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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 3
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 5
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 7
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
8 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 9
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 11
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.
12 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 13
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
14 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 15
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.
16 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 17
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).
18 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 19
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 21
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.
22 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 23
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
24 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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,
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 25
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.
26 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 27
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
28 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 29
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
30 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 31
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.
32 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 33
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).
34 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 35
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.
36 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 37
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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, H (1995) ‘Lost in the Streets: A Gumleaf Requiem for Bill Bull’, Journal of Australian Studies n44
Attwood, B (2003) Rights for Aborigines, Sydney: Allan & Unwin
Bradley, K (1995) ‘Leaf Music in Australia’, Australian Aboriginal Studies v2
Brauer, A (Pastor) (1938) ‘An Additional Page from the Life of the Fathers’, The Australian Lutheran Almanac for the Year 1938 (Centenary Edition), Adelaide: The Lutheran Publishing Company
Breen, M (ed) (1989) Our Place Our Music. Aboriginal Music: Australian Popular Music in Perspective v2, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies
Broome, R (1996) ‘Historians, Aborigines and Australia: Writing the National Past’ in Attwood, B (ed), In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin
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
38 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 39
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 41
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
42 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 43
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.
44 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 45
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
46 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 47
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.
48 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 49
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.
50 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
(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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 51
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.
Bibliography
Atherton, M (2003) ‘Intercultural music’, in Whiteoak, J and ScottMaxwell, A (eds)
52 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, Sydney: Currency House
Barz, G and Cooley, T (eds) (1997) Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, Oxford University Press.
Baulch, E (2003) ‘Gesturing elsewhere: the identity politics of the Balinese death/thrash metal scene’, Popular Music v22n2
Bohlman, P (2001) ‘Ethnic North America’, in Nettl, B et al., Excursions in World Music, 3rd
ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: PrenticeHall
Frith, S (1996) Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
Hatch, M (1989) ‘Popular music in Indonesia’, in Frith, S (ed) World Music, Politics and Social Change: Papers from the International association for the Study of Popular Music, Manchester University Press
Lam, J (1999) ‘Embracing "Asian American Music" as an heuristic device’, Journal of Asian American Studies v2n1, February
Lockard, C (1989) Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia, University of Hawaii Press
Mitchell, T (2001) ‘Dick Lee’s Transit Lounge: Orientalism and PanAsian Pop’, Perfect Beat v5n3, July
O’Toole, B (1998) ‘New traditions’, in Rowley, C (ed), Australia: Exploring the Musical Landscape, Sydney: Australian Music Centre
Radano, R and Bohlman, P (eds) (2000) Music and the Racial Imagination, University of Chicago Press
ScottMaxwell, A (1998) ‘JewishAustralians in Popular Music’, unpublished paper presented to ‘Musical Visions’, the Sixth National AustraliaNew Zealand IAPSM Conference, University of South Australia, Adelaide, June 2528
― (2001) Multicultural ideals and editorial realities: intercultural (mis)communication and cultural representation in the making of a reference work’, Journal of Intercultural Studies v22n2
― (2002a) ‘Locating klezmer music in Australia’, Australasian Music Research v7
― (2002b) ‘Negotiating difference: Peter Ciani’s ItalianAustralian musical journey’, Perfect Beat v6n1, July
―ScottMaxwell (2003a) ‘The Perils and possibilities of border crossing: Sawung Jabo’s transition from Indonesian rock superstar to Australian multicultural artist’, unpublished paper presented to the ‘Sonics Synergies: Creative Cultures’ Conference, University of South Australia, Adelaide, July 1720, and the Combined Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Musicological Societies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, November 2730.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 53
―ScottMaxwell, A (2003b) ‘"This Beautiful Country’: country in Peter Ciani’s music’, in Hayward, P (ed), Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music, v1, Gympie, Qld: Australian Institute of Country Music Press
Sen, K & Hill, D (2000) Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, Oxford University Press
Taylor, T (1997) Global Pop: World Music, World Markets, New York: Routledge
Walech, J (2003) ‘"Goodbye My Blind Majesty": music, language, and politics in the Indonesian underground’, in Berger, H and Carroll, M (eds), Global Pop, Local Language, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi
Wang, O (2001) ‘Between the notes: finding Asian America in popular music’, American Music v19n4, WinterWhiteoak, J and ScottMaxwell, A (eds) (2003) Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, Sydney: Currency House
Wong, D. & Lysloff, R (1998) ‘Popular music and cultural politics’, in Miller, T and Williams, S (eds), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, v4: Southeast Asia, New York: Garland Publishing
Yampolsky, P (1989) ‘Hati yang Luka, an Indonesian hit’, Indonesia n47
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 55
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
56 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 57
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
58 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 59
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
60 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 61
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.
62 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 63
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
64 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 65
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.
66 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 67
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:
68 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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:
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 69
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
70 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 71
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
72 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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)
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 73
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.
74 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 75
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
76 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 77
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
78 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 79
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
80 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 81
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
82 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 83
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.
84 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 85
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).
86 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 87
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.
88 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 89
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 91
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
92 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 93
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
94 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 95
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.
96 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 97
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)
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 99
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).
100 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 101
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
102 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 103
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
104 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 105
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 –
106 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 107
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
108 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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)
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 109
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)
110 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 111
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.
112 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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).
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 113
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.
114 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 115
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
116 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 117
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.
118 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 119
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.
120 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 121
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
122 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 123
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 125
‘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
126 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 127
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
128 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 129
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).
130 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 131
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).
132 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 133
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).
134 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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’.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 135
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.
136 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
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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
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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
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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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 139
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
140 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 141
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
142 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 143
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
144 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 145
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
146 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 147
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 149
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.
150 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 151
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
152 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 153
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.
154 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 155
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
156 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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.
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 157
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.
158 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 159
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
160 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 161
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
162 Popular Music: Commemoration, Collaboration and Communication
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
Popular Music: Commemoration, Commodification and Communication 163
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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