Identifying the elemental aspects of the Stuart piano sound has encouraged me to develop an elemental approach to music composition. The comprehensive beauty of this Australian piano has also encouraged me to look more deeply into what interests me most about our society. I came to ask myself how may I musically interact with Australian social and cultural sensibilities. As a consequence of these thoughts I have composed music that explores elements of what I perceive to be my Australian environment, how I see it. Ancient & New was a working title of the project until I realised these words could be interpreted as being separate even alien of the other. A portrayal of the Aboriginal music as being old, or something of the past, does not encompass the current day Indigenous culture in all its modern vibrancy. The ethos of this work was that the interactions of the ‘old’ with the ‘new’ would transform into a collaborative form of music. One piece however, in the series is still entitled Ancient & New because it does depict musically the differences in the Indigenous and European cultures, and the awkwardness of first encounters. There are sections in Ancient & New that musically depict the European singers having difficulty with pronunciation of Australian Indigenous words, whilst being completely at home with the Latin dictums of the 18th century Christian music.
The expanded frequency range, and the dynamic and tonal characteristics of the Stuart soundscape demonstrated in the vocabulary of sounds and in the detailed tonal analysis of chapter four, were expected to inject a 21st century sound sensibility to traditional and non traditional forms of Indigenous music. It was anticipated that an intercultural form of Australian music could be the result of this exploration. Similar to the flourishing Indigenous schools of visual art that exploded after Geoffery Bardon’s Papunya art revolution in the 1970s,385 or the music of Neil Murray and Yolgu man George Rrurrambu epitomized by their song Blackfella/Whitefella, and Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s song From Little Things Big Things Grow’. These intercultural forms connect the traditional functional repository of cultural story and information 386 with globally used western forms and are indicative of the comprehensive cross-culture that occurs through all generations and styles of the performing and visual arts in Australia. 387
The new ‘form’ in this research is the instrumental object and sound of the Stuart & Sons piano. It is handcrafted using Australian woods, and it implements an audacious vibrational technology onto its traditional predecessor388 , causing a change in piano sound that has been thoroughly explored by this research. The newly formed piano will sonically interact within a musical form that traditionally functions to describe place and cultural business. 389 I think this is a powerful integration, especially regarding notions of music describing ‘place’ and story. The piano is made in the same national place as the Indigenous music. Both the instrumental physical form and the musical form describe elements of that place, and elements of its story. New musical interpretations of place and stories are expected to
385 Ian MacLean, How Aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art,(IMA Publications ,2011)
386 Catherine Ellis, (1985). Aboriginal Music -Education for living. (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1985),16-18.
387 Peter Dunbar-Hall, Deadly sounds, deadly places – (Sydney: UNSW press, 2004), Introduction.
388 the traditional modern piano, depicted in this research by the Concert Steinway D.
389 2Ellis, 16-18.
