Editorial: Musicology Australia

Abstract

The integral relationship of music and language in song texts, letters and in other key facets of human thought and behaviour is the focus of this issue of 'Musicology Australia'. In articles concerned with song genres of indigenous Australian communities, Linda Barwick analyzes rhythmic modes in 'lirrga' songs in order to understand the aesthetic intentions of 'lirrga' composers and performers and to examine the shaping of these songs in performance, Lysbeth Ford explores the linguistic complexity of 'lirrga' texts and Murray Garde proposes that the texts of the 'kun-borrk' genre are part of a wider practice of intentionally vague language. The many ways in which indigenous Australian communities use music, song texts and dance to interact with aspects of contemporary life is also a theme of Peter Dunbar-Hall's review. Taking a species-wide stance, Ian Cross argues that music and language underwrite the social and intellectual flexibility that have enabled us to conceive abstract concepts and to form and maintain social relations. His essay also makes an apt counterpart to reviews by Mary Buck, Peter Tregear, Denis Collins and Simon Perry which examine important cross-disciplinary studies of music, science and philosophy, German film music and canonic works by Bach and Schoenberg. In his article, Craig De Wilde demonstrates how letters sent during the American Civil War can be used to reconstruct a Union Army musician's daily military duties and emotional landscape, with music associated in the letters with homesickness and the mundane as well as with the horrors of war. Homesickness, Deborah Crisp argues, also inspired Chopin's 'musical letter' nocturne of 1830. The role of letters and music in biography is taken up in reviews by Paul Watt, Goetz Richter, Jane Southcott and Linda Kouvaras, while the importance of archival documents in the reconstruction of our cultural map is a cornerstone of reviews by Dorottya Fabian, Roland Bannister and Alejandro Planchart.