Australian patron and music publisher Louise Dyer (1884-1962) dedicated her life to promoting French music in France and French music and culture in Australia. The latter was harder to do, since her permanent residence from 1929 was France. She wrote a regular column for the Melbourne Herald newspaper with the clear mission to inform Australians of important events in the commercial, literary, musical, and dramatic worlds in France. It was in the Herald that she first began proselytizing about the benefits of the 1937 Exposition internationale and how important it was that Australia be properly represented. With the Exposition she saw an opportunity for general information about Australia to be publicly disseminated. Personally, the Exposition was also an opportunity for Dyer's publications of music to be on display. Although her publishing house was French it was known widely that she was Australian. The organizers of the Australian Pavilion at the Exposition aimed to dispel the idea that Australians lacked culture by having a significant focus on the visual arts. One might expect that Dyer would have been completely supportive of this focus, yet she reacted very negatively to their presentation with little acknowledgement of the art that was exhibited. I suggest that her disparagement reflected her overall disappointment at not being offered an official advisory role with the set-up of the Australian Pavilion. Nevertheless, the display of her musical editions, in both the Pavilion and the Exposition's Palais du Livre, contributed to the presentation of a new projection of Australia, not just as a nation that produced primary produce but also one involved in significant cultural projects.
This article examines the educational activities of the Sydney branch of the British Music Society in the context of interwar Australian musical nation building. Despite its name, the British Music Society was international in its outlook, established to aid in cultural regeneration following World War I. Through its Australian branches, it aimed both to develop an Empire-wide appreciation for British music and to support the development of musical culture in Australia more broadly. Alongside concerts, radio programmes, and public lectures on music, from the mid-1920s, the Sydney British Music Society became particularly interested in music education, hoping to develop a musically literate Australian 'audience of the future,' while reinvigorating what was seen as a failing music education system. After summarizing the position of the Sydney British Music Society on British, 'international,' and distinctly Australian music, this article considers the Society's work in the context of developments in Australian music education, before examining in detail the competitions for school students they instituted from 1926 and their role in nation building.
In December 1933, prominent members of Melbourne's musical community gathered to bid farewell to Dr Gerhard von Keu ss ler (1874-1949). Having spent eighteen months in Australia, this distinguished German composer, conductor, and musicologist was returning to Europe to fulfil a series of professional engagements. Although focused primarily on composition while in Melbourne, Keu ss ler had also conducted several high-profile orchestral and choral concerts in Sydney and Melbourne. Simultaneously, a blatant piece of Nazi party propaganda published in the Zeitschrift f & uuml;r Musik proclaimed Keu ss ler to be 'Ein deutscher M & auml;rtyrer in Australien,' whose professional activities there had been obstructed in retaliation for the Nazi authorities' removal of Bruno Walter as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Keu ss ler was back in Melbourne by June 1934, when he took up a new role as music director of St Patrick's Cathedral. When his one-year contract ended, Keu ss ler decided to return to Germany permanently. This article examines Keu ss ler's contribution to Australia's musical life during the 1930s and considers tensions evoked by Keu ss ler's position as a German musician working in Australia during this critical interwar period, when Australians were increasingly questioning the dominance of European music and musicians in their search for a national musical identity.
In 1974 Roger Smalley (1943-2015) described Karlheinz Stockhausen's Moment Form theory as 'the only really new, linguistically independent and therefore generally applicable formal concept to have arisen since 1945.' This article examines Smalley's writings that extrapolate the principles and techniques of Moment Form. Finding further expression in Smalley's own constructivist compositions, these principles can be summarized as a non-hierarchical approach towards material and form, an acceptance and non-coercive approach to diverse materials, and a prioritization of material over system. Each of these principles can be understood as endorsing the global principle of polyvalency. As a case study, the formal structure of Smalley's Monody (1971-1972) for piano with live electronic modulation will be rendered analytically accessible by applying these principles to an investigation of archival sources including early drafts, compositional sketches, revised performance scores, and BBC recordings of early performances given by the composer. This will build on previous analyses by Christopher Mark and Lindsay Vickery providing new insight into the work's evolution and Smalley's constructivist compositional process.
