‘The Whole Work is Full of Primitive Rhythms’: The Folk-Primitivist Origins of Peter Sculthorpe’s National Music

Abstract

Although the Aboriginal-derived titles and programmes of Peter Sculthorpe’s early music are well known, his works from the 1950s have been interpreted for the most part as landscape compositions or in relation to generalized notions of ‘Australian’ musical character. This article examines the work’s paratexts and Sculthorpe’s chronologically close statements to show that when the pieces were written he was less concerned with landscape than with achieving what he saw as a national character derived from connections between his music and Australian Aboriginal culture. Interpretation of Sculthorpe’s statements in the context of the abundant press coverage of John Antill’s Corroboree combined with analysis of musical topics and gestures in the Sonatina and Irkanda I reveals that sections of these early works are more representational than has previously been thought, and that these representations draw on the discourse of primitivism and the discourse of the folk. One facet of this involves the example of some of Bartók’s folk-derived modernist idioms which served Sculthorpe as a model. Since some of this music includes the first iterations of what became Sculthorpe’s characteristic harmonically static fast music, the interpretation of primitivism presented here has bearing on how we might understand the fast, percussive passages of his later work. Doubt is cast both on Sculthorpe’s claims of the formative influence of Aaron Copland’s music and on the idea that the slow melody of Irkanda I derived from Sculthorpe’s sketching of the landscape around Canberra. Newly accurate dating of the composition of the Sonatina and The Loneliness of Bunjil is given, as well as analysis of aspects of Irkanda I in terms of its early title, ‘Aboriginal Burial (Irkanda)’.