Am Forbes

Experiencing Music—Restoring the Spiritual: Music as Well-being

In her most recent book, Experiencing Music—Restoring the Spiritual, the Rev. June BoyceTillman MBE draws on a lifetime of musical experience as a performer, educator and composer of sacred works, and explores the transformative power of music to rebuild individuals, relationships and community that she has experienced and observed. She balances the liminality of ethnographic research by frequent recourse to an extraordinary breadth of scholarship from disciplines such as theology, musicology, philosophy, education and anthropology to construct a framework for her arguments.

Sorrowful Voices: Performing Mahler's Kindertotenlieder

Gustav Mahlers Kindertotenlieder is arguably one of the most daunting of song cycles, not only on account of its technical demands but due to the intrinsic emotional weight of Rückerts poetry. In performance the singer becomes the conduit of the textual and musical expression and bears the artistic weight of enabling both poet and composer to ‘speak’. This paper considers the multiple ‘voices’ that inform and inhabit performance of Mahlers Kindertotenlieder in addition to those of poet and composer. It explores the ‘performing voices’ as represented by the interpretative gestures of iconic performances, including those of Kathleen Ferrier and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, considers the ‘mythological voices’ emanating from the superstitions surrounding the work, and finally considers the ‘personal voice’ of the performer with its entwined physical and emotional characteristics. This paper underlines the role of vocal technique and controlled nuances of expression in the ability of the singer to convey the multilayered ‘sorrowful voices’ of the Kindertotenlieder to the listener.

The local impact of an international celebrity: Fritz Kreisler in Australasia

Abstract From early May to the end of July 1925 the violin virtuoso, Fritz Kreisler, toured Australia and New Zealand giving recitals in major cities to overwhelming audience and critical acclaim. Demand for tickets was so strong that an additional fifteen concerts were added to the tour even while it was underway. This article provides the first comprehensive account of Kreisler ‘s Australasian tour detailing the repertoire performed and considers evidence for the impact of this repertoire and of Kreisler himself on local performance scenes. The role of the media in shaping Kreislers reception is explored, focusing on pervasive quasi-religious imagery that painted Kreisler as a cultural ‘knight in shining armour’ for the Antipodes.

Henry Handel Richardson: The music

Abstract The acclaimed Australian novelist, Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946), best known as the author of The Getting of Wisdom, was by all accounts a very private person. Her adoption of a male nom de plume with her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908), went beyond a savvy ploy to avoid critical condescension and prejudgment of her writing as the product of a ‘lady novelist’, initiating what was to become an enduring barrier between her creative persona and her private life. As Henry Handel Richardson, Mrs Ethel Robertson produced novels and short stories, but these were not the only products of her creativity, as this edition of her songs bears testimony.