ANZ LitLovers LitBlog (2024)

Anyone who’s interested in Australian music history will want to read Jillian Graham’s Inner Song, a Biography of Margaret Sutherland. But I have more than a casual interest in the 20th century history of music in Melbourne because it was the era of my piano teacher, the prominent concert pianist Valda Johnstone (1914-2007). She was a contemporary of the notable Australian composer and performer Margaret Sutherland, and from my archive of VJ’s concert programs, I know that they performed on the same program at least once —

VJ also had the sheet music for Sutherland’s Second Suite: Chorale Prelude, Mirage, Lavender Girl, The Quest (published by Allens). It had the performance timing noted on the front cover so she must have performed it somewhere, maybe on radio. (She was a regular on ABC 3LO and on NZ radio when she toured New Zealand.) VJ had a handwritten score for ‘Mirage’ too. I donated it to the State Library of Victoria after her death, along with the rest of VJ’s papers.

With co-pianist Phyllis Batchelor (1915-1999), VJ also performed, at least once that I know of, a composition of Sutherland’s. (VJ had a huge repertoire, and as you can see from the sheet music deposited at the SLV, she liked playing modern compositions.) This typewritten program shows that Sutherland’s piece was a Pavane for two pianos— for an ‘Afternoon of Music’ in 1965. Held at the home of Mr and Mrs John Doyle in Normanby St, Kew, it was a performance for an award in the name of the music critic for The Age, Dorian Le Gallienne, who was also a composer. (I have a program for a concert held at the Kelvin Hall (later the Playbox Theatre) that includes his composition for two pianos called ‘Legend’).

#Digression: When I was a teenager, I went twice with VJ to recitals held in private homes. Do people still offer their homes as performance spaces like this, I wonder?

Margaret Sutherland AO OBE (1897 – 1984) was a composer, performer and activist for the musical arts community, playing an important role in lobbying for our Melbourne Arts Centre when the site was at risk of development. Despite periods of time when her output was limited, (and a disappointing number of lost scores, how did that happen??) — as you can see from a partial list of her 90 works at Wikipedia, she was a prolific composer, best-known perhaps for her symphonic poem ‘Haunted Hills’, which you can hear at You Tube here.

As Jillian Graham explains in this comprehensive biography, Sutherland composed across all forms, including a symphony called ‘The Four Temperaments’; concertos like this one for violin and this concertino; an opera called ”The Young Kabbarli’; poetry set to music; solo, duet & trio pieces including sonatas; and a large oeuvre of chamber music such as this String Quartet No 1. Commenting on this, Graham explains that Sutherland prioritised writing smaller chamber worksbecause…

She enjoyed writing for unusual combinations of instruments and felt more comfortable with chamber music. ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather do in the whole world,’ she said in 1965. ‘I love the intimacy of writing for a small group of musicians rather than for a big orchestra. I suppose this is reasonable—women don’t go in for tackling epics.’ Again, in 1968, she equated a feminine sensibility with chamber compositions, arguing that women’s offerings should not be devalued because they did not conform to the dominant masculine paradigm.

‘A woman can contribute in a special kind of way. I don’t think that women want to write the same type of things as men, but their contribution is no less important. They [men] seem to have the same yardstick all the time, this symphonic business.’ (p.103)

But the cost and difficulty of having orchestral work performed was also a factor.

[Having works performed was] “very difficult in the past. Now we have grants. In the past many of us had to write our own parts, even orchestral parts. It was a very expensive thing to have an orchestral work performed: £250 at least. We used to have to wait years to get a first performance, but by then you would have moved on to other areas.” (p.103)

#Digression: I know this to be true. The Spouse formed his own jazz orchestra, the Australian Cotton Club Orchestra (ACCO) so that he could have his arrangements performed, and I memorably had to lend a hand with writing out the piano part for an arrangement of ‘Japanese Sandman’ while he did the other parts which had to be ready in time for the recording.

Copying parts is not something a creative person wants to do; it’s just laborious work which demands great care and attention to copying exactly what’s in the score, for each individual part. The bigger the ensemble or orchestra, the more tedious work involved, which takes time away from the creative impulse. These days, it can be done on a keyboard linking to a computer, but it wasn’t like that in 1988 nor in Sutherland’s day either. It costs money to have someone else do it, and Sutherland lobbied for grants to have this work done.

That ‘Japanese Sandman’ arrangement for the ACCO was commissioned by Bill Armstrong for The Bill Armstrong Collection (1989, WEA) so I was interested to see that Sutherland didn’t receive her first commission until 1966 at the age of sixty-nine, and even then it was thanks to the insistence of Robert Hughes!

As foundation chair of the Australian Performing Rights Association (APRA), Robert Hughes refused to end a meeting until they agreed to commission Margaret. In early 1967, she began work on her three-movement String Quartet No 3.Written for the Cremona Quartet, whose members she knew well (Leonard Dommett, violin 1; Sybil Copeland, violin 2; John Glickman, viola; and Henry Wenig, cello) Margaret was influneced by the emotional quality of intensity and rapport she noted in the group. The result was a confident exhibition of modernism that moved beyond her previous string quartets.

A second commission followed, this time by the Australian Musicians Overseas Scholarship Fund for a piano piece.Extensionwas one of three piano works written in 1967… (p.202).

One of the really terrific aspects of this biography is that Graham is a musician herself and writes knowledgeably about Sutherland’s musicianship, style, and continuous innovation. (This is not necessarily the case when a journalist with no music background writes a bio!) For example, in discussing Extension and Chiaroscuro I and II, Graham explains…

The titleExtensionrefers to the thematic and tonal material extending from the basic shapes and pitch orders of the opening passages, as is also the case in theChiaroscuros.As ever, Margaret was seeking new directions for her musical language, and in her last two years of composition, wanted to demonstrate her mastery of contemporary methods. (p.202)

Though not wealthy, Sutherland had a fairly privileged upbringing in a family that was prominent in the arts. She had good role models in her aunts who encouraged her to follow her creative instincts and enabled her education both at home and at the Conservatorium of Music. But family finances became compromised after the deaths in middle age of her father and all her uncles, and she had to work at teaching piano (which she hated) to save the wherewithal for her first overseas trip.

It was not a study trip in the usual sense because she did not make much of the opportunity for tuition in the UK or Europe. Sutherland, even as a young musician, had very firm ideas about the impact of tuition on creativity, and was already expressing opinions about the teaching at the Albert Street Conservatorium, transferring to the ‘Con’ at Melbourne University because she wanted to work with Edward Goll (1884-1949) whose ideas she preferred. But she developed a longstanding dislike of the conductor Bernard Heinze (1894-1982) who was Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne and the dominant musical figure in Melbourne for decades.

#Digression#2 Heinze was also a great mentor to VJ at the ‘Con’ and as a conductor, which led to many engagements at the Myer Music Bowl and the ABC. Indeed, as VJ told me when we were working on her (unpublished) memoirs, he called her up one day to discuss a problem that was limiting her career opportunities…

‘Valda’, he said, ‘I’ve got a serious matter to discuss with you… you are a very bad sight reader.’ ‘I know’ I said, ‘You needn’t tell me, I know. What can I do?’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what you can do – go to the market and buy a shilling’s worth of music, take it home, read it, play it and throw it away. And then go and buy another shilling’s worth.’

‘And also, besides that,’ he continued,’ You want to get into a studio where you’ll have to play for some of the students, a singing studio or something where you have to play accompaniments.’

‘I said I’d do that, and in a fortnight I received a phone call from the ‘Con’, asking me to go and interview a Russian baritone who had come to Australia and was looking for a young pianist – would I go up and meet him?’

So Valda went off to his home in South Yarra and so began a long association with Adolf Spivakovski, a bass-baritone teacher of opera and brother of the violin virtuoso Nathan ‘Tossy’ Spivakovski (who Sutherland hoped would play her compositions, p 102). Although VJ was a concert pianist in her own right, Heinze’s intervention was the catalyst for a successful career as a sought-after accompanist, leading to VJ’s long association with the sopranos Sylvia Fisher, Kathleen Goodall and Irene Branston, and with the violinist John Glickman and visiting celebrities such as the Viennese tenor Mario Dane.

In other words, networking was just as important back then as it is now, and alienating important people isn’t usually a good idea. Because Inner Song documents exhaustively the many hostilities that Margaret Sutherland had … with Bernard Heinze, Eugene Goossens (1893-1962); Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014); Margaret Schofield; George Dreyfus, (b.1928) and ABC radio broadcast management … the biography gives the unfortunate impression that whether her abrasive criticisms were justified by her frustrations or not, she was (a-hem) ‘difficult’.

Well, Beethoven was notoriously cranky, and though that caused him difficulties in his lifetime, it hasn’t impacted on his place in musical history and it doesn’t impact on Sutherland’s legacy as a composer and a role model for other women. It may be that her personal life didn’t help. Sutherland’s marriage was apparently a disaster, and the lack of support and interest in her career impacted on what she was able to achieve, though Graham concedes that we only have her side of the story, and Sutherland had ‘edited’ that, getting rid of everything that was a reminder of a marriage that ended none too soon in divorce.

Well of course we want a bio to be honest. A hagiography that conceals a subject’s flaws isn’t worth reading IMO. Maybe being driven by an ‘inner song’ isn’t compatible with congenial relationships, not if you have to keep standing up for yourself as a trailblazer. But it was good to read that Sutherland did have some longstanding friendships, including the musicologist and fellow Lyceum Club member Lorna Stirling (1893-1956) who collaborated with Sutherland in organising the Midday Concerts during the war years and in the campaign for the Arts Centre; and the welfare activist and international affairs specialist, Ada Constance ‘Con’ Duncan (1896-1970).

There is a great deal to like about this biography, but my interest waned from time to time because resentments about the patriarchy partially overshadowed the story of a successful woman composer of the 20th century. I don’t doubt that Sutherland’s career was hampered by the gendered limitations of her era, and it’s an important part of her story, but though a feminist of long standing, I wearied of hearing so much about it.

Margaret Sutherland was a woman of remarkable achievement who deserves to be remembered for her contribution to 20th century music, nicely summarised at the Australian Music Centre where you can hear samples of her compositions:

The stature of Margaret Sutherland is unique in Australian music. She is honoured both as a distinguished composer and as one who continuously generated fresh interest and activity in the field of music. She asserted the importance of new music, particularly the work of Australian composers, and demonstrated her commitment to this belief by an extraordinary range of activities.

Inner Song is also reviewed at the Queensland Reviewers Collective. If (paywalled) Limelighthasn’t reviewed it yet, they surely will.

Author: Jillian Graham
Title: Inner Song, a Biography of Margaret Sutherland
Cover design by Pfisister + Freeman
Publisher: Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Press, 2023
ISBN: 9780522878233, hbk., 283 pages including Selected References, Endnotes, an index and 12 B&W photo reproductions.
Review copy courtesy of Melbourne University Press

If you are interested to hear some of the remarkable music composed by Australian women, visit this site at the Australian Music Centre where you can hear samples from a CD called ‘Women of Note Vol 2’.

You can read an obituary for Margaret Sutherland here:

Margaret Sutherland AO OBE 1897 – 1984