In November 1999 Ross Edwards was invited to speak at the Australian National University’s Conference on Belonging.

‘How have non-Indigenous Australians rationalized, argued, thought through or been baffled by the issue of forming affections to, living in and belonging to, a place and a country from which the Indigenous people have been largely dispossessed?’

The full text of his presentation is as follows:

When I was growing up in Sydney in the 1960s I knew I wanted to be a composer, and I also knew that sooner or later I’d have to study overseas. In those days music wasn’t taken very seriously as a school subject, especially at the school I went to, which actively discouraged it. When I began to study music at Sydney University it was just before the burgeoning of interest in Australian composition, initiated by Professor Donald Peart, that led to the appointment of Peter Sculthorpe to the Music Department, and there was no course offered in composition. So I left, to study privately with Richard Meale (who I found most encouraging and inspiring), and eventually transferred to the Music Department of The University of Adelaide which, under Professor David Galliver, had a policy of importing European composers to do 6-monthly teaching stints, and I was able to get the kind of training in technique and analysis considered indispensible for a young composer in those days. My studies there with the Scottish composer Peter Maxwell Davies and, later, the Hungarian, Sandor Veress, were enormously beneficial to me.

After graduation I went to Europe for post graduate studies with Peter Maxwell Davies and stayed three years, mostly in England. Half of me was at home there, but the other half felt like a fish out of water – the usual schism between cultural origins and birthplace. I began to feel more and more estranged from the ‘accredited’ model for post-war European art music that young composers were supposed to follow, and not long after my return to Australia, late in 1972, I found that, for me, European music had lost its meaning – the gestures and syntax had become stale and irrelevant and even the tuning system it was based on seemed crudely inflexible. This problem was compounded by my having taken up a teaching position at the Sydney Conservatorium: it isn’t easy to convey enthusiasm for something you don’t believe in.

During this depressing time I composed very little. However, the music I did manage to write was taking an entirely new direction – almost, it seemed, of its own accord – and the stylistic mannerisms of my earlier music either disappeared or were transfigured. I worked mainly at night in a room opening onto bushland and there was a continuous interplay of insect and frog sounds outside the window. Perhaps, in freeing myself from preconceptions of how music should be composed, I was now open to the direct influence of these mysterious nocturnal sounds. Anyway, although I may not have been conscious of it happening, they seem to have been responsible for the quirkish rhythms and assymetrical phrase structures that found their way into the music. Also, a certain sense of timelessness and an absence of the climaxes and resolutions – the psychological drama – of Western art music.

The other day I read an account of how an 11th century Chinese sage, Chang Tsung, responded to a would-be disciple who came to him and said: ‘Please teach me the Buddha-Dharma and open my ignorant eyes.’ Chang Tsung shouted at him: ‘How dare you come here seeking the dead words of men! Why don’t you open your ears to the living words of nature?’ Well, in the mid-1970s, having rejected what I’d come to think of as ‘dead’ music, I found myself taking refuge in the living sounds and patterns of nature, and I even persuaded my wife that we should move to the coastal village of Pearl Beach, about 90 kilometres north of Sydney on the edge of a national park. This was fairly impractical because I taught at the Sydney Conservatorium three very full days a week, but the idyllic years we spent in this tranquil environment were to determine the course my music would take. The summer days were swathed in the drones of cicadas with their mysteriously abrupt starts and stops and, at evening, the insects would start up. I was entranced by the insect chorus because it seemed to be on the verge of conveying some profound message which was ultimately elusive. All the temporal relationships in my music – the relative lengths of phrases and sections – are influenced by these ancient voices, whose near-symmetries and inconsistently varied repetitions often seem close to our inherited musical syntax. I don’t doubt that, over the millenia, such voices have generated much of the world’s music and it’s not hard to detect their presence in various surviving folk and religious traditions.

It’s time, I think, to play you a musical example of my work. Here’s an extract from Yarrageh – Nocturne for Solo Percussion and Orchestra, inspired by a walk through a resonant spring landscape on the Pearl Beach fire track . Yarrageh is an Aboriginal word – and I have to admit I don’t know its origin, but the popular dictionary I consulted defines it as ‘the spirit of spring’. I subtitled the work ‘nocturne’ because, although conceived in broad daylight, it explores the possibilities of a ‘nocturnal’ mode of listening, less concerned with keeping track of a logical sequence of musical events in time – in order to perceive an overall structural unity – than with responding intuitively to the uniqueness and mysteriousness of each passing moment. In other words it’s a sort of contemplation object in sound, commissioned for the concert hall – a recent Western innovation – but pointing to music’s reinstatment as an agent of ritual and healing – its age-old universal function. In this recorded extract Ian Cleworth is the solo percussionist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Porcelijn.

[ 7 mins.]

Yarrageh – extract. (opening 3 minutes)

That piece, to my surprise, found favour with the apostles of Orthodox Modernism: it even got performed at an International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Poland. Some other pieces I wrote in the 1980s, however, ruffled establishment feathers both here and abroad and all but destroyed my reputation as a so-called serious composer. The most notorious example is, without doubt, my Piano Concerto, composed in Pearl Beach in 1982. My original intention for this work was to compose something rather like Yarrageh – stark and introspective – but some unseen force dictated otherwise. In what seemed like a moment of sheer revelation the outside world seemed to burst in on me and I suddenly became aware that I had the extraordinary privilege of living in a paradise of sun-blessed ocean and joyously shrieking parrots gyrating in the warm air, and that this ecstacy simply had to be transmitted through music. The critics, especially the European ones, gave me hell but, fortunately, the public responded positively and this remains one of my most popular pieces.

Living in Pearl Beach put me directly in touch with the natural world – a permanent legacy which gave direction and meaning to my life and work. It gave me a very acute sense of place, of belonging and relating to a particular environment. Ideally, I could gladly have stayed there forever, but our children needed to go to school in Sydney and anyway, the village was taking on a new character: the roads were getting tarred, rising rents were forcing the Hippies to retreat to the hills and the Yuppie weekenders were moving in. It was time to go.

I took back with me a musical language that was very much my own. Its twofold manifestations: an austere, inward-looking one sometimes referred to as my sacred style because of its alignment with certain oriental traditions of meditational music; and its extroverted antithesis: my maninya style, dominated by the ethos of the Piano Concerto and the later violin concerto, Maninyas. Both have a common origin in the natural environment, but whereas the former attempts to distill its essence, the latter can’t seem to resist turning it into a dance. The insect patterns are still there, punctuated by birdcalls – real or mythological – but they’ve been ritualised and, moreover, they accommodate references to a variety of musical cultures, for example: Japanese, Indonesian, Celtic and pre-Renaissance European. (I should mention that my antipathy to European music was finally resolved once I’d found my own direction, although I hear it now with new ears and with a preference for the 16th or earlier centuries. Late Stravinsky is, among others, an exception).

The ‘word’ maninya is taken from a nonsense poem I once made up spontaneously when I couldn’t find a suitable text for the vocal music I urgently wanted to write. To me, it’s come to mean ‘dance/chant’, and more specifically, Australian dance/chant. It has the essential characteristics of most chants from around the world except that it follows insect rather than speech rhythms, and it’s not concerned about elucidating a text, but rather, pointing directly to the unfathomable mystery of existence. I’d like to play you the opening of a choral maninya called Flower Songs which I wrote in 1986. I couldn’t find a suitable text for this one either, so I used the scientific names of a number of south eastern Australian wildflowers – hence the title – and these are reiterated over drones to produce a sort of hypnotic incantation – a buzzing of bees, a joyful affirmation of cicadas. This recording’s by The Song Company (of Sydney) conducted by Roland Peelman.

Flower Songs – extract – (opening 3 minutes)

That music was written in Sydney but, for me, it will always be associated with the Pearl Beach fire track where, in the course of daily walks, my musical language evolved. So, in my mind, it has a very strong sense of place and belonging and thus, perhaps, an incipient Aboriginality. Next year I hope to begin work on another work for voices. This will be called Star Chant, and its text, which has been devised by Dr. Fred Watson, Astronomer-in-Charge at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, juxtaposes classical European and Aboriginal names of significant stars and constellations from Australian skies. Fred, who would have loved to be here today, says he has ‘tried to do this with the greatest respect for the indigenous culture….bearing in mind that it is entirely possible that Aboriginal people were the world’s first astronomers’. I feel very positive about our attempt to reconcile European and Aboriginal cosmology, and thus, the scientific and spiritual world view. Last year I composed an orchestral piece in which I surprised myself by fusing vestiges of both Aboriginal and Gregorian Chant. I called it White Ghost Dancing. There are recorded instances of Aboriginal People mistaking early Europeans on our shores for the ghosts of their ancestors, since ghosts were believed to be light-coloured – and as I composed, the concept of a white ghost began to symbolise non-indigenous Australia’s innate Aboriginality – its capacity to transform and heal itself through spiritual connectedness with the earth. I’m convinced that if my music’s going to make a useful contribution it will be to help facilitate this process.