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Michael Hooper is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where from 2012 to 2015 he was an ARC Research Fellow. He is the author of The Music of David Lumsdaine (2012) and Roger Smalley on Music (2018).
The third quarter of the 20th century was a time of particular turbulence for classical composers, when both extreme conservatives and intransigent radicals could have successful careers. Michael Hooper traces the progress of a group of Australian composers in an unstable cultural world of striking polarities - national, international: traditional, progressive. As he shows in telling technical detail, a distinctive musical identity might involve exploring how opposed extremes can either converge or diverge: and by homing in on explicitly Australian contexts that involve painters, writers, academics and even politicians, Hooper's well-documented analyses capture the most memorable qualities of compositions from a time when post-tonal modernism remained a positively mainstream concern. * Arnold Whittall, Professor Emeritus of Music Theory & Analysis, King's College London, UK *
