ABSTRACT
Chapter Five examines the impact of the relative geographical isolation of Western Australian practitioners from their contemporaries in other Australian cities. Physically distanced from other hubs of cultural activity and with fewer performance opportunities, unique approaches to contemporary percussion emerged in this city in the 1980s. Distinctive outputs blending contemporary western and traditional musics from neighbouring countries including Indonesia and Papua New Guinea feature, and the influences of these traditional musics still resonate today. Practitioners in Perth – the most isolated capital city in the world – had extremely limited contact with peers around the country in the 1980s, and the result was the development of highly creative approaches to percussive music making influenced by sound art, the visual arts and instrument building techniques. The legacies of ensembles are discussed in this chapter, with examples of unique instruments and the repertoire they championed: the Paul Sarcich Percussion Ensemble, Nova Ensemble, AC/PVC and Tetrafide Percussion.
