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Music of Australia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Music of Australia
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| Timeline | |
| Genres | classical · hip-hop · indigenous Australian music · Ska · immigrant music · jazz · country · rock (pub rock · indie · punk · metal) |
| Organisations | ARIA · APRA · CMMA |
| Awards | ARIA Music Awards · Country Music Awards of Australia · The Deadlys · Australian Music Prize · J Award · WAMi Awards · NT Indigenous Music Awards · Perth Dance Music Awards |
| Charts | Kent Music Report · ARIA Charts · Triple J Hottest 100 |
| Festivals | Big Day Out · Splendour in the Grass · Livid · Homebake · Falls · Tamworth Country Music Festival · Womadelaide · National Folk Festival · Overcranked |
| Media | Countdown · Rage · Triple J · ABC · Community Radio |
| National anthem | Advance Australia Fair |
| Cities and regions | |
| Adelaide · Brisbane · Canberra · Melbourne · Sydney · Perth · Hobart | |
| Arts in Australia |
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Architecture |
Australian music is the music originating from the country of Australia.
Contents |
Indigenous Australian music has become a vehicle for social protest, and has been linked, by both performers and outsiders, with similar forms from Native Americans; Jamaican singer Bob Marley is often credited with helping to revive traditional Aboriginal music, as did the movie Wrong Side of the Road, which depicted Aboriginal reggae bands struggling for recognition and linked it with land rights. Yothu Yindi's sudden pop success in the 1990s surprised many observers, and helped bring many Aboriginal issues into mainstream Australian affairs. In 1980, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) began broadcasting traditional music and has become extremely successful. CAAMA has helped popularise remote musical communities, such as Blek Bala Mujik whose "Walking Together" became a sort of Australian anthem after its use in a Qantas commercial. The Deadlys are the major showcase of contemporary Indigenous Australian music.
The history of jazz and related genres in Australia extends back into the 19th century. During the gold rush era of the 1850s American, British and locally formed 'blackface' (white actor-musicians in blackface) minstrel troupes began to tour Australia, touring not only the capital cities but also many of the booming regional towns like Ballarat and Bendigo. Minstrel orchestra music featured jazz-like musical characteristics including improvisatory embellishment and polyrhythm in the (pre-classic) banjo playing and clever percussion breaks. Some genuine African-American minstrel and jubilee singing troupes toured from the 1870s. A more jazz-like form of minstrelsy reached Australia in the late 1890s in the form of improvisatory and syncopated coon-song and cake-walk music, two early forms of ragtime. The next two decades brought ensemble, piano and vocal ragtime and leading (mostly white) American ragtime artists, including Ben Harney, 'Emperor of Ragtime' Gene Greene and pianist Charlie Straight. Some of these visitors taught Australians how to 'rag' (improvise unsyncopated popular music into ragtime-style music).
By the mid 1920s, phonograph machines, increased contact with American popular music and visiting white American dance musicians had firmly established jazz (meaning jazz inflected modern dance and stage music) in Australia. The first recordings of jazz in Australia are Mastertouch piano rolls recorded in Sydney from around 1922 but jazz began to be recorded on disc by 1925, first in Melbourne and soon thereafter in Sydney.
Soon after World War 2, jazz in Australia diverged into two strands. One was based on the earlier collectively improvised called "dixieland" or traditional jazz. The other so-called modernist stream was based around big band swing, small band progressive swing, boogie woogie, and, by 1947, watered down version of bebop. By the 1950s American bop, itself, was dividing into so-called 'cool' and 'hard' bop schools, the latter being more polyrhythmic and aggressive. This division reached Australia on a small scale by the end of the 1950s. From the mid-1950s rock and roll began to draw young audiences and social dancers away from jazz. British-style dixieland, called Trad, became popular in the early 1960s. Most modern players stuck with the 'cool' (often called West Coast) style, but some experimented with free jazz, modal jazz, experiment with 'Eastern' influences, art music and visual art concept, electronic and jazz-rock fusions.
The 1970s brought tertiary jazz education courses and continuing innovation and diversification in jazz which, by the late 1980s, included world music fusion and contemporary classical and jazz crossovers. From this time, the trend towards eclectic style fusions has continued with ensembles like The Catholics, Australian Art Orchestra, Tongue and Groove, AustraLYSIS, Wanderlust, The Necks and many others. It is questionable whether the label jazz is elastic enough to continue to embrace the ever-widening range of improvisatory musics that are associated with the term jazz in Australia. However, mainstream modern jazz and dixieland still have the strongest following and patron still flock to hear famous mainstream artists who have been around for decades, such as One Night Stand players Dugald Shaw and Blair Jordan, reeds player Don Burrows and trumpeter James Morrison and, sometimes, the famous pioneer of traditional jazz in Australia, Graeme Bell. pung
See: Andrew Bisset. Black Roots White Flowers, Golden Press, 1978 Bruce Johnson. The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz OUP, 1987 John Whiteoak. Playing Ad Lib:Improvisatory Music in Australia: 1836-1970, Currency Press, 1999
Australia has a long tradition of country music, which has developed a style quite distinct from its U.S. counterpart. Waltzing Matilda, often regarded by foreigners as Australia's unofficial National anthem, is a quintessential Australian country song, influenced more by Celtic folk ballads than by American Country and Western music. This strain of Australian country music, with lyrics focusing on strictly Australian subjects, is generally known as "bush music" or "bush band music." The most successful Australian bush band is Melbourne's Bushwackers, active since the early 1970s.
Another, more Americanized form of Australian country music was pioneered in the 1930s by such recording artists as Tex Morton, and later popularized by Slim Dusty, best remembered for his 1957 song "A Pub With No Beer". In recent years local contemporary country music, featuring much crossover with popular music, has enjoyed considerable popularity in Australia; notable musicians of this genre include Beccy Cole, Gina Jeffries, Lee Kernaghan and sister Tania Kernaghan, Sara Storer, Felicity Urquhart, and the hugely successful Kasey Chambers, Keith Urban and Shannon Noll.
Australia has produced a wide variety of popular and rock music. While many musicians and bands (some notable examples include the 1960s successes of The Easybeats and the folk-pop group The Seekers, through the heavy rock of AC/DC, and the slick pop of INXS and more recently Savage Garden) have had considerable international success, there remains some debate over whether Australian popular music really has a distinctive sound. Perhaps the most striking common feature of Australian music, like many other Australian art forms, is the dry, often self-deprecating humor evident in the lyrics. Rock music has also traditionally been the mainstay of Australian music culture and group releases. Dance music and to an extent, hip hop, has only recently gained nationwide acceptance and airplay.
In the mid-1950s, American rock & roll spread across the world. Sydney's independent record label Festival Records was the first to get on the bandwagon in Australia, releasing Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" in 1956. It became the biggest-selling Australian single ever.
American-born entrepreneur Lee Gordon, who arrived in Australia in 1953, played a key role in establishing the popularity of rock & roll with his famous "Big Show" tours, which brought to Australia many leading American rock'n'roll acts including Bill Haley & His Comets, Little Richard, Eddie Cochrane, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly & The Crickets and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Gordon was also instrumental in launching the career of Johnny O'Keefe, the first Australian rock star, who rose to fame by imitating Americans like Elvis Presley and Little Richard. O'Keefe and other "first wave" bands were popular until about 1961, when a wave of clean-cut family bands took their place.
Though mainstream audiences in the early sixties preferred a clean-cut style -- epitomised by the acts that appeared on the Nine Network pop show Bandstand -- there were a number of 'grungier' guitar-oriented bands in major cities like Sydney and Melbourne, who were inspired by American and British instrumental and surf acts like Britain's The Shadows -- who exerted an enormous influence on Australian and New Zealand music prior to the emergence of The Beatles -- and American acts like guitar legend Dick Dale and The Surfaris. Notable Australian instrumental groups of this period included The Atlantics, The Denvermen The Thunderbirds, The Planets, The Dee Jays, The Joy Boys, The Fabulous Blue Jays and The Whispers.
Jazz was another important influence on the first wave of Australian rock. Unlike the musicians in bands such as The Comets, or Elvis Presley's backing band, who had rockabilly or country music backgrounds, many musicians in Australian rock'n'roll bands -- such as Johnny O'Keefe's famous backing group The Dee Jays -- had a solid background in jazz.
The "second wave" of Australian rock is said to have begun in about 1964, after the impact of The Beatles. Beat groups like Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs and Ray Brown & The Whispers were followed by The Easybeats, The Bee Gees, The Masters Apprentices, The Loved Ones and cult acts like The Throb. A wave of acts also came from New Zealand, including Ray Columbus & The Invaders, Max Merritt & The Meteors, Dinah Lee and The La De Das.
Many Australian bands and singers tried to enhance their careers by moving overseas in particular to England then seen as the mecca of popular music. Varying degrees of success resulted as not all bands matched the success of the Bee Gees. Others that made the journey were the Easybeats, the first band to crack the UK market, Lloyds World and the La De Das.
The "third wave" of Australian rock began in about 1970 with the last of the early 60s groups dissolving. Few acts from this era got major international success, and it was even difficult to achieve continued fame across Australia, due to low radio airplay and the increasing dominance of overseas performers on the charts.
Despite resistance from commercial radio, acts as diverse as AC/DC, Sherbet and John Paul Young were able to achieve major success and develop a unique sound to Australian rock. One of the key agents for the increased exposure of local music was the nationally broadcast ABC-TV television pop show Countdown, which was soon followed by Australia's first non-commercial all-rock radio station Double Jay. Hard rock band AC/DC and harmony rock group Little River Band also found a major overseas success in the late 70s and early 80s, touring all over the world, while a score of Australian expatriates solo performers like Helen Reddy, Olivia Newton-John and Peter Allen became major stars in the USA and internationally. Icehouse also formed in the late 1970s
This period also saw bands like Skyhooks moving towards New Wave, and punk rock bands like The Saints, as well as electronic musical groups, such as Cybotron, Severed Heads and Essendon Airport. Perhaps most influential of the 'underground' scenes, however, was Australian pub rock, which began in Adelaide in the early 1970s with bands like Cold Chisel and The Angels and in Sydney Midnight Oil.
The Australian Music Industry as a business began to formalise during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Although not taken seriously by the mainstream business community in those early years, none could discount the pioneering spirit and business acumen of the likes of Michael Gudinski, Michael Chugg, Ray Evans, Dennis Charter, Glenn Wheatley, Harry M. Miller, Harley Medcalf, Michael Browning, Peter Rix, Ron Tudor, Roger Davies, Fred Bestall, Lance Reynolds, Alan Hely, Frank Stivala, Sebastian Chase, Philip Jacobsen, Peter Karpin, Roger Savage, Ernie Rose, Bill Armstrong, Kevin Jacobsen, Phil Dwyer, Ken Brodziak, Denis Handlin, Stan Rofe, Jade Johnson, Terry Blamey and Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum. These were the people largely responsible for promoting and developing the Australian music ‘business’ during those formative years.
Clubs and Venues catering for the demand of live band entertainment flourished in capital cities all over the country, however, the central development of the Australian Music Industry during these years was in Sydney and Melbourne. Clubs such as Chequers, the Bondi Lifesaver and the Coogee Bay Hotel in Sydney, and the Thumpin Tum, Catcher, Berties, Sebastian’s, the Hard Rock Café and the Q Club in Melbourne were synonymous with the biggest names in Australian Rock & Roll.
In 1970 the first ever outdoor music festival modelled on Woodstock was held at Ourimbah near Sydney, and several other followed over the next two years, but most were a financial failure. In 1972 the first festival that proved successful enough to be repeated was the 1972 ‘Festival’ which attracted some 35,000 music fans from across the country to Sunbury on the outskirts of Melbourne. Australian music was not only alive and well; it was flourishing under the guidance of the early music industry entrepreneurs.
‘Pop’ magazines such as Go-Set (which began in 1966), the Daily Planet, RAM, and Juke, and television programs such as Countdown, Uptight, Sounds Unlimited and Happening 70 promoted Australian popular music to a youth market who had never before experienced such media exposure of their idols and stars. ‘Pop Stars’ were now being created by direct marketing to a targeted teenage audience. Recording studios such as 301 and Alberts’ in Sydney and Armstrong Studios in Melbourne became legendary. Independent label Mushroom Records was founded in 1973 and although it struggled to survive for its first two years of existence, it was saved in early 1975 by the commercial breakthrough of Skyhooks, whose debut LP became the biggest-selling Australian rock album ever released up to that time; this success enabled Mushroom to become a significant player in the Australian music industry and compete with established companies like EMI, CBS and Festival.
The Bands and Recording Artists who shaped Australian Music during these seminal years were: - Skyhooks, AC/DC, Renée Geyer, Spectrum, Chain, Daddy Cool, Marcia Hines, Zoot, The Masters Apprentices, Air Supply, The Angels, Axiom, Kevin Borich Express, Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band, Carson, Cheetah, Richard Clapton, Cold Chisel, Johnny Farnham, Healing Force, Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls, Hawking Bros, Flake, Buffalo, Bjerre, Wendy Saddington, The Seekers, Ronnie Charles, Company Caine, Denise Drysdale, Healing Force, Trevor Spry, Radio Birdman, Buster Brown, Little River Band, Ray Burgess, Mental as Anything, Marty Rhone, Ariel, The La De Das, Peter Allen, The Dingoes, Babeez, Mondo Rock, Icehouse, Midnight Oil, Doug Parkinson, Jon English, Blackfeather, Ronnie Burns, The Ferrets, Mike Brady,Martin Gellatley, Hush, Tully, Madder Lake, Supernaut, Russell Morris, Allison Durbin, Olivia Newton-John, Ross D. Wylie, The News, Max Merritt and the Meteors, Debbie Byrne, Rose Tattoo, The Reels, The Saints, Sebastian Hardie, Lash, William Shakespeare, Sherbet, Silver Studs, John St Peters, Jeff St John, Stylus, Jim Keays, Tamam Shud, Ted Mulry Gang, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Ol’ 55, Mark Holden, Stevie Wright, John Paul Young, Helen Reddy, Redgum, Hot City Bump Band, Jo Jo Zep & The Falcons, Colleen Hewett, Linda George, Ayers Rock and Brian Cadd.
David Hines has written an original Australian musical based on the music from the 70's called Class of 77
In the 1980s, numerous innovative Australian rock bands arose. These included Hunters & Collectors, The Church, TISM, Divinyls, Hoodoo Gurus, The Sunnyboys, Men at Work, The Go-Betweens and The Triffids. During this period a number of Australian bands began to reflect their urban environment in songs dealing with day to day experiences of inner-city life eg Paul Kelly & the Coloured Girls perhaps best exemplified in his songs "From St. Kilda to Kings Cross" and "Leaps & Bounds", John Kennedy's Love Gone Wrong in songs such us "King Street" and The Mexican Spitfires in tracks like "Sydney Town" and "Town Hall Steps." This decade also saw the rise of world music groups like Dead Can Dance; of special importance is Yothu Yindi, who helped found the field of Aboriginal rock. In 1985, the Newsboys emerged and produced the hit albums Not Ashamed, Step Up to the Microphone, Devotion, and more. Then soap star Kylie Minogue began her music career in the late 1980's and released The Loco-Motion which became the biggest selling single in Australia for the decade and quickly catapulted her to worldwide stardom.
The first annual ARIA Music Awards were held in 1987. John Farnham and Crowded House were the most successful artists at the event.
In the 1990s, the excesses of the 80s provided a bleak backdrop for commercial music, with only bands like AC/DC and INXS able to break into the US and European markets. On the home front, the indie scene that sprouted power pop bands like RatCat and Falling Joys began to become popular. There was also success for songwriters like Tom Morgan from Sydney band Smudge who collaborated with popular US band The Lemonheads. Morgan was affiliated with the Half A Cow record label which was one of many label/records stores that existed during the 90s. Half A Cow owner Nic Dalton also played in The Lemonheads and had his own bands such as Godstar and Sneeze.
American and British alternative music, especially genres such as grunge and Britpop became popular toward the mid 90s, leading to the rise of Australian alternative rock bands which included Regurgitator, You Am I, Powderfinger, Silverchair and Something for Kate. With the 90s came the centralization of many of the independent labels that saw the passing of labels such as Red Eye and Waterfront after the failed attempt by Polydor Records to provide a commercial outlet for these independent labels.
While Industrial sounds emerged in Australia in the 1980s and early '90s with bands like Severed Heads, Ollie Olsen's No, and Foil, electronic music - with its inherent forms of techno, house, drum & bass and electro - peaked in the 1990s. While there were bands as diverse as Itch-E and Scratch-E, Boxcar, 5000 Fingers Of Dr T. and Sub Bass Snarl operating out of Sydney, Melbourne excelled with producers like Zen Paradox, Voiteck, Third Eye, Snog, Black Lung, FSOM, Little Nobody, Honeysmack, Artificial, TR-Storm, Son Of Zev, Half Yellow, Amnesia, Isnod, Blimp, Frontside and Sonic Animation all taking advantage of the existing infrastructure of pub venues created for live rock music, like the Punters Club and the Evelyn Hotel in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. In Adelaide, the Dirty House techno/house label, with resident producers HMC and Cinnaman, also made sizeable inroads overseas.
Major organisations involved in funding or in receipt of funding are: Funding Agencies
Music: Chamber
Music: Orchestra
- Sydney Symphony
- Symphony Australia
- Queensland Symphony Orchestra
- Adelaide Symphony Orchestra
- Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
- Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
- West Australian Symphony Orchestra
Music: Orchestra (Pit)
Opera
- Australian Hip Hop
- Culture of Australia
- Category:Australian musicians
- List of Indigenous Australian musicians, Indigenous musicians and groups
- Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop
- List of Number 1 singles in Australia during the 1960s
- List of Number 1 singles in Australia during the 1970s
- List of Number 1 singles in Australia during the 1980s
- List of Number 1 singles in Australia during the 1990s
- List of Number 1 singles in Australia during the 2000s
- List of artists who reached number one on the Australian singles chart
- Triple J Hottest 100 - an annual top 100 list, based on the votes of listeners of youth radio station Triple J from 1993
- Breen, Marcus. "The Original Songlines". 2000. In Broughton, Simon and Ellingham, Mark with McConnachie, James and Duane, Orla (Ed.), World Music, Vol. 2: Latin & North America, Caribbean, India, Asia and Pacific, pp 8-19. Rough Guides Ltd, Penguin Books. ISBN 1-85828-636-0
- DCITA, (2005), A New Era - Orchestras Review Report 2005 PDF
- Warren Bebbington, (ed.) (1998). The Oxford companion to Australian music. Oxford. ISBN 0195534328.
- Australian Music Office - Australian Government organisation aimed at promoting export initiatives for Australian arists and music companies
- [1] - The Australian Music Channel @ YouTube
- [2] - Web TV and Radio for Australian Music
- MusicAustralia - an initiative of the National Library of Australia and National Film & Sound Archive
- Australian Music Centre
- The Tasmanian Composer's Collective
- Ihos Music Theatre and Opera
- Didgeridoo - Australian Aboriginal musical instrument
- Oz Music Project: Australian Music Webzine and Resource Site
- Australian Music Online
- Australian Classical Music Store
- Aus Music Scrapbook
- Milesago: Australasian music and popular culture 1964-75
- GO-SET MAGAZINE CHARTS: AUSTRALIAN TOP 40 SINGLES AND ALBUM CHARTS 1966 - 1974
- Australian Rock Database
- Howlspace: Music from Australia & NZ
- Bruce Johnston on Australian Jazz
- Australasian Music and Dance Research
- Roocast - Australian Music Podcasts
- Frank Coughlan: Father of Australian Jazz
- Meet Me At The Trocadero: The Life and Times of the Sydney Trocadero 1936 to 1970
- Vietnamese music in Australia
- Australian Music Artist: Vanessa Amorosi
- Xdafied - Free Australian music download website
- The Dwarf - one of Australia's largest online music site's
- FasterLouder - A popular Australian rock music resource
- Where Did They Get That Song? - Sources of Australian Pop Records of the 50s 60s and 70s
- National Film and Sound Archive homepage
- National Film and Sound Archive Sounds of Australia
- RealTime - Australian contemporary arts magazine covering dance, performance, sound/music, visual arts, film and media art