anton dvorak

inspiration for the Being Australian score

"Music … is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience...."

Bernard Herrmann, American composer

At the heart of Being Australian is an original orchestral score shaped by the melody of Marie Cowan's Waltzing Matilda and inspired by the personal experiences described in people's story submissions to Being Australian.

This "new Matilda" will be fresh and original, compelling and meaningful, rich in themes and ambiances, respectful of its sources of inspiration, contemporary in form and composition and performed with skill and maturity.

Like worthy soundtracks of memorable films past, the score will have a cinematic gravity all its own.

Antonín Dvorák's Symphony from the New World is a very apt example of symphonic inspiration for the Being Australian score. The New World Symphony is Dvorák’s expression of a young nation he observed over a century ago.

Dvorák's work triumphs at combining diverse themes and airs resulting in the musical equivalent of verbal or literary anecdotes about the character of national life in a relatively young United States in the late 19th century.

Specifically, Dvorák (1841-1904) created music from sources indigenous to the United States of the 1890s: Indian melodies and chants, ragtime tunes and cakewalk instrumentals, plantation-derived airs and Negro melodies, folk music and the foxtrot.

These and other influences were brought together and extended, elaborated and refined with compositional techniques to yield a musical journey of discovery and revelation – an orchestral work that conveys an impression of the land and the people who live there. There is something to this approach worth emulating in the score for Being Australian.

Dvorák’s Symphony Number 9 in E minor, nicknamed at the last minute by the composer as Symphony from the New World, made its world debut at Carnegie Hall in New York City on December 16, 1893. It was created and received as a work of 'fine art' worthy of being performed in the great concert halls of the world. This is the vision – indeed a condition of fulfillment – for the score for Being Australian.