Peter Sculthorpe & the Cry of the Earth

Grove Koger

April 29 is the anniversary of the birth of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, who died in 2014.

I wasn’t familiar with Sculthorpe’s name until I began researching the music of an Australian composer of an earlier generation, John Antill, and his rousing composition Corroboree. That famous work recreates the experience of an Aboriginal dance ceremony and incorporates an Aboriginal instrument, the bullroarer.

Like Antill, Sculthorpe was inspired by the indigenous life and music of his country. I’m still learning more about his works, but the ones that have moved me the most make use of the didgeridoo, routinely described as being our planet’s oldest wind instrument. Categorized by musicologists as an aerophone (a category that includes such seemingly unlike instruments as the accordion and the flute), a didgeridoo is basically the limb of a tree that’s been hollowed out by termites before being trimmed and further hollowed by hand. Examples range from 3 to 9 feet in length, and when blown with vibrating lips, produce deep, resonant, haunting tones. To me, they’re the aural equivalent of handfuls of cool, rich soil.

Didgeridoos are usually constructed from eucalyptus limbs, although bamboo or pandanus is sometimes used. The term itself isn’t Aboriginal but was applied to the instrument by non-Aboriginal writers trying to imitate the instrument’s sound. There are nearly four dozen authentic regional names, ranging from artawirr to yiraka.

But whatever we call the instrument, it features prominently in several of Sculthorpe’s works, especially the extraordinary Earth Cry, which you can watch the Australian Youth Orchestra perform in a 2013 video with Christoph Eschenbach conducting and William Barton playing the didgeridoo. That’s Sculthorpe himself you see walking to the front of the stage amid enthusiastic applause at the end of the performance.

The piece “owes a debt,” as Sculthorpe put it, “to a setting of Aboriginal poetry, The Song of Tailitnama,” that he completed in 1976. He called Earth Cry itself a “straightforward and melodious work,” and explained that “we need to attune ourselves to this continent, to listen to the cry of the earth, as the Aborigines have done for many thousands of years.”

You’ll find plenty of information about Sculthorpe online, and he’s the subject of several books as well, including Graeme Skinner’s Peter Sculthorpe: The Making of a Composer (University of New South Wales Press, 2007).

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John Antill’s Australian Rite

Grove Koger

From a musical point of view, the key event in John Antill’s life seems to have been his attendance at a caribberie, or corroboree—an Aboriginal Australian dance ceremony—when he was about sixteen or seventeen. Antill had been born in Sydney on April 8, 1904, so the ceremony must have occurred between 1919 and 1921, although in later life he was uncertain about the exact date.

As Antill explained, such a ceremony “generally takes the form of realistic imitations of humans or animals. Any current event may furnish the theme from which the ‘tribal’ poets, musicians and actors produce the ceremony, which is usually of very elaborate proportions.… The performance takes place after sundown, in the glow of campfires, creating a most impressive atmosphere and causing great excitement.” The young man made notes about the music he heard that night, and it’s those notes that eventually led to the composition of his most famous work—Corroboree.

The score’s gestation period was a long one, however. Antill composed most of the piece between May 1943 and May 1944, and it received its world premiere in 1946 under the baton of Eugene Goossens. It was staged as a ballet, as Antill had originally intended, four years later.

Corroboree consists of seven movements of varying lengths, beginning with a “Welcome Ceremony” that involves (according to Antill’s program notes) “Witchetty Grub men assisted by members of the Emu Totem.” It concludes with “Procession of the Totems and Closing Fire Ceremony,” at nearly 16 minutes by far the longest movement. Here “representatives of the Lace Lizard, Cockatoo, Honey Ant, Wild Cat and Small Fly Totems participate.” This is also the most fully developed movement of the piece, and builds to an exuberant, orgiastic finale. As critic Bob McQuiston has written in Audiophile, it’s “one of the most original and thrilling conclusions in all dance music.”

Particularly interesting is Antill’s incorporation of an unusual instrument called a bullroarer in the finale. Also known as the turndun, the bullroarer is common to a number of indigenous cultures around the world, including Australia’s. It consists of a thin wooden slat attached to a cord and is played by twisting the cord a bit and then swinging the slat around in a wide circle. The cord winds and unwinds, and the piece of wood vibrates in a higher or lower pitch depending on the length of the cord and the rapidity with which it’s swung. The sound can carry over great distances and is regarded as the voice the gods. In Corroboree, the player maintains an ominously low pitch, adding to the power of the finale.

The reference in the title of today’s post is to Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring, which is undoubtedly the most famous piece of music of the twentieth century. In Australia itself, Corroboree enjoys much the same status. Goossens called it the first composition of “really authentic Australian character” that he had heard, and it shares much the same soundscape and primitive force as Stravinsky’s masterpiece. Almost inevitably, questions of cultural appropriation have been raised in Antill’s case. His parents were English, and he was, after all, a spectator at the indigenous ceremony he witnessed as a youth. But there’s generally no easy answer to such questions. What we’re ultimately left with is the music itself, and that’s more than enough.

The painting on the cover of the CD at the top of today’s post is Aboriginal Design by contemporary artist Joan Kerrigan and the second is A South Australian Corroboree (1864) by W.R. Thomas. The portrait of John Antill is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia, and the bullroarer in the final image is part of the Grinnell College Musical Instrument Collection. The performance of Corroboree I’ve linked to is the one on the Naxos CD.