Sydney Music Research Symposium abstracts

MICHAEL ATHERTON
Originals, Facsimiles and Virtual Objects: Oceanic Musical Instruments and Sound-producing Objects in the Australian Museum
This paper is about a work in progress on a collection of 800 Oceanic musical instruments and sound-producing objects, all of which are housed in the Australian Museum, Sydney. About two-thirds of the items are from Papua New Guinea. During a research programme conceived to describe and interpret the collection, contact with the same raised a number of questions. Who chooses the objects? How do colleciton managers reconcile conservation practices with open access to what is held as Australian heritage? How will indigenous communities and the general public remain informed about the collection? What is the future of such collections? Clearly, there is a tension between opposing views of the museum as either a research institution or a place for public programmes. This influences objectives in reporting on the collection. Who, or rather where, is/are the audience/s? These questions will be addressed through a critical presentation of initial findings.

CORINNA BONSHEK
The Studio Artist and the Performing Body: Power, Gender and Transgression in Kylie Minogue's 'Did It Again'
Popular music theorist Simon Frith has located the performer's body as the site for the production of meaning, arising from the 'integration of sound and behaviour' in performance. The music video with its almost exclusive focus on the body of the performer has become priveleged as a 'place where the energy of the music and the identity of the artist interconnect' (Hawkins 1997). Striking out against media criticism, which has labelled Minogue's early music 'teenybopper chartpap' and Minogue herself a 'puppet', 'airhead' or 'teenqueen', this recent music video 'Did It Again' engages with such criticism by creating caricatures of Kylie's former images. Deconstructing her previous personae, and counterpointing them against each other, Kylie questions the notion of a fixed or stable performance identity, while giving her previus images agency. Rather than vapid, the Kylie caricatures bicker and fight their way through the clip, vying for attention. The audience is encouraged to find humour in their antics while identifying with the personification of Kylie as she is now, who is portrayed as cool, detached and in control.
It is the contention of this paper that the visual drama of this work has been vital to the establishment of Kylie's new credibility. By engaging with her past images, Kylie has been able to displace negative criticism, celebrate her status as pop star, and enable a more cynical audience to appreciate her latest music/image.

SALLY MACARTHUR
Passion and Love in Alma Mahler-Werfel's Songs
In late nineteenth-century Vienna, women rarely had the possibility of following their own creative urges. They were expected to live according to a masculine prescription and, as Alma Mahler-Werfel's biographer François Giroud writes, they were deemed to be the natural enemy of morality, reason and creativity. Such was this tacit status of women in society that it would not have been considered unusual for Gustav Mahler, upon proposing to Alma Schindler in 1901, to forbid his future bride to continue composing. Despite the fact that by then Alma Schindler had already composed one hundred lieder, some instrumental music and a sketch for an opera. Mahler actually requested that she 'regard my music as yours' and she reluctantly agreed to this request. In this paper, I could, but I will not ask what happened to all but the remaining fourteen songs from Alma Mahler-Werfel's pen. I will not even speculate on how the course of the history of music might have changed had she continued composing throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, a period that led Schoenberg to 'suspend the tonal system'. What is pertinent in this paper is the possible difference that the female and/or feminine touch makes to music in an artistic environment tht had become inscribed with a deep, soulful, self-referential masculinity that seemed to underscore creativity in all its manifestations, including its constructed representaions of women. In some ways this paper is speculative, but I want to explore the notion that Alma Mahler-Werfel's music is saturated with passion and love, ingredients that also seem to permeate many of the texts she has set (by her male poets). In one song, 'Ansturm' (from Vier Lieder composed in 1911), she deals with sexual desire and release, subject matter that would normally be forbidden in women's artistic expressions in the early twentieth century.

KATHRYN MARSH
Children's Playground Singing Games: Conflicts between Pedagogical Theories and Musical Practices
This paper reports the finsings of a recent ethnomusicological study of variation and transmission processes in Australian children's playground singing games. The study involved the audiovisual recording of more than 600 performances of playground singing games, and concurrent interviews with their performers in a multi-ethnic Sydney primary school over a period of six years. This study has been undertaken in order to examine assumptions regarding the nature of children's playground singing games and chants and the underlying paradigms of musical evolutionism and universalism which continue to influence contemporary music education practices, despite profound changes to the auditory environment in which children now play and learn.
Transmission processes were examined in relation to modes of oral transmission, whereby textual, musical and kinaesthetic materials of playground singing games are both conserved and changed in performance. Context-based variant analysis of processes of innovation found in the games was used to challenge the notion that children's compositional and improvisational strategies fit invariable and universla models, as postulated by a number of current music education theorists.
Findings of the study are also used to refute conceptions of children's musical play as simplistic and universal. Children's singing games in this playground were found to exhibit sophisticated rhythmic features of syncopation and polymetricality, a wide range of structural devices for variation, and a unique tonality at variance both with the functional tonality and pentatonicism of musical repertoire used in the classroom.

NIGEL NETTHEIM
Gustav Becking's Theory of Musical Rhythm
Gustav Becking (1928) studied systematically the character of the music of different composers, nationalities and times, insofar as it reveals different human attitudes. He approached this study by means of comparisons of the rhythmic character of the music as revealed in the shape of the conducting beats (under carefully defined conditions). He illustrated the beat shapes by means of diagrams which have become famous as the 'Becking curves'.
I will explain and discuss this work of Becking, which has until recently been little-known in the English-speaking world. Live demonstrations of the various conducting beats will be given. Most attention will be paid to the cases of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

GREG SCHIEMER
7-limit Tonality Diamond in Verdic Mass
In just intonation, musical intervals are defined by integer ratios. Odd-numbered harmonics play a special role in defining the musical character of the tuning system. Partch's diamond provides a framework for further classification of intervals as components of either major or minor chords. Vedic Mass, my most recent notated composition, is an a capella vocal work based on a 7-limit just intonation tonality diamond. In this presentation, I demonstrate how the diamond classifies harmony into major and minor, how these chords will sound in just intonation, and how these intervals are represented using conventional 12-tone equal tempered notation. I also discuss my underlying compositional motivation for the work which is based on a Sanskrit text used in the context of a contemporary Catholic mass.

RICHARD TOOP
The Composer's Voice
A favourite theme of post-modernist discourse has been the 'death of the author', or more modestly, the marginalisation of the authorial presence. However, in much 'new music' from the '60s onwards, the author has been emphatically present, not just in the traditional roles of composer and interpreter, but literally as 'voice' - usually speaking rather than singing - and moreover as 'the composer's voice', as a presence asserting (explicitly or implicitly) authorship fo the surrounding instrumental and/or electro-acoustic elements. Where this involves live performance, it may be relatively ephemeral, capable of replacement by other, non-authorial voices; but in the case of electro-acoustic music, the presence is a permanent one: in such pieces, the author's voice will be present for as long as the pieces themselves are presented. This phenomenon is observable in music from many schools and persuasions; examples include works by Robert Ashley, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Alvin Lucier and Karlheinz Stockhausen.