Cause to Rejoice: The Life of John Bishop
Rigby, $14.95 pb, 159 pp
A Handbook of Australian Music
Sun Books, $15.95 pb, 158 pp
Music and Musicmakers
There is a long tradition in Australian music publishing that only the worst will do. In the era of long-winded and Latinised Victorian histories and reminiscences of old colonists, the music sector easily bested the rest for pontification and inaccuracy. In the thirties, when even journalistic standards were at an all-time local low, the few music histories and biographies that managed to find their way into print, often via the vanity presses, were tediously pedantic. The forties actually improved on matters, due to war-time isolation and a new awareness of music as propaganda; but the fifties produced the most conservative of demi-books, their authors still mentally located somewhere on their knees before a middle European iconostasis that concealed, artistically, a good deal of ritualised nonsense in the name of cultural superiority.
Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to contact us.
Leave a comment
If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.
If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.
Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.