Reviewed by: Composing Australia: Nostalgia and National Identity in the Music of Malcolm Williamson by Carolyn Philpott Michael Hooper Composing Australia: Nostalgia and National Identity in the Music of Malcolm Williamson. By Carolyn Philpott. Melbourne: Lyre bird, 2018. (Australasian Music Research, no. 16.) [xix, 228 p. ISBN 9780734037886 (paperback), $34.30.] Illustrations. Roger Covell sits behind much of the early reception of the composers of Malcolm Williamson's generation. As critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, he had the first word about new performances. And his book, Australia's Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967; 2nd ed., Lyrebird, 2016) played a significant role in establishing "Australian music" as a topic about which to write. With Composing Australia, Carolyn Philpott, focusing on nationalism in William -son's music, takes part in a newer tradition of writings that similarly seek to detail the music that composers have written in response to Australia. The difficulty that writers now face in detailing the music from the 1960s—the time when Williamson's career began—is that the critical responses from that time are often decisive, and the views of those critics risk overdetermining the subject. There are some solutions. One is to focus on recordings of the music itself, though much of the music written in the 1960s was not recorded, and even where it was, the correspondence of composers often complains about the quality of the performances. Another solution is to disregard the criticism entirely, which might make sense given that the performances about which criticisms were written have a questionable relationship with their scores. Nevertheless, that option neglects the essential role that critics played in shaping the discourses by which the composers were known. Everyone—composers included—read Covell's book, so there is a strong connection between reception, criticism, and accounts of Australian nationalism. Covell's book devotes several pages to Williamson, and he begins by clarifying that his complaint with Williamson was not due to the light– serious divide in his early output (something that others found difficult) but about the "intrinsic quality of his invention" (Covell, Australia's Music, 172). Nevertheless, by the end of his discussion of Williamson's music, Covell is surprisingly dismissive, returning to his earlier review of the Third Piano Concerto—performed by John Ogdon and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1964—to write that "Williamson overworks it ['a pleasant little tune of an outdoors type'] shamelessly and finally subjects it to a massive apotheosis after the manner of some minor Soviet composers. Is this to take too serious-browed a view of what is, without question, primarily music for entertainment and quick, instinctive response?" What, then, is the scholar now approaching Williamson to do with this feeble, "sub-Prokofiev grotesquerie"? (Ibid. 177). For the most part, Philpott ignores the problem, which is an approach that [End Page 276] has two virtues. The first is that it gives space for some analysis. The second is that it positions the work apart from Anthony Meredith and Paul Harris's biography Malcolm Williamson: A Mis -chievous Muse (London: Omnibus, 2007), which at the time of its publication caused something of a stir with its open and revealing approach to Williamson's life. Philpot's approach is laudable, since there is much still to be written that sets out some of the nuts and bolts of music written by Australians in the second half of the twentieth century. We simply do not know enough about the music that was composed, and focusing on the music is a useful counter to the quick judgments that were made about many composers. Also, one of the reasons that so many writers have been concerned with the argumentative side of Williamson's personality is his tendency to speak his mind in public forums—speeches that were often later published in the dailies and in more academic sources. Williamson was as critical of others as critics were of his music. Much of the scholarship about composers who referred to themselves as Australian has tended to be defensive, either attempting to list the traits that define someone as Australian, or with an ear to the consolidation of those traits through...
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Feb 25, 2021
Marianne Boruch 