Composition as calling

A notable activist and musician

Kay Dreyfus

Inner Song: A biography of Margaret Sutherland

by Jillian Graham

The Miegunyah

$50 hb, 302 pp

Press

Jillian Graham begins her biography of Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984) with a story that vividly captures two themes that recur throughout the book: Sutherland’s activism, and her sometime exclusion from Australia’s institutional musical life as it developed through her lifetime.

The occasion is the opening of Melbourne’s new, custom-built concert hall on the south bank of the Yarra River. Speaking from the stage on 6 November 1982, Premier Rupert Hamer – for whom the hall is now named – spoke of Sutherland’s role in securing the five-and-a-half acre site that was formerly Wirth’s Circus Park for what became Melbourne’s arts centre precinct. Starting as a founding member of the Combined Arts Centre Movement (CACM) in 1943, she ‘kept the venture on the political agenda’ across the four decades that brought her to this moment, marking significant milestones (the laying of the foundation stone by Elizabeth II during her 1954 visit), and fighting off a competing commercial development. In support of the foundation of the CACM, Sutherland organised a petition of some 40,000 signatures.

In the gala concert that followed, not one note of Australian music was heard. Although Sutherland was present, none of her music was included in the program. Graham writes that this deficit was partially rectified when a tribute concert was given in the foyer –– the foyer, not the main hall – in October 1984. By that time, Sutherland was dead.

Joel Crotty is an Australian musicologist with a comprehensive knowledge of twentieth- and twenty-first century Australian music, its practitioners, creators, and scene. I asked him why Margaret Sutherland’s music matters. He opined that Sutherland is ‘the best of her generation’ – that is, the generation of the 1890s to the 1920s – head and shoulders above the rest. She brought Australian composition into the twentieth century, connecting to contemporary Europe, advocating for Béla Bartok and Paul Hindemith against a mainstream preoccupation with the English pastoral style. Sutherland experimented with neoclassicism in the late 1930s and foreshadowed the modernism that was to characterise the music of the 1960s. She wrote in a style that the younger generation of composers wanted, joining them in reacting against the conservatism of the older generation.

Crotty’s good opinion is not without its caveats. Sutherland was at her best in smaller combinations; voice and strings were what she understood best. Works written for larger forces were more problematic. Graham admits that Sutherland did not understand the orchestra or orchestration well; she even wrote outside the range of some instruments. Local musicians tried to help her with her orchestral scores, but at times goodwill evaporated in the face of her combative behaviour and her resistance to the idea of making any changes to her music. Crotty ascribes this deficiency to her lack of formal training.

Among her many strongly held opinions, Sutherland professed a disdain for institutional learning, an attitude which, according to Graham, she had absorbed from her aunts. When she travelled abroad in 1924, she did not enrol in the Royal College of Music, as did a whole cluster of aspiring young Australian women musicians in the 1930s. Instead, though she undertook some private discussions with the English composer Arnold Bax, she preferred to learn by observing the scene, an approach that clearly opened her ears but did not address the technical requirements of writing for a symphony orchestra.

It is probably fair to say that Sutherland was shaped more by her father’s family than by her formal educational experiences, and Graham gives close attention to this formative process as one of the motivations for the biography. The moderately affluent, genteel Sutherland family was certainly remarkable in several ways. The men were all teachers, academics, or professionals who shared with their father a lamentable habit of dying in early middle age; three of the four have entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Of the three women, Jane was an artist while the two other aunts were musicians. Only three of the men married, including Margaret’s father, George. Curiously reclusive, the five unmarried aunts and uncles continued to live together with their widowed mother.

Graham’s narrative of Sutherland’s early years draws generously on Sutherland’s own writings. Apart from a travel diary from an overseas trip in 1951, Sutherland did not keep a diary or journal. But she did write, and well; Graham quotes freely from her autobiographical notes and articles, from talks given to the various clubs and societies of which she was a member, from newspaper opinion pieces and correspondence. Accordingly, Sutherland’s own voice comes through strongly. The primary parental influence was her father; in the classification system devised by the German pop-psychologist Volker Elis Pilgrim, she was a father–daughter. Graham remarks that she rarely mentions her mother, except to say that she was a ‘wonderful mother’. The aunts were stronger role models. Her aunt Julia was Margaret’s first piano teacher, while she derived the idea that her composing was a calling from her aunt Jane.

All is charm in Margaret’s stories of her early life and her Sutherland family. Later, the tone changes. Her exchanges with the newly established Australian Broadcasting Commission are argumentative and challenging, though one might say alongside batting for her own music she was also advocating for Australian music generally – self-interest and selflessness are sometimes hard to disentangle from her lifelong, energetic campaigning. But it is her account of her undoubtedly troubled marriage to Norman Albiston that is most disturbing. It was clearly a mismatch; it may well be, given her family’s history with the institution, that Margaret was temperamentally unsuited to marriage. She certainly seems to have been more comfortable with the company of other professional women, and it is striking that most of the people Graham interviewed for her book are women.

Part of the received narrative of Sutherland’s life is that her marriage was unhappy (which it clearly was) and that her husband was unsympathetic to her creative aspirations. But I could not help noticing that in the ten-roomed house the couple acquired in Kew, there was a dedicated music room large enough to house two pianos, one at least a grand, and that Margaret kept the house after the divorce. Graham admits that we are given a completely

Christmas In Brogo

one-sided view of the ‘hideous years’ of the marriage. Quoting Norman’s third wife, to whom he was married for twenty-eight years, Graham offers a more sympathetic portrait of the man. Altogether, Graham’s biography is a balanced and tender study of a complex life, the third of three dedicated studies of the life and works of this important Australian musician. g

Kay Dreyfus is a Research Affiliate in the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (SOPHIS), Monash University.

If we always had a long enough line we could forgo prose altogether. Let that opinion stand for all those that have come before and expired. What follows is a report, some of the content of which could also be categorised as rumour. I heard reports of there being an elderly writer, with a weak voice, present, but I was there and neither saw, nor heard them. But the day doesn’t start with a gathering, rather the getting ready. It starts with unicorns. Ideally, everyone would have a unicorn but there aren’t enough to go around, and we only keep them to keep

Them safe. I’ve my own now, and arguably it protects me, as no harm came to me during the earthquake, apart from the displacing of a straw hat from its usual shelf; probably some lowering of dust. My unicorn is small and well put together, with rainbow tail and mane, a strawberry horn and mouldy mauvish fetlocks. Snowberry would be a good name. Unicorns do not walk out of the bush like bushrangers or goannas. They must be coaxed into existence, according to what I’ve seen. Luckily, I was among some very good unicorn coaxers, at least

They took the fate thrust upon them with grace and industry. Labouring towards a unicorn can take quite a few hours, but it is apt enough work for Christmas Day, when there are no puddings left to stir, and we have danced our all to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got To Give It Up’ –something I suggest everyone tries. A little outdoor disco on Christmas morning is just the ticket I reckon, and helps the fruit cake go down. A stump doesn’t need a speech if it can feature a dancer, a boogie merchant, of which I can tell you there are nineteen humans,

One pre-existing unicorn, some arachnids, and insects, which count but are not counted. I probably forget most of the day and the night. Buttonholes are a thing: I wear a large watermelon-coloured dahlia. And there are two more unicorns by evening, which makes us excited, partly because of the inevitable unicorn race, which has no winner. Two humans ride their destinies home, opining in their soft ears. Later, I remember the night before, how the dead radio came to life, just after midnight, playing both Classic FM and Clean Bandit’s ‘Symphony’.

Michael Farrell