You can't separate William Barton from his country.
"It's embedded in your DNA, it is what makes you the person that you are."
The country of one of Australia's leading didgeridoo players is the savanna landscape of the Bidjara, Wannyi, Lardil and Kalkadunga peoples of inland Queensland.
Musician William Barton Photo: Keith Saunders
Barton told RNZ Concert host Bryan Crump his peoples' relationship with that country goes back at least 60,000 years.
"To be able to tell some of that story through the art-form of music ... is a very special place to be."
Barton's name for the didgeridoo is the yidaki, and it was his Kalkadunga uncle, Arthur who taught him how to play it.
But Barton's story stretches not just back thousands of years, but also thousands of kilometres across the planet to the home of European classical music and the songs he picked up from his mother, Delmae, who had a love not just for the traditional music of her Bidjara ancestors but also for opera, and maybe even a bit of rock and roll.
Barton's latest tour of Aotearoa will see him performing his own work for voice, yidaki and strings, "Square Circles Beneath the Red Desert Sand", in a seven-venue tour with the Brodsky Quartet.
Brodsky Quartet Photo: Duncan Elliot Matthews
"Square Circles" begins not with Barton's yidaki but his voice, an instrument he's turning to with growing confidence.
"In the opening of Square Circles, I want to take the audience back to that magic place which to me is the horizon ... I feel that every region, every clan's area, every tribal area throughout the world has a normal resonant frequency or a melody so that if you're in tune enough, you can either hear that melody or you can feel that melody, but that comes from that country."
"So that's why when you travel and you're a composer-in-residence, that's the whole point, to absorb that landscape - well for me anyway - to put a little bit of that landscape, allow that landscape to flow into the music as much as possible."
While it was his Uncle Arthur who taught Barton the art of the yidaki, the art of interpreting country, Barton's choice to perform with western classical musicians comes from his mother Delmae.
"My Mum, she used to play classical music to me when I was growing up, and before I was born into this world, and that was where the classical seed was planted."
Photo: Wikimedia
Her love of classical music also came with an affinity for the natural world she'd learned from her Bidjari people, and which she passed on to her son.
The land around Mt Isa is rocky, isolated, tough country but, as Barton says, "it has a rugged beauty".
Long road trips through that country came with his mother's musical response to it.
"I remember as a young kid we would travel between Mt Isa and Normanton or Burketown, which were anything from 200 to 600 kilometres away ... and Mum would sing in the car between guideposts with her operatic-style voice."
If Barton's Uncle Arthur was alive now, what would he make of him playing the yidaki in the concert hall rather than at a corroboree?
"I think he would be proud, because the important thing for me is that cultural integrity ... with that honesty of intention ... playing one of the world's most ancient instruments, and ceremonial instruments as well, within the context of a symphony orchestra, I feel that I'm playing my part in humanity."
