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Music and Musicmakers

by
February–March 1984, no. 58

Cause to Rejoice: The Life of John Bishop by Audrey Hewlett

Rigby, $14.95 pb, 159 pp

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

Playing for Australia by Charles Buttrose

Macmillan, 186 pp

A Handbook of Australian Music by James Murdoch

Sun Books, $15.95 pb, 158 pp

Music and Musicmakers

by
February–March 1984, no. 58

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.

Cause to Rejoice: The Life of John Bishop

Cause to Rejoice: The Life of John Bishop

by Audrey Hewlett

Rigby, $14.95 pb, 159 pp

Playing for Australia

Playing for Australia

by Charles Buttrose

Macmillan, 186 pp

A Handbook of Australian Music

James Murdoch

Sun Books, $15.95 pb, 158 pp

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