Performing Arts

This hefty volume begins with an article on a cappella singing (ensembles with names like Café of the Gate of Salvation and Voices from the Vacant Lot) and ends with the zither, which instrument, the editors assure us, ‘can be seen as a metaphor for the present-day cultural diversity of music in Australia’. We have no lack of companions today: indeed, over the last decade they have been coming thick and fast. However the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia seems to have had a particularly troubled genesis, though the editors, John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell, make no reference to it.

It is snatching some kind of victory out of defeat, I suppose, to write a Ph.D. thesis about the rise and fall of a theatre company, and Julian Meyrick has successfully transformed thesis into book. This has been achieved mainly through very good writing; lively, intelligent and uncluttered by jargon. The formal paraphernalia of the thesis – notes, appendices, statistics, bibliography and index – are not only useful in themselves, but crucial evidence for the argument.