Redmond Barry Fellowship

Dr Jillian Graham

Beyond the Stave: A Biography of Australian Composer and Arts Activist Margaret Sutherland (1897-1984)

The aim of this project is to research and write a scholarly biography of Australian composer Margaret Sutherland (1897-1984), who spent most of her life in Melbourne. Sutherland is an intriguing character from many perspectives. While it was acceptable for women to teach or perform music in the early years of the twentieth century, it was not thought that women were capable of writing good music. Cecil Gray epitomised this attitude in 1924 with his comment that ‘a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all’.

As early as the 1920s, Sutherland could be compared with contemporary composers in Europe and the USA who were reacting against aspects of the Romantic style of the nineteenth century. She produced around 200 works in her lifetime, mostly chamber and vocal/choral works, but also orchestral works, four for theatre and one opera. In addition to her contribution as a composer, Sutherland was a tireless advocate for Australian composers and for the arts in general in this country. One of her most notable contributions in this regard was the leading role she played in the Combined Arts Centre Movement (CACM), which lobbied strongly over a 13-year period to have the Melbourne Arts Centre built where it is today.

There is a consensus among scholars about the high calibre of Sutherland’s music and the influence she has had on Australian music. David Symons acknowledges that she is ‘recognised as one of Australia’s most important composers of the early and middle years of the twentieth century’. American scholar and musicologist Jane Weiner LePage refers to Sutherland as the ‘undisputed first lady of Australian music as well as one of the earliest and most respected composers in the country’. Earlier, in his watershed book, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (1967), Roger Covell maintained that ‘it was a woman composer, Margaret Sutherland of Melbourne, who really naturalised the twentieth century in Australian music’.