Repertoire, landscape and memory : Williams's and Schultz's Journey to Horsehsoe Bend cantata

In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues in the final pages of his 600-page tome, against the purist vision of the natural world put forward by Henry David Thoreau. For Schama: "Neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated nor the past and the present are so easily fixed."¹ Most of his book is the account of how Western art and literature have re-made nature and history through myth and processes of remembering the past. In collapsing the two, Schama finds a resource for the future of human invention: "we need only poke below the subsoil of [the earth's] surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory."² And further, "the sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mould of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it."3 In this paper I would like to highlight the qualities of Williams's and Schultz's Cantata Journey to Horseshoe Bend as a project that resonates with Schama's interests in the dynamic relationship between landscape and memory. The Cantata echoes the blurred boundaries of the past and present, and projects the natural features of the Central Australian landscape into a musical representation. The sense of place - what Aboriginal people refer to as 'country' - is both the motif and motive behind this work. It adapts Ted Strehlow's self-implicated tale of his father's death on the Finke River at a cattle station called Horseshoe Bend. Strehlow's textured episodes in his memoire Journey to Horseshoe Bend ⴠare both intensely visual and densely developed reflections and reminiscences often enfolding a poetic of the landscape within a prosaic account of frontier narratives. While there are analyses of this Strehlow work completed or in progress, I wish to focus specifically on the adaptation given to the book by Williams and Schultz as a means of evaluating the kinds of investments that are made musicologically in their adaptation of this work and, where possible, to speculate on what can be drawn from them.