This research explores the tension between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ musical styles in eight significant works of guitar music by Australian composer Nigel Westlake; namely Antarctica, Songs from the Forest, The Hinchinbrook Riffs, Six Fish, Shadow Dances, Shards of Jaisalmer, Jovian Moons, and Mosstrooper Peak. Through detailed analysis and recorded musical performances, consideration is given to the extent that these works bridge the aesthetic divide identified by Adorno, Jameson, Huyssen, and others; exploring their potential conformity to notions of postmodernity in music. The argument is advanced that Westlake has created a musical language that simultaneously combines sophistication and mainstream appeal. Illumination is made of many significant details of Westlake’s guitar music—including rock guitar techniques, harmonic formulations from popular music, and the extensive use of the more esoteric idiom of octatonicism—which provide a foundation for future analysis, evaluation, and performance of Westlake’s music. The creative research component comprises two audio CDs containing edited studio recordings of six works featuring the classical guitar in both a solo and ensemble setting, as well as documentation of other live performances.

Exploring Twentieth-Century Music

Bridging the Great Divide: An Exploration of Postmodernism in the Guitar Music of Nigel Westlake

There is currently a backlash against modernism in English-language music studies. While this vogue of ‘modernism bashing’ is ostensibly based on progressive ideologies, it is dependent on a one-sided perception of musical modernism which it shares with earlier conservative disparagements. Of central importance in this respect is the ‘othering’ of musical modernism as an essentially continental European phenomenon in the ‘Anglosphere’, where it is consistently suspected of being a ‘foreign import’ – by conservative commentators in the first part of the twentieth century, just as by their ‘new-musicological’ successors at the turn of the twenty-first.

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Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism

String quartets by South African composers : a comprehensive catalogue and annotated discussion of works composed between 1940 and 2016

This study focuses on listeners’ form perception as they encounter Western concert music. The general aim was to investigate college music students’ form perception as they listen to five long-rang...

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Perception of the Ternary Arch-Form in Western Concert Music: Evidence from College Music Education.

Selected Violin Works of Alan Scott ‘Vaness’ Chakmakjian Hovhaness: Two New Performance Editions with Historical Discussion, Compositional Style Overviews, and Pedagogical Considerations