Rite of Spring: 75 Years of ABC Music-Making

CONTENTS

Cover

Introduction — A Walk Through ABC Music-Making

Prelude — The Pallbearer

PART ONE: THE HEINZE ERA 1932–1945

1. A Commonsense View of All Types

The Early Years of ABC Music-Making

2. Walter Conder’s Trifecta

Captain H E Adkins, Sir Hamilton Harty, Jim Davidson

3. Cleary’s Dream Team

W J Cleary, Herbert Brookes, Bernard Heinze, Charles Moses, W G James

4. Eyes On the Prize

ABC Classical Music-Making Takes Shape

5. Two English Gentlemen

Howard Jacobs and Malcolm Sargent

6. The ABC Bands Play On

Stephen Yorke, Al Hammett, Spivakovsky-Kurtz Trio, Other Local Artists

7. Vienna Downunder

The 1937 Celebrity Season

8. Second Comings

Touring Artists 1938–1939

9. The Two Maestri of 1940

Georg Schnéevoigt and Sir Thomas Beecham

10. Keeping the Home Fires Burning

Clive Amadio, Jim Gussey, Neville Cardus

11. Heinze’s Finest Hour

The Beethoven Festivals, Eugene Ormandy

PART TWO: THE GOOSSENS ERA 1946–1962

12. The Tour That Changed Australian Music

Eugene Goossens 1946

13. Goossens Sets the Musical Agenda

ABC Orchestra Building 1947–1949

14. Rites and Resurrection

Otto Klemperer, Alceo Galliera, Juan José Castro, Walter Susskind

15. The Apocalypse

Goossens’ Gigantism, Sir John Barbirolli

16. Autumn Leaves

Disbanding the Military Band and Wireless Choruses

17. Post-War Light Music, Jazz and Dance Bands

Fred Hartley, Jay Wilbur, Graeme Bell, Don Burrows

18. Hothouse Flowers

ABC Classical Music-Making After Goossens

PART THREE: THE HOPKINS ERA AND BEYOND 1963–2007

19. An Outsider Brings Renewal

John Hopkins as Federal Director of Music

20. Demise of the Dance Bands

ABC Light Music-Making Confronts Changing Tastes

21. The Era of Reports Begins

ABC Music-Making Post-Hopkins

22. The Restructure of ABC Music-Making

Impact of the Dix and Tribe Reports

23. Sinfonia Antarctica

Divestment of the ABC Orchestras

Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Searchable Terms

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

A Walk Through ABC Music-Making

In the first three years of its existence, from 1932–1935, the Australian Broadcasting Commission arranged microphone appearances for more than seventy thousand instrumentalists and singers. In just one of those years, 1934–1935, a total of twenty-eight thousand one hundred and thirty-three hours of broadcast time was devoted to music. From then, the ABC increased its musical activities, until now — seventy-five years after the opening night relay on 1 July 1932 — the number of musicians appearing in ABC broadcasts and concerts, and the number of performance-and-radio hours, is in the millions.

Over those years, the world’s greatest musicians have appeared in Australia on behalf of the ABC and three generations of Australian musicians have grown up knowing that in one way or another, their professional future and that of the ABC would be inextricably linked.

Some patterns of ABC engagement occur again and again: musicians who first broadcast on ‘Young Australia’ or who appeared in the ‘Instrumental and Vocal Competition’; audience members who attended Bernard Heinze’s Youth Concerts or John Hopkins’s Proms; composers and critics who were turned onto ‘serious’ music by Neville Cardus and A E Floyd; jazz buffs for whom Arch McKirdy or Jim McLeod opened windows on a musical world; non-specialist radio-listeners who never missed a broadcast by Ralph Collins or John Cargher; and the many significant Australian musicians who once were members of ‘The Argonauts’.

And then, of course, there were the great ‘Celebrity Concert Series’, where audiences heard Rubinstein and Lotte Lehmann, George Szell and Sir Thomas Beecham, Schwarzkopf, Rostropovich and Ashkenazy in their prime. Almost every Australian has their definitive ABC musical moments of these kinds.

There are many books that could and should be written about this phenomenal history of music broadcasting and concert presentation. Some, such as accounts of individual orchestras, of particular radio networks like triple j, of ‘Countdown’ and other popular television shows, have been, or are currently being, written. Other specific topics haven’t yet been covered in the comprehensive manner they deserve, but it would be quite possible to write lengthy books on individual subjects such as Singers, Pianists, Opera, Jazz, Music Broadcasters, or Composers on the ABC.

The Rite of Spring: 75 Years of ABC Music-Making can’t cover all these areas in depth. It is not intended as an encyclopaedia with every important ABC musical event or personality allocated a paragraph or two. Instead, it concentrates on the ABC’s live music-making ensembles, particularly in the early years when the Commission ran not just its own full-time studio orchestras, but also a military band, dance bands and choruses.

Back in that era, the ABC’s first Music Adviser, the conductor Bernard Heinze, used to take young audiences on ‘A Walk Through the Orchestra’, pointing out some of the notable or curious features that went into the making of the music. As part of those much-loved rites of passage, Heinze would ask selected musicians to comment on their own pieces in the puzzle, and to demonstrate some of the challenges they confronted in achieving such wonderful musical outcomes.

This book is intended as an analogous ‘Walk Through ABC Music-Making’, with descriptions of some of the background events that built a culture of music-making which was genuinely unique in the world.

The ABC no longer runs any permanent, full-time musical ensembles, with the symphony orchestras being the last of its groups to be off-loaded. As we enter this new era, it’s hoped that The Rite of Spring can serve as a reminder of how much the national broadcaster contributed to the world-class live music-making that Australians now take for granted.

PRELUDE

The Pallbearer

Once the initial shock had abated, the death of Dame Nellie Melba from septicaemia on 23 February 1931 would come to be seen as a moment of generational change in Australian music.

Melba’s operatic productions and constant farewell tours throughout the 1920s had proved that Australians could achieve musical standards of international class. Her business backing from J C Williamson and the Tait Brothers had defined the manner in which Australians got to hear the world’s best vocalists and instrumentalists, and her personal popularity ensured that so-called ‘high art’ could be run effectively as a commercial operation. At the time of her death in Sydney, with the Depression well established, she was revered not just as the greatest singer of her generation, but also as the most powerful figure in Australian music more generally — an administrator and entrepreneur whose fame had transcended her classical music origins.¹

‘There was never a stronger-minded woman’, wrote Claude Kingston, who worked with her from 1924 on the Melba-Williamson opera seasons. ‘What she accomplished is a matter of history, and some day, I hope, Australians will recognise her for what she was — a great woman who had an immense impact on this country’s musical development.’²

Yet Melba left an Australian arts community that was struggling to survive an economic calamity. The Scullin Federal Labor Government had been elected into the most unfortunate of financial circumstances, the Wall Street Crash occurring two days after they came to power in October 1929. With the country’s backbone economy, based on wheat and wool, collapsing, British investment being withdrawn, and the six individual Australian states virtually bankrupt, the national income declined by over 12 per cent in the space of just twelve months.³ As the embattled country entered the 1930s, unemployment reached 29 per cent.⁴

Musicians, caught up in the decline of disposable income available for entertainment, were among the worst affected, the general economic malaise exacerbated by the simultaneous arrival of the talkies, which threw pit musicians out of work across the country. ‘The music business had slowed down to a walk’, said one contemporary. ‘No one bought it, and as for the artists, they starved. In the streets of Melbourne you would come across some of our best musicians playing the fiddle or singing, trying to earn a crust. There were parades of unemployed marching up Bourke Street trying to attract attention to their plight.’⁵

For all her success as a cultural icon, even Melba herself had begun to feel the financial squeeze. Her later operatic seasons in partnership with the Williamson company had struggled to make money, and the commercially oriented Taits were beginning to realise that the financial viability of future Australian operatic productions — and Australian classical music concerts — would rely increasingly on government support.⁶ The days of the five brothers touring the likes of Paderewski, Heifetz, Galli-Curci, Chaliapin and Moiseiwitsch for profit were fast drawing to a close, as household disposable income contracted, and governments began to take on new responsibilities in the realm of culture.

In broadcasting, too, it was becoming harder and harder to make a quid. The Australian Broadcasting Company, formed in 1928 from a merger of A-Class radio stations and owned by a consortium consisting of Sir Benjamin Fuller (owner of theatres), Stuart Doyle (owner of cinemas) and Frank Albert (publisher and retailer of sheet music) was also struggling to survive. At the time of Melba’s death, Fuller, Doyle and Albert were coming to the conclusion that they should not seek a renewal of their government-sanctioned broadcasting licence upon its expiry on 30 June 1932.

Such a withdrawal from the A-Class monopoly⁷ would represent yet another bitter blow to Australian musicians, given that the Australian Broadcasting Company had been a major employer. In Sydney and Melbourne alone, up to fifty different ensembles ranging from elite chamber musicians through to community groups and choirs, and onto brass and military bands — and even full-sized orchestras — would broadcast in this way, filling air-time with live performance. Such was the demand that auditions were held constantly, with hopefuls turning up to perform in tiny rooms draped in black velvet to prevent any natural vibration being picked up by the microphones. Pianist Enid Conley-Williams, who served as accompanist for many of the Sydney auditions, recalled:

Thirty or forty people were heard each day, and one day an all-time high was reached when fifty-three ambitious people auditioned. This session extended well into the evening. The new medium was a tremendous lure to all. Even housewives came along with babies in prams … and while they faced up to the ordeal, which it was to many, other waiting contestants kept baby amused.⁸

By 1931, both the Melbourne and Sydney branches of the Australian Broadcasting Company had core studio orchestras numbering about fifteen players, who were regularly augmented by teachers and leading students from the Conservatorium Orchestras and talented amateurs.⁹ Most were doing a minimum of three broadcasts a week in order to keep up with the demand.

The Director-General of Music for the Australian Broadcasting Company was Professor Bernard Heinze, Melbourne University’s Ormond Professor of Music. Although only thirty-six years old, the conductor and former violinist was already a household name to many ABC listeners, a fact brought home to him in the year of Melba’s death when he found himself out on the Nullarbor Plain en route to Kalgoorlie:

The train stopped at one of those little platforms in the middle of nowhere to coal up, or water up, and I went to the post office where one man was standing at the desk. I gave him my telegram and my name and he said: ‘Bernard Heinze! I listen to you on the radio! I listen to every note you play!’ I was dumbfounded.¹⁰

To those who knew him, though, Heinze had always been destined to achieve something special. Transforming himself from the humble son of a Ballarat watchmaker into an ever-so-grand British-style eminence grise¹¹, the Broadcasting Company’s leading musical light always had a touch of the shaman about him, and like the legendary miracle-workers of primitive societies, he’d been through a kind of death-and-resurrection.

As a young officer fighting for the British Royal Garrison Artillery on the Somme in 1916, Lieutenant Heinze’s lookout post was struck by a shell, and for three minutes he was buried alive. Giving himself up for dead, he allowed the weight of the earth and the inevitable suffocation to overwhelm him in the darkness, but just as he approached the point of no return, somehow, miraculously, he was dug out of the mud-tomb by surviving members of his regiment.¹²

As if reborn, he emerged from the earth a changed man, for the rest of his life physically prone to severe headaches, and on the very rare occasions when he narrated the story of his death-and-transfiguration, even much later in life, his body would tremble and he would break into an uncontrollable and highly visible cold sweat.¹³ Having glimpsed the other side, he no longer behaved like ordinary men.

In any case, as the state-sponsored train carrying Melba’s body arrived at Spencer Street station in Melbourne on 25 February 1931, Heinze was standing there among a range of dignitaries, on the platform, paying his respects. When the media sought a statement on behalf of the Australian musical community, he was the man they asked.¹⁴ And at Melba’s funeral the next day, with a huge crowd in attendance at Scots Church in Collins Street and then en route to the burial at Lilydale, and with the eyes of the national press everywhere, the Ballarat-born conductor solemnly bore the coffin as one of eight pallbearers.¹⁵

More than carrying Melba’s body, Heinze was inheriting her mantle.

PART ONE

The Heinze Era

1932–1945

CHAPTER 1

A Commonsense View of All Types

The Early Years of ABC Music-Making

Over the course of its seventy-five-year history, the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s live music-making came to be seen as a high-minded attempt to deliver culture to Australians, and in that it fulfilled the vision of its founders. But in doing so, it had to overcome two inherent contradictions. Here was a broadcaster that was simultaneously a concert entrepreneur, and here too was a public service organisation that created art. To make it work, ABC music-making required the services of three generations of exceptional individuals driven by a vision for musical excellence, and who were willing to deny those to whom the ABC’s role in live music presentation seemed an anomaly.

The battlelines were drawn back in 1931 when the Scullin Labor Government used the opportunity presented by the demise of the Australian Broadcasting Company to gain federal public control of the organisation and to build it in the image of the BBC, drafting a Bill for the establishment not of a Company but a Commission which involved a total nationalisation of the service.

On the day the Bill to create the Commission was tabled in Federal Parliament in November 1931, Scullin’s Government fell, its defeat in the House of Representatives over a bill to provide Christmas relief to the unemployed sending Australia into a hard-fought Federal election.¹

The newly formed United Australia Party under Joe Lyons, brandishing the slogan ‘All for Australia and the Empire’, emerged victorious in the subsequent election. But they scarcely had time to settle before the lobbyists for an Australian Broadcasting Commission came knocking at their door.² Regional communities, many of whom had little or no access to Australian Broadcasting Company services, began agitating for greater coverage, radio manufacturers identified a host of potential new markets for their hardware, and musicians pushed for greater employment opportunities.

An only slightly reworked version of the Scullin Bill was reintroduced into Parliament on 9 March and was passed on 17 May 1932, just six weeks before the Australian Broadcasting Company’s licence expired and the new Commission, under the direction of the Postmaster-General’s Department, began operations.

The Broadcasting Act under which the Commission had been established seemed clear in its musical intentions, its Paragraph 24 stating:

The Commission shall endeavour to establish and utilize in such manner as it thinks desirable in order to confer the greatest benefit on broadcasting, groups of musicians for the rendition of orchestral, choral and band music of high quality.³

Superficially there was nothing controversial about the Charter as it related to music. In an era when recordings were still far from commonplace, it made sense for any national broadcaster to run its own groups of musicians producing good-standard live performances for broadcast. And politically there was much to recommend in-house ensembles, not only creating employment for musicians in the depths of the Depression, but also, through their work, lifting the spirits of those who were less fortunate.

In any case, with the ABC Act only passing into law six weeks before the first broadcast, things were moving too quickly for anyone to be unduly concerned about the letter of the Commission’s charter. In that frantic environment, the pursuit of high quality occasionally had to take a back seat to the more urgent and practical needs of filling air-time, showing off the capabilities of radio and giving underemployed musicians a job. But from the moment the ABC’s mission statement was ratified by Federal Parliament on 17 May 1932, the colourful world of ABC music-making was destined to become shrouded in shades of administrative grey.

In practical terms, there were industrial and musical contingencies not covered by the wording of the Act. What, for instance, happened when the ABC orchestras, choirs and bands didn’t just perform in studio broadcasts but also presented their own public concerts for which an admission price was charged? What about when outside promoters wanted to hire them for private or commercial activities? Were the musicians there, as the Act suggested, exclusively to play on the wireless at taxpayers’ expense?

On the artistic side, how could high quality be determined when half the nation thought of bands as vulgar and the other half thought of orchestras as highbrow?⁴ And how could a public service industrial structure be applied to artistic practice anyway? How could musical quality and security of employment be maintained simultaneously? These were issues which would dog ABC music-making for generations — and most were there from the outset.

In any case, on 1 July 1932, the year after Melba’s death, an ensemble billed as ‘The National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra’ assembled at the NSW Conservatorium Theatre to perform before a small, invitation-only audience as part of a live broadcast inaugurating this new Australian Broadcasting Commission. While wearing the ABC’s banner, essentially the ensemble was the Conservatorium’s own orchestra augmented for the occasion by members of the old Australian Broadcasting Company’s 2FC/2BL and 3AR/3LO studio bands and conducted by E J Roberts, with a guest-conducting role for Conservatorium director W Arundel Orchard.

Showing off the amazing capabilities of the new radio medium, the broadcast began with live speeches from Prime Minister Joe Lyons in Canberra, Opposition Leader James Scullin in Melbourne, and ABC Chairman Charles Lloyd Jones in Sydney. At the time, less than a third of Australians owned a set that could receive the ABC’s signal, but with these amazing demonstrations of its capabilities going on the whole time, everyone wanted one.

Speeches over and with fifty players onstage, conductor Roberts, in his eccentric, jerky style that earned him the nickname among musicians of ‘Shellshock’, gave the downbeat to Weber’s Oberon Overture, which was performed with vigour and an agricultural roughness. Later, the venerable Orchard came on as guest conductor in Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a performance which, one reviewer noted, lacked ‘delicacy of touch’ and for which ‘the grace of fluttering phrases sometimes evades it’.

One of the problems was the group’s inexperience, many of them never having played together previously, and some among them being quite unfamiliar with playing in a symphony orchestra at all. By all accounts, Roberts wasn’t much help, his reputation among musicians being less as a conductor and more as a golfer.⁵

The arduous concert proceeded, through a bracket of two arias by Handel sung by bass Laurence Macaulay, onto Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and then to soprano Madame Goossens-Viceroy singing art-songs by Duparc, Fauré and Ware, before Macaulay returned for a lighter repertoire by Breville and Hahn.

The ABC’s first Chairman, Charles Lloyd Jones, speaks to the nation from the studios of 2FC in Sydney as the ABC takes to the air for the first time on 1 July 1932. Immediately following this speech, the programme crossed to the NSW Conservatorium of Music where the ‘National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra’ performed in the ABC’s first live music broadcast.

The highlight of the night was Isador Goodman’s appearance as soloist in the Liszt Piano Concerto in E flat. The popular Goodman came onstage at 9.42pm and with his typical bravura style that saw him garner fans from both within and outside the classical fraternity, he surged into the concerto with great dramatic flair, the critics bowled over by the orchestra’s ability to respond to his lead. The concert concluded at 10.38pm with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.⁶

Goodman himself gained no sense that it was meant to be a gala occasion, and at the end simply packed up and went home as he would after any concert, not even realising that the whole thing had been broadcast live around the nation.

Just hours old, and already the new Australian Broadcasting Commission was being regarded by some musicians not so much as a broadcaster but as a concert organisation.

For musicians caught up in the Depression, the arrival of the Australian Broadcasting Commission was a godsend, offering not just an immediate meal ticket but the longer-term prospect of comparative security of employment, respectability, and audience numbers vastly in excess of anything they could have imagined previously.⁷ With radio not yet ten years old in Australia, the new medium had an insatiable appetite for live musical product, no matter how bad it sounded.

Radio technology at this time was modest, with many listeners-in restricted to homemade ‘crystal sets’, and there was still an element of eavesdropping in the culture of radio listening (hence the term ‘listener-in’). In any case, the need to compress the sound through telephone landlines meant that even on the best sets, broadcast quality of music was scratchy, particularly in more remote regions like North Queensland and Tasmania, while much of Western Australia had to do without music altogether until June 1933. In spite of the crackles and fade-outs, the technology itself remained a wonder, and was improving all the time, meaning that demand for musical product could only increase. If it played or if it sang, the ABC of 1932–1933 was after it. And if the musicians or ensemble could put together three different programmes a week at a vaguely acceptable performance standard, they were welcomed with open arms.

Audience preferences were always for live music rather than recordings — indeed in the first two years of ABC broadcasting, the percentage of air-time devoted to recordings actually fell from 61 per cent to 37.5 per cent.⁸ For the best musicians, this created a hefty workload, and for the administrators, there just couldn’t be enough quality ABC ensembles on-hand to fill the available air-time.

The harried men finding the talent, setting up the ensembles and juggling the schedules were the state Controllers of Programmes, William G James in Melbourne and former organist and pianist (and sometime ABC accompanist) Ewart Chapple in Sydney. Having so many different local programme slots to fill, they liaised together, offering each other programmes on relay and taking turns to schedule a ‘national’ programme that went to the four eastern states.⁹

As with all other ABC workers at the time, however, their employment was insecure. Sixteen-week contracts were typical, and despite their long work hours they enjoyed none of the benefits — superannuation, overtime and long-service leave — that would subsequently become synonymous with ABC employment. It was a heady time, wherein the possibilities of the new medium, and the constant demand for broadcast material, meant that vacancies were filled without advertisement and new opportunities were seized instantly, often without recourse to protocols or policy.

Much of the music being broadcast in the Commission’s first two years had a vocal component, and choirs in particular were popular, with groups like the Melbourne Chorale, Hurlstone Choral Society, and Queensland State and Municipal Choir all making regular appearances. The Mastersingers Quartet under the direction of John Antill were contracted on a part-time basis for national appearances, and their frequent broadcasts were supplemented by community singing, broadcast live in prime time from town halls and community centres. Typically, these enthusiastic amateur choruses burst into lung-busting renditions of sentimental favourites like ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Old Folks At Home’.¹⁰

Workers’ ensembles weren’t neglected, with the Sydney Tramways Mouth-Organ Band featuring in one broadcast in 1933¹¹ and anything from barbershop quartets to hillbilly singers and yodellers finding their way on-air.

On the ABC’s daily schedule, music functioned alongside horseracing, religious programming, news (read direct from newspapers), and anything else that happened to capture immediate attention to become not just ‘music-as-we-have-always-understood-it’, but an element of a new communication medium in its own right — the radio broadcast.¹² There was a wonder about it that was a pleasure in itself, and while good music was always welcome and there were some finely attuned musical ears among the listeners-in, the fact that it was music at all was often, at least initially, entertainment enough.¹³

In Perth, Judy Mitchell (who ended up working for the ABC in Perth, during Rudolf Pekarek’s years with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra) had a typical experience with the new technology during the 1930s:

My dad was very keen on the radio. It went on the moment he woke up and then he’d go to work, but it would go on again the moment he got home. The first time I ever came in contact with it, when I was a tiny child, there was music coming out of the console. It was an orchestra playing and I can remember distinctly, wondering how they could fit all those people into that box. It just seemed impossible! I still remember my puzzlement. I even got up and looked behind it, just trying to work out how it happened.¹⁴

Dr. Keith Barry, a medical-doctor-turned-music-critic, was so excited by the democratic potential of music on the radio that he too ended up joining the broadcaster, becoming a long-serving Federal Controller of Programmes. Addressing a music teachers’ conference he reflected:

Radio has been the means of bringing the best music into the homes of millions of people who might otherwise never have had the opportunity to hear such music except on the rarest occasions. It has the additional advantage of treating rich and poor, city and country dwellers alike; no matter how poor you are, so long as you own a radio set you are in the same happy position in regard to broadcast music as the richest man in the world.¹⁵

In its first year of operation, 1932–1933, musical performances took up 53 per cent of broadcast time, and the ABC’s first Annual Report catalogued seventeen thousand and sixty-seven engagements of instrumentalists and singers. Even though stations weren’t on-air for a full twenty-four hours, there was nevertheless a constant demand for musical product in all its forms.¹⁶ Aside from the Commission’s own ensembles, a vast range of external groups were engaged for broadcast in the first year of operation, including eighteen orchestras, fifteen brass or military bands, sixty-four choirs, twenty quartets, nine trios, twenty dance bands and fourteen novelty ensembles.¹⁷

Typically, the first ‘Musical Interlude’ for the day ran for twenty-five minutes from 7.35am, with another session beginning after the first break at 9.15am. A further fifteen minutes in the morning might be devoted to ‘Salon Music’ and another five to a brief ‘Organ Interlude’. The afternoon would kick off with fifteen minutes of ‘Studio Music’ followed by News Commentary and then another half-hour of musical items.

Throughout the afternoon until the 5pm close, more music would be juxtaposed with racing results and sporting commentaries. ‘The Children’s Hour’ began at 5.30pm, and it too featured music, while the evening’s musical programming began with a further ‘Musical Interlude’ at 7.40pm, followed by a Military Band Concert for seventy-five minutes from 9.15pm and then ‘Dance Music’ for the final hour of the night.¹⁸

Accompanists were some of the most overworked members of the ABC staff, with people like Vern Barnett at 2FC earning legend status for their versatility and calmness under pressure; while 2BL’s more highly strung principal accompanist Horace Keats would go on to establish a reputation as a composer of quality. Others like Enid Conley-Williams, Ewart Chapple and Maynard Wilkinson would fill in where necessary while pursuing other duties either within or outside the ABC. Those whom they accompanied included not just instrumentalists but also some of the leading vocalists of the day, among them Gladys Moncrieff, Marie Bremner, Marie le Varre, Marie Doran, Rene Maxwell and Josie Melville.¹⁹ They also worked with plenty of amateurs.

Series of musical events, including opera and musical comedies, concerts by the NSW State Orchestra under Edgar Bainton, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Bernard Heinze and Fritz Hart, and the South Australian Orchestra under Harold Davies, were presented. In chamber music, broadcasts were made by the Sydney String Quartet, the Elder Quartet and Trio attached to the South Australian Conservatorium, and by the newly arrived Spivakovsky-Kurtz Trio. Melbourne’s Bach-Handel Festival was broadcast live, while big choral works like The Messiah, Elijah and the first Australian performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius all hit the airwaves in the first two or three years of the Commission’s programming.

From the old Australian Broadcasting Company, the Commission inherited its own small studio orchestras which numbered twenty permanent players in Sydney and fifteen in Melbourne.²⁰ These were primarily light music ensembles but within its first year the ABC expanded them to ‘concert orchestra’ size at twenty-four players each — still way too small to play the great classics in their original instrumentations, but a statement of intent at least, and for some broadcasts and concerts they would form the core grouping of forty-five-piece orchestras supplemented by casuals.

From the outset, everyone understood that orchestral music was on the up-and-up within the ABC. It was only a matter of time, money and administrative will before ABC ‘classical’ music-making would become something more than these rough-and-ready groups of twenty-four players in just two cities. Whether it would comprise one or six orchestras was a moot point, but whatever form the eventual orchestral expansion took, it wouldn’t just be limited to the studio, but would occur in concert halls as well.

On the understanding that there was an orchestral future to create, Bernard Heinze was able to stage a Wagner-Brahms Festival in 1933 and under his direction — soon to become formalised in 1934 in his role as Music Adviser to the Commission — the ABC could begin to plan for visits by its own international conductors and guest artists knowing that, at a stretch, there would be ABC-based orchestral resources available.

Heinze’s longer-term plan was for his local University of Melbourne-based ‘Celebrity Series’ to be adopted by the ABC at the national level. He’d conceived the idea in London a decade earlier when he passed by a billboard outside the Royal Albert Hall announcing such a series with names like Czech violinist Jan Kubelik, German pianist Wilhelm Backhaus and two Australians, soprano Florence Austral and — much to Heinze’s surprise — pianist William G James, whom he’d known as a fellow boy-from-Ballarat, two years older than Heinze, and with whom he worked as a colleague at the Melbourne Conservatorium.²¹

Heinze believed that orchestras, which were not in themselves inherently marketable, could nevertheless attract large and enthusiastic audiences when teamed up with soloists of international stature. There was a clear precedent to prove the point in the case of the J C Williamson company and its notorious Tait brothers who had bought into the company in 1920. Over the course of the 1920s, the company made a successful business out of bringing the greatest names in classical music to Australia.²²

On conceiving his plan for a Celebrity Series featuring his Conservatorium Orchestra, in the later 1920s Heinze made a beeline for the Taits, who had the international contacts, but who lacked a reliable orchestra that could increase the spectacle and the repertoire beyond their solo recital series. Over a game of golf with Frank Tait, Heinze did the deal, with box office takings split fifty-fifty between the commercial organisation, which provided the soloists, and the university, whose orchestra accompanied them.²³ The Russian-born British pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch was the first big name of the many who were to follow in Melbourne, his concerts sold out, and for the first time, Victorian audiences became accustomed to orchestral concerts built around the personality of the soloist.

But while that plan of borrowing Tait artists for orchestral concerts worked well in the local context during the 1920s, when Heinze transferred the ‘Celebrity Series’ to the national level with the ABC and its own ensembles in the 1930s, there was no way that the dependence upon a commercial entrepreneur could last the distance.

The ABC was supposed to be a broadcaster, but with Heinze driving the agenda, it was now also a concert entrepreneur, and a hugely-advantaged competitor in the international musicians touring market. They and the Taits were on a collision course.

Meanwhile, in its first years the ABC formed partnerships with other professional and concert-giving organisations all around the country. A six-month season of twice-a-week Grand Opera broadcasts, beginning in October 1934 and featuring mainly local artists and much new repertoire, was a collaboration with Fuller’s Theatre Circuit, which introduced conductors Maurice d’Abravanel and Robert Ainsworth to Australian audiences, while the young Joseph Post also came to national attention as a conductor in the same season. Another studio broadcast witnessed Alfred Hill conducting his own opera Hinemoa, and by mid – 1935 the Commission was broadcasting one thousand hours of opera alone, every year. Not to be outdone, local brass bands, choral groups and chamber ensembles continued to supplement the in-house and professional performances.

Percy and Ella Grainger preparing some of the instruments used in the series of ABC lectures, ‘Music: A Commonsense View of All Types’, broadcast on the national stations from 1934. The extraordinary diversity of styles covered by Grainger earned ridicule at the time, but has since come to be recognised as one of the most important lecture-demonstration series ever given in Australian music.

Percy Grainger returned to his home country in 1934 for performances and lectures with the national broadcaster and others.²⁴ Whether or not Australia was ready for the return of its prodigal musical son is debateable, but in any case, the great man pressed on with his ABC broadcasts, demanding a veritable phalanx of instruments including multiple harmoniums, musical glasses, marimba, eight-part choir, vocal soloists and two orchestras. At times he required up to twenty players of tuned percussion, including pianos, to cram into ABC studios, while his demonstration of his Free Music for Four Theremins or strings, play-conducted from a graphic score by Percy Code, confused everybody.²⁵

Grainger’s lecture-demonstrations on the ABC were notable for their breadth of vision and heretical artistic judgements. Way ahead of their time (and certainly before the term ‘world music’ had ever been coined), they covered music of all kinds — classical, traditional, popular — from all parts of the globe, and all historical periods from the thirteenth century to the present day were given equal treatment. Even before they went to air, the synopses were published as Music: A Commonsense View of All Types, and remain among the definitive aesthetic statements from one of Australia’s most brilliant musical minds.²⁶

Grainger’s broad, inclusive approach to music reflected that of the ABC itself in its first two years of operation. By 1934 the Commission was broadcasting a total of more than twenty-eight thousand hours of all types of music and the previous year’s microphone appearances by instrumentalists and singers had doubled to thirty-three thousand nine hundred and ninety-one.²⁷ For elite Australian musicians, the spectre of unemployment was beginning to recede and the two-year-old ABC was already coming to be seen as the nation’s preferred employer of quality ensembles.

CHAPTER 2

Walter Conder’s Trifecta

Captain H E Adkins, Sir Hamilton Harty, Jim Davidson

Initially the new Commission stewed over more than two hundred applications from hopefuls wanting to become the ABC’s first General Manager, eventually settling on former rural reporter and politically conservative radio administrator H P Williams, who suffered a fatal heart attack just a few months after his appointment.

To fill the vacancy in early 1933, the Commissioners didn’t bother advertising for a second time within just a few months and nor did they consider any applications. Instead, with the ABC’s Deputy Chairman Herbert Brookes driving the agenda, they went on their own instincts. Commissioner May Couchman sought Prime Minister Joe Lyons’s private approval, the head of the Postmaster-General’s department, H P Brown, gave it the nod, and the Commission quickly appointed Major Walter Tasman Conder to the top job.

Conder had been an over-achiever from an early age.¹ He went to Gallipoli in 1915, but almost immediately, on what would become the iconic day of 25 April that year, was hit by Turkish gunfire. Repatriated to Australia, he became commandant of Langwarrin Military Camp, just outside Melbourne, where he was in charge of soldiers invalided out of the frontline force by venereal disease. Aside from fighting for their rights to full pay, he created a military band which raised morale and allowed him to indulge his own love of music.

It was a singularly successful appointment and by war’s end, Conder’s professional career was on the rise. He became Governor of Pentridge prison (where once again he formed a military band), and then Victorian Inspector of Prisons, but in 1923, the smell of the greasepaint lured him away from penal institutions and he joined J C Williamson Ltd and the Taits as a high-level administrator with particular responsibility for developing the Firm’s new commercial interests in broadcasting.

ABC General Manager Major Walter Tasman Conder (on right) with Victorian Manager T W Bearup and Victorian ABC Commissioner May Couchman. Conder was an ex-J C Williamson showman whose populism clashed with the emerging highbrow idealism of the Commission, but whose relationships with touring musicians were exceptionally warm and cordial. Conder was also an indefatigable advocate for the ABC’s employment of Australian musicians.

One of his achievements during this time was a direct broadcast of opening night of the Melba-Williamson La Bohème from Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s Theatre. On another occasion he organised a radio singing contest on behalf of Allans Music and as a judge enlisted Bernard Heinze, who endured the test piece ‘Just a Cottage Small by a Waterfall’ up to six hundred times.² The two men ‘got on’, and from 1924 Heinze was regularly supplying Conder with ensembles to perform in concerts for broadcast.

Conder was known as a workaholic with a genuine humanitarian streak and a flair for the spectacular populist gesture (he would later stage an air race from London to Melbourne). He and Bernard Heinze would work closely together off and on for the next decade, Conder the racing-horse owner and gambler with his penchant for popular and community music, and Heinze with his eye on the great classics, supporting each other, often as personal referees, and each complementing the other’s musical passions.

Conder was the perfect man to run a nationalised live music-making operation at a time of economic downturn. He believed that Australian musicians should be given employment priority over foreigners,³ and he was adamant that as many people as possible should be given the opportunity to hear them. In short, he stood for good musical jobs and full houses, and he saw the ABC as his vehicle for delivering both.

In pursuing that vision as the ABC’s first significant General Manager, Conder demonstrated tremendous energy and hands-on involvement in his efforts to ensure that the new broadcaster catered for as diverse an audience as possible. In not much more than two years of employment, he established in-house musical groups that would offer secure employment for musicians for years to come, and he ensured that three very different sets of musical tastes were catered for in the Commission’s music-making activities.

The project that was closest to Conder’s heart was the creation in 1933 of the ABC’s own Military Band. As his track record in military and penal institutions indicated, Conder had a personal interest in the establishment of such ensembles, which he regarded as morale-boosters whose musical appeal spanned a wide cross-section of society. Such groups of wind, brass and percussion instruments had been popular in the 1920s (the Australian Broadcasting Company also had a military band of its own), but the Depression had killed off much of the grassroots activity from which the elite bands emerged.⁴ So by 1933, the military band business needed a boost.

Conder’s initiative to engage and train the ABC’s own new group of fifty permanent players was ambitious by any measure, but he was determined to ensure the highest possible standards were achieved. With that in mind, he went straight to Britain’s Royal Military School of Music (RMSM), Kneller Hall. The elite Military School’s respected Director of Music, Captain H E Adkins, was engaged on a short-term contract to become the ABC Military Band’s first conductor.⁵

Like Conder himself, Adkins had a flair for the grand gesture, his groundbreaking work with RMSM’s military band over the previous decade including high-profile concerts with massed ensembles at the Royal Albert Hall and Wembley Stadium. Composers like Holst (who lived just around the corner from Kneller Hall) and Vaughan Williams (who wrote his Folk Song Suite for them) were supporters of their work and Sir Henry Wood was a visitor to the school. Adkins’s standards were notoriously high and it was school policy that cadets should attend the opera at Covent Garden and other major London musical events as an integral part of their training.⁶

So Conder couldn’t have chosen a better-credentialled bandsman to build the ABC’s first in-house ensemble, but, not content to confine the new group to the studio, he immediately scheduled a mammoth concert tour for them, from one side of the country to the other, lasting from the end of 1933 until the end of March 1934.⁷ In its eighteen months of existence, the ABC had never attempted such an entrepreneurial, concert-based activity and the infrastructure for it had to be built from the ground up.

A few months before Adkins’s arrival, Conder gave Deputy Bandmaster McAnally the responsibility of selecting and engaging the musicians and then pre-rehearsing them in the tour repertoire. But before the band could be assembled for the first time, the Musicians’ Union was onto Conder about the pay-scales. It demanded that musicians who were the sole members of their sections (more than half the Band), should be paid at principals’ rates and that each broadcast — of which there were many scheduled — attract an additional payment to each player.

As the negotiations dragged on and the already-hefty salaries budget blew out, Conder was left with no option but to reduce the band in size from the intended fifty players to forty, and before Adkins’s arrival it would diminish still further to just thirty-five, meaning that all outdoor performances scheduled on the mid-summer tour had to be scrapped.⁸ Eventually an agreement, strongly weighted in favour of the musicians, was signed, allowing the ABC to proceed with the still-ambitious and expensive tour.

Assembling for the first time on 21 November 1933, it was apparent to Adkins from the outset that McAnally had put together a motley crew with almost no military band experience among them. The two percussionists, drawn from dance bands, had only ever played drums and cymbals and were unfamiliar with standard military band instruments like xylophone, vibraphone and tubuphone. Adkins found both of them to be ‘hopeless incompetents’ and one was ‘so lacking in intelligence’ that he had to be dismissed within the first week.⁹

Adkins said that very few among them could be ‘classed as more than very fair instrumentalists’, the majority being rated between fair, poor and bad. Two players were over seventy years of age, while gifted Australian military band players like Perth-based xylophonist Harold Reid, who had an international reputation, had not even been approached. ‘Loyalty to his friends must have been Mr. McAnally’s strong suit’, Adkins wrote, ‘but it evidently far outweighed his loyalty to the Commission’.

No one among those assembled by McAnally had ever heard of routine musical terms such as ‘marks of expression’, ‘phrasing’, ‘correct intonation’, ‘balance of tone’, or ‘general ensemble’, including those being paid principal rates merely for playing a routine instrumental solo, no matter how brief. Adkins identified four particular problems:

Their lack of knowledge of the Military Band medium … most of them brass, orchestral or dance band players, or wholly unemployed, prior to the formation of this band.

Their obvious lack of experience of playing in good class musical combinations.

Their evident lack of practice on their instruments.

Their gross ignorance of Pianissimo tone production.

By Adkins’s estimation, McAnally himself was an ‘incompetent conductor … and devoid of any artistic musical sense whatsoever’. Instead of pre-rehearsing the more difficult numbers, he ‘flogged to death’ pieces that weren’t on Adkins’s list and which McAnally himself was scheduled to conduct in pre-tour broadcast trials. Because of the cost of rehearsals, all of which required full payment to the musicians, the actual practice sessions with Adkins were minimal and were occupied mainly by the British bandsman teaching his charges the rudiments of military band musicianship.

It was a daunting prospect, not just musically but physically as well. Ahead lay nearly seven thousand miles of travel, beginning with a debut at Sydney Town Hall on 21 December 1933, then through regional New South Wales to Brisbane, and regional Queensland as far north as Rockhampton in the heat of January. Then it was back to regional New South Wales and on to Melbourne and regional Victoria in February, arriving in Tasmania at the end of the month, before heading on to South Australia and Western Australia, from where Colonel Adkins was scheduled to depart by ship on 29 March 1934.¹⁰

Targeting the middle-brow audiences who were beyond light music but still short of the great orchestral masterpieces, this first incarnation of the ABC Military Band built their programmes around arrangements of the classics, with most featuring something by Wagner (orchestral showpieces from The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin and Tannhauser among them), plus stirring anthems like Land of Hope and Glory and Sibelius’s Finlandia, popular hits by the Strauss family, and even arrangements of the piano concertos by Mendelssohn, Grieg and Tchaikovsky, played by Henri Penn. Ballads, sung by local artists picked up along the way, were always popular. Audiences were generally huge — at Brisbane City Hall somehow they managed to cram in three thousand people in mid-January 1934 — and the only disappointing attendances coincided with heatwaves.

The hit of each night was when Adkins got the audience joining in on the choruses of sea-shanties, especially those in which he introduced elements of humour. Ever ready to laugh, they were also highly susceptible to sentimental music such as hymns or patriotic anthems. ‘It is apparent to me that the Australians are really a music-loving people’, Adkins said in response to the reams of fan mail that he received, ‘but not too enamoured of highbrow music’.¹¹

In spite of the heat and the arduous travel, the Band averaged six performances a week throughout the three-month tour, drawing on eight different programmes, many of which were broadcast live through the national stations — and Adkins ran workshops along the way for local bandmasters. The regional venues proved particularly problematic, some of them having proscenium openings just twenty feet across, meaning that half the band was in the wings, heard but not seen. Adkins himself lived in fear of falling off the postage stamp-sized stages and in Cootamundra the venue walls were so thin that those outside could hear just as well as those inside who had paid for admission.

The tour created a sensation, with enthusiastic audiences wherever they went and Adkins’s versatility and can-do attitude winning over regional and metropolitan audiences alike. Nevertheless Adkins confessed to living ‘in constant fear and anxiety that the band would break down completely’. On occasions he physically pulled instruments away from players’ lips to prevent wrong entries, and he had to conduct from memory simply to remain poised for such physical intervention. But for all that, the players themselves showed their ‘Skipper’ tremendous loyalty and worked their tails off for him.

Even so, behind the scenes it hadn’t been quite the smooth ride that the public imagined, with McAnally remaining a problem. Conder wrote subsequently that:

As the tour progressed it became apparent that … [the Deputy Bandmaster] was ready to cause trouble whenever he had the opportunity. Eventually it was decided to send him to Sydney and to replace him by Bandmaster Stephen Yorke of the Gloucestershire Regiment … [who] during the later part of the tour acted as Deputy Conductor.¹²

That sacking aside, as the band travelled relentlessly from one city to another, reports filtered back to Head Office of the outstanding results being achieved along the way, with Adkins being singled out for special praise as both man and musician. By the time the tour reached its final destination in Perth, the band had not lost any steam, with the ABC’s irascible and hard-to-impress Western Australian manager at the time, Basil Kirke, fulsome in his praise of the tour in general and of the final Perth concerts in particular.¹³

At the end of his mammoth tour of duty with the ABC Military Band, Captain Adkins finally arrived in Perth in late March 1934, describing his four months in Australia as ‘one of the very bright spots in my life’. Here he places a wreath on the State War Memorial in King’s Park, watched by the ABC’s Western Australian Manager Basil Kirke (on left of three at bottom of steps).

By the end of the tour, Adkins had generated such goodwill that his ragtag band of amateur and unemployed musicians played like a competent military band, earning success on their own merits, rather than merely through the spectacle of it all. Publicly, Adkins could not have been more pleased with them, for their willingness, desire to improve, their pride in the band and their genuine warmth displayed toward him.

In a letter to Conder, he described the tour as ‘one of the very bright spots in my life’, and reserved special praise for Conder himself: ‘That the tour has been an outstanding success is in no small way due to your organising genius and whole-hearted cooperation’, he wrote from dockside in Perth.¹⁴

Like all subsequent international conductors engaged by the ABC during the 1930s, Adkins was asked to submit a final report on the tour and on ‘general aspects of the organisation’. He turned in a seven-page epic, which was as entertaining and thorough as it was scathing, containing paragraphs of abuse directed toward the Musicians’ Union who ‘will, unless curbed in some way, kill musical art in this country’.¹⁵

By contrast, he was again fulsome in his praise of Conder himself:

I cannot recall a single occasion when any suggestion or request from me was ignored. It was extremely gratifying to me to feel that I had his respect and confidence to such a degree that he backed me unhesitatingly in everything I asked him to do. His native shrewdness and high business and organising ability, coupled, I should think, with being one of the world’s hardest workers, has forced my whole-hearted admiration.¹⁶

But he expressed his gratitude to Conder in a far more practical way, adding a lengthy Appendix whose philosophical overview could have been written by the ABC’s General Manager himself, and in particular the part which read:

The lessons to be learned from my experiences on this intensive tour are:

The public have no desire to be educated up to the standard of appreciating classical music, however much the champions of highbrowism (who form a very small minority) may state to the contrary.

They buy their wireless sets and pay their annual licence fees for the express purpose of being entertained and amused by comparatively light fare in every department of music, or other forms of entertainment.

Certain types of the well-known classics, of a not too sleepy nature, can always be sandwiched between other items in lighter vein, provided the people are not informed beforehand that they are going to hear a classical number. The public are like babies, and will swallow any form of medicine provided it is well mixed with jam or other sweet and cloying substance.¹⁷

These were sentiments that would prove troubling among the Commissioners, but for the time being they represented a ringing endorsement for Conder’s policy of trying to engage the widest possible cross-section of the Australian community in ABC music-making. Meanwhile, in his undated response to the Report, Conder wrote that ‘No praise is too high for the manner in which Captain Adkins despatched his duty …’. He and Adkins remained the best of friends following Adkins’s return to Britain¹⁸ and the band itself would play on. In fact, it would last a generation.

Meanwhile, another admirer of the ABC’s General Manager was the distinguished Irish composer-conductor Sir Hamilton Harty who, in 1934 under Conder’s management, undertook the ABC’s first-ever Australian tour — albeit with performances only in Sydney and Melbourne — by an international orchestral conductor. It, too, was to be a groundbreaking event.

Having just retired from a stellar thirteen-year stint at Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra, Harty had a reputation as an ‘orchestra-builder’, and his Irish background and history as an explicitly nationalist composer (his Irish Symphony was popular at the time), made the fifty-four-year-old seem an ideal choice as the role model and eminence grise which the new Commission desperately craved for its highbrow music-making.¹⁹