Hooper Brewster-Jones: 20th Century South Australian musical genius outsider – with an Angels coda
Hooper Brewster-Jones and two examples (top inset) of his prolific composing output. Lower inset: John Brewster, Sam Brewster and Dave Gleeson with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra members Hilary Bruer and Janet Anderson for a 2018 concert featuring hits by the Angels rock band and a piece by the Brewsters' grandfather and great grandfather.
The Angels concert image by Tom Huntley
Hooper Brewster-Jones was South Australia’s outsider modernist genius and one of the most progressive composers in Australia during the 1920s and 1930s.
Born in 1887 at Black Rock Plains in the Flinders Ranges, Brewster-Jones’s only music teacher until 1901 was his father, the headmaster and sole teacher at country schools in Armagh and Bute. This didn’t hinder Brewster-Jones composing “The Bute March” on his ninth birthday.
Brewster-Jones was called the most promising student who ever entered Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium on an extended three-year scholarship, studying under Byrceson Treharne and winning won several prizes. In 1905, Brewster-Jones gained the Elder Scholarship for three years at the Royal College of Music, London, where he studied piano, singing, chamber music and composition. Charles Villiers Stanford taught him composition but expelled Brewster-Jones from his classes for showing his work with outrageously new harmonies and melody breaking all the rules.
Brewster-Jones made many concert appearances in London and was music master at Harrow Preparatory School and Carlton House Girls’ School, Cambridge but returned to Adelaide in 1909 to foster music there. On 1910, he married Gerta Homburg he’d met in Germany, where she studied singing, specialising in German lieder. Brewster-Jones never joined the Elder Conservatorium staff as too restricting but taught piano, singing and composition privately and believed teaching should be “a psychological study of the student’s possibilities”.
In 1915, Brewster-Jones conducted his first orchestral concert and later, at his own expense, formed the Brewster-Jones Symphony Orchestra at Queen’s Hall in Grenfell Street, Adelaide city. During World War I, it was South Australia’s only symphony orchestra and, by 1920, had 70 players.
During 1916, Brewster-Jones composed an opera in three acts, leading into an enormous adventurous output in the 1920s, including the modernist Formula Series piano preludes, an opera The Nightingale and the Rose and the symphonic poem “Australia Felix”. As a pianist and conductor, Brewster-Jones introduced contemporary French music to Adelaide and Melbourne and his interest in music of other cultures included transcribing Aboriginal songs and corrobborees.
Brewster-Jones’s love of the Australian bush and its bird life produced many songs and 73 piano pieces based on recordings of bird life, many recorded on bush trips to the Flinders Ranges with Hans Heysen.
Brewster-Jones worked with the Australian Broadcasting Commission and its new Adelaide station 5CL as a pianist, radio lecturer and conductor of the state's studio orchestra (precursor of the Adelaide Symphony) in the 1930s. He judged at eisteddfods and was the music critic for The Advertiser and later The News.
By the late 1940s, Brewster-Jones had retired from active musical life but performed the Mozart piano concerto in D minor with the Adelaide Stringster Orchestra, formed and conducted by his son Arthur Brewster-Jones in 1949. Jones died 15 minutes later of a heart attack.
In 2018, Brewster-Jones’s grandson John Brewster (on guitar) and his great grandson Sam Brewster (drums) walked onto the Adelaide Festival Theatre stage with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra playing a piece written by Hooper Brewster-Jones. The occasion was a performance of reimagined hits by Adelaide 1970s rock band The Angels.
Both classically trained musicians, John Brewster and his brother Rick took a folk path and formed the Moonshine Jug and String Band that morphed into rock band The Angels after they teamed up with a mercurial frontman Doc Neeson.
And perhaps the adventurous Hooper Brewster-Jones wouldn’t have been too shocked at the audience’s traditional lewd response to The Angels’ hit “Am I even gonna see your face again?”.
