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Review Essay

Western Australia introduced a new Western Australian Certificate of Education (WACE) Music course for Year 11 and 12 students in 2009. Course construction was protracted due to political interference, input from vested interests within the music teaching community and adverse community publicity. The result has been the creation of a long and potentially confusing syllabus document. This article reports on music teacher experiences with the new course five years after its initial implementation. A questionnaire was distributed to all WACE music teachers asking them to respond to 27 statements drawn from a literature review relating to course design in music education, and the WACE syllabus document. At the end of the questionnaire, participants were invited to provide extended responses regarding the new course. Extended responses were frequently negative and sometimes contradictory, leading the researchers to conclude that after five years, the WACE music syllabus document, as a driver of 'curriculum', is creating a degree of discontent and confusion in the minds of many music teachers. The lessons are obvious: for any curriculum to achieve a desired educational outcome, the syllabus document needs to be clear and consistent, be guided by a philosophy which is coherent and transparent to teachers, and drawn from the relevant literature on the subject.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History. Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970 offers a rethinking of recent Australian music history. Amanda Harris presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. Harris also historicizes the practices of non-Indigenous art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and policy frameworks. Centralizing auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal people's mobility and non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture. This book seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and postcolonizing efforts, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures.

This thesis examines the space and time of imagined sound in Australian post-World War Two literature and music. Using what I term a critical close listening methodology, I will discuss a range of novels, poems, songs, song suites, film clips and art music compositions that, through a return to various times in the past, offer a remapping of Australian space. Literary and musical representations of the post-European settlement era – narratives as diverse as the desert explorer imagined by both Francis Webb in his poetic sequence 'Eyre All Alone' (1961) and David Lumsdaine in his electro-acoustic composition Aria for Edward John Eyre (1972), the convict and outsiders songs of The Drones and Gareth Liddiard (2006 and 2010), the soundings of mythic island foundations in Baecastuff's Mutiny Music (2006 - present) and the destruction and rebirth of the continental top-end in Alexis Wright's novel Carpentaria (2006) – resonate within key moments of the post-war era, such as the search for the centre, the shift towards recognition of Indigenous custodianship in the post-Mabo period, and the move beyond the boundaries of the nation. Drawing together literary and musical works in seven chapters, I consider representations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences of a range of Australian geoimaginaries – the continent, the archipelago, and the island. I argue that the close listening method, with its focus on sound, generates a unique cartography of the artistic, historical, and political harmonics of the works assembled, while also creating a productive dialogue between the distinct mediums of the works. These statements of postcolonial spatiotemporal difference deepen our understanding of the complexity of fundamental national spaces and times, mapping the development of pivotal geoimaginaries that accompanied the historical terrain of the post-war period.

This book represents the first critical survey of a section of a rich Australian corpus of chamber music. The author has included various instrumental combinations with piano as well as vocal music with piano. The survey is chronological, as well as by composer. An appendix to the work provides source material for future research into this area. The research has concentrated on progressive modernist music by Australian composers. The commentary utilises the author's rich experience as composer, pianist and educator.

Introduction -- The economics of music exports -- Music entrepreneurs and export readiness -- Networking at music industry export events -- Case study : Australia -- National case studies, export schemes and policy -- Born global? -- Appendix 1. Interview list -- Appendix 2. Australian Music Industry Exports Survey -- Appendix 3. Music export snapshots.