It is well to be reminded of the rich history of ABC live music – as we are in Martin Buzacott’s handsomely presented The Rite of Spring: 75 Years of ABC Music-Making – given that the national broadcaster is no longer in the business of running its own ensembles or fulfilling the duties of a concert organisation.

Histories of the ABC and its orchestras have been written periodically – usually, like this one, to commemorate a significant anniversary – but The Rite of Spring takes a slightly broader view of the ABC’s live music ensembles by including coverage of groups that belonged to the ‘Light Entertainment’ unit. As listed above, these consisted of dance, show and military bands. But just as the six state symphony orchestras consumed the lion’s share of the ABC’s music-making funds and resources, so too they occupy the bulk of Buzacott’s narrative. Indeed, the section headings of the book’s tripartite divisions signal the focus on orchestral music: The Heinze Era 1932–1945, The Goossens Era 1946–1962, The Hopkins Era and Beyond 1963–2007. The fact that the third-named section – which covers by far the longest time frame – occupies less than a quarter of the book, points to another focus of the volume: the first thirty years of the organisation’s history. Buzacott also allocates a disproportionate amount of attention to music-making in Sydney, as ‘The Goossens Era’ testifies. True, Sydney was the centre of the ABC’s music administration divisions, but it is surprising that the three decades of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Hiroyuki Iwaki and Markus Stenz are dispensed with in three paragraphs.

In light of the current history wars and the ABC being regarded in some quarters as an organisation with a record of barely concealed leftist leanings, a study of this kind could have offered a sophisticated examination of culture, class and national identity as played out in the ABC’s music policies and in the concert-going habits, practices and tastes of its live music audiences. With the rise of the ‘entertainment industry’ in the twentieth century and unprecedented technologies for the transmission of music, the ABC was deeply implicated in the business of music and ideology.

Disappointingly, Buzacott treads a more conventional (and less interesting) path by skirting around these issues. From time to time, he points out that managers at the ABC believed that the purpose of music at the national broadcaster was to ‘raise Australian cultural standards’, without offering a close examination of what ‘cultural standards’ might have been taken to mean. Sometimes Buzacott himself exudes the pompous attitude of an old-school ABC mandarin. Sprouting clichés about ‘Beethoven’s indomitable spirit’ and the universality of his music, Buzacott cites Bernard Heinze’s wartime performances of Beethoven’s orchestral music as an example of the ‘civilising influence [that] music could exert in times of trouble’. It is well to remember that, at precisely the same time, this same music was exerting its ‘civilising influence’ under Wilhelm Furtwängler in Nazi Berlin. I don’t doubt that Heinze’s concerts resonated with the nation’s Zeitgeist – the tremendous demand for tickets to Sydney’s 1943 Beethoven Festival and the profound impact that it had on those who attended attest to the power and significance of the event – but let’s keep ‘civilising influence’ out of the discussion.

The Rite of Spring reads like a book-length obituary. On 31 December 2006, the ABC formally divested itself of the state symphony orchestras, the last of the in-house ensembles to be dispensed with. Fortunately, the orchestras were left with the administrative structures in place to ensure their ongoing viability. The ABC’s other ensembles were rather more ruthlessly relinquished. Once it was decided that they had passed their use-by date, they were consigned to oblivion. We can tick them off one by one in the course of Buzacott’s narrative. The military band, the first all-new ABC ensemble in 1933, was the first to go in 1951. It was shortly followed by the ABC choruses (although the ABC Adelaide Singers held out until 1976). Brian May and the ABC Melbourne Show Band lasted until 1982, by which time the ABC’s dance bands had long ceased to exist. We never learn what happened to the string quartet.   Like any long and detailed obituary, The Rite of Spring offers insights into the character of the deceased – in this case, the characters of those who figured in positions of authority in ABC music – including ‘warts and all’ accounts of a range of personalities. It is enlivened with anecdotes and material gleaned from interviews with significant personages past and present. The volume’s fifty pages of endnotes seem to convey an air of academic authority, but Buzacott’s method lacks the rigour of true scholarship and the number of misspelled titles of musical works would shame an undergraduate. But if it does not convince as a textbook, nor does it have the pizazz of a page-turner. That said, it is a worthy account of the history of a large and complex organisation, and its appearance in the ABC’s seventy-fifth anniversary year is timely.

Which brings us to the title. Spring suggests a new beginning, but the book is an account of a life that has been lived. Buzacott states in an ABC Books media release that Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring ‘cropped up continually at critical moments in ABC history’, an assertion that is not argued with any conviction in the account he offers. More to the point, I should think, is that Stravinsky’s ballet concludes with the brutal sacrifice of ‘The Chosen One’. Which is not to say that there was blood on the floor at year’s end 2006, when the ABC axed the last of its ensembles. Indeed, it was said that the only sound emanating from head office was the popping of champagne corks.