Academic literature on the topic 'Australian vocal repertoire'

Button-quail (Turnicidae) are a greatly understudied family of birds; their cryptic habits make studying them in the wild challenging. They are known to be quite vocal which could assist with detectability, and so it follows that survey results will be more reliable as knowledge about button-quail vocal repertoire increases. Until recently, there were no published vocal recordings of the Chestnut-backed Button-quail Turnix castanotus, and descriptions and accounts of this species’ vocalisations were limited. We recorded vocalisations of Chestnut-backed Button-quail at six locations across the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Three broad vocalisation types were identified: advertising ooms, drumming, and contact calls. We present descriptions and visual representations of these vocalisations, and draw comparisons with previously published accounts of this species, and other Australian button-quail.

AbstractBudgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) are small Australian parrots with a well-documented, learned vocal repertoire and a high degree of vocal production learning. These birds live in large, social flocks and they vocally interact with each other in a dynamic, reciprocal manner. We assume that budgerigars must process and integrate a wide variety of sensory stimuli when selecting appropriate vocal responses to conspecifics during vocal interactions, but the relative contributions of these different stimuli to that process are next to impossible to tease apart in a natural context. Here we show that budgerigars, under operant control, can learn to respond to specific stimuli with a specific vocal response. Budgerigars were trained to produce contact calls to a combination of auditory and visual cues. Birds learned to produce specific contact calls to stimuli that differed either in location (visual or auditory) or quality (visual). Interestingly, the birds could not learn to associate different vocal responses with different auditory stimuli coming from the same location. Surprisingly, this was so even when the auditory stimuli and the responses were the same (i.e., the bird’s own contact call). These results show that even in a highly controlled operant context, acoustic cues alone were not sufficient to support vocal production learning in budgerigars. From a different perspective, these results highlight the significant role that social interaction likely plays in vocal production learning so elegantly shown by Irene Pepperberg’s work in parrots.

Bennett wrote in a variety of instrumental and vocal genres. Some of his most popular pieces during his lifetime comprise anthems, oratorios and cantatas. But his enduring legacy resides with his instrumental output, in particular works that include a pianist. This article begins with an examination of performances that occurred in Britain and in Germany, where Bennett’s close associations with the Mendelssohn circle provided him with substantial encouragement during his formative years. Advances in transportation and increasing globalization led touring artists to travel farther to cities worldwide, bringing with them Bennett repertoire to foreign shores. George Loder, for example, conducted the US premiere of The Wood Nymphs overture at the New York Philharmonic in 1848. Arabella Goddard gave an early American performance of the Piano Sonata Op. 46 (Die Jungfrau von Orleans) in 1875, just two years after its premiere in London. In addition, émigrés from Britain and Germany, especially to Australia, New Zealand and America, contributed to the movement of British music across the globe. In both small towns and large cities, from Melbourne to Auckland, San Francisco to Boston, audiences heard Bennett compositions. In tracing performances of Bennett’s instrumental music before the First World War in both his own country and selected areas outside the British Isles, this research contributes to our understanding of developments in modern concert life as well as the transmission of British music within the Empire and beyond.

AbstractWhile in the northern hemisphere, many studies have been conducted on the vocal repertoire of long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melas), no such study has been conducted in the southern hemisphere. Presented here, is the first study on the vocalisations of long-finned pilot whales along the southern coast of mainland Australia. Multiple measures were taken of 2028 vocalisations recorded over five years in several locations. These vocalisations included tonal sounds with and without overtones, sounds of burst-pulse character, graded sounds, biphonations, and calls of multiple components. Vocalisations were further categorised based on spectrographic features into 18 contour classes. Altogether, vocalisations ranged from approximately 200 Hz to 25 kHz in fundamental frequency and from 0.03 s to 2.07 s in duration. These measures compared well with those from northern hemisphere pilot whales. Some call types were almost identical to northern hemisphere vocalisations, even though the geographic ranges of the two populations are far apart. Other call types were unique to Australia. Striking similarities with calls of short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) and sometimes sympatric killer whales (Orcinus orca) were also found. Theories for call convergence and divergence are discussed.

IllegitimacyBack in 1987, Gregory Bateson argued that:Kurt Vonnegut gives us wary advice – that we should be careful what we pretend because we become what we pretend. And something like that, some sort of self-fulfilment, occurs in all organisations and human cultures. What people presume to be ‘human’ is what they will build in as premises of their social arrangements, and what they build in is sure to be learned, is sure to become a part of the character of those who participate. (178)The human capacity to marginalise and discriminate against others on the basis of innate and constructed characteristics is evident from the long history of discrimination against people whose existence is ‘illegitimate’, defined as being outside the law. What is inside or outside the law depends upon the context under consideration. For example, in societies such as ancient Greece and the antebellum United States, where slavery was legal, people who were constructed as ‘slaves’ could legitimately be treated very differently from ‘citizens’: free people who benefit from a range of human rights (Northup). The discernment of what is legitimate from that which is illegitimate is thus implicated within the law but extends into the wider experience of community life and is evident within the civil structures through which society is organised and regulated.The division between the legitimate and illegitimate is an arbitrary one, susceptible to changing circumstances. Within recent memory a romantic/sexual relationship between two people of the same sex was constructed as illegitimate and actively persecuted. This was particularly the case for same-sex attracted men, since the societies regulating these relationships generally permitted women a wider repertoire of emotional response than men were allowed. Even when lesbian and gay relationships were legalised, they were constructed as less legitimate in the sense that they often had different rules around the age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual couples. In Australia, the refusal to allow same sex couples to marry perpetuates ways in which these relationships are constructed as illegitimate – beyond the remit of the legislation concerning marriage.The archetypal incidence of illegitimacy has historically referred to people born out of wedlock. The circumstances of birth, for example whether a person was born as a result of a legally-sanctioned marital relationship or not, could have ramifications throughout an individual’s life. Stories abound (for example, Cookson) of the implications of being illegitimate. In some social stings, such as Catherine Cookson’s north-eastern England at the turn of the twentieth century, illegitimate children were often shunned. Parents frequently refused permission for their (legitimate) children to play with illegitimate classmates, as if these children born out of wedlock embodied a contaminating variety of evil. Illegitimate children were treated differently in the law in matters of inheritance, for example, and may still be. They frequently lived in fear of needing to show a birth certificate to gain a passport, for example, or to marry. Sometimes, it was at this point in adult life, that a person first discovered their illegitimacy, changing their entire understanding of their family and their place in the world. It might be possible to argue that the emphasis upon the legitimacy of a birth has lessened in proportion to an acceptance of genetic markers as an indicator of biological paternity, but that is not the endeavour here.Given the arbitrariness and mutability of the division between legitimacy and illegitimacy as a constructed boundary, it is policed by social and legal sanctions. Boundaries, such as the differentiation between the raw and the cooked (Lévi-Strauss), or S/Z (Barthes), or purity and danger (Douglas), serve important cultural functions and also convey critical information about the societies that enforce them. Categories of person, place or thing which are closest to boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate can prompt existential anxiety since the capacity to discern between these categories is most challenged at the margins. The legal shenanigans which can result speak volumes for which aspects of life have the potential to unsettle a culture. One example of this which is writ large in the recent history of Australia is our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and the impact of this upon Australia’s multicultural project.Foreshadowing the sexual connotations of the illegitimate, one of us has written elsewhere (Green, ‘Bordering on the Inconceivable’) about the inconceivability of the Howard administration’s ‘Pacific solution’. This used legal devices to rewrite Australia’s borders to limit access to the rights accruing to refugees upon landing in a safe haven entitling them to seek asylum. Internationally condemned as an illegitimate construction of an artificial ‘migration zone’, this policy has been revisited and made more brutal under the Abbot regime with at least two people – Reza Barati and Hamid Khazaei – dying in the past year in what is supposed to be a place of safety provided by Australian authorities under their legal obligations to those fleeing from persecution. Crock points out, echoing the discourse of illegitimacy, that it is and always has been inappropriate to label “undocumented asylum seekers” as “‘illegal’” because: “until such people cross the border onto Australian territory, the language of illegality is nonsense. People who have no visas to enter Australia can hardly be ‘illegals’ until they enter Australia” (77). For Australians who identify in some ways – religion, culture, fellow feeling – with the detainees incarcerated on Nauru and Manus Island, it is hard to ignore the disparity between the government’s treatment of visa overstayers and “illegals” who arrive by boat (Wilson). It is a comparatively short step to construct this disparity as reflecting upon the legitimacy within Australia of communities who share salient characteristics with detained asylum seekers: “The overwhelmingly negative discourse which links asylum seekers, Islam and terrorism” (McKay, Thomas & Kneebone, 129). Some communities feel themselves constructed in the public and political spheres as less legitimately Australian than others. This is particularly true of communities where members can be identified via markers of visible difference, including indicators of ethnic, cultural and religious identities: “a group who [some 585 respondent Australians …] perceived would maintain their own languages, customs and traditions […] this cultural diversity posed an extreme threat to Australian national identity” (McKay, Thomas & Kneebone, 129). Where a community shares salient characteristics such as ethnicity or religion with many detained asylum seekers they can become fearful of the discourses around keeping borders strong and protecting Australia from illegitimate entrants. MethodologyThe qualitative fieldwork upon which this paper is based took place some 6-8 years ago (2006-2008), but the project remains one of the most recent and extensive studies of its kind. There are no grounds for believing that any of the findings are less valid than previously. On the contrary, if political actions are constructed as a proxy for mainstream public consent, opinions have become more polarised and have hardened. Ten focus groups were held involving 86 participants with a variety of backgrounds including differences in age, gender, religious observance, religious identification and ethnicity. Four focus groups involved solely Muslim participants; six drew from the wider Australian community. The aim was to examine the response of different communities to mainstream Australian media representations of Islam, Muslims, and terrorism. Research questions included: “Are there differences in the ways in which Australian Muslims respond to messages about ‘fear’ and ‘terror’ compared with broader community Australians’ responses to the same messages?” and “How do Australian Muslims construct the perceptions and attitudes of the broader Australian community based on the messages that circulate in the media?” Recent examples of kinds of messages investigated include media coverage of Islamic State’s (ISIS’s) activities (Karam & Salama), and the fear-provoking coverage around the possible recruitment of Australians to join the fighting in Syria and Iraq (Cox). The ten focus groups were augmented by 60 interviews, 30 with respondents who identified as Muslim (15 males, 15 female) and 30 respondents from the broader community (same gender divisions). Finally, a market research company was commissioned to conduct a ‘fear survey’, based on an established ‘fear of rape’ inventory (Aly and Balnaves), delivered by telephone to a random sample of 750 over-18 y.o. Australians in which Muslims formed a deliberative sub-group, to ensure they were over-sampled and constituted at least 150 respondents. The face-to-face surveys and focus groups were conducted by co-author, Dr Anne Aly. General FindingsMuslim respondents indicate a heightened intensity of reaction to media messages around fear and terror. In addition to a generalised fear of the potential impact of terrorism upon Australian society and culture, Muslim respondents experienced a specific fear that any terrorist-related media coverage might trigger hostility towards Muslim Australian communities and their own family members. According to the ‘fear survey’ scale, Muslim Australians at the time of the research experienced approximately twice the fear level of mainstream Australian respondents. Broader Australian community Australian Muslim communityFear of a terrorist attackFear of a terrorist attack combines with the fear of a community backlashSpecific victims: dead, injured, bereavedCommunity is full of general victims in addition to any specific victimsShort-term; intense impactsProtracted, diffuse impactsSociety-wide sympathy and support for specific victims and all those involved in dealing with the trauma and aftermathSociety-wide suspicion and a marginalisation of those affected by the backlashVictims of a terrorist attack are embraced by broader communityVictims of backlash experience hostility from the broader communityFour main fears were identified by Australian Muslims as a component of the fear of terrorism:Fear of physical harm. In addition to the fear of actual terrorist acts, Australian Muslims fear backlash reprisals such as those experienced after such events as 9/11, the Bali bombings, and attacks upon public transport passengers in Spain and the UK. These and similar events were constructed as precipitating increased aggression against identifiable Australian Muslims, along with shunning of Muslims and avoidance of their company.The construction of politically-motivated fear. Although fear is an understandable response to concerns around terrorism, many respondents perceived fears as being deliberately exacerbated for political motives. Such strategies as “Be alert, not alarmed” (Bassio), labelling asylum seekers as potential terrorists, and talk about home-grown terrorists, are among the kinds of fears which were identified as politically motivated. The political motivation behind such actions might include presenting a particular party as strong, resolute and effective. Some Muslim Australians construct such approaches as indicating that their government is more interested in political advantage than social harmony.Fear of losing civil liberties. As well as sharing the alarm of the broader Australian community at the dozens of legislative changes banning people, organisations and materials, and increasing surveillance and security checks, Muslim Australians fear for the human rights implications across their community, up to and including the lives of their young people. This fear is heightened when community members may look visibly different from the mainstream. Examples of the events fuelling such fears include the London police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian Catholic working as an electrician in the UK and shot in the month following the 7/7 attacks on the London Underground system (Pugliese). In Australia, the case of Mohamed Hannef indicated that innocent people could easily be unjustly accused and wrongly targeted, and even when this was evident the political agenda made it almost impossible for authorities to admit their error (Rix).Feeling insecure. Australian Muslims argue that personal insecurity has become “the new normal” (Massumi), disproportionately affecting Muslim communities in both physical and psychological ways. Physical insecurity is triggered by the routine avoidance, shunning and animosity experienced by many community members in public places. Psychological insecurity includes fear for the safety of younger members of the community compounded by concern that young people may become ‘radicalised’ as a result of the discrimination they experience. Australian Muslims fear the backlash following any possible terrorist attack on Australian soil and describe the possible impact as ‘unimaginable’ (Aly and Green, ‘Moderate Islam’).In addition to this range of fears expressed by Australian Muslims and constructed in response to wider societal reactions to increased concerns over radical Islam and the threat of terrorist activity, an analysis of respondents’ statements indicate that Muslim Australians construct the broader community as exhibiting:Fear of religious conviction (without recognising the role of their own secular/religious convictions underpinning this fear);Fear of extremism (expressed in various extreme ways);Fear of powerlessness (responded to by disempowering others); andFear of political action overseas having political effects at home (without acknowledging that it is the broader community’s response to such overseas events, such as 9/11 [Green ‘Did the world really change?’], which has also had impacts at home).These constructions, extrapolations and understandings by Australian Muslims of the fears of the broader community underpinning the responses to the threat of terror have been addressed elsewhere (Green and Aly). Legitimate Australian MuslimsOne frustration identified by many Muslim respondents centres upon a perceived ‘acceptable’ way to be an Australian Muslim. Arguing that the broader community construct Muslims as a homogenous group defined by their religious affiliation, these interviewees felt that the many differences within and between the twenty-plus national, linguistic, ethnic, cultural and faith-based groupings that constitute WA’s Muslim population were being ignored. Being treated as a homogenised group on a basis of faith appears to have the effect of putting that religious identity under pressure, paradoxically strengthening and reinforcing it (Aly, ‘Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism’). The appeal to Australian Muslims to embrace membership in a secular society and treat religion as a private matter also led some respondents to suggest they were expected to deny their own view of their faith, in which they express their religious identity across their social spheres and in public and private contexts. Such expression is common in observant Judaism, Hinduism and some forms of Christianity, as well as in some expressions of Islam (Aly and Green, ‘Less than equal’). Massumi argues that even the ways in which some Muslims dress, indicating faith-based behaviour, can lead to what he terms as ‘affective modulation’ (Massumi), repeating and amplifying the fear affect as a result of experiencing the wider community’s fear response to such triggers as water bottles (from airport travel) and backpacks, on the basis of perceived physical difference and a supposed identification with Muslim communities, regardless of the situation. Such respondents constructed this (implied) injunction to suppress their religious and cultural affiliation as akin to constructing the expression of their identity as illegitimate and somehow shameful. Parallels can be drawn with previous social responses to a person born out of wedlock, and to people in same-sex relationships: a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of denial.Australian Muslims who see their faith as denied or marginalised may respond by identifying more strongly with other Muslims in their community, since the community-based context is one in which they feel welcomed and understood. The faith-based community also allows and encourages a wider repertoire of acceptable beliefs and actions entailed in the performance of ‘being Muslim’. Hand in hand with a perception of being required to express their religious identity in ways that were acceptable to the majority community, these respondents provided a range of examples of self-protective behaviours to defend themselves and others from the impacts of perceived marginalisation. Such behaviours included: changing their surnames to deflect discrimination based solely on a name (Aly and Green, ‘Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror’); keeping their opinions private, even when they were in line with those being expressed by the majority community (Aly and Green, ‘Moderate Islam’); the identification of ‘less safe’ and ‘safe’ activities and areas; concerns about visibly different young men in the Muslim community and discussions with them about their public behaviour and demeanour; and women who chose not to leave their homes for fear of being targeted in public places (all discussed in Aly, ‘Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism’). Many of these behaviours, including changing surnames, restricting socialisation to people who know a person well, and the identification of safe and less safe activities in relation to the risk of self-revelation, were common strategies used by people who were stigmatised in previous times as a result of their illegitimacy.ConclusionConstructions of the legitimate and illegitimate provide one means through which we can investigate complex negotiations around Australianness and citizenship, thrown into sharp relief by the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers, also deemed “illegals”. Because they arrive in Australia (or, as the government would prefer, on Australia’s doorstep) by illegitimate channels these would-be citizens are treated very differently from people who arrive at an airport and overstay their visa. The impetus to exclude aspects of geographical Australia from the migration zone, and to house asylum seekers offshore, reveals an anxiety about borders which physically reflects the anxiety of western nations in the post-9/11 world. Asylum seekers who arrive by boat have rarely had safe opportunity to secure passports or visas, or to purchase tickets from commercial airlines or shipping companies. They represent those ethnicities and cultures which are currently in turmoil: a turmoil frequently exacerbated by western intervention, variously constructed as an il/legitimate expression of western power and interests.What this paper has demonstrated is that the boundary between Australia and the rest, the legitimate and the illegitimate, is failing in its aim of creating a stronger Australia. The means through which this project is pursued is making visible a range of motivations and concerns which are variously interpreted depending upon the position of the interpreter. The United Nations, for example, has expressed strong concern over Australia’s reneging upon its treaty obligations to refugees (Gordon). Less vocal, and more fearful, are those communities within Australia which identify as community members with the excluded illegals. The Australian government’s treatment of detainees on Manus Island and Nauru, who generally exhibit markers of visible difference as a result of ethnicity or culture, is one aspect of a raft of government policies which serve to make some people feel that their Australianness is somehow less legitimate than that of the broader community. AcknowledgementsThis paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP0559707), 2005-7, “Australian responses to the images and discourses of terrorism and the other: establishing a metric of fear”, awarded to Professors Lelia Green and Mark Balnaves. The research involved 10 focus groups and 60 individual in-depth interviews and a telephone ‘fear of terrorism’ survey. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members and wider Australian respondents to the telephone survey. ReferencesAly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 33.3 (Feb 2010): 268-81.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege.” M/C Journal 11.2 (2008). 15 Oct. 2009 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/32›.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen”. M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08-aly-green.php›.Aly, Anne, and Mark Balnaves. “‘They Want Us to Be Afraid’: Developing a Metric for the Fear of Terrorism. International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities & Nations 6.6 (2008): 113-122.Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.Bassio, Diana. “‘Be Alert, Not Alarmed’: Governmental Communication of Risk in an Era of Insecurity.” Annual Conference Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005. ‹http://www.anzca.net/documents/anzca-05-1/refereed-proceedings-9/247-be-alert-not-alarmed-governmental-communication-of-risk-in-an-era-of-insecurity-1/file.html›.Bateson, Gregory, and Mary Catherine Bateson. “Innocence and Experience”. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. New York: Hampton Press, 1987. 167-182. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.oikos.org/baten.htm›.Cookson, Catherine. Our Kate. London: Corgi, 1969.Cox, Nicole. “Police Probe ‘Die for Syria’ Car Stickers”. WA Today 11 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/police-probe-die-for-syria-car-stickers-20140911-10fmo7.html›.Crock, Mary. “That Sinking Feeling: Correspondence”. Quarterly Essay 54 (June 2014): 75-79.Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1978 [1966].Gordon, Michael. “New UN Human Rights Chief Attacks Australia over Asylum Seeker Rights ‘Violations’.” Sydney Morning Herald 7 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/new-un-human-rights-chief-attacks-australia-over-asylum-seeker-rights-violations-20140907-10dlkx.html›.Green, Lelia. “Bordering on the Inconceivable: The Pacific Solution, the Migration Zone and ‘Australia’s 9/11’”. Australian Journal of Communication 31.1 (2004): 19-36.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Green, Lelia, and Anne Aly. “How Australian Muslims Construct Western Fear of the Muslim Other”. Negotiating Identities: Constructed Selves and Others. Ed. Helen Vella Bonavita. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 65-90. Karam, Zeina, and Vivian Salama. “US President Barack Obama Powers Up to Shut Down Islamic State”. The Australian 11 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.theaustralian/world/%20us-president-barak-obama-powers-up-to-shut-down-islamic-state-20140911-10f9dh.html›.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969.Massumi, Brian. “Fear (the Spectrum Said).” Positions 13.1 (2005): 31-48.McKay, Fiona H., Samantha, L. Thomas, and Susan Kneebone. “‘It Would Be Okay If They Came through the Proper Channels’: Community Perceptions and Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers in Australia”. Journal of Refugee Studies 25.1 (2011): 113-133.Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. New York: Derby & Miller, 1853.Pugliese, Joseph. “Asymmetries of Terror: Visual Regimes of Racial Profiling and the Shooting of John Charles de Menezes in the Context of the War in Iraq.” Borderlands 5.1 (2006). 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol5no1_2006/pugliese.htm›.Rix, M. “With Reckless Abandon: Haneef and Ul-Haque in Australia’s ‘War on Terror’.” In K. Michael and M.G. Micheal (eds.), The Third Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security Australia. Canberra, July 2008. 107-122. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=gsbpapers›.Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1977.Wilson, Lauren. “More Visa Over-Stayers than Asylum-Seekers”. The Australian 11 Oct. 2012. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/more-visa-over-stayers-than-asylum-seekers/story-fn9hm1gu-1226493178289›.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

Master of Music (Music Education)
This thesis documents an investigation of the selection procedures relating to Australian vocal repertoire for mid-adolescent and Higher School Certificate (New South Wales) performers, as used by private singing teachers, school music teachers and singing students. It explores the similarities and differences in the criteria employed in these selections. Semi-structured interviews were the source of data and were conducted with participants from these three categories as well as two composers. The participants evinced highly disparate views. The private singing teachers believed that repertoire should be dictated by the technical ability and physiological constraints of mid-adolescent students and that their role in selecting repertoire was related to the long term vocal growth of each individual. They felt that the school music teachers vetted their repertoire choices with no useful explanation of their reasoning, while the school music teachers noted that students frequently presented repertoire that was too difficult or that was not readily communicated with the audience. The ability of mid-adolescent singers to communicate with and engage an audience was the prime concern of the school music teachers. The students wanted to impress their examiners and believed that infrequently heard repertoire was the best choice, though this was not endorsed by the teachers. There was a perception that the students would perform at their best when they chose repertoire to which they could relate emotionally. Many private singing teachers and school music teachers are not aware of the very broad range of contemporary Australian music and its divergent characteristics. However, there is a shortage of appropriate Australian repertoire that addresses the physiological and emotional needs of mid-adolescent singers.

Thesis (M. Mus. (Mus. Ed.)--University of Sydney, 2006.
Title from title screen (viewed 19 March 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music (Music Education) to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print format.

This chapter highlights Australian-born composer Sadie Harrison’s Easter Zunday (2008). This poem by William Barnes paints a lively portrait of an Easter celebration in the West Country, and is set with artful, infectious relish—an ingenious amalgam of the rustic and the sophisticated. It undoubtedly needs a tenor of special histrionic gifts, one unencumbered by inhibition, able to assume and sustain a ripe Dorsetshire accent with confidence. As the piece nears its climax, stamina will be put to the test—phrases expand, and an exhilarating final surge of energy could prove dauntingly strenuous. The composer’s indications aptly confirm the uplifting spirit of both text and music. Like the voice part, the accompaniment is rhythmically complex, and both performers will need intense concentration in order to coordinate perfectly.

This chapter explores Australian musician and composer Brett Dean’s Poems and Prayers (2006, revised 2011). These five songs form a highly distinctive showpiece, containing elements reminiscent of cabaret. The style is eclectic, within a ‘friendly atonal’ mode. Intervals will need careful tuning and rhythms are often elliptical. Each song could hardly be more different. The sharp, mordant texts have more than a hint of irony and bitterness, and the range of moods projected requires a singer of considerable artistry and poise as well as excellent diction. The first three songs (‘Literature’, ‘A Child Is a Grub’, and ‘Prayer I’) are brief, but highly concentrated. The vocal range throughout is comfortable and eminently practicable, avoiding extremes. Declamatory speech occurs in the fourth (‘Equality’), and the last movement (‘Prayer’) is almost entirely in Sprechstimme.