William Barton: didgeridoo guru from the bush hits global stardom
Didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton has entered a new era as a musician carving out a powerful musical legacy.
If William Barton closes his eyes he can see his uncle, a tall proud man with one hand on his didgeridoo. A deep pinkish red haze that engulfs the desert at dusk wraps around him and settles on the rocky outcrops of Kalkadungu country, near Queensland’s Mt Isa. Uncle Arthur Peterson, a respected elder, takes his instrument to his mouth and the sound is like being transported to a church where one voice swells to many, every crevice of the space filled. Uncle didn’t just make music, says Barton, he made electricity.
Barton knew he wanted to be part of that mystery and aged seven began learning from his uncle, listening and observing for the next four years until the Kalkadungu man died.
At Uncle Arthur’s funeral his instrument was placed on top of his coffin and filled with stones. But instead of burning the didgeridoo on the fire — it is custom to silence that instrument forever at its player’s death — the elders of Uncle Arthur’s mob presented it to his 11-year-old nephew.
“What struck me in my memory of Uncle Arthur was this real aura about him and this real special presence, the A-factor, someone of great significance even if they didn’t show it in their characteristics,” says Barton, today widely acclaimed as Australia’s best didgeridoo player. “You can see they were powerful on the inside but they were humble. They were story-keepers but also storytellers.”
Last month, a tall, proud man walked on to the stage at the City Recital Hall in Sydney, in the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s first series of socially distanced public performances in the six months since Covid restrictions were put in place. Backlit in blue, standing at more than 188cm, he looked intensely at the audience before playing his hauntingly beautiful piece Didge Fusion.
“My only complaint was that I wanted to hear more of his extraordinary didgeridoo playing,” wrote critic Murray Black for this newspaper. Though on stage for just four minutes of the hour-long program, Barton left the audience with a gift: they had also witnessed that “A-factor”.
Barton has taken the didgeridoo from the bush to the world’s greatest concert halls -
Carnegie Hall, the Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Pompidou Center in Paris among them - and has notched up concerts not only here with the state symphony orchestras but the London and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras.
British conductor Simon Rattle says Barton is “one of the great virtuosos”. Didgeridoo player Mark Atkins describes him as a “humble, talented and inspirational player who walks in both worlds”.
He’s “Hendrix with a didj” if you ask ABC Classic FM presenter Martin Buzacott, who engineered a life-changing meeting in 2002 between Barton and composer Peter Sculthorpe, who died in 2014, which would see the pair become longtime collaborators: “In my lifetime spent working in classical music, he is the sole individual with whom I’ve worked — performer or composer, Australian or international — who I would single out without hesitation as a musical genius”. And he’s not just talking about the man who plays an instrument shapedfrom the arm of a coolibah tree, he’s referring to the whole package: the didgeridoo player, guitarist, vocalist and composer continuing in the tradition of Sculthorpe in shaping a uniquely Australian sound.
It says something that Barton is often asked to appear at events that could be considered as exercises in cultural diplomacy: he performed for former US president Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping and last year premiered Kalkadungu’s Journey, the work he co-wrote with Matthew Hindson, for Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. Back home he has performed at the memorials of everyone from great Australian painter Margaret Olley to former PMs Gough Whitlam and Bob Hakwe.
For NAIDOC week next month he will collaborate with The Royal Australian Navy Band on a performance (also for Remembrance Day) and do a livestream to the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. Then in January he will perform with his partner Véronique Serret, a former violinist with the ACO and former concertmaster of the Darwin Symphony Orchestra, at the Sydney Festival in a piece they call Heartland.
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William Barton is standing in the kitchen of a two-storey terrace in Sydney’s Paddington, where he has been learning to tame a moody oven.
“I’m still getting used to it,” Barton says. “The oven becomes temperamental if I’m in a rush. That’s when I know I need to sit down and have a cup of tea like Aunty Peggy.”
“Aunty” is Peggy Glanville-Hicks, the Australian composer who died in 1990 and bequeathed her home as a place for composers to live and work. And so the latest recipient of the year-long residency moved into the house with Serret, six didgeridoos, three guitars and an unusual three-stringed guitar called a “bogan box” made by his friend Peter Laing.
As with performers across the country, Covid has forced Barton to slow down and instead of touring the world he has had time to take long walks, cook, and to explore his music — thinking, composing, playing — with which he has found a surprising new affinity.
“This week my fingers are getting that fast movement that I want and translating my musicality from the didgeridoo,” says Barton, pulling up a stool at the piano in the corner of the loungeroom and improvising a driving rhythm. “It has certainly evolved since the beginning of the residency and during a time we are not able to travel, it’s actually a gift. I said to Veronique this morning, maybe for the SSO Fanfare premiere,” — he is one of 50 composers commissioned for a multi-season initiative culminating in the SSO’s return to the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall in 2022 — “I want to write something for the orchestra but by then I should be comfortable to play piano in the concert hall.”
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“Hello William, I hear you’re a good didgeridoo player, we’ll soon see about that.” Barton flashes a grin as he recalls in an English accent those first words a chequered vest-wearing Sculthorpe said to him all those years ago at a Queensland Symphony Orchestra rehearsal. “We’ll soon see …” became an invitation, lighting the fire within the then 21-year-old from the bush who had debuted with QSO as a soloist when he was 17. Challenge accepted.
It turns out Sculthorpe didn’t live too far from Aunty Peggy and after negotiating several hills and zigzagging through terrace-laden streets past chocolatiers, shoe shops and cafes we’re standing outside his former residence in Woollahra. Barton waves at the house “Hello Uncle Peter”.
Barton had initially been programmed to open and close the QSO concert with his improvised playing but after Sculthorpe heard him he reconfigured his work Earth Cry in that very rehearsal to put the didgeridoo at its centre, recalls Buzacott, QSO’s then artistic administrator. Word got out about this unusual collaboration and the audience filled the hall on a spring evening to hear a young man from the bush collaborate with the luminary of Australian music; people became restless when the conductor appeared without the soloist.
“Then, from outside at the very back of the auditorium, there emerged a distant rumble which might have been airconditioning or a machine, until the first flourish of harmonics and overtones clearly identified it as the sound of the Australian earth, the ochre-coloured, hit-in-the-guts sound of intense air circulating through hollow timber,” Buzacott later drafted for the notes inside Barton’s first album. “The doors flung open and the behemoth figure of William Barton emerged, walking through the audience while performing a solo as a traditional cleansing ritual.”
It was a poignant gig for everyone who was there. The orchestra received an extended ovation and — amid a period of financial turmoil — received enough donations to take Barton to perform a similar Sculthorpe-themed program in Tokyo the following month and make him QSO’s first ever musician-in-residence for the next three years.
Barton would go on to give more than 50 performances of Sculthorpe’s works, collaborating on seminal compositions such as Songs of Sea and Sky, Earth Cry and Requiem, which Sculthorpe wrote for him.
“That open canvas for him had always been the pen and paper,” says Barton. “Whereas my canvas is the landscape. As an improviser and someone with ears and wanting to be in tune with music from an early age I could hear that in his music, he had the songlines of Australia. “It was nationalistic music, and when I say nationalist it’s not some kind of crazy political party it’s like those great European and American composers back in the day, they’re writing about their songlines, you know Sibelius, Janacek. You go to the Czech Republic and that’s what the music is, that’s what you see in the mountains, that’s what you hear.”
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Barton’s tour of Aunty Peggy’s neighbourhood continues and we cross a busy road and descend in to the grassy bowl of Rushcutters Bay Park. Barton likes to walk here in the morning, feeling the early vibrations of the sun on his skin and watching ripples emerge on the glassy harbour as the world wakes.
“Even though I’m not on my own country,” he says, as we stop at a park bench, “I do think of Mt Isa and that’s very important. Being in the grandest opera and concert halls throughout the world with the greatest symphonies, which I’ve had the pleasure of playing with, that natural amphitheatre is back in Mt Isa, too, you know, out in the bush.”
While Barton’s Uncle Arthur taught him traditional didgeridoo technique, it was his mother who opened his mind to other genres. Delmae Barton played everything from classical music to Elvis at home and would often instigate impromptu singalongs. Barton’s brother and father, who worked as a linesman for the postmaster general, played guitar and in his pre-teens William started on the instrument, too. The family was “one of the first Aboriginal families” to attend the Mt Isa Folk Club where Barton experienced a “mishmash” of influences.
“I used to listen to my AC/DC on the tape player in Mt Isa and when I changed over the A-side or the B-side I would listen to classical music. Listening to things like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and thinking ‘Oh wow that would be so cool with didgeridoo’.”
At the Mt Isa Cultural Centre his parents would often volunteer to take tourists out on country.
“In the concert hall I’m connecting with a normally whiter audience,” Barton says. “I see that as a reflection of my childhood with mum and dad and how they were welcoming to people from other countries.
“I know some of those audience members might not have met an Aboriginal person before and they might have certain views [but] then they see someone like me in a suit coming out as William Barton adding one of the oldest cultures in the world to what would be considered the sophistication of an orchestra.”
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Those who have followed Barton on the orchestral stage in recent years have not only witnessed his virtuosity, they’re observed his external transformation. During the past six years he has lost70kg through a combination of healthy eating, intermittent fasting, walking and working with a personal trainer. It was not one particular incident or turning point that prompted him to make this change, rather a quiet reckoning with himself.
“I wanted to contribute to my longevity as a storyteller and leave my own legacy, a part of a bigger legacy with my culture. In my mind I always had this vision where I know what body I want. It’s time for me to be a warrior because I’m 39 and it’s like, OK now I can go into that next phase of my life where I want to be mentally fit and physically fit inside and out.”
Has losing weight affected the way he relates to the didgeridoo? “Most definitely I feel like my whole body is vibrating with the instrument like it should be, because you are at one,” he says before reflecting more on the question. “The human body is such a beautiful strong and powerful vessel and it adapts. So when I was overweight, it adapted to me so I played at a certain level.”
Finding love, he says, has also prompted him to take more responsibility for his wellbeing. “[Veronique and I] met a long time ago but connected again three years ago officially. She’s quite special, you know, a powerhouse.”
Just before Covid turned the performing arts on its head, the pair performed with Delmae at MONA FOMA and at WOMADelaide.
“It’s lovely having mum there because she loves doing the bowing, it’s really special,” he smiles. ‘Dreamtime opera diva’, she likes to be known as.”
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After our hilly loop of the neighbourhood we arrive back at Aunty Peggy’s where the afternoon sun has changed the shapes in the house. In the evening when the wind blows the trees in the backyard, Barton notices the shadows of the leaves dancing through the window. It’s in these moments, “listening to the sound between silence” he finds inspiration, communing with the house and the musical voices that have been there before him.
“It’s special and important for artists at a certain time in their career to have a space. Not necessarily for free, but to have a space where they can create and make their own pathways there,” he says. “It’s not just about creating our own legacy as artists and composers but being part of that bigger legacy, Sculthorpe, my ancestors, [composer] Ross Edwards, people who contribute to the nationalistic feeling of what that is.”
William Barton is performing in Heartland as part of the Sydney Festival on January 15.
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