From port essington to the himalayas: Music, place and spirituality in two contemporary australian compositions

Abstract

This chapter discusses notions of ‘Australianness’, a sense of spirituality is often bound up very closely with a sense of place, and it is this nexus between music, spirituality and place with which the two pieces. These are Peter Sculthorpe’s Port Essington, for string trio and string orchestra, based on Sculthorpe’s score to the film, Essington, made for Australian Broadcasting Commission Television and originally scored for piano, and Ice Man, for piano solo, by Stuart Greenbaum. Stuart Greenbaum’s Ice Man presents one of the archetypes of the outback described by Hughes: that of ‘lost explorers’ - although in this case the locale is not in this country but in the Himalayas. While the Hi..