ABSTRACT
The historiography of Australian early musical modernism in the 1920s and 1930s has steadily advanced since the mid-1990s as part of a general reassessment of Australian musical culture before the 1960s (Brown et al. 1995; Whiteoak and Scott-Maxwell 2003; Sitsky 2001, 2005; Richards 2007). But the history it describes is still amorphous, and some of the unpublished music has simply disappeared. 1 Feminist counter-narratives of modernity and modernism have helped plug this gap (e.g. Hunt 2011), while multi-author topical and cross-genre studies have widened the academic focus beyond the individual creative input of composers and the analysis of individual historians. The semi-autonomous responses of performers and listeners, and of traditional (reiterative) communities to modernization are now being counted as historical factors in understanding a lost era in Australian culture. Indeed, the ‘postmodern’ diversity of these studies paradoxically hinders their reduction to a conventionally modernist historical narrative that might have been summarized here. But though composers and works must now share the limelight, the historical record will probably continue to recognize the distinctive role that Australian performers, commentators, and audiences accorded them, as representatives and ambassadors of their art music culture between the wars.
