Aboriginal music: Education for living. Cross-cultural experiences from South Australia

Abstract

Abstract In the last two years (1984-85) two major books in Australian musicology have focussed on ethnomusicology, even more precisely, on Australian Aboriginal music. The first, reviewed in Musicology Australia VIII, was a series of essays (the majority on Aboriginal music) in honour of Alice M. Moyle.1 Catherine J. Ellis and Alice M. Moyle have both been involved continuously in research and publication in Aboriginal music for the last quarter-century and have done much to determine the direction of this area of Australian musicological research. With one or two others, 2 Trevor A. Jones is the most prominent of the others. they were pioneers at a time (c. 1960) when Aboriginal music was considered scarcely worthy of serious study by most music scholars, and even the discipline of musicology itself was only just emerging as a systematic subject in Australia.