The Ngarra-burria First Peoples Composers program is an Indigenous-led initiative that assists Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians to develop composition skills and emerge within the Australian classical/new music sector. It is about enabling new expressions via mostly scored music for fine First Nations musicians, and the facilitation of their own narratives. This is against a background of many non-Indigenous composers appropriating First Nations cultural materials including music, and First Nations cultural and historical narratives, a practice which went on for many decades. In the chapter we hear from the founder Christopher Sainsbury and participating composer Nardi Simpson, both First Nations people. Ngarra-burria means ‘to listen and to sing’ in the Dharug Aboriginal language of the Sydney region. Whilst the industry has some way to go, in the seven years since the program began in 2016 many ensembles, festival directors, soloists, educators and broadcasters have indeed begun to listen to First Nations composers and sing with them. Many composers from the program are being commissioned, programmed, broadcast and participate in various industry events. As Nardi Simpson points out, it is not all about the music, but also about the ongoing community of First Nations musicians that existed already, of which Ngarra-burria has become a recent part. Whilst the composers glean from any relevant Western styles and techniques in the workshops we hold, they are not necessarily tethered to the same.

This chapter considers evidence of European music making in the early colonial towns of Sydney and Hobart. Two concert series in 1826 show the role of music in reimagining colonial towns as organised and aesthetic cities. The musicians that led the concerts shaped these musical worlds, bringing European instruments, forms of opera and vocal music, chamber, orchestral and solo instrumental music that would continue to develop over the next two centuries in Australia’s urban centres. We trace several key musicians who shaped the early phase of these towns’ music-making, looking to the cultural practices of the British Isles and continental Europe. While contextual evidence from this time reminds us of the ongoing presence of Aboriginal people, there is only an occasional glimpse of the musicians’ awareness that their efforts to import a European musical culture took place on Aboriginal land.

In this artist perspective, didjeridu virtuoso William Barton recounts key moments in his career from his education on Kalkadunga Country to the biggest art music stages in Australia and the world. From early collaborations with Peter Sculthorpe to recognition of Barton as a composer in his own right, Barton now sits in the engine room of major arts programming, with roles on Boards of Directors of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Music Centre. Barton’s music and his practice remains grounded in history, place and culture.

This chapter explores the history and present of the singles charts, and the phenomenon of the number one single, in a specifically Australian context. The history of the Australian singles charts are explored, from their beginnings in Go-Set magazine in 1966, based on sales of physical product, to the present-day situation, where the ARIA singles charts are primarily based on listens on streaming services. The chapter goes on to discuss the ways in which these differing consumption methods over the years affects the composition of the charts. While the charts in Australia often reflect overseas success by international artists, the particular music industry ecosystem in Australia can affect the success of different music.Similarly, the number one singles by Australian artists from the last decade are discussed, suggesting that it is increasingly difficult to have Australian chart success without international success.

This chapter provides an overview of folk and multicultural festivals in Australia, especially as to how these events have been important to the creation and celebration of community identity since the 1950s. It begins with a brief outline and critique of the policies that have shaped modern Australia as a culturally diverse nation and the role of festivals as a vehicle for representing ethnic identity, inclusivity and tolerance. This discussion also considers the contentious positioning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures as part of a broader notion of diversity, as well as debates raised by a focus on the performance of ethnic identity that emphasises authentic practice and devalues cross-cultural collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of an Australian folk culture in British folk music traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the revivalist folk movement of the 1960s. The final section outlines the development of national folk festivals as events representing an authentic Australian folklore and culture that, like multicultural festivals, offer insight into the problematic relationships between place, community, belonging and the national space.

Modernist art music of the interwar period takes its place among other early Australian musical modernisms. It developed within an antipodean modernity transformed by new technologies of transport and communication. Mobility – the movement of people, scores, print journalism and recordings – is central here. Using a conceptual framework informed by transnational historical approaches and expanded understandings of the unsettled and contested concept of modernism, this chapter provides a more generous reading of this musical moment long obscured by the concerns and anxieties of a young nation negotiating its complicated ties to Britain and continental Europe while searching for a distinctive culture. After tracing the emergence of a modernist musical discourse in Australia’s popular press, this chapter looks at the output of a group of composers and various forms of modernist musicking to reveal a transnational community of Australian musicians who actively participated in what can be understood as a modernist music world.

This chapter considers practices of Indigenous language singing in the place now known as Australia, framing it as both an overt act of resistance to settler-colonisation and key to the maintenance of reciprocal Indigenous relationships with landscapes. In response to deliberate and sustained government attempts to diminish the use of hundreds of Indigenous languages, song has emerged as core to Indigenous language revitalization efforts. Renewed interest in Indigenous songs has also motivated increasing numbers of Indigenous community-directed ethnomusicology studies involving the repatriation of audio recordings. In describing the dynamic intersection of popular music and Indigenous song forms since the mid twentieth century, this chapter draws links to longstanding Indigenous practices of sharing songs across vast geographic and cultural boundaries. Discussing the inherent complexity of revitalizing, maintaining, and innovating within Indigenous traditions, the authors emphasise the relational nature of song and the inherent responsibilities singers carry.

Festivals are one of the main contemporary forums in which Indigenous Australian public ceremony is staged, learned, shared and increasingly, revived. In this chapter we review the literature on public ceremony at Indigenous festivals, focusing on Junba at the Mowanjum festival in the Kimberley and Kun-borrk/Manyardi at the Stone Country and Mahbilil festivals in western Arnhem Land/Kakadu. We consider festivals as serving several purposes: Firstly, as a forum for cultural revival, reclamation, and maintenance, supporting language and song revival and reclamation work by local individuals, groups and Indigenous businesses. Secondly, as a forum for education and diplomacy, serving as powerful statements of Indigenous sovereignty, identity, law and diplomacy which educate the broader public. Thirdly, as a site for continuity and innovation of practice. We examine how performers in the Kimberley use Junba to transform society to address inequity and discrimination in wider Australian society, and performers in western Arnhem Land use Kun-borrk/Manyardi at festivals to support interdependence and reciprocity enacted as part of regional ceremonial practices and ideologies of being ‘different together’.

This chapter explores the development of youth music media and music festivals in Australia, and the synergies between them. This includes the national expansion in the 1990s of public youth radio station Triple J, and its ABC television counterparts rage and Recovery, in parallel with a new wave of music festivals like the Big Day Out, Homebake and Livid. This infrastructure and these events were central to a period of transition for Australian popular music. Local alternative scenes developed into a translocal industrial sub-sector, marketing a distinct national identity and incorporating urban and regional youth audiences. Cultural institutions and practices established during this time, such as the modern music festival and the celebration of ‘homegrown’ Australian artists, continue to be influential. This chapter draws on secondary texts and scholarly literature to map and connect these developments, which are analysed using scene theory.

This chapter explores the music histories of two internationally recognizable Australian sites – The Sydney Opera House and Uluru. By examining music’s relationship with place, the chapter discusses millennial-old musical histories, early colonial negotiations and contemporary musical encounters. The world-renowned Sydney Opera House opened to gala performances, protest and acclaim in 1973. Positioned on Sydney Harbour, the site has variously been known as Bennelong Point and Tubowgule, has fostered music making for millennia, and continues to be symbolic of Australia’s musical identity. Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) is a Dreaming site and geological phenomenon in Australia’s geographical ‘Red Centre’ with long-established importance in Anangu songlines, which also holds significant symbolic value in contemporary music making. Centring this account in place, the chapter explores the musical encounters that have shaped music in Australia across time, drawing attention to the acoustic possibilities of Country, people and stories of the past.

The performance of ‘Chinese music’ in Australian has a long and varied history. Performances of sonic arts which display a Chinese origin or connection range across various genres including classical, folk, opera, popular and sacred music. The performers are and have been equally diverse, including immigrants, international students, visiting artists and cosmopolitans from mainland China, the Sinosphere and the population of ‘Chinese overseas’, as well as people born or permanently residing in Australia of both Chinese and non-Chinese heritage. This chapter focuses on contemporary practice of different genres and on ethnographic examples from our own experience, but as space and historical records allow, we also look back in time. Our discussion illustrates some of the main ways that music has served to enhance social connections within and beyond Australia’s Chinese community, including within an Australian sociocultural fabric that has increasingly acknowledged and valued cultural diversity and multiplicities of cultural identity.

This concluding chapter considers the dynamics of music and place, issues of diversity, and the impact of Indigenous artists on building bridges to a whole history of music in this place. Reflecting on the four interlinked themes guiding this Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia: Continuities, Encounters, Diversities, and Institutions, it takes up musical threads not covered elsewhere in the volume, discussing pub rock and hip hop to consider dynamics of exclusion, inclusion, and identity. In advocating for a move away from anthropocentrism toward ecocentrism in considering the relationships between music and the place now known as Australia, it simultaneously foregrounds unresolved tensions associated with Indigeneity, settler-colonialism, and prejudice in music that are ultimately intertwined with concepts of place and belonging.