Uni's Tribute To Two Composers

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday October 27, 1993

MEG MATTHEWS

MACQUARIE University is in good company. Both Oxford and Breslau universities awarded honorary doctorates to composers, recognising the worth of Joseph Haydn and Johannes Brahms, respectively.

Last Sunday, Macquarie University honoured not one, but two, Australian composers, Dulcie Holland and Miriam Hyde.

Both received honorary doctorates presented by the Chancellor, Justice Michael Kirby, and the ceremony was followed by a tribute concert at which a selection of their music was performed.

Both composers celebrated their 80th birthday in January this year (10 days apart) and both have achieved considerable success in a traditionally male domain.

Both have combined their domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers with careers in music as composers, performersand educators and both have had a profound impact on generations of young musicians.

The first and final items of the concert were aptly chosen. Dulcie Holland's Fanfare for Six Trumpets, composed this year for the Scots College Centenary, provided a strong splash of colour to be in the concert.

Performed by Sydney Conservatorium trumpeters and conducted by Gordon Webb, it had a forcefulness and taut type of energy one does not usually associate with a gently spoken 80-year-old grandmother.

Equally astounding were the final piano pieces composed and performed by Miriam Hyde.

To hear her clarity of touch, rippling fluency and subtle phrases and to see her total involvement in the music she has created was inspiring to both would-be concert pianists and would-be composers.

Three of the solo items were character pieces, composed 1932-1946, and drawing their inspiration from nature as do many of her piano solos but Scherzo Fantastico (and it was) was composed in 1986.

With her daughter, Christine, she then played two transcriptions of orchestral works as duets, Happy Occasion Overture (1957) and a delightfully witty Fantasia on Waltzing Matilda.

Although there are obvious limits to the similarities between these two composers, both do have a sense of humour, a welcome inclusion in 20th-century music which sometimes bogs in its own earnestness.

In six recital songs, A Singing of Sayings, composed in 1990, to poems by Jyoti Brunsdon, Dulcie Holland has created a short song cycle, skilfully contrasting the whimsical, the dreamy, the dramatic and the witty with unexpected melodic lines and picturesque accompaniment.

Josephine Allan, as the chief accompanist and pianist for the concert, supported the other artists in a variety of shorter works by Holland and Hyde to a standard that matched the excellence of the occasion, playing with Roslyn Dunlop (clarinet), Vivienne Powell (mezzo soprano), and with Shuti Huang(violin) and Peter Morrison (cello) in Trio Solaris, who gave a most polished performance of Dulcie Holland's Trio.

Christine Draeger (flute) was accompanied somewhat more stolidly by James Muir in Miriam Hyde's Flute Sonata.

The large audience who attended the graduation ceremony and concert were a most appreciative mixture of colleagues, students, teachers, families, friends and fans.

Macquarie University, Abe Segal and his Australian Musicians Academy, are to be commended for organising an event of such historical and musical significance in which so many could share.