The Difference of Perth Music: A Scene in Cultural and Historical Context (original) (raw)
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From Snake Pits to Ballrooms: class, race and early rock’n’roll in Perth
Continuum, 2017
In the late 1950s, rock'n'roll as both a musical genre and a pervasive youth cultural form spread from the U.S. to emerge in various regionalized forms throughout most Western societies. Through the development of various social, technological and industrial circumstances, rock'n'roll was the first youth subculture in Perth, Western Australia to develop widespread acknowledgement across popular cultural consciousness. From its roots in working-class culture to its eventual commercial embrace by middleclass audiences, rock'n'roll developed in Perth through a set of specific circumstances linked to both racial and class-based factors, distinctive to the city as a small, isolated and predominantly suburban location. Whilst the majority of historical analysis on early rock'n'roll focuses on Australia's east coast, this paper attempts to counter that by drawing from interviews conducted with a number of individuals who were instrumental in the emergence of rock'n'roll in Perth. As such this essay delivers a social history of the style as it developed in that city, placing it at the beginning of a fundamental shift in popular music as a cultural phenomenon, and underlining the importance that a number of specific social and cultural factors including class and race played in the development of a locally specific rock'n'roll culture. In the 1950s, Perth was a small, isolated city with a population of just over 300,000. Almost 4000 km west of Australia's largest city of Sydney, Perth was without its own designated international airport until 1970. With domestic air transport still relatively rare in the late 1950s, Perth remained a three-day journey by road or rail from Australia's more densely populated east coast. The city had originally been established in the late 1820s as an administrative centre for the Swan River Colony, with its population bolstered as a result of the gold rush of the late nineteenth century, and again by postwar immigration from many parts of Europe. Because this postwar population growth took place at a time of economic growth and when urban development was focused on suburban growth, the city expanded outwards from its relatively small central urban centre (Maccallum and Hopkins, 2011). As a result, Perth's metropolitan area is spread across a comparatively large land mass of over 6000 km 2. Both Ballico (2012, 2013), and Stratton and Trainer (2016) discuss the ways in which the city's isolation and its suburban nature have impacted Perth's music culture in recent decades, but these factors-as well as others more closely connected to identity politics-have been prevalent since the postwar period, and have contributed to a distinctive set of circumstances through which this community has been shaped. Despite its status as the capital city of Western Australia, Perth was time defined by both political and cultural conservatism, the aura of postwar and Depression-era austerity, and the 'Cold-War
Context
Documenting cultural life in contemporary Australia seems a fraught and daunting task, if not for the one-sided narratives so consistently reinforced through early scholarship, then at least due to the geographical vastness and diverse population that makes generalisation so difficult. The arrival of Music City Melbourne: Urban Culture, History and Policy is thus welcomed for its resolute specificity and unique historical lens. The book narrates and delineates popular music in Melbourne from the 1950s until the mid-2000s, exploring how it has shaped, and been shaped by, cultural policy and migration. The text is a much-needed contribution to scholarship on both Australian cultural policy, which focuses predominantly on the fine arts, and Australian popular music that in general fails to account for the historical contributions made by marginalised groups. Indeed, the authors describe Music City Melbourne’s historical emphases and use of subtly critical language (most notably, their ...
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Music by the Few for the Many: Chamber Music in Colonial Queensland
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The early development of Queensland's musical culture has only been partly documented. Despite a number of general surveys and a few specialist publications in recent decades, the largest body of research, dating mostly from the 1970s and 1980s in the form of academic dissertations, remains unpublished. As I demonstrated in a recent article for this journal, the narrative of Queensland's music can be traced in various ways, including focusing either on a specific organisation or ‘cause’ – phenomena that in turn interface with the efforts of countless individuals. An alternative strategy is to survey a specific genre of music-making, where likewise a diverse range of performers, repertoire, venues and events are part of the mix. This article endeavours to trace the development of chamber music in colonial Queensland as an important subset of an active concert life that included numerous popular entertainers, touring artists and musical-theatrical troupes. Support of chamber m...