French poststructuralist philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. More specifically from the ‘Image of

Thought’ chapter in his Difference and Repetition (1968).

My paper will endeavour a rudimentary exploration of this Deleuzian philosophical concept.

For Deleuze, the idiot can be perceived as a character who is not ruled by the presupposition

of ‘common sense’ and furthermore he argues that it is always these socalled idiots that are

invariably at the forefront of all innovation, artistic or otherwise. Rather generally we can say

that this is because the naive lack the selfconsciousness required to reiterate institutionally

dominant forms of ‘common sense’. By refusing to conform to this notion of ‘common

sense’, the Idiot can’t help but follow their instincts and in the process produce new concepts.

Thus within this context, I propose that James Brown provides a particularly good example of

this Deleuzian proposition.

For someone that has had such an enormous influence on contemporary popular music, it is

fairly well known that James Brown’s musical abilities were not highly regarded among his

own musicians. This is borne out in a recent example in the form of exBrown trombonist

Fred Wesley’s recent book Hit Me Fred: Confessions of a Sideman, where Brown’s former

bandleader provides the most comprehensive insight to date of the trials and tribulations of

working with the ‘Godfather of Soul’.

Wesley’s memoirs provide further testimony to the often amusing accounts of Brown’s


musical failings that have over the years emerged from his former alumnus. Brown was not

only an often infuriating taskmaster, but he also had a rather curious approach to the process

of composition, as Fred Wesley duly testifies:

Mr. Brown would sometimes come to the gig early and have what we

call a “jam”, where we would have to join in with his fooling around

on the organ. This was painful for anyone who had ever thought of

playing jazz. James Brown’s organ playing was just good enough to

fool the untrained ear, and so bad that it made real musicians sick on

the stomach. (Wesley, 2002: 11011)

To proceed in such a manner obviously requires a particular audacity and James Brown is

most certainly attributed with such a quality. This level of audaciousness is articulated in the

following quote from long time Brown stalwart and drumming legend John ‘Jabo’:

James would come in and get the sticks and sit down behind the drums

and say, “well, this is the way I want you to play it.” And you still

haven’t figured out which way he wanted it to go. Your best answer

was, “OK, gotcha Mr. Brown.” So you’d sit right back down and play

what you were playing anyway. Because he never really played! Hey,

man, I’m being honest, James did not play anything! He even wanted

to fool around with the guitar! And he couldn’t! (Gladstone et al, 1997:

43)

One may counter that Brown’s musicianship has obviously endeared itself to vast members of

the record buying public. Indeed, to give credit where its due, Brown did provide some more

than passable drums on several early recordings, of which the well known hit Night Train

(1961) is one of the more notable examples. We must keep in mind that the judgement

imposed on Brown’s notional lack of musicianship may appear overly harsh in this context

because it is obviously posited from the perspective of the ‘learned’ musician.

As was the case with most of Brown’s personnel, gigs with the Godfather were often just

considered temporary employment between jazz gigs or more cerebral compositional

enterprises, and their attitude toward Brown’s musicianship was judged accordingly.

Brown’s great bands of the 1960s were populated with a significant proportion of skilled Jazz

players, musicians such as Wesley, Alfred ‘Pee Wee’ Ellis and Maceo Parker to name a few of

the best known. The musicians’ collective frustration was compounded by the fact that playing


with Brown was far more lucrative than what was generally offered in the jazz world, and that

meant playing a subordinate role in a genre that was considered to be comparatively lowbrow.

As aficionados of the more cerebral bebop, their only desire was to try and eventually make it

in the jazz big league, which is precisely where those that were able did indeed end up. For

instance, the cantankerous trumpeter Waymon Reed went on to play with Max Roach and the

Count Basie Orchestra, the latter group with whom Fred Wesley would also later join, whilst

‘Pee Wee’ Ellis assumed the directorship of Van Morrison’s band.

Boasting an ensemble of such pedigree, Brown’s ‘educated’ band members were of the view

that his Funk prototype was simplistic and unsophisticated and therefore was not always to be

taken particularly seriously. To irritate the situation further, Brown’s autocratic style of

leadership was often a demeaning and debilitating experience and from time to time the

musicians would see fit to avenge such maltreatment by belittling their employer’s musical

ability.

Wesley recounts an amusing episode involving former trumpeter Waymon Reed whom the

author cites as one of the most consistently confrontational members of the group. After

another rather common altercation with Brown we find Reed in the dressing room, and

according to Wesley:

he took out his horn and for hours and more hours played parts of

Count Basie’s “Shiny Stockings”, pausing between licks to laugh real

loud and say stuff like, “That’s real music”, not the honkytonk stuff

we have to play on this gig. (Wesley, 2002: 105)

The more prominent members of the James Brown bands did use their tenure with Brown as a

stepping stone until they were able to fulfil a higher calling within the jazz world. This was

perceived as the domain of the ‘real’ musician.

Of course, one has to point out here, that this concept of the ‘real’ musician is itself a

constricting presupposition and perhaps Brown’s ultimate legacy was his forthright

ambivalence toward such a distinction. Thus whilst his personnel were occupied with dreams

of being recognised as ‘proper’ musicians, Brown’s innovations were to have direct aesthetic

implications on the evolution of jazz itself, rendering any dogmatic image of the genre as

anachronistic.

There is a certain irony in the fact that a man who was maligned among his peers for his

apparent musical ineptitude would end up even influencing the very musicians his personnel


looked up to. Miles Davis changed the bebop world when he took the then radical step of

incorporating Brown’s rhythmic innovations into his music, a direction most notably

discerned on albums such as Bitches’ Brew (1970). Thus, the James Brown story opens up an

interesting inconsistency in the correlation between handson pragmatism and its relation to

actual musical agency as well as providing a tale of ruthless determination over traditionally

recognised ‘ability’.

In an effort to address this situation, I wondered if perhaps drawing an analogy with Deleuze’s

conceptualisation of the ‘Idiot’ would be of some benefit. Deleuze’s character enables both

naivety and innovation to productively coexist and I felt this an appropriate concept to discuss

Brown’s idiosyncratic musical talent. I was curious to establish just how he indeed managed to

maintain the required level of agency to not only direct such talent, but furthermore, to

synthesise such differences of musical opinion into the cohesive and enduring influence on

popular music it would become.

Image of Thought

To give a rather general overview, Deleuze develops the Idiot in the chapter titled ‘The Image

of Thought’ in Difference and Repetition. The Idiot character plays a pivotal role in Deleuze’s

quest for a way to conceive of a philosophy undaunted by the presuppositions of a ‘dogmatic’

image of thought. In this respect, the Image of Thought can be rather generally perceived as an

institutionally dominant form of thinking.

Deleuze derives the Idiot from Descartes, offering that the Cartesian Cogito provided the

means of avoiding the objective presuppositions of a priori human rationality. Whilst Deleuze

maintains an obvious fundamental disagreement with Descartes over the Cogito as concept, he

says that the Cogito implicitly appealed to the perspective of the untrained philosopher. For

Deleuze, the philosophical breakthrough provided by Descartes’ Idiot was contained in its

implicit subjective presupposition, that is, an egalitarian right to think because to ‘think

therefore I am’ implied a ‘common sense’. One would rightly point out that Descartes

attribution of such ‘common sense’ as a natural and evenly distributed property amongst all

human beings is also a presupposition, and it is for this reason Deleuze distinguishes

presupposition into the objective and subjective. The philosopher praises Descartes’ Idiot for

espousing the latter, as a form of ‘private’ thought to the more ‘public’ and uncontested

institutional thought. Whilst Deleuze acknowledges the impossibility of avoiding


presupposition, he argues that Descartes’ concept ascribes sense a common property,”we

would do better to ask what is a subjective or implicit presupposition: it has the form of

‘Everybody knows…’” (Deleuze, 1994: 130). Thus in this ‘private’ and subjective thought

Descartes assumes everyone knows how to be and to think (ibid).

For Deleuze, the innovation of the Cogito was to open up the role of the untrained thinker, the

Idiot who has not the sufficient knowledge to uphold the dominant image of thought. Thus the

Idiot enacts a resistance against the illusion of socalled objectivity, whose basis is merely

instated via an institutionalised ‘dogmatic’ image of thought which is upheld for the sake of

its own perpetuity. Deleuze’s enthusiasm for the Idiot is as a conceptual means to champion

an egalitarian philosophy, one that necessarily takes up the cause of subjective presupposition

against an objective one. This is why Deleuze remarks that the philosopher takes the side of

the idiot as though of a man without presuppositions (ibid). Basically the successful

philosopher, successful artist, musician – is one that proceeds without such presupposition.

Thus the Idiot makes possible an escape from this dogmatic ‘Image of Thought’ which,

Deleuze contends, is a way of thinking that operates to merely reinforce dominant ways of

thinking. Deleuze seeks to challenge a history of philosophy where thought has a ‘natural’

orientation towards truth, and that reason necessarily provides an elaboration of this truth.

Deleuze is critical about its implications for an a priori nature of thought, with an assumed

teleology, meaning and logic. For Deleuze, such a dogmatic Image of Thought leads to the

monolithic institution of rigid thought. Perhaps by way of illustration we could cite the

frequent difficulty in engaging interdisciplinary discourse within the academy.

Deleuze says that the only way to “start without presuppositions” in

philosophy is to become some sort of Russian Idiot, giving up the

presumptions of common sense, throwing away one’s “hermeneutic

compass” and instead trying to turn one’s “idiocy” into the

“idiosyncrasies” of a style of thinking “in other ways” (Rajchman,

2000: 38)

Brown as Deleuzian ‘Idiot’

My proposition is to offer Brown as this type of Deleuzian Idiot, a man who would not make

music the way he was ‘supposed to’. Where Brown differs from many other selfstyled

illiterate musical naifs is that Brown continually fought his peers, some of America’s finest


musicians, to deliver this vision, regardless of how unfeasible it may have looked on paper.

Indeed, history is full of examples that similarly illustrate that the ‘proper’ way is not always

one conducive to progress, and furthermore, that such unfeasibility becomes innovation in

retrospect. On the point of Brown’s musical deficiencies, Cynthia Rose posits:

During the 1960s and early 70s, Brown’s touch seemed so certain it

dazzled new recruits as much as his towering ego bruised them. How

did he a man who relied on “real” musicians completely to

implement his ideas pick and choose his accomplices with such

unwavering success? [Former bandleader] Pee Wee Ellis says he had

“an inner ear”. Ellis drums a beringed finger on the desk before him

and savours the very words. “James has this instant ability, this basic

motherwit, which allowed him to apprehend a certain combination of

things. And he could get close enough to accomplishing the spirit of it

himself to figure “if I can get this close, I can PUSH it the rest of the

way”. (1990: 60)

Wesley’s surprising admission only strengthens the perception of how thought is reflected

against public presupposition, in this case that of ‘proper’ music. The notion of ‘proper’ is

merely an inescapable belief in the illusion of a transcendent category and exemplified the

type of opinionated thought that most of us are unfortunately burdened with. The problem

with this situation is that it obscures what we have actually ‘become’.

Although I should add that to be fair, Wesley’s memoirs are generally cordial, and are not a

tale of sour grapes. Indeed his overall opinion of his time with Brown is ultimately

conciliatory:

I’ve got to give James credit,” says Wesley, “because he allowed me

to be creative he made it possible for me to be ultracreative. Take a

tune like Doin’ It To Death (in 1973). I would never, ever, in my

wildest imagination have thought of doin’ something like that. But him

givin’ me a basic idea caused me to create that. It’s my creation, but

it’s what he gave me to create with. He would give you these little,

unrelated elements, sometimes not even musical, and say ‘make

something out of it’. (quoted in Rose, 1990: 9293)

This is where Brown had a superlative ability to forge new connections, to make the music


work regardless of its orthodoxy. This is what Deleuze attributes to the great artist, as one who

can make new and unforeseen connections. Deleuze would argue that this is the basis of an

experimental and ‘nomadic’ thought that has no regard for upholding doxa. This parting

admission from Wesley upon recounting of the genesis of Brown’s 1972 single, Get on the

Good Foot, is testimony to this:

A horn line like that – NEVER would I think of it. It was just nowhere

in my psyche. But this is what James gave me to work with. So now I

got to take that, and put it along with a silly bass line – what I think is

a ridiculous bass line. But you take his little weird elements and put

them together into something which sounds like something and there

you are, changing music. (quoted in Rose, 1990: 9293)

Indeed those with more than a cursory knowledge of Brown’s work will already know that this

track was not only an R’n’B charttopper and one of Brown’s biggest hits, but it also had the

distinction of being recognised as the record which would inspire ‘breakdancing’.

Indeed, the doityourself nature of contemporary music practice has warranted a general

acceptance that the untrained and musically inept can fruitfully partake in the production of

music. Perhaps we are slowly shaking off this ‘common sense’ of a right way of approaching

musical composition. Indeed the championing of Brown in these musical circles is testimony

to his legacy in opening up the possibilities for the untrained musician, and goes some way to

understanding his constant referencing in such ‘doityourself’ dance music culture.

However, I should add that this paper is not simply about espousing the virtue of being a poor

musician, or an untrained one. The whole point is that by removing the overarching rule of

judgement that mediates a dogmatic image of thought, possibilities open up. The Idiot’s most

important quality is an instinct for orientation. Through successful orientation the Idiot is then

capable of perceiving new connections that have otherwise not been able to surface.

It is a question of someone – if only one – with the necessary modesty

not managing to know what everybody knows, and modestly denying

what everybody is supposed to recognise. Someone who neither

allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything. Not

an individual endowed with good will and a natural capacity for

thought, but an individual full of ill will who does not manage to

think, either naturally or conceptually. Only such an individual is


without presuppositions. (Deleuze, 1994: 130)

Brown was completely fulfilled by his own standard of achievement, which is perhaps an

enviable quality. But this level of bravado and selfbelief was also borne from pure lack of

choice; Brown’s amazing innovations had to be made because he was bereft of the musical

and cultural capital of his peers. He thus used his experience as the ‘common man’ to

successfully reach out to the suitably disadvantaged, which more than accounted for his

superstar appeal within Black America. The Idiot is selfassured because he is not bothered

with an orientation toward any image of thought that cannot see him. Why can’t we do this?

Deleuze would enthuse that the genuinely new requires a shock to thought that allows

thinking to proceed. Reminiscent of another of the 20th Century music’s great Idiots, John

Cage, who famously said, ‘I have nothing to say and I’m saying it’, the new requires an

espousal of concepts without a discourse. It is for this reason that many genuinely new artists

cannot be understood in the context of the present and are (somewhat monotonously) declared

to be ‘ahead of their time’. Although this description does have similarities to Deleuze’s

concept of the “untimely” that which is “neither temporary or eternal” (ibid). In spite of my

fervent praise of Brown’s uncanny ability I am not ascribing to him some type of teleological

vision of the way music should be made. In fact, Brown freely offers that funk was not the

result of some foresight or that he was intending to take music in a particular direction:

“Funk was not a project”, he growls. “It happened as part of my

ongoing thing. In 1965, I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat.

Simple as that, really. I wasn’t going for some known sound, I was

aimin’ for what I could hear. ‘James Brown Anticipation’ I’d call it.

You see, the thing was ahead”. (quoted in Rose, 1990: 59)

True to the sheer pragmatic function of the Idiot, Brown did not mistakenly attribute

presuppositions of intent or align his work to some transcendental project that would

undermine its very newness. You can’t try and capture the future; it must be allowed to

become in its own unpredictable and often illogical way. In fact it was later when the self

perception and knowledge of his legacy became an internalised concept, an object of

introspection, that it became increasingly difficult for Brown to uphold that illusion of what

he should be. Perhaps we can say that this is how stars become parodies – they lose that

innocent sense of invention or as Deleuze would say, thought without an image. In this

respect, Brown’s appeal to the ‘common man’ saved his career as that legacy sufficiently


endeared his work to a new generation of other musical nonliterates who would sample him

into the future.

Such illogic is important to innovation and should not be easily dismissed. The reason why I

am so enamoured of Brown is that he was one of those characters who, like the Idiot, were

able to enact change without conforming to a predetermined pattern. He exemplifies how a

subjective presupposition can overcome the objectivity of ‘public’ thought and of what

‘music’ should be. This is precisely why Deleuze prizes naivety and why he says that the work

of the artist is not to represent, but to create connections.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Deleuze, G (1994) Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone Press

Gladstone, E; Simins, R and Starks, J (1997) In Grand Royal

Rajchman, J (2000) The Deleuze Connections, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

Rose, C (1990) Living in America: The Soul Saga of James Brown, London: Serpent’s Tail

Wesley, F (2002) Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Side Man, Durham: Duke University Press


From ‘Helped’ to ‘Helper’ – the ‘At-risk’ Child and Altruistic Music-

making.

Susan West and Susan Garber

Abstract

This paper describes an alternative approach to music education, the HandinHand program

that focuses on the social benefits of using music as a ‘communicative bridge’ to encourage

musicmaking and social interaction between different social groups. In particular, it examines

the effect of HandinHand on a particular atrisk child in a special lateprimary/secondary

school in the ACT. It is suggested that, since HandinHand assumes musicality and pro

social behaviour in all children, it offers a way for disadvantaged children to see themselves,

and allow others to see them, in a different light.

Introduction

Woden School, in the south of Canberra, ACT, is a secondary schools for students with

intellectual disabilities, medical conditions and emotional and/or behavioral difficulties.

Students at Woden School have come from mainstream classes, or special education classes in

the mainstream environment, neither of which have been found to meet their needs adequately.

Some of the students at this special education school are categorised under the general

heading of ‘atrisk.’ The class groups are small – usually half a dozen children – staffed by a

teacher and a teacher’s assistant. In 2003, the ANU instigated a pilot project at Woden School

to study the effectiveness of a community outreach program, HandinHand, on these atrisk

students1.

HandinHand unites classes of children in Canberra schools with a range of diverse groups in

the region with the aim of encouraging participatory musicmaking, principally through

singing, as a means of life enhancement. Visits are made to nursing homes, senior citizens

social clubs, care facilities for adults with physical or mental impairments and hospitals.

Experienced ‘HandinHanders’ also visit other schools and describe and demonstrate the

1 The pilot project was instigated and developed by Susan Garber, coauthor or this paper, as part of her PhD

dissertation, ‘The HandinHand Community Music Program: A Case Study’ (2004). HandinHand was

founded and developed by Garber’s supervisor and coauthor of this paper, Susan West, based on the work of

Dr. John Diamond.


program to teachers and students interested in participating. In 2003, HandinHand was also

introduced at Cranleigh Special School, a primary school for children with profound physical

and/or mental disabilities. These children, while initially being seen as recipients of the Hand

inHand program, eventually became providers of the program with their mainstream peers.

One of the principal features of the HandinHand program is its use of repertoire from the

socalled Tin Pan Alley period of American Popular Song, roughly the first half of the

twentieth century. These songs were originally chosen as being suitable for the program

because the principle target ‘audience’ was the aged. Since the aim of HandinHand is to

actively engage all participants in singing, choosing songs that senior citizens were most likely

to remember was an obvious strategy. Songs include popular repertoire of the period not only

from the USA but from Australia and some European countries.

This type of repertoire has not traditionally been seen as part of standard repertoire for young

school children. However, as one of the authors has argued elsewhere (West, 2003), they have

been shown to have a range of benefits for both the recipients and the children who ‘deliver’

the songs into the community. The idiom has many features that make the songs both

enjoyable and easily singable by both large and small groups, unlike later songs when what

Rockwell calls the ‘preeminence of the singersongwriter’ prevailed (Rockwell, 1984: 82).

This development created both a ‘reemphasis on personal, emotional involvement’ but, less

positively, ‘encouraged compositional selfindulgence and songs circumscribed by the singer

songwriter’s vocal weaknesses and idiosyncrasies’ (Rockwell, 1984: 82). Individualistic styles

and the identification of song with performer has made for a more modern repertoire of

popular song that lends itself less readily to the mass singing that is part of HandinHand

approach. At the same time, the idiom has enough features common to popular song in

general to allow children of a range of ages to respond to it positively.

The HandinHand program is not a program specifically set up to address the problems of at

risk youth. It does not, therefore, offer a definition for ‘at risk’, preferring to adopt an attitude

like that of Greer who says ‘I have deliberately avoided defining which students are at risk

because to label at risk every poor child or everyone in a singleparent household is unfair and

demeaning and, as research indicates, not accurate either’ (Greer, 1991:391). The program

works from the premise that everyone can make music and that everyone is capable of giving

and sharing music with others. HandinHand suggests that music can have a uplifting effect

on anyone, regardless of his or her level of mental or physical health and, furthermore, that


everyone has the capability of helping others through music.

Having groups of school children visit the aged and disabled is not, in itself, unusual. One of

the difficulties with the HandinHand program is explaining, in brief, how it differs from

other programs that may share similar elements. The children go out and sing in the

community, but they do not perform in the traditional musical sense. They often sing with

senior citizens but the program is not specifically intergenerational in nature. Those with

whom the children sing may be entertained, but HandinHand is not entertainment. There is

a general, broad, therapeutic aim, as is often ascribed to any sort of musical involvement, but

it is not music therapy and has no specific clinical goal. HandinHand contributes to a range

of music education outcomes but is not designed principally to forward those outcomes. The

program is both a group approach and an individual one, in that the children sing together but

at the same time, oneonone with the target group.

Garber (2004) and West (2003) have addressed these elements but also point out that the most

important feature of the HandinHand program is the altruistic intent at the heart of the

shared musicmaking, which is seen as an ongoing process. The receivers are activated not

only to join in the musicmaking but to share it, in turn, with others. In this way, the children

and those they visit, are all seen as ‘helpers’ rather than ‘helped’ whether they have

disabilities or not.

Altruism, HandinHand and the ‘AtRisk’ Child:

The notion of turning the ‘helped’ into the ‘helper’ can be seen to have particular resonance

for those ‘atrisk’ of failing at school, or otherwise developing antisocial behaviors. As

Curwen says,

When we help atrisk students, we inadvertently give them the message

that they are in an inferior position. Reversing this role brings pride.

Students feel good when they see themselves as genuinely useful.

Helping others is therapeutic. To understand the power of helping

others, ask yourself who enhances you selfconcept more: someone

you love says ‘I need you’ or someone you love says ‘you need me’

(Curwen, 1992:103).

Some writers argue that children who feel good about themselves are more likely to help

others. Kohn, amongst others, suggests that altruistic behavior is common in individuals who

have a healthy selfesteem and positive role models. Kohn writes that ‘people who feel in


control of what happens in their lives, and who have little need for approval from others are

the most likely to help others’ (Kohn, 1988: 7). Eisenberg, Guthri and Murphy draw similar

conclusions: ‘Children who are most caring and altruistic are self confident, active, and

advanced in moral reasoning and have parents as good models’ (Eisenberg et al, 1999: 28).

They also state that children ‘become more helpful when they are happy or successful’ (ibid:

28). Hampson entitles his journal article: Peers, Pathology, and Helping: Some kids are

more helpful than others and notes that the most helpful children selfreported ‘higher self

concept, higher extroversion, lower neuroticism and greater affinitive tendency’ (Hampson,

1979: 294).

The HandinHand program suggests that the opposite might also be true; that allowing

children to engage in helping behaviors in a supportive, nonjudgmental environment infused

with gratitude, can improve children’s selfconcept, and promote ongoing prosocial

behavior. Since one of the problems associated with the atrisk child is lack of selfesteem,

this approach could be particularly beneficial to these children.

In considering the atrisk child, it is interesting to note that some writers can take a negative

view of human nature in general and emphasize its selfish side. One of the difficulties for the

atrisk child is that school can often reenforce negative, rather than positive behaviors, and

provide little alternative directions for children who have difficulties in the traditional system.

Kohn suggests that the use of common phrases such as ‘human nature,’ and ‘I'm only human,’

emphasize negative traits in the human race, and that ‘we evoke [them] to explain selfishness

rather than service, competition rather than cooperation, egocentricity rather than empathy’

(Kohn, 1990: 30).

With this in mind, Heubner (2003) comments on a variety of research that highlights the high

proportion of psychologists who focus on the negative aspects of people’s nature. Heubner

writes that of 100,000 abstracts published by Psychological Abstracts since 1887, 90% focus

on anxiety, depression and psychopathology. The remaining articles are on positive aspects of

mental health, including altruism. Diamond, on whose work the HandinHand program is

based, similarly stresses that psychologists, psychiatrists, social and healthworkers often

focus on what needs to be cured, rather than on what positive aspects of the disabled or atrisk

personality can be harnessed in order to promote selfhelp (Garber, 2004). An anonymous

writer in, Reclaiming Children and Youth, discusses the possibilities for challenged children:

Children and youth with emotional or behavioural problems are often


preoccupied with the special challenges presented by their daily lives.

While being shuttled among school, therapy sessions, and other

activities, they often spend a great deal of time concentrating on their

own problems. It therefore might seem odd to suggest that these

young people be asked to give time back to their community through

acts of altruism. However research and experience has shown that by

allowing children and youth to feel they are contributing members of

their communities, they are less likely to exhibit rebellious or

delinquent behavior (Anon, 1999: 92).

It is easy to become preoccupied with negative aspects as we confront the pressing problems

of antisocial behavior in our schools and communities. Researchers and practitioners can

correct this pessimistic view by using findings emanating from positive youth development

research. Cultivating empathy and altruism provides a promising means of changing patterns

of bullying in students, and climates of violence in schools (Hoover and Anderson, 1999). In a

similar vein, Curwin states that, ‘for atrisk students, opportunities to help others may provide

a way to break the devastating cycle of failure’ (Curwin, 1992: 39). Lantieri quotes other

writers to make a similar point:

As Youniss and Yates (1997) pointed out, the case for increasing the

participation of youth in service projects should not be made as a way

of overcoming their perceived deficits, but as "a developmental

opportunity that draws upon youth's preexisting strengths and their

desire to be meaningfully involved in society" (Lantieri, 1999: 83).

Switzer, Simmons and Dew set up a study to examine the effects of a ‘schoolbased helper

program, on adolescent self, attitudes and behaviors’ (Switzer et al., 1995: 429). Although this

study did not focus on atrisk students, its results were promising. Boys, in particular, showed

improvement in ‘selfimage, commitment to school and community, problem behavior, and

commitment to altruism’ (ibid: 429). The writers claim that ‘helper programs might become

an important mechanism in producing positive life changes for adolescents’ (ibid: 429).

Clearly HandinHand is working from the viewpoint that encouraging positive behaviors is

likely to have positive effects. Rather than assuming prosocial behavior derives just from

positive attitudes about the self, perhaps such positive attitudes can be derived from

involvement in prosocial activities as well.


Method

Data for the Woden project was collected as part of a larger case study of the HandinHand

program at its home school and extension environments. The principal researcher used a range

of collection techniques for the case study. At Woden, these included recorded observations of

the involved students prior to the commencement of the project; journal entries recording

observational detail during the project; interviews both during and after the project with class

teachers and assistants; video recording of a complete day of activities including previsit

music session, the outreach visit and postvisit debrief; interviews with previous teachers

who had worked with the students in the mainstream environment; as well as discussion and

recorded comments from other members of Woden staff, visitors and residents from St.

Andrews Village, where the outreach visit was located. For the purposes of this paper,

collected information was reviewed and analysed by both authors and two teachers, one of

whom knew the children and one who didn’t. The project was documented with particular

regard to one student, John to represent typical results for these children and compare and

contrast with results for mainstream children.

Two classes of Woden students, totalling 12 students in all, were involved in the project. The

two classes came together for the music session and the two class teachers and their assistants

stayed with the students for extra support. The students had twice weekly music lessons over a

tenweek term culminating in an outreach visit to the nursing home within St. Andrews

Village, for the end of the term.

The Preparation

One feature that has been noted of HandinHand is its adaptability to a range of different

situations, both in terms of the givers and receivers. Each individual ‘giver’ is responding to

the individual ‘receiver’ with the intent of offering music in a way that will uplift and inspire.

HandinHand works on the principle that everyone can help others through music, regardless

of their particular behavioral, mental or physical disability. A general understanding of the

problems or difficulties of each target group is helpful but this is only required, literally, at the

level accessible to a sixyear old child (the age at which children first experience Handin

Hand). No detailed knowledge of specific problems or disorders is necessary, as it is with

music therapy, for example. The specific ‘label’ attached to the Woden students or, indeed, the

elderly, nursing residents they were to visit, was considered both unnecessary and unhelpful.


The behavior of the Woden students is described below in order to compare and contrast with

behavior observed as part of the outreach, rather than to ‘label’ the individual children.

The students in the two classes often had unpredictable behavior, used bad language, were

uncooperative, and lacked communication and social skills. Unsurprisingly, there was some

apprehension amongst Woden staff as to how the students would behave and respond in a new

environment with the elderly residents. Particular children were discussed with regard to

whether they should attend the outreach at the nursing home, as their behavior was so

unpredictable. To give an example of the kinds of behavior children normally displayed, a

teacher who had taught some of the children at a previous school reported to Garber:

Robert use to throw things across the classroom…On one occasion he

was asked him to pick up the toys he had been playing with on the

floor and…he threw a life size model of a human torso across the

room, aiming it at the assistant. He liked hurting other children. In

one of the classes he was in, some of the children were so frightened

of him that they started to regress, they started to wet their beds. I

remember him having to be dragged down the hallway by two

members of staff. He often had to be physically restrained (Garber,

2004: 121).

John, who was particularly observed during the outreach (Garber, 2002a), was not as

aggressive as Robert, but would often behave inappropriately and with little regard for the

feelings or feedback of others. He swore, made inappropriate noises, wandered around the

classroom, had little ability to stay ‘on task’, and disrupted other children. His behavior was

immature and he was frequently in timeout. He regularly missed part of his recess to catch up

on work that he had not completed during class time. He sought attention constantly through

his negative behavior. The assistants in the school remarked particularly on the lack of thought

of the students, including John, for others. Managing and controlling behavior was seen as a

large part of the assistant’s role:

We keep the class as calm as possible so that the teacher can teach the

class. Sometimes we remove a student, or sit with them in ‘time out’

for a while. There is usually a lot of swearing, and not much caring

for each other. They are very self involved (Garber, 2002b).

The teachers and assistants were clearly aware of their own concerns about the behavior of the


children, voiced in a postsession interview some few weeks after the visit. They revealed their

initial scepticism regarding the children going to a nursing home and being able to behave

appropriately. ‘Honestly when you suggested it first we said ah ha! She doesn’t know us at

all,’ referring to the students (Garber 2002b). At this point in the video, the assistants look at

each other and shake their heads laughing, ‘But we wanted to be supportive.’

Over the term the students learnt a repertoire of songs in the music classes suitable for the

outreach. The songs were primarily those from the socalled Tin Pan Alley era, which are

songs known to the target populations of elderly and have been shown, through HandinHand,

to be easily singable en masse as well as popular with children.

There are three main points to be made about the previsit preparation during the music

sessions. First, these students were late primary and/or high school age and at a special school

for students with particular behavioural or learning difficulties. Given the findings of

researchers like Mizener (1993), who discusses the falling interest and involvement with

music as students move through school, one could have expected more opposition to the idea

of learning songs at all, even leaving aside the idea of singing old songs for old people.

Durrant discusses a number of research studies into singing and describes the reaction of the

Head of Music of a London secondary school to singing: ‘In the classroom context, he stated

that singing activity exaggerated the problems of the music class and considered it a ‘risky

enterprise’… (Durrant, 2001: 5).

Surprisingly, the Woden students did not show any particular disinclination to learn the songs

or to sing. One of the writers of this paper found a similar phenomenon when applying the

HandinHand approach in an even more difficult environment:

Prior to studying in Canberra, I had worked at the Bronx School for

Career Development, (BSCD) a High School in the South Bronx, New

York City. Students at BSCD were also classified as atrisk with

emotional and/or behavioral problems. The level of disturbance and

impoverished home life of students was in many cases significantly

higher than that observed in the ACT. BSCD had school police on

site at all times and there were metal detectors at the entrance to alert

authorities to concealed weapons. The support staff were expected to

deal with many potentially dangerous and uncontrolled students.


After moving to the ACT, a colleague at the school, with whom I kept

in touch, reported one week where five different staff members had

suffered injuries inflicted by students. Nevertheless, I and some of my

colleagues had had considerable success applying the HandinHand

approach at BSCD. One session in which West was present involved a

group of atrisk students singing Aeroplane Jelly both individually

and as a group (Garber, 2004: 55).2

It is possible that the purpose behind the learning of the songs is significant here. We are not

suggesting to the students that singing is something they should do. Rather, from the first, it

is made clear that the singing is the vehicle through which interaction will occur to help the

residents. This changes the way both teacher and student approach the singing and, even in

the context of ‘difficult’ students like the Woden cohort, appears to circumvent the standard

problems a teacher may face in this situation.

Secondly, the students learnt the songs relatively quickly. West (2003) has pointed out that

Tin Pan Alley songs seem to be easy for young students to sing for a number of reasons. At

the same time, the Woden students cannot be said to have had a strong background in music

and there had not been a music teacher at the school for some time prior to the

commencement of the pilot project. Again, the HandinHand philosophy may be important

in this context. Getting students to an outreach as quickly as possible is considered much

more important than the accuracy of their singing. Students like the Woden cohort are very

quickly in a position to use their music for the benefits of others, a situation that would not be

the case if a formal ‘performance’ were required. This is not to say that the singing at the

outreach was highly polished or professional. Clearly the principal child observed, John, often

didn’t sing whole songs and sometimes appeared to forget lyrics or forget to sing when he was

engaged with a resident. Since the outreach is not regarded as a performance, a fact noted as

important by the class teachers, these lapses were unimportant and encouragement to sing

occurred through the nature of the singing, rather than through specific instruction or

commands to sing.

Third, compared to what was reported of students prior to the pilot project and in postproject

interviews, the behavior in music lessons was relatively good. As indicated below, there was

certainly inappropriate behavior and swearing, but there was not the level of disruption seen in

2 West visited BSCD on December 4th 2002.


some other classes. West and other teachers have reported that teachers have noted that atrisk

children seem to behave more appropriately in music lessons. How much this has to do with

the music per se, and therefore relevant in any school music context, or how much it relates to

music sessions adopting this particular philosophy, is hard to say. At Woden, the students

were aware from the beginning of the pilot project that their music making had a purpose and,

given the speed of learning, and the general improvement in behavior even prior to the

outreach, it is reasonable to speculate that the given approach had some positive effect on the

students.

As preparation for the outreach, the class practiced singing to the staff at the school as though

they were seniors in a nursing home. Particular emphasis was placed on the children

introducing themselves to the ‘residents’, taking their hands and looking into their eyes. If the

‘residents’ were mobile the students were encouraged to ask the seniors to dance. The

purpose of the visit was discussed with the students and questions were asked including: Why

are we going? How do you think it will make the residents feel? How do you think you should

behave? These questions set the tone for the project. The intent was clear from the start, and

appeared to have a positive affect. One could speculate that a more formal approach to music

with technical skills as a priority would not have engaged these type of students.

The Day of the Visit

On the day of the visit to the retirement village the combined music class numbered ten out of

the twelve children: one child in the class was absent due to a suspension, another child was in

the Time Out room for disruptive behavior. Prior to going to St. Andrews Village, the class

sang through the repertoire they would be singing with the elderly residents. This lesson was

accompanied, in the usual fashion, by inappropriate behavior and, often, a degree of chaos.

John, like several other children, indulged in a range of offtask and attentionattracting

behavior, some clearly motivated by the presence of the video camera and filmmaker. He

imitated another child, pulling faces and falling off his chair. He made a face at the camera

and then purposefully made gestures in front of the teacher sitting next to him as she was

singing, invading her personal space and attracting attention. He disrupted filming on more

than one occasion during this previsit session. He continued to pull faces, call out and make

rude finger gestures. He ignored teacher and assistant comments about the nature of behavior

that is expected on the visit. He made no attempt to converse with anyone, indeed none of the


children showed an inclination to relate to their peers other than to laugh at or tease them.

When the class was asked the reason for the outreach visit they called out short, or single

word responses without waiting to be asked and without reference to each other: ‘Singing’;

‘No swearing’; ‘Get them to dance’. One child responded to the last comment, saying ‘I’m

not going to dance with anyone.’ Most of the children seemed to understand the nature of the

visit in simple terms but given their ages, did not respond with any degree of maturity.

The teacher reminded the children about some of the approaches they could use at the nursing

home through roleplaying, with the teachers playing the role of the elderly residents.

Throughout this roleplaying, the inappropriate behavior continued from John and others. At

the same time, as the songs were sung, John did participate in the activities and, while he

didn’t sing all the time, he didn’t specifically refuse to sing. Indeed, none of the children

refused. At times, the room became quieter momentarily, and then activities were interrupted

by random swearing and silly behavior, often directed at the camera.

Neither John nor the other children appeared to be thinking about the effect of his or her

behavior and actions on classmates or on the teachers and adults in the room. There was little

relating to each other or even the adults unless specifically addressed, and then only some of

the time. John was selfabsorbed and selfcentred. He sought attention through his anti social

and inappropriate behavior and the class teacher needed to continually prompt John to behave

appropriately, with varying degrees of success.

At St. Andrews Village Nursing Home

Garber (2004) describes a visit to a nursing home by a combined group of mainstream

primaryage children and profoundly disabled children from a special school. She quotes a

visiting teacher who asks, “Which are the children from the special school,” and eventually

realises she can identify them by their different uniform. The same comment may be made in

relation to the Woden visit. On arriving at St. Andrews, children like John did not evince any

behavior that appeared outside the range of what is ‘normal’ in the mainstream environment.

They, like mainstream children, appear to require little or no behavior management. At the

same time, some children’s responses to the residents may be said to be quite ‘abnormal’ in

terms of empathetic reaching out, compared to mainstream children.

The lack of a need for ‘behavior management is one of the striking features that has been

noted about HandinHand visits in general. (Garber, 2004). Possible behavioral problems


were an issue of great concern with the Woden group, particularly for teachers who had not

experienced an outreach visit before. However, there were no instances of swearing or

disruptive behavior during the visit. John was observed to be ‘off task’ once during the forty

five minutes session and responded immediately and positively when assisted to reengage.

This compares to six attempts to redirect John during the halfhour previsit session alone, not

all of which were immediately successful.

Teacher concerns about John’s behavior was obvious, despite the clear differences he

exhibited. At one point, for example, John is seen in video documentation talking to a

resident. He reaches up to stroke her hair. An arm appears immediately to remove his hand,

which he does without fuss or comment, and continues to talk to the woman. On viewing the

videotape it is clear that his intent is positive and caring but the teacher is clearly concerned.

The residents showed no such concerns, having no previous experience in which to develop

concerns. This positive response from the residents may well have contributed to John’s

ability to behave so differently.

John’s behavior towards the residents and to teachers and assistants was uniformly positive,

gentle and polite. He alone notices a resident has dropped her walking stick and runs over to

pick it up for her, making more than one effort to see that it is placed in the best position for

her to reach. He spends several minutes tying the shoelaces of a doll belonging to one of the

residents and then presents it to her. He is seen in conversation with residents between songs,

asking and answering questions. He shows great interest in a resident who is a dwarf but,

nonetheless, behaves with perfect manners. He relates to other members of his class, drawing

in one of the other more difficult boys, with an arm around his shoulder, indicating that the

boy should sing with the nearby resident. In short, there is no evidence at all in the tape

recording of the nursing home visit that this child can behave in extremely antisocial ways.

If John’s behavior mirrored that of mainstream children his empathetic response to the

residents was significantly magnified. It is not unusual for some mainstream children to show

some shyness at first with residents they don’t know. John exhibited no such reaction, even

though he is seen as being ‘shy’ by his class teacher. He, quite literally, reached out strongly,

enthusiastically and repeatedly, to take residents’ hands, to hug and stroke them while smiling

broadly and making eye contact. He was noticeably gentle and showed an ability to adjust his

contact to suit what he perceived to be the level of disability of each resident. For example, on

one occasion he is seen moving a woman’s arms gently and then with increasing strength until


he has his and her arms linked over their heads. On another occasion he picks up one hand of

a woman and begins moving it with the music. After a few moments, he reaches for the other

hand that appears to have been affected by a stroke. The woman responds slowly and John

carefully picks up this somewhat paralysed hand and begins to move it as well but more gently

than he is moving the other hand and arm. He adjusted the movement he made which each of

the woman’s hands to reflect what she appeared able to do, and his movements were less

vigorous than with the previous woman. He consistently showed attentiveness and awareness

of the individual needs of each resident and receives an equally attentive response in return.

His movements with residents were not only adjusted in response, it seems, to the resident’s

needs, but also in response to the music. While he is clearly not singing at all times, his

movement indicates that he is aware of, and responsive to, the music, clearly trying to move

with the resident in time with the song. Interestingly his lack of strong singing does not seem

to affect the residents who are often seen singing to him. His enthusiasm and willingness to

engage with them prompts an immediate response. The residents are both encouraging and

grateful.

After the Visit

The change in behavior witnessed in John and his classmates is also observable in the post

visit discussion back at Woden school. The group is calm and engaged with the discussion.

They respond to the teacher and to each other. Some teasing of each other is evident but there

is now interaction between the students, which was not observable, in any positive sense, prior

to the visit. When the teacher suggests the students go and have some recess, no one

immediately makes a move to leave the room. Robert, the boy described by one teacher above

as ‘liking to hurt people, comments, ‘I love them, they’re lovely people.’ They talk about their

‘favourite’ resident and discuss how they helped them.

Later, the class room teacher commented:

I thought that the nursing home visit was nothing short of a miracle …

It was successful because it wasn’t a public performance … I was

particularly surprised at John … He finds it difficult to be in a group

at all … John overcame his shyness … They were given a different

sense of who they are. (Garber, 2002b).

These few statements convey a number of important points. The notion of the visit being ‘a


miracle’ suggests that the music and the outreach was able to bring out a different side of the

children and the teacher was indeed surprised and delighted by the outcome. The second

statement referring to the lack of performance is also an important point and indicates how the

teachers have understood the importance of the different nature of the interaction. Since the

students were not performing, they were able to engage in the outreach visit after minimal

preparation and with no stage fright or anxiety. This did not cause the residents or the

students any concern because all the adults involved were unconcerned about issues of

‘musical quality’. They were making music with and for the residents. The idea of the

children being given a ‘different sense of who they are’ is also seen as being important by the

teacher.

Conclusion

The behaviours observed in Woden School students, particularly the child ‘John’ who was the

main focus of the documentation cited here, indicates the possibility that the HandinHand

program offers a model with implications for both the social and musical development of the

‘atrisk’ child. The children respond positively both to the musical interactions prior to the

visit but particularly to the visit itself, showing different social behaviours that transfer to

calmer and more considerate behaviour in the classroom. Comments from classroom teachers

six weeks after the visit indicate that the different behaviours of the children had made an

impact on the teachers, but also that some transfer effect had been maintained:

They are usually very self involved. Going to the nursing home they

were starting to think about someone else. They liked meeting the old

people. They were really well prepared. We came in and we looked at

each other. It was just really good. We didn’t hear any swearing, we

didn’t have to take any one out, and on a normal day we would have.

We did not hear the children say anything against each other. The

music helped. They don’t have a lot to say. It’s ice breaking. We had

a purpose. It was a lot of fun. When we go out now, we hop on the

bus, they sing, they don’t argue. They like Me and My Shadow, and

Pennies from Heaven. We enjoyed it very much. (Garber, 2002b).

HandinHand is uniting an arts program, specifically using music, with the idea of prosocial

behavior in the community as a normal part of human interaction, rather than as punishment


for societal crime or an intervention methodology. While the Woden project worked with at

risk students, the HandinHand philosophy is not designed with that perspective in mind.

Students were not being ‘targeted’ in order to help them, but were being asked, like the

mainstream Ainslie students, to voluntarily engage in musicmaking for the benefit of others.

The HandinHand philosophy, while being used in situations that are designed to

therapeutically assist the disadvantaged, the ill and the atrisk, is broader than all these

categories. Its basic premise insists on the positive social and emtional value of music for all,

regardless of obvious disability or social problem. The inherent equity in this approach

removes much of the feeling of patronage from the interactions that Curwin sees as being so

disempowering for the atrisk student (Curwen, 1992: 108). Perhaps this may be Handin

Hand’s greatest contribution: that the therapeutic value of altruistically driven musicmaking

can impact upon all members of society without the need to specifically target the problems of

individuals within that society.

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Internet Induced Changes in Music Consumption Patterns

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