Abstract
This essay reports on a “voice” that has been singing in Canberra since March 18, 2003. On that day, 150 local women entered Australia’s Parliament House and turned their grief for the people of Iraq into an international media event as Australia went to war in the Persian Gulf. Judith Clingan’s Lament re-sounded the ancient role of the citizens’ chorus in public life, revealing fresh artistic possibilities for citizens within contemporary democracies. This chapter offers cross-disciplinary perspectives on the work of A Chorus of Women and its large repertoire of original music. The Chorus plays an enduring, inspirational civic role in the Australian capital, “singing up” harmony between people and nature, and commenting on matters global and local in many songs, and major productions, written by women. Their mythic-scale choral dramas, all composed by Glenda Cloughley and directed by Johanna McBride, involve writing for, and directing, community musicians with wide ranging musical capacities. Cloughley’s creative method is applied to the Chorus culture from her initiation of the 2003 Lament, confirming potent links she had theorised in her doctoral research between women’s lament and renewal in the indigenous layers of European regeneration mythology.
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Notes
- 1.
The words of Lament were twice read into Hansard by Labor Party Senators Claire Moore and Trish Crossin, during the debate on the decision to go to war.
- 2.
Judith Clingan, “Lament,” original handwritten manuscript, March 14, 2003, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/Sheet Music/Peace/Lament handwritten.pdf.
- 3.
Fran Kelly, “7.30 Report 18 March 2003 – The Lament,” The 7.30 Report, ABC News Australia, March 18, 2003, https://youtu.be/Xg9PzFyEYyY. On March 18, 2003, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s premier weekday television current affairs programme, led the bulletin on Australia’s participation in the Iraq War with the singing of Judith Clingan’s Lament. Political journalist Fran Kelly referred to: “… a chorus of women, singing for peace in the halls of Parliament House this afternoon, as the Prime Minister rose to his feet in the chamber to confirm the very reality they were lamenting.”
- 4.
Glenda Cloughley, “Letter to the Singers of the Lament,” A Chorus of Women, March 18, 2003, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/Papers and Writings/Glendas letter to the women 190303.pdf.
- 5.
Judith Clingan, “Lament,” interview by Andrew Ford, The Music Show, ABC Radio National, March 22, 2003, https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/musicshow/22nd-march-2003/3545360.
- 6.
John Morton, “Foundations of Being,” in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11. I refer here to the indigenous Australian conception of “Law” as that is described by John Morton. “The Law governs the world of all Creation. It encompasses not only the rules and regulations by which people live, but also the laws of nature. Without the Law, nothing would exist or persist. In that sense, the Law is the Constitution, a charter of all that was, is, and shall be. By the same token, the Law is everywhere, binding the world together in a systematic way.”
- 7.
Glenda Cloughley, “The Resounding Silence” (MSc (Hons) Thesis, University of Western Sydney, 1996), https://researchdirect.westernsydney.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:383.
- 8.
International Association for Analytical Psychology, “Analysis and Activism 2020+ U.S. Presidency Conference,” accessed September 15, 2019, https://iaap.org/conferences/analysis-and-activism-iv-2/.
- 9.
Marija Gimbutas, The Civilisation of the Goddess (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 352–401. The Bronze Age followed three waves of invasion by Proto-Indo-European “Kurgan” peoples from the Russian Steppes at c. 4400–4300 BCE, c. 3500 BCE and soon after 3000 BCE, according to Gimbutas’1956 theory of migration and subsequent research. In her later work, Gimbutas described a “collision of cultures” as these warrior, sky god-worshipping peoples colonised the earth-worshipping indigenous Europeans—so establishing a “two-tier” social system.
- 10.
Glenda Cloughley, “The Generative Substratum: On Relocating the Indigenous European Psyche” was the title of Glenda’s paper to the 2004 international symposium of the Institute of Archaeomythology in Bulgaria. Glenda acknowledges Gimbutas as author of the term “the generative substratum.” While Gimbutas did not use the term in her publications, her editor and literary executor Joan Marler has confirmed in personal communications that Gimbutas commonly used the phrase to refer to the social tier “under” the hierarchically dominant ruling tier.
- 11.
“The Baby’s Cry” is one of these songs for silenced voices. It sounds the desolate, culturally unheard wail of Jocasta’s newborn son, Oedipus, whose father has ordered his death. Oedipus is a mythic example of an abandoned boy, with an experience of traumatic infant impotence, that “reproduces” the compassionless, omnipotent ruler. Through studies of ancient dramas, history and biography, Glenda showed the consistency of this “oedipal” pattern from Sophocles’ King Oedipus to modern leaders—among them, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and, more recently, Donald Trump. Her thesis suggests that peace, social justice and adequate responses to climate change all depend on “resounding the silence” through poetic imagination that finds wisdom for the common good.
- 12.
Glenda Cloughley, “Perspective – Lament,” interview with Sandy McCutcheon, ABC Radio National, May 14, 2003, transcript, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/Media/ Perspective - 14_5_2003_ Glenda Cloughley.pdf.
- 13.
Walter Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 11–13. The theologian Walter Brueggemann traces the generative, leading role of grief in the “narrative of liberation” and in the ethical transformations that lament makes possible in envisioning and creating an alternative social order to “totalism”; “… [R]eal criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right.” “…If the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries [of grief] that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place.”
- 14.
Purpose or goal (Greek); the purposive impulse towards the realisation of potentials, central in psychology following Carl G. Jung.
- 15.
Jill Parliament, “Children of Iraq,” Songbook for Citizens (Canberra: Citizens Press, 2013), 20, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/images/Songbook.pdf.
- 16.
Glenda Cloughley, “Your Cry Our Cry,” Songbook for Citizens, 172.
- 17.
Glenda Cloughley, “Love Has A Voice,” A Chorus of Women, March 9, 2007, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/Love-Has-A-Voice.htm.
- 18.
Glenda offered to listen to Chorus women’s dreams as a form of research for songwriting during the preparation of Websong. Her songs “Oracle of Laws” and “The Web” contain references to women’s dreams.
- 19.
Websong was performed in 2004 in the National Gallery of Australia at the Oneira Arts Festival, Canberra; in Bulgaria at Boris Christoff Music Centre, Sofia, and the International Institute of Archaeomythology Symposium, Rila, where Chorus women were artists-in-residence; New South Wales Art Gallery and National Galleries in Canberra and Melbourne alongside Glenda Cloughley’s 2004 Barbara Blackman Temenos Foundation Public Lecture, “Lament and Renewal in Temenos Oz”; 2005 Floriade Festival, Canberra.
- 20.
Amanda Whiteley, “Remembering the Canberra Firestorm,” The Age, January 18, 2015, https://hercanberra.com.au/city/recollections-of-the-canberra-firestorm/.
- 21.
Glenda Cloughley, “The Web,” A Chorus of Women, Songbook for Citizens, 147.
- 22.
Meg Rigby, “She Spins,” A Chorus of Women, Songbook for Citizens, 76.
- 23.
Desmond Tutu, “Eco-Ubuntu,” Enviropaedia, accessed December 20, 2020, http://www.enviropaedia.com/topic/default.php?topic_id=336.
- 24.
Jane Addams, “Democracy or Militarism (1988)” in Jane Addams’ Essays and Speeches, ed. Marilyn Fischer and Judy D Whipps (London: Continuum, 2005), 1–4. The assertion that peace is the nurture of life and “the unfolding of life processes” (rather than either an “abstract dogma” or “merely the absence of war”) was repeatedly asserted by the Nobel Peace Laureate Jane Addams. In 2015, Glenda set Jane Addams’ words to music in the “Law Chorale – Peace is the Nurture of Life” in A Passion for Peace.
- 25.
Several Chorus women have written songs for the Peace Vigils, including “If We Only Knew” by Judith Clingan, “When People Start to Sing” by Johanna McBride and Janet Salisbury, “ANZAC Hymn” by Honey Nelson and “Spirit Songs for ANZAC Eve” by Glenda Cloughley and Yamitji-Noongar woman Judith Kelly.
- 26.
Meg Rigby, “Peace Bell Song,” A Chorus of Women, August 6, 2018, https://youtu.be/spRPX26ewZM.
- 27.
Glenda Cloughley, “A Recipe for Peace,” A Chorus of Women, Songbook for Citizens, 4.
- 28.
Glenda Cloughley, “Lest We Forget,” A Chorus of Women, Canberra Refugee Rally, April 13, 2014, https://soundcloud.com/a-chorus-of-women/lest-we-forget. Women have written verse lyrics for “Lest We Forget” on subjects ranging from domestic violence to sanctuary for refugees, and the personal consequences of war. A Chorus of Women. Songbook for Citizens, 48.
- 29.
ANZAC Day is an Australian and New Zealand annual public holiday on April 25, which commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealand military forces at Gallipoli, Turkey, during the First World War, in 1915.
- 30.
Graeme Dunstan, “Report of the Fourth Annual, Lest We Forget the Frontier Wars March at the Australian War Memorial, April 25, 2014,” Peacebus, June 1, 2014, http://www.peacebus.com/FrontierWars/140601FrontierWarMarchReport.html.
- 31.
Paul Farrell, “Asylum-seekers: Thousands Rally in Protest Against Government’s Policies,” The Canberra Times, April 13, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/13/asylum-seekers-thousands-rally-in-protest-against-governments-policies.
- 32.
Johanna McBride, “A Home Away from Home,” A Chorus of Women, Canberra Refugee Rally, April 13, 2014, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/dbpage.php?pg=A_Home_Away_from_Home.
- 33.
Christine McGinn, Sarah McPhee and Nicholas McElroy, “Refugee Rallies Held Across Australia,” The Canberra Times, July 20, 2019, https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6284056/refugee-rallies-held-across-australia/.
- 34.
Glenda Cloughley (words), “Song of Life.” Johanna McBride (arr. after Beethoven). A Chorus of Women and Canberra Citizens, April 14, 2019, https://youtu.be/hHB7SOE3POk.
- 35.
Scott Bennett, “Parliament House and the Australian People,” Research Paper no. 29 (Canberra: Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Australia, 2008), https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20101013164244/http:/www.aph.gov.au/Library/pubs/rp/2007-08/08rp29.pdf. This parliamentary paper, published on the 20th anniversary of the opening of Australia’s Parliament House, cites the performance of Lament as an occasion when music powerfully expressed the people’s voice.
- 36.
Hanaa Edwar is Founder and General Secretary of the Iraqi Al-Amal Association and Co-Founder of the Iraqi Women’s Network. In March 2013 she was in Canberra for the Inaugural Australia Arab Women’s Dialogue meeting.
- 37.
Peter Arnott, Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 15–20.
- 38.
Martin Crotty, “Gallipoli: The Birth of a Nation? Trial and Trauma,” Religion and Ethics, ABC Radio National broadcast, April 24, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-birth-of-a-nation-gallipoli-trial-and-trauma/10094786. “The founding myth” or “birth” of Australian cultural identity is a claim that many military historians and Australian political leaders have made (and continue to promulgate) about the Australian ANZAC soldiers’ participation in the disastrous First World War campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey, in 1915.
- 39.
The Gifts of the Furies has had 30 performances, including substantial excerpts. Major productions with large citizens’ choruses set for SATB, soloists and instrumental ensembles were presented in 2009, at the Great Hall of the Australian National University; 2010, in partnership with the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra; 2011, at City Uniting Church, Canberra. In 2009, Glenda and Johanna created a “two-hander” version with Linda Wise at Pantheatre in Malérargues, France; updated with Craig San Roque in Alice Springs, Australia in 2012. They performed the two-hander in Australia and overseas, including in Launceston, Tasmania at the 2010 Sounding the Earth: Music, Language and Acoustic Ecology conference of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, and in Braga, Portugal at the 2012 conference of the International Association for Analytical Psychology and International Association of Jungian Scholars on The Psychology of C.G. Jung in Conversation with a Changing World.
- 40.
The Eumenides is the final drama in The Oresteian Trilogy of Aeschylus, 458 BCE. Glenda consulted numerous translations while she was writing words and music for The Gifts of the Furies. She often found Robert Fagles’ to be the best attuned to her effort to represent poetic wisdom about the lawful relations between people and Earth, consistent with her “reading” of the most ancient indigenous layers of European symbolic artmaking.
- 41.
Glenda Cloughley, “When Our Ethos Sings,” in Canberra Red: Stories from the Bush Capital, ed. David Headon and Andrew MacKenzie (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2013), 166–7. Ethos, “Spirit of Community” (1961) stands in Civic Square, Canberra. Sculptor Tom Bass’ tall, dignified figure of a woman was the city’s first public art commission.
- 42.
Glenda Cloughley, The Gifts of the Furies, A Chorus of Women, September 25, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WHaRURG1G4.
- 43.
Bob Hawke served in office from March 11, 1983 until December 20, 1991.
- 44.
Glenda Cloughley, Gifts of the Furies, A Chorus of Women, September 25, 2010, https://youtu.be/oACu-vu3lsE. We fondly remembered Bob Hawke, after his death on May 16, 2019, with a video of his impromptu speech after our final performance of The Gifts of the Furies on September 25, 2010 at Australia’s Old Parliament House.
- 45.
The 1915 International Congress of Women coincided with the first week of the ANZAC’s Gallipoli campaign. Within the Passions Glenda refers to the Congress women as our “spiritual great-grandmothers.” A Chorus of Women’s longstanding local and international links with WILPF are exemplified in Johanna’s description of us as WILPF’s “singing sisters.”
- 46.
Watch Glenda Cloughley, A Passion for Peace (“Resolution One”), A Chorus of Women, April 28, 2015, https://youtu.be/dA0iE1OLU_8. This choral song is a musical setting of the text of the first Resolution passed by the International Congress of Women in 1915. The recording shows Johanna McBride conducting and soprano Louise Page leading the Women’s Chorus in the role of Jane Addams, President of the 1915 International Congress of Women.
- 47.
“Treaty of Versailles,” History.com, last modified March 3, 2020 https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/treaty-of-versailles-1.
- 48.
Glenda Cloughley, A Passion for Peace, A Chorus of Women, 2015, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/dbpage.php?pg=Highlights#peace_festival; Glenda Cloughley, The People’s Passion, A Chorus of Women, November 11, 2018 and June 28 and 30, 2019, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/dbpage.php?pg=Highlights#PeoplesPassion.
- 49.
Barbie Robinson and Richard Scherer, “A Chorus of Women – The People’s Passion” in Living Arts, Canberra, July 2019, https://www.chorusofwomen.org/Media/The People’s Passion review by Living Arts Canberra July 2019.pdf.
- 50.
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (Middlesex: Penguin, 1964), 32.
- 51.
Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, 32. Koestler cites Pliny and also notes that “accounts of the scale given by different authors vary slightly.”
- 52.
Johanna McBride, “We Are the People,” A Chorus of Women. Songbook for Citizens, 154.
- 53.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C Approved by Governments,” October 8, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/.
- 54.
These lyrics are excerpted from one of several versions of “The Wellsprings” Glenda has made for Chorus performances since the original for The People’s Passion (2018). This song seeks to give poetic and musical depiction to the “Law” relating to the “generative substratum” described by Marija Gimbutas. It was partly inspired by various translations of “The Spirit of the Valley,” Chapter 6 of Tao de Ching (c. 500 BCE) by Lao Tzu. “The Wellsprings” is also the subject of Glenda’s essay “Wellsprings Spirits: Eglantyne Jebb, Greta Thunberg and Choruses of Women” in ‘Spare the Rod’: Convention on the Rights of the Child Thirty Years On, Independent Scholars Association of Australia NSW Chapter Papers and Proceedings 2019 (2020): 75–88.
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Acknowledgement
Glenda Cloughley and Johanna McBride would like to acknowledge their heartfelt thanks for the reading, encouragement, and editorial guidance of Dr. Liz Clarke and Dr. Craig San Roque.
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Cloughley, G., McBride, J. (2022). Making Music in A Chorus of Women. In: Kouvaras, L., Grenfell, M., Williams, N. (eds) A Century of Composition by Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95557-1_22
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