Critical Times: Australian New Music and the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s

This issue of the resonate journal re-approaches some of the music composed by Australians in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Although these years are often acknowledged as important for establishing contemporary understandings of Australian new music, they are under-represented in writings about more recent Australian music of this kind. What scholarship exists tends towards the biographical.

There are also startlingly few commercial recordings of new music from this era. Indeed, if there is one question that prompted the theme of this issue of resonate, then it is this: how is it that one can find endless references to Nigel Butterley’s In the Head the Fire as ‘the composition that won the 1966 Italia Prize ahead of Luciano Berio’s Laborintus II’, and yet listening to the piece requires a record player and a long-out-of-print LP...?