These chants are important to Sydney Aboriginal culture. Mostly, the singers had not previously heard or sung these chants, though it was common knowledge to each of them that the chant manuscripts existed. Matt Doyle had dreamt a version of the Barrabul-la chant a few years earlier. As we played the chants over a period of several months each of the singers connected their musical and cultural associations into their musical interpretations of the chants. The singers interpreted the notations in different ways. Both Matt Doyle and Clarence Slockee were interested in singing the pitches and language as notated in the transcribed manuscripts. Richard Green and Karen Smith viewed the manuscripts purely as European documented moments of colonial history, and interpreted the notated pitch, language, rhythm and subject intuitively in improvisations.
As Richard Green improvised the chant in Sydney language I realized we were making contemporary music, not examining as historians, the music of the past. The energy of this music was being experience ‘in the now’ as we interacted musically together, today, Yaguna413 . Accompanying and interacting with each of the singers as they each musically interpreted the chants differently, was a great musical experience for me. I developed an intuitive realisation of the importance this music has for all of us, today. As we played the chants together in the Stuart piano room 2107 at the Conservatorium, I listened to the sound of the Stuart piano for the first time in a seemingly isolated musical practice, one that to my knowledge, had never previously been work-shopped or even demonstrated at the Conservatorium in my 34years here. This was a very different practice of music to anything I had ever experienced, yet this was fundamental music of this region, the place I had lived in as an active musician for most of all my life of 54 years. In a multi-layered way, both musically and socially, I was experiencing the wide Australian ‘gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous culture now entrenched throughout our society.414
Peter Sculthorpe’s Idea
In his Sun Music autobiography, composer Peter Sculthorpe offers a historic solution albeit in hindsight, to the historic Australian social lack of cultural interaction between the first peoples and the majority of emigrant peoples.
If, following white settlement, imported Celtic music might’ve been fused with Aboriginal chant, today our music would possess a powerful voice …. Perhaps the home sick ballad might have been replaced by vigorous dance music. It could have changed our whole national character…. Such a fusion of musics just might have helped create an identity for us… it might have helped sever ties with the mother country , instead of proclaiming a Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 we might have been proclaiming the Republic of Australia.415
413Sydney word for ‘now’: Richard Green,“Dharug Dalang”August 2015. http://www.dharug.dalang.com.auCentre for Technology Information and Technoloy and Solutions, NSW Government.
414 William E.H. Stanner, (1991) After the dreaming: (Sydney : ABC Enterprises for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1991), 2nd section of the Boyer lecture, After The Dreaming,delivered in the wake of the 1967 referendum which passed with a 90 per cent majority vote that the constitution be amended to permit Aborigines to be counted in the census.
415 Peter Sculthorpe,Sun Music, (Sydney: ABC Books), 200.
