Engaging history and negotiating national identity with Miki's Concerto Requiem (1981) at the 18th Biennial Festival of Arts in Adelaide, South Australia

Abstract

Minoru Miki's Concerto Requiem, performed in the Festival in Adelaide in 1994, was part of the Artistic Director's new vision for Australia to ‘meld East and West in a new Australian-ness’. It also coincided with fiftieth-anniversary events to mark the end of the Pacific War. Miki, who was composer-in-residence at the Festival, was acutely aware of public perceptions of the Japanese as bitter enemies. He specifically requested that Concerto Requiem be performed in remembrance of all Australians and Japanese who had died in the war, but it is only the analysis presented here that has revealed the depth and subtlety of Miki's compositional strategy to convey musically his message for coexistence. This study explores the way Concerto Requiem demonstrated Hunt's broad vision and was a tool for reconciliation between Australia and Japan. It argues that the performance was an episode in the story of cultural relations between Australia and Japan that reveals the way music and music-making occur in the nexus between geopolitical imperatives and historical resonances that continue to have an impact on the negotiation of identity at transcultural festivals in Australia today.