The 'Imagined Sound' of Australian Literature and Music

Joseph Cummins

Description

A new way to read and listen to literature and music

‘Imagined Sound’ is a unique cartography of the artistic, historical and political forces that have informed the post-World War II representation of Australian landscapes. It is the first book to formulate the unique methodology of ‘imagined sound’, a new way to read and listen to literature and music that moves beyond the dominance of the visual, the colonial mode of knowing, controlling and imagining Australian space. Emphasising sound and listening, this approach draws out and re-examines the key narratives that shape and are shaped by Australian landscapes and histories, stories of first contact, frontier violence, the explorer journey, the convict experience, non-Indigenous belonging, Pacific identity and contemporary Indigenous Dreaming. ‘Imagined Sound’ offers a compelling analysis of how these narratives are reharmonised in key works of literature and music.

Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction – Imagined Sound; Part One: Listening to the Continent; 1. Reimagining ‘the centre’: Francis Webb’s ‘Eyre All Alone’ and David Lumsdaine’s Aria for Edward John Eyre; 2. Midnight Oil: Sounding Australian Rock around the Bicentenary; 3. Sound and Silence: Listening and Relation in the Novels of Alex Miller; Part Two: Listening to Islands and Archipelagos; 4. An Archipelago of Convicts and Outsiders: The Songs of The Drones and Gareth Liddiard; 5. Echoes between Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania: The Space of the Island in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm; 6. A Sonic Passage Between Islands: Mutiny Music by Baecastuff; Part Three: Listening to the Continental Archipelago; 7. Noisy Songlines in the Top End; Coda; Notes; Works Cited; Index.

Sujets

• Literary criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781785270932
• Langue: English

Extrait

The ‘Imagined Sound’ of Australian Literature and Music
The ‘Imagined Sound’ of Australian Literature and Music
Joseph Cummins
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2019
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Joseph Cummins 2019
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-091-8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-091-5 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Imagined Sound
Part One Listening to the Continent
1 Reimagining ‘The Centre’: Francis Webb’s ‘Eyre All Alone’ and David Lumsdaine’s Aria for Edward John Eyre
2 Midnight Oil: Sounding Australian Rock around the Bicentenary
3 Sound and Silence: Listening and Relation in the Novels of Alex Miller
Part Two Listening to Islands and Archipelagos
4 An Archipelago of Convicts and Outsiders: The Songs of the Drones and Gareth Liddiard
5 Echoes between Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania: The Space of the Island in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm
6 A Sonic Passage between Islands: Mutiny Music by Baecastuff
Part Three Listening to the Continental Archipelago
7 Noisy Songlines in the Top End
Coda
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Foreword
Hearing is the first of our senses to be activated, and the last to be extinguished. Of all our sensory conduits to the world, being heard is the most powerful evidence of life. As Shakespeare dramatized in Hamlet , the dead may be seen, smelled, tasted and touched, but they cannot be heard; after death, ‘the rest is silence’. In the public sphere, two senses above all are felt to be both competent and appropriate in the exchange of complex meanings: sight and hearing. Yet while they might be traversing the same material terrain, the two are such dissimilar vehicles that they disclose and create very different political spaces.
Vision is the faculty most closely implicated in scientific discourse, and approved forms of knowledge are invariably visual metaphors: vision, perspective, revelation, imagination, enlightenment. These describe forms of knowledge whose objective is to exercise control over the universe. In the (spurious) mind–body split, science elevates the activities of the former over the latter, and vision is the sense most closely associated with the analytical mind. Vision is an instrument of regulation, power (the controlling gaze, the panopticon). It is a distancing faculty, with high powers of analytical separation and is thus associated with the axiom that ‘knowledge is power’, the foundations of the Enlightenment paradigm. This historical association has given vision great authority.
But sound is a very different mediator. It floods the social space so that all its occupants hear much the same thing, share the experience in a way that looking cannot do. We cannot see ourselves or the community of which we are memebers in toto , but we can hear ourselves, immersed in a collective identity. Sound also penetrates the body – the voice in the ear is extraordinarily intense and intimate. In many ways, then, our understanding of our social being is mediated more fully and intensely acoustically than visually. Sound can also instantly modify the nature and the horizon of identity. We shout, we whisper, we snarl or vocally caress. This is why sound is such a powerful and flexible tool of social negotiation. And while we ‘stand back to get a better look’, our voices are channels of propinquity, ways of drawing us nearer to each other.
It is these distinctive attributes of sonic negotiation which have made sound the oldest way of defining territory and identity. From war cries of the ancients, the trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho, to church bells, village clock chimes, political and sports stadium chants, we define our space through sound. Sound defines collective identity among all communities. The community in this case is defined in terms of nation: the Australian soundscape and some of what R. Murray Schafer, in his benchmark study The Tuning of the World , called its ‘keynote sounds’, sonic markers of place. In the essays collected here, Joseph Cummins has explored the way in which sound is interwoven with various attempts to articulate Australian identity. Using as his platform the idea of ‘imagined sound’, he explores

the imaginative and spatio-temporal relations created by sound within literature and music […] It is imagined sound because it is created by descriptive language, by ideas, even by imagines, not just the physical vibration of heard sound […] In contrast to thinking about sight, attending to sound lets me consider how space and time are remapped and reconfigured by what we hear .
In the following studies it is primarily the soundscape as mediated through artistic representations of place and space, an approach that lifts the study well above simplistic sonic postcards, to disclose the complex ambiguities in the relationship between sonic and visual space, and the national imaginary. The work thus overlaps with a form of ‘literary criticism’, the analysis of why literature ‘works’. But it is distinguished by its recognition of the link between sound and language, a link that was largely elided as poetry increasingly became a medium of print, a process that turned critics into eyes rather that ears, that turned Shakespeare from a master of the stage and a sound engineer, into a ‘literary genius’, from the mid-seventeenth century, the era in which print became the primary authoritative medium of information. That shift from aural to visual authority was crystallized in Samuel Johnson’s decision for his Dictionary that the English vocabulary should be confined exclusively to words that had appeared in print. It was a development that laid down the foundations of a critical tradition in which even scholars of popular music often feel that an analysis of the subject equates to a discussion of lyrics, without reference to the crucial role played by music – sound – in the formation of meaning and affect.
This collection of essays moves us further towards, or back to, a recognition of the role of sound in the definition and projection of national identity, a role which, as these studies disclose, is far more complex than simplistic celebrations of, for example, ‘national’ musics. These case studies in the way sound functions in the articulation of place and space reveal the complexities, contradictions and fissures in the bland generalizations that have framed so many representations of Australian identity.
Bruce Johnson
Leura, NSW, June 2019
Acknowledgements
This book is underpinned by a sort of refusal to stop thinking and writing about music and literature together. Such a project would not have been possible without the support of Elizabeth McMahon and John Napier at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Their encouragement, knowledge, advice and cross-disciplinary enthusiasm was vital. Alister Spence, Phil Slater and Helen Groth were also mentors to me during my time at UNSW. A particular thank you to Al and Phil, from whom I learnt so much.
Various chapters of this book were road-tested at conferences held by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), the Australasian Association for Literature, the Australia/New Zealand and UK/Ireland branches of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the Centre for Modernist Studies in Australia and the American Comparative Literature Association. A particular thank you to everyone at ASAL, the most supportive scholarly community I can imagine. Tej P. S. Sood and Abi Pandey at Anthem Press were integral to the transformation of my manuscript into a book.
Thanks to my parents Anthony and Mary-Anne, my brother and sisters, Serge Stanley, Dirk Kruithof, On the Stoop, Lines of Flight, the Splinter Orchestra and the NOWnow, Matt Syres. Thanks also to Paul Jones and Jimena Acevedo at Ian Barker Gardens, and to the music staff at International Grammar School, Sydney.
A very special thank you to Ashley Barnwell, for all your encouragement, inspiration, support and love. You are my partner in crime, always willing to discuss, deconstruct, and argue.
As a young child my grandmother Colleen read me Roald Dahl’s Boy and Going Solo , igniting my interest in history and writing. As I got older, and to the present day, she is always ready to discuss books, history and politics. For sparking my love of these topics, and for her encouragement, example of open mindedness and discussion, and genuine interest in my work, Imagined Sound is dedicated to Nan Colleen.
Early versions of parts of this book were previously published as ‘A