For decades the UK has been happy to glug Australian wine, enjoy Australian entertainers and soaps on television, more recently the Pacific Rim has lent its name to an eclectic new cuisine. We even seem to be adopting their disenchanted attitude to the Royals. Every now and then an Australian movie busts the block but we are more likely to encounter Australasian actors such as Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe in American product. It is a similar sort of export story which has hampered Australian music. Despite the massive size of the continent, the concentration of the main arts centres to a few main centres of population has caused many young artists to seek their fortunes in the wider world. The long outward procession of great Australian singers began in the nineteenth century and Dame Joan Sutherland once attributed their success to an excellent diet of dairy produce and resulting strong bone structure. Not just singers, behind many of the "British" sounding names on record sleeves, we find the small print of the biography points to a native Brisbane, Sydney or Canberra. The success of Australian performing artists in conquering the world suggests there is a thriving musical scene from which to set out.

But what of Australian composers? Those we are aware of may not be immediately identified as Australians: Percy Grainger was a cosmopolitan figure and his heyday some time ago, while Malcolm Williamson as Master of the Queen's Music has made very little impact. An openness to the world and tendency to an outward flow has clearly kept performing standards high but the development of a distinct Australian voice in composition may have suffered. It was the advocacy of Eugene Goossens and Everest Records that made John Antill's Corroboree, with its aboriginal instruments, an exotic sensation for collectors some forty years ago. We now really want to know if they are keeping some tasty dishes for home consumption. An extensive range of CDs from the Jade and Revolve companies gives listeners worldwide a chance to try out these composers who have a good reputation at home. Will they travel? Robert Allworth's Jade label now runs to some 75 CDs, the majority are compilations shared between several composers. The titles are designed to attract the listener with assorted promises of Champagne Breakfast, Afternoon Light or Voodoo Fire, and most feature one or more substantial pieces along with some miniatures. This assortment approach is unusual and the programming is not entirely satisfying. Anyone taking a special interest in any single figure will find themselves faced with the prospect of needing to buy a set of discs. Even so, the series unfolds in a magazine fashion, the listener can pick and choose and no one is forced to listen to all the tracks every time. As well as featuring substantially on the Jade records, Derek Strahan uses his Revolve label to showcase some of his own major pieces.

Dulcie Holland retained her creative powers well into her eighties and continued to play her own pieces. Discovering that a pupil of John Ireland was writing music in the mid nineteen nineties was a bit like finding a perfect old world plant that has thrived under Southern skies, becoming subtly different. On the evidence I have heard, Dulcie Holland was essentially a miniaturist but a first rate one. She seems to have had a very productive Indian Summer and all the works I heard date from the nineties. The Afternoon Light CD contains two delightful short pieces for quartet and a tone poem Barely Spring for flute, violin and cello. There is poetry as well as craftsmanship here. Anyone in search of the perfect piano encore could leave them smiling with her Fairy Penguins which can be heard on the Eden in Atlantis disc. The penguins concerned are, I should stress, a small variety famous for their comic agility rather than any pronounced sexual nonconformity.

The Cello Sonata of 1993 is included on the Eden in Atlantis disc and its characteristic economy of utterance spans a wide range of moods. She can be angular at times, in the manner of Vaughan Williams in a huff but the overriding impression is of an appetite for life and an exploration which seems playful, as if stimulated by the self-imposed limits. There is a quiet strength in this sure-footed composer who knew exactly what she wanted to achieve. One of her last works was a piano suite of four aspects of the process of grieving. It is strong, brave and hopeful, the distilled wisdom of years and not at all depressing. The Four Aspects Suite is on the Remembering Adrian Braun disc.

Allworth has put enormous energy into establishing his Jade label and effectively putting a generation of Australian talent on the map. His own music tends to the elegiac, often drawing on the plucked tone colours of the mandoline and lute. The most striking piece here is the Lute Concerto of 1988, which seems to shimmer in a melancholic late-summer heat haze. The plucked tones suggest the evanescence of life. It is haunted and haunting music, utterly individual. If the proximity of Asia is suggested, then a Bachian spirit seems to emerge out of the mists near the end. Though in three movements, it is slow throughout, as if a baroque concerto had been left out too long in the sun. The Lute Concerto is on the Eden in Atlantis disc.

Allworth's elegiac power is also well displayed by the short piano tribute Remembering Adrian Braun, in memory of a man who died tragically young. Though a serial piece, it makes a very direct emotional statement. On the same disc there is a mandoline and piano movement, inspired by Ayn Rand. There seemed some disparity between the subject and the music. Perhaps the energy spent trying to link the music to the title distracted from pure listening but the Lute Concerto forms a better introduction to this interesting figure. Afternoon Light, named after a book by the late Sir Robert Menzies, is a piece written for the Sydney Mandolins in 1991. Again the tone-colour of massed mandolins makes a distinctive effect.

The most ambitious of these composers is Derek Strahan, whose first concert piece dates from 1964, though it was not to be until 1980 that Strahan felt able to devote himself entirely to composition. Behind Strahan's concert music there lies a large body of film and television work, some of which has found its way onto the discs under consideration.

The Cult of Diana is not a tribute to the late Princess of Wales but a 1992 Suite from the score of a detective movie. The Suite conjures an atmosphere of menace and ceremonial ritual. Budgetary constraints limited the forces to a synthesizer and a couple of instruments, though an orchestra would have shown the music in a better light. The synthesizer proved rather more effective in the music for the film Fantasy, 1990, a kaleidoscopic tale of erotic mind-games in a remote mansion. The mixed popular idioms in which an old Molloy ballad rubs shoulders with finger-snapping Bernstein-like riffs all project well on the electronic timbres.

Some twenty years earlier, for a series of Australian wildlife films called The Australian Ark, the budget ran to a chamber group built around woodwind with guitars and plenty of percussion and the result was a model of its kind. To produce real music that fulfills the brief and also makes pleasing and evocative listening without the pictures shows that Strahan had developed a sound technique by 1970.

Wind instruments have a central rôle in Strahan's sound world and the 1995 piece entitled Voodoo Fire is scored for clarinet with percussion and keyboard (piano & synthesizer). The performance by clarinettist Alan Vivian is first rate. Strahan is seeking to push classical performers into a region where the composer, performer and listener meet in a white hot fusion more associated with jazz. The remarkable thing is how much of that is captured on these recordings, taken from the first performances.

Some listeners may feel that the String Quartet, The Key, 1980 - 81, is pulled apart in the tug of styles and the highly subjective nature of Strahan's art means that sometimes a piece may be held together by sheer willpower. What breaks open in The Key finds a new synthesis in The Princess, the Clarinet Quintet which followed directly. It has enjoyed the status of a contemporary favourite in Australia with frequent broadcasts of the recording, made some twenty years ago. Happy music is the easiest to underrate but the success of the piece is again ensured by the clarinet playing of Alan Vivian, who bestrides the jazz and classic idioms with complete assurance. Here is a chamber piece that could serve to banish the lingering fears some listeners have that chamber music is music for only a few people.

In 1987, the celebrated mezzo-soprano Lauris Elms commissioned Strahan to write a song-cycle to celebrate the city of Sydney. Premiered at the Sydney Opera House, the cycle entitled Rose of the Bay, scored for mezzo, piano and clarinet turned out to be one of the composer's most substantial scores. It is more of a deconstruction than an ego-trip: the identity seen as a succession of city landscapes, reflected in the loved one is eventually expanded by psychometric contact with another time and place.

In this equivocal love-gift to Sydney, the composer seems to delight in defeating every expectation we might have of a song cycle. But Strahan is the sort of composer whose rewards are unexpected and a work which looks as if it might be an occasional piece of purely local interest proves to be an uneasy universal vision. The style is declamatory throughout, with the singer
mainly in her lowest register and this excellent ABC recording will enable it to be more widely heard and discussed.

Pieces of Eden in Atlantis, Strahan's projected multimedia opera, began to emerge in the early 1990s. Atlantis for flute/alto flute and piano was the first of these preparatory studies. Though its duration is around twenty minutes, the intensity remains high throughout. The première performance by Belinda Gough at her degree recital in 1992 is electric but the microphone is badly placed, capturing the breath of the player throughout.

A further step along the road to Eden came in 1995 when Strahan unveiled the soprano scene for Eve. The sensuality of the language with its images of ripe figs and turquoise skies promises a heady experience and so it proves. Strahan makes huge demands of his singer, requiring the agility of a coloratura and the attack of a Valkyrie. Liza Rintel, the soloist of the first performance, recorded live, has both. To ask for honey on top is not so much a criticism of her as a comment on the superhuman demands of the rôle.

Of the CDs under consideration, Voodoo Fire is the most immediately appealing and it is a pity that the Eden in Atlantis is on a different disc. The Today Yesterday album, comprising the String Quartet and Clarinet Quintet is an interesting coupling, eloquently describing a crisis and its resolution. Rose of the Bay is a piece of more than local significance, musically somewhat claustrophobic but conceptually strong. The Australian Ark is delightful light music while the film music for The Cult of Diana and Fantasy probably does not transcend its original purpose.

By others I don't mean to imply also-rans, only that there was less to go on, often just a miniature. The Australian reputation for plain speaking does I think carry over into the music. There is a sureness of aim and a respect for writing with particular occasions, performers and situations in mind. Aiming to please a particular audience is not to be sneered at and some of this production is sure to please wider circles. There are critics who would pull faces at the notion of string quartet movements to commemorate the births of children or a piano piece for a wedding anniversary. Yet I did find myself admiring a culture that celebrated the quiet places of the human heart.

© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001