The score for High Ground maps the frontier in two musical languages

There are two musics in High Ground. They do not blend. They do not negotiate. They occupy the same film the way two languages occupy a border town, each comprehensible to its speakers and opaque to everyone else, and the frontier between them is where the violence lives. Stephen Teague’s score for Stephen Maxwell Johnson’s 2020 film about a massacre in 1930s Arnhem Land and its aftermath is built on this division, and the question it raises, deliberately or otherwise, is whether the division is honest or whether it is doing something more dangerous: reproducing the colonial binary it claims to critique.

The orchestral cues arrive with the colonisers. Strings, brass, the full apparatus of European concert music, deployed in broad, sweeping phrases that map the landscape from above. These cues do what orchestral scores have always done in frontier narratives: they claim territory. The sound fills the frame. It tells you that what you are looking at is significant, that history is being made, that the people making it have weight. The orchestration is not triumphalist, exactly. Teague is too careful for that. But it carries the authority of a tradition that has been scoring colonial conquest since the earliest westerns, and that authority is embedded in the timbre itself. A full string section does not sound neutral. It sounds institutional. It sounds like power.

The Indigenous cues operate on different terms entirely. Percussion dominates. The rhythmic patterns are circular rather than linear, repeating and layering rather than developing toward resolution. There are textures that suggest didgeridoo and clapstick without directly quoting them, a decision that sits on the edge between respect and evasion. The dynamic range is narrower. The cues do not swell. They persist.

The gap between the two

What interests me about this binary is not the individual cues but the space between them. Teague does not score the film’s central relationship, between Travis (Simon Baker), a white sniper haunted by his role in the opening massacre, and Gutjuk (Jacob Junior Nayinggul), a young Yolngu man seeking justice, with a unified musical language. When Travis is on screen alone, the score is orchestral. When Gutjuk moves through Country, the percussion takes over. When they share the frame, the score pulls back, becomes sparse, or disappears altogether. The absence of music in their shared scenes is itself a musical choice. It says: there is no common language for this relationship. The score cannot bridge what the characters cannot bridge.

This is effective. It is also, I think, worth interrogating. The binary maps too neatly onto a set of associations that the film complicates at the narrative level but reinforces at the sonic level. Orchestra equals Europe equals institutional power equals historical agency. Percussion equals Indigenous equals resistance equals patience. The characters resist these categories. Travis is not simply a representative of colonial force; he is a traumatised man trying to undo harm he participated in. Gutjuk is not simply a vessel of Indigenous resilience; he is a young man with specific desires and specific rage. But the score assigns them to their respective sound worlds with a consistency that can feel reductive, as if the music is more certain about the categories than the film is.

Landscape cues and the question of ownership

The most interesting passages in Teague’s score are the landscape cues, the moments when the camera pulls back from character and dwells on the Arnhem Land escarpment, the flood plains, the stone country. These cues occupy a middle ground between the two registers. They are orchestral in instrumentation but rhythmic in structure, or percussive in texture but scored for pitched instruments. They suggest a landscape that belongs to neither musical tradition, or to both, and the ambiguity is productive in a way that the character-linked cues are not.

There is a sequence midway through the film where the camera tracks across a series of rock faces. No characters are visible. The score here is built from sustained low strings and a pulse that might be a bass drum or might be a processed heartbeat. The sound is below language, below culture, below the colonial apparatus and the Indigenous response to it. It is the sound of the land itself, or at least the sound of a composer imagining what the land itself might sound like, which is a different thing. The distinction matters. No score can speak for Country. What a score can do is acknowledge the gap between the sound it makes and the place it describes, and in these landscape passages, Teague’s music does exactly that.

Warren Ellis and the Australian western

It is impossible to write about scoring Australian frontier narratives without mentioning Warren Ellis, whose work with Nick Cave on The Proposition (2005) established the sonic template for the genre. Ellis’s approach was essentially textural: bowed strings, droning harmonics, instruments played at the limits of their range, producing sounds that felt more geological than musical. The score for The Proposition did not divide along colonial lines. It created a single, abrasive sound world in which all characters were equally exposed, equally vulnerable, equally small against the landscape. The music did not take sides. It took the landscape’s side, which is no side at all.

Teague’s approach in High Ground is more structured and more legible than Ellis’s. You can identify what each cue is doing and who it is doing it for. This clarity is both a strength and a limitation. The score is easier to read than Ellis’s, which makes it more immediately effective as narrative support but less unsettling as sonic experience. Ellis made you feel lost. Teague makes you feel oriented. In a film about a frontier, about the line between known and unknown, about the violence that occurs when one culture’s certainty meets another culture’s prior claim, I am not sure orientation is what the score should be providing.

Whether the binary holds

The question I keep returning to is whether Teague’s dual-language approach is truthful or merely symmetrical. Symmetry implies equivalence: two musical traditions, two cultures, meeting on equal terms within the frame of the score. But the history High Ground depicts was not symmetrical. The massacre that opens the film was not a battle. It was an act of annihilation conducted by armed men against unarmed people. The aftermath was not a negotiation. It was a series of consequences flowing from an act of absolute power. To score this history with two musical languages that are given roughly equal weight is to impose a formal balance on material that resists it.

I do not think Teague is unaware of this tension. The orchestral cues carry an undertone of menace that acknowledges, at the timbral level, the violence embedded in the tradition they represent. The percussive cues have a persistence that is not passive but defiant, a refusal to stop that functions as a kind of resistance. The score is smarter than a simple binary, even if the binary is its organising principle. But the organising principle shapes what you hear, and what I hear, finally, is a score that maps the frontier more cleanly than the frontier existed. The mess is in the film. The clarity is in the music. Whether that clarity serves the film or simplifies it is a question I have not resolved, and I suspect Teague has not resolved it either, which may be the most honest thing about the score.