Power, identity, capital: the Australian art music field 1960–1994

Thesis

This thesis examines how art music was funded in Australia between 1960 and 1994. These decades saw the introduction of government funding and increased institutional support for new art music in Australia. From the time the government allocated $10,000 in assistance to composers in 1967, up to the release of nation’s first cultural policy in 1994, arts funding prompted political controversy and criticism. Responding to this criticism, and in order to justify public spending on the arts, successive governments instrumentalised the newly-subsidised arts and music to cultivate and project a new image of the nation. Outside of Australia, institutional histories of postwar western art music have primarily focused on the either the long 1960s, or the neoliberal turn in arts production from the 1980s and 1990s. This thesis examines a transition from Keynesian social interventionism in the 1960s to the neoliberal turn in arts administration during the 1980s and 1990s. I reveal how during this transitional period governments and administrators pivoted from emphasising the intrinsic, and supposedly civilising effects of the arts to promoting their instrumental, tangible social and economic benefits.

This study is the first to chronicle an institutional history of art music in Australia during the postwar period. Drawing from a wide range of previously unexplored archival sources, I analyse how the interactions of composers, music critics and commentators, politicians, conductors, intellectuals, arts advocates, and the general public shaped art music administration. Since the 1960s, I argue, government arts funding facilitated a transactional relationship between funders, administrators, and producers. Governments and publics expected instrumental, tangible benefits in return for public arts subsidy. And administrators and entrepreneurially alert composers positioned themselves in relation to political economic, social and nation branding priorities to receive funding and opportunities. Examining how entrepreneurial practices emerge and operate in non-market spheres of cultural production illuminates how government subsidies can create a marketplace for artistic producers to meet the demands of their government, administrative, and public clients.

Authors: Shon, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-2r6karj4w
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: arts administration; cultural policy; nation branding; music patronage—government; art music—Australia; Western art music composition
• Subjects: Music; Cultural policy; History