Australian Composers Audio Online
Additional Sources | Composer Interviews | Australian Connections
Streamed off-air music - Composer Name Listing
"Sort by Creator" option - top R.H. of each list
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This is a select list of the works of Australian composers, available online from the University of Melbourne Digital Repository. All files require a high bandwidth connection. Authorised users are required to enter University login password for access.
Additional sources
Australian Music Presented : classic/amp - ABC Classic FM Radio.
classic/amp, is ABC Classic FM's home for a growing online collection of Australian classical and experimental music drawn from the ABC's vast archive of music recordings. Includes a Composer Index
Naxos Music Library (restricted
- University of Melbourne only)
Includes both classical and world
music, as well as Australian works and the ABC Classics record label.
To search by country, choose the Advanced Search tab in the top banner to display the country search box.
Enter the country name or, if you are unsure, click on the magnifying glass to produce a list of countries available.
Click on the country name from this list and it will be placed in the search box automatically.
You can also fill in a number of search boxes to further refine your search - e.g. country plus composer name, etc.
In each case, use the magnifying glass icon to display a list of contents for each search box - saves spelling, typos, etc.
Music is available for listening at a listening station on campus or from any computer with internet access via remote login.
Smithsonian Global Sounds. (restricted
- University of Melbourne only)
Online recordings of the world's musical and aural traditions. Included are Australian ballads and folksongs, tribal music and aboriginal songs, and some bird songs.
Use the search option, or browse by country, genre, language, instrument, artist, label, etc.
Music is available for listening at a library listening station or from any computer with internet access via remote login. Users may also purchase tracks or complete albums.
Advanced Search - MusicAustralia - Australia's Music: Online, in Time
" Most of these are links to sound files, but in some cases the online content is a link to a performer or group website which contains sound files. To listen to online sound files, you will need one or more sound players. "
Use the "Advanced Search" link and mark the "resources available online" and "sound" boxes.
Refer to online help. Information on Players and Plug-ins will help you get started.
Australian Music Online - Listening Room
"Australian Music Online (AMO) is a web-based initiative that aims to advance the marketing and promotion of new Australian contemporary music, across a diverse range of genres, both nationally and internationally."
Includes access to newsletters, FAQs, links to websites containing information about Australian music and the local industry, etc.
Composer Interviews
Audio clips - require Quicktime player
From the University of Melbourne Digital Repository. Login access to these audio files is available on top right of website. Authorised users are required to enter University login password for access.
- 1. The colonial quadrille / presented by Andrew Ford. (Login required)
Dots on the landscape (ABC Classic FM) ; episode 1. Also on CD - UniM Music CD 7572 v.1
Summary: Since European settlement, music in Austalia has continuously evolved in Australian society. Isaac Nathan is reputed to be the colony's first professional composer. His music saw the beginning of the art of composition in this country. His arrangements of Aboriginal melodies and his ambitions as a composer of opera, laid the ground for later endeavours in Australian music. Includes the voices of composers: Anne Boyd; Colin Bright; George Dreyfus; Moya Henderson; Liza Lim; Richard Meale; David Page; Vincent Plush; Peter Sculthorpe and Larry Sitsky. Also featured are music critics, Roger Covell and Elizabeth Silsbury; Prof. of Aboriginal Studies at Melbourne University, Marcia Langton; and novelist and librettist, David Malouf.
- 2. Looking over our shoulders / presented by Andrew Ford. (Login required)
Dots on the landscape (ABC Classic FM) ; episode 2. Also on CE - UniM Music CD 7572 v.2
Summary: Europe provided Australian music with its early role models and its institutions: the concert halls, the opera house, the symphony orchestra. Young composers continue to study there and, at various time, there have been centres that have attracted our most talented musicians (eg. Hill and Grainger at Leipzig in the 1880s and 90s; Boyd, Wesley-Smith and Edwards in York in the 1970s). And yet Australian composers have an increasingly ambivalent attitude to Europe. Working out that attitude seems still to be one of the defining features of Australian composition. Features the composers, Anne Boyd; Gerard Brophy, Ross Edwards, Mary Finsterer, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Moya Henderson, Miriam Hyde, Peter Sculthorpe, Larry Sitsky, Carl Vine and Martin Wesley-Smith; and the Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of York, Wilfrid Mellers.
- 3. Percy / presented by Andrew Ford. (Login required)
Dots on the landscape (ABC Classic FM) ; episode 3. Also on CD - UniM Music CD 7572 v.3
Summary: Percy Grainer is Australia's best-known composer. His music and his life seem to embody many of the recurrent trends in Australian music: emigration, experimentation, and larrikinism. Grainger was also among the first to identify the unique potential of musical composition in Australia and to recommend that composers in this country look to the north (ie. Asia) for inspiration and affinity.
Features the voices of Percy Grainger, Brian Allison, Ros Bandt, Stephen Banfield, Warren Burt, Naomi Cass, Gerald Gentry, Wilfrid Mellers, Vincent Plush, Peter Sculthorpe, Alessandro Servadei, Roger Smalley and Martin Wesley-Smith.
- 4. Looking north / presented by Andrew Ford. (Login required)
Dots on the landscape (ABC Classic FM) ; episode 4. Also on CD - UniM Music CD 7572 v.4
Summary: In spite of Grainger's urgings, it was really not until the 1960s that Australian composers began to turn their gazes away from Europe and tap Asia as a musical resource. Some of these tappings were consciously oriental (Sculthorpe, Conyngham, Boyd) while others were more aesthetic (Meale). What have been the advantages of embacing influences from Indonesian gamelan to Japanese gagaku? What have been the effects on music in Australia?
With the voices of Anne Boyd, Barry Conyngham, Roger Covell, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Lisa Lim, Richard Meale, James Murdoch, Vincent Plush, Peter Sculthorpe and Elizabeth Silsbury.
- 5. Looking around / presented by Andrew Ford. (Login required)
Dots on the landscape (ABC Classic FM) ; episode 5. Also on CD - UniM Music CD 7572 v.5
Summary: In music, as in the visual arts, Australian composers have drawn inspiration both from the landscape and the fauna it supports. Birdsong, for example, has been a feature of Australian composition since its earliest days. A composer like David Lumsdaine can even make musical works that consist entirely of edited recordings of birdsong. Apart from the outback and the bush, there are other types of landscape, which inspire musicians. Barry Conyngham's inspiration has been the cities in which the majority of Australians live.
Featuring the composers, Anne Boyd, Warren Burt, Barry Conyngham, Brett Dean, Chris Dench, Ross Edwards, Alan Lamb, David Lumsdaine and Peter Sculthorpe.
- 6. Comings and goings / presented by Andrew Ford. (Login required)
Dots on the landscape (ABC Classic FM) ; episode 6. Also on CD - UniM Music CD 7572 v.6
Summary: The earliest Australian composers came from overseas and many continue to come. On the other hand, some Australian-born composers, like Grainger, often find that they can work more effectively in another country. How does the expartriate experience affect a composer? And how does it effect the composer's view of Australia?
Featuring Don Banks, Alison Bauld, Warren Burt, Tristam Cary, Brett Dean, Chris Dench, George Dreyfus, Elena Kats-Chernin, James Murdoch, Vincent Plush, Peter Sculthorpe, Larry Sitsky, Roger Smalley, Peter Tahourdin, Felix Werder, Malcolm Williamson and Julian Yu.
Australian Connections
Audio clips - require Quicktime player
From the University of Melbourne Digital Repository. Login access to these audio files is available on top right of website. Authorised users are required to enter University login password for access.
- "Australian Connections " - Episode 1. The Colony of New South Wales: 1788 - 1826 (Login required)
In the first of a new series of seven programs ranging from 1788 to the present day, Tim Dehn begins
his own personal exploration of some of the music performed in Australia and much of which was also
created here, together with the stories of those who heard it. Today's program begins with a five-octave
piano that arrived with the First Fleet, continues with country dance music and the elegance of the flute
and ends with Rossini, played at one of Sydney's first concerts in 1826; and we meet John Grant - one of
Australia's first human rights activists.
- "Australian Connections " - Episode 2. Explorers and Prospectors: 1845 - 1870 (Login required)
The middle of the nineteenth century is the setting for the second in this new series of seven programs in
which Tim Dehn explores music heard and largely composed in Australia and links it to people and events here
at the time. Today, a myopic Charles Sturt enduring the heat of the Simpson Desert, the pitfalls of the
Victorian gold rush, a visit to Sydney by the ex-wife of Home, Sweet Home composer, Henry Bishop, and three
weekends of Aussie Rules without a single goal scored; not to mention the first defeat of an English cricket
team by Australia.
- "Australian Connections " - Episode 3. From Colonies to Commonwealth: 1888 - 1916 (Login required)
From the excitement of the 1888 Centennial Exhibition in Melbourne to a death in the trenches of the Somme
in 1916, today's program considers boom, bust and Federation. It links these events to music by two composers
of the time: English-born George Marshall-Hall who settled in Australia and became a friend of the Heidelberg>br /> School of artists and Australian-born Frederick Septimus Kelly, who settled in England, became a friend of the
social elite and served at Gallipoli. The program features the first recording of Kelly's unfinished piano sonata
- left incomplete when he returned to the trenches in 1916.
- "Australian Connections " - Episode 4. Between the Wars: 1920 - 1940 (Login required)
This program shares memories: memories of listening to Test Match commentaries on the ABC and of the Depression (Jim Coulter); and of learning to fly with Charles Kingsford-Smith (Lady Nancy Bird Walton).The program also shares passions: for Percy Grainger's adventures in language (Malcolm Gillies & David Pear): and for Henry Handel Richardson's famous Richard Mahoney Trilogy and how she composed songs by way of relaxation (Clive Probyn & Bruce Steele). And this is the period that saw the foundation of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, soon to be followed by ABC orchestras in every capital city in Australia - stories told by Lesley Johnson and Philip Sametz. Musical analysis comes from Richard Divall, who introduces the orchestral suite The Bush by Fritz Hart; and Larry Sitsky, who plays the Sonata Ballade by the rather neglected composer Roy Agnew.
- "Australian Connections " - Episode 5: If you remember the Melbourne Olympics of 1956 (Login required)
If you remember the thrill of Italian food and cheap red wine; if you went to hear Sir Bernard Heinze's concerts in the Melbourne Town Hall; if you were an avid Argonaut; if you remember Sir Donald Campbell and "Bluebird" - or even if you remember none of these things at first hand, then this is the 'Australian Connections' program for you! Sharing their memories in this fifth program in the series are Charles Fuerst, who describes emigrating from Vienna to Australia after the Second World War, and how he volunteered his services as a translator at the 1956 Olympics; and Dave Warren, who relates how it took no less a person than a visiting RAF Air Marshal to spot that Dave's device for recording aircraft flight data was worth developing: it became the famous "Black Box." Historian Graeme Davison shares his love of the popular culture of Australia in the 1950s; Merrick Beesley recounts the exploits of Donald Campbell on Lake Eyre in 1964; Elizabeth Weeks recalls the excitement of being introduced to big Romantic music at the Bernard Heinze Youth Concerts; Larry Sitsky and Colin Symes reflect on the impact of Corroboree by John Antill and that composer's champion, Eugene Goossens; Joel Crotty introduces music by Robert Hughes and Margaret Sutherland; and Peter Sculthorpe remembers how difficult it was in the 1950s to get his ideas taken seriously.
- "Australian Connections " - Episode 6: Setting Sail: 1973 - 1988 (Login required)
Australia in the 1970s and 80s experienced scientific, cultural and sporting achievements along with political controversy. Tim Dehn links people and events of this period to music by Australian composers Graham Koehne, Ann Carr-Boyd and Ross Edwards.
- "Australian Connections " - Episode 7: The New Millenium (Login required)
In this final program, music by Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Anne Carr-Boyd, Elena Kats-Chernin and Brenton Broadstock accompanies people and events here over the past decade. Julian Burnside, QC, considers one aspect of contemporary Australian life and there's a look to the future with digital radio. This series of Australian Connections began in 1788 with a tiny English piano that doubled as a side table and it ends with an 8-octave grand piano made here and exported to England.
Enquiries are welcome.