Wild men and mystics: Rethinking roy agnew's early Sydney works

Sydney of the late 1910s and '20s was not as parochial as music historians have long assumed. The early piano music of Roy Agnew benefited from and reflected the richness and diversity of his surroundings. Through an analysis of representative works from this period and an examination of their cultural context I argue that Agnew’s music belongs to the large body of modern music from the early twentieth century described by Jim Samson as ‘transitional’ and that Sydney's musical elite was aware of and could access the most recent modern European music.