Kakadu for Orchestra (1988)

Abstract

The orchestral works of Peter Sculthorpe (b. 1929) are in many respects related to the development of Australian orchestras since mid-century, including major orchestras in Sydney (where he lives), Melbourne, and elsewhere, and to the emergence of enthusiastic and ever-larger Australian audiences for new orchestral music. Sculthorpe's four Sun Music pieces from the 1960s are frequently cited as landmarks in the emergence of an internationally recognized, contemporary Australian style. He has continued to explore his vision of Australia in music that has extraordinary appeal and attractiveness to players and listeners. Sculthorpe's program notes, preconcert talks, public lectures, and interviews help make his work accessible to the widest possible audience. He explains many features of his music as reflective of Australian landscape, including the flatness of his melodic material, the music's repetitiveness, and its slow rate of change. Other features he explains are inspired by his affinity for the classical musics of Japan and Indonesia, Australia's Asian neighbors, such as his particular modalism, the gamelanlike accompanying figures and gongs, the non-developing sectional construction, and the long, gradual increase of tension building to dramatic climax. The title of the 1988 orchestral work Kakadu refers to Kakadu National Park in northern Australia, a vast area of rocky escarpments leading down through bushland and floodplain to the sea. Kakadu, the composer explains in his program note preceding the score, is concerned with his feelings about this place, its landscape, its change of seasons, its dry season and its wet, its cycle of life and death. The work is unusual among Sculthorpe's orchestral works in that it was commissioned by an American for an American occasion. An Aspen Music Festival trustee, Emanuel Papper, commissioned Kakadu as a birthday present for his wife, for performance at the festival in 1988. Australian music was featured at the festival that year - Sculthorpe was one of the festival's composers-in-residence - in recognition of Australia's national celebration of the bicentenary of European settlement. Jorge Mester conducted the Kakadu premiere in July; the first Australian performances, in Sydney and Melbourne, were in April of 1989, around the time of the composer's sixtieth birthday. The work has been programmed by a great number and variety of orchestras, including the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra in Miami (Dr. Papper's hometown) in 1992. A performance by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by the late Stuart Challender is available on the Australian label ABC Classics (426481). Sculthorpe chose the title Kakadu for several reasons. Like many Australians in 1988, he was uncomfortable with his country's celebrating white settlement that destroyed much of the continent's ancient, indigenous black culture. He surmised that Americans might be familiar with the Kakadu area if only as the location for much of the popular film Crocodile Dundee. In Kakadu, as elsewhere, Aboriginal culture had almost disappeared; sadly, today there are only a few remaining speakers of kakadu, or gagadju, the composer writes in his program note. Further, the Australian landscape, so essential to Sculthorpe's musical vision, is a major subject of Aboriginal music; the songlines or dreaming tracks describe every rock, tree, and water hole along the paths of the totemic ancestors. …