AUSTRALIAN MUSIC PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE



A Review in six parts by DEREK STRAHAN 



1. REVOLUTION 

When John Antill's "Corroboree" was first performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1946 (rescued from a forgotten back drawer by, as he then was, Mr, Eugene Goossens) it was hailed as the first Australian composition written in modern idiom. But the modern idiom was that of Stravinski's "Rite of Spring", first performed in 1913 time-lag of thirty years.

So when the new young composers of the 1960's dragged Australian music screaming into twentieth century nowtime, it was not just an updating of musical awareness. It was a quantum jump into a new time stream.

At the height of the revolution, regular subscribers to orchestral concerts might have been excused for concluding that, in the matter of original Australian compositions, there existed a national conspiracy to confuse, bemuse, abuse and only occasionally, and then inadvertently, amuse audiences with an unrelenting flow of works of unrelenting modernity whose purpose, as stated in programme notes, was to educate, to inform, but never to do anything so vulgar as to entertain.

When David Ahern's "Ned Kelly Music" was performed at a Sydney Prom Concert in 1968, audiences, in their innocence, accepted it as a "fun" piece. In the words of James Murdoch: "Players silently playing their instruments, or shouting 'Ned Kelly' and variations on it; farting noises from the brass; shufflings and anarchic movements within the orchestra - all produced delighted laughter from the "audience." However, such audience reaction, according to the composer was an incorrect response. In Ahern's radio talk, given before the broadcast of the work, he insisted: "I had no intention of providing a "fun" piece, nor gimmickry. The work is a serious working out of idea and principles that are current with the most advanced European thinking".

This was a surprising and unexpected self-justification in that, by invoking European precedent, it seemed to conjure up, yet again, the dreaded spectre of the "cultural cringe", that deference to older and therefore "better" cultures which has dogged Australian creative expression. The Jindyworokism of the 40's was a doomed attempt to "nationalise" Australian arts and now, it seemed, even the new music" of the 60's was falling into the earlier trap of working to "second-hand"

European models. The fact that the models were now current instead of superseded or even superannuated, did not make the same old dependence any less noticeable.

The only answer seemed to be to advance even faster and further into musical futurism than European and American rivals; to be more avant than the avant-garde, in order to dispel once and for all, at home and abroad, Australia's shameful reputation for being, in Roger Covell's phrase, "one of the final refuges of the arriere-garde in music". This meant embracing only such musical practises as rejected all old models. All traditional models of harmony, melody structure, form and rhythm patterning were regarded as suspect because of their associations; because of, in the words of Richard Meale, their "cosy terms of reference". 

This posed horrendous problems for Australian composers of "serious" music, most of whom were emerging through tertiary institutions where caporales of the avant-garde were now entrenched as lecturers. If Brahms felt overawed by Beethoven, how much more difficult was it for Australian composers following Boulez, Cage, Messiaen, Penderecki, Varese et al. Brahms could use the same musical forms as Beethoven, yet still develop his own musical persona; still write truly German music. But Australian composers had to start with the doctrine that there was no doctrine existing which was truly Australian. New Australian forms had to be invented before a note of truly Australian music could be written. The problem was not one of inspiration. All Brahms had to do for inspiration was fall terminally in love with the widow of Robert Schumann. Australian composers are no doubt as capable of falling in love as Brahms was, whatever their sexual preferences. No, the problem was not lack of inspiration. It was lack of definition. If no existing definitions of musical practise were acceptable because they were not Australian enough, then all questions had to be re-asked, in order to find the ideologically correct new Australian answers, starting with the most basic question: "What is music?"

In a seminar on his own music given at the Australia Music Centre, in 1982, Australian composer Barry Conyngham publicly acknowledged that, in the matter of defining what is Australian music, he "followed the Roger Covell philosophy". This was interesting. Australia has now scored a first in world music history. Previously, academics and critics have anatomised music after it was written. Now we have an Australian composer acknowledging dependence on academic opinion to define the parameters of what Australian music is before it is written.

Professor Roger Covell, now head of the music department at the University of NSW was first appointed senior lecturer there in 1960, the year in which he joined the staff of the Sydney Morning Herald as music critic, a position which he also still holds. As Covell's opinions have so strongly influenced the direction and nature of original Australian music over the past quarter-century, these opinions are perhaps worth reviewing in the same spirit that he himself reviewed Australia's musical past in his authoritative work: "Australia's Music: Themes of a New Society", first published in 1967.

In this work Covell approached the task of reviewing Australian music past and present with the zeal of a prophet into whose hands has fallen a bulldozer for laying low mountains of museum art, exalting valleys of obscurity, and making smooth all crooked places in preparation for the advent of Australia's musical messiahs.

Those who fell short of the prophet's vision were given very short shrift. Eric Gross's "Botany Bay 1770" score sounds "as though he is shuffling a card index of standard effects". Clive Douglas, in "Essay for Strings", 1952, makes a "very aimless sound indeed". Sir Eugene Goossens "The Apocalypse" (revived by the ABC in 1981 ) displays "simplicity" overlaid by "randomly acquisitive thickening of harmony or colour" in a "style of gone-to-seed irrelevant luxuriousness."

In commenting on composers of Alfred Hill' s generation and after Covell wrote: "The second-hand sound of most Australian music was inevitable given the "provincial nature of Australian society" (an assessment which no historian would dispute given Australia's earlier geographical isolation and, consequently, the "nostalgia for a lost Europe" which pervaded not only the arts but social modes generally.

However, for Covell this fact became justification for rejecting even so innocuous a source material as our European-based heritage of folk-songs. Coercively prophetic, he pronounced it was "virtually certain that Australia will not make use of such traditional melodies as it now possesses after the manner of the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century music nationalists in Europe."

Feeling, perhaps, that this blanket indictment of our bush heritage was not strong enough to shame potential composers into turning their backs on it, Covell went on to opine: "it now seems too late for Australia to have a Bartok or Kodaly or Vaughan Williams, much less a Borodin or Dvorak, deriving a recognisable national and personal style from traditional sources." Instead he installed the "new cosmopolitanism of serial and post-serial music" as the norm to follow, a norm commendable for its "perpetually variable rhythm and non-conformist melody" and in which was finally laid to rest the "principle of relative tonality, a principle that amounted to a fetish in the Viennese classical period and later".

R.I.P. amongst others, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Saint-Saens, Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinski, Shostakovich and even Bartok. Your works are buried with you and of no further use to us. Museum art. Monuments to past glories. The old regime. To the guillotine with them.

Your average, fellow-citizen concert-goer still sat happily in the front row, knitting brows while ABC Symphony Orchestras, under a parade of distinguished batons, expertly spilt the blood of the old masters. But programmed in among the old were increasing examples of the new music. In these the composer/audience roles were reversed. Whereas the old masters bled their hearts in public for the entertainment of patrons, the new masters set out to bleed the patrons for the entertainment of themselves. In my next article I will have more to say about this interesting, if messy, ritual. 

AUSTRALIAN MUSIC PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE



A Review in six parts by DEREK STRAHAN 



2. NEW REGIME 

In the first article of this series I noted how, from about 1960, Australian composers were exhorted by academics and critics to reject, as a basis for original compositions (if they were to be truly Australian) all such traditional music devices as "conformist" melody, relative tonality, recurrent rhythm patterns, together with such intrinsically "second-hand" source material as our Irish- and English- derived bush ballads, for the reason that all such practises and sources were in themselves tainted by colonial ism, and by the contagious virus of the dreaded "cultural cringe" 

No survey of Australian concert music during the sixties would be complete without reference to the work of Richard Meale and Peter Sculthorpe. The writer wishes to make clear his respect and admiration for the work of both composers. References to their music In these articles are through the mouths of musicologists and critics. My survey is of their comments, which reveal that in the sixties, there was a Meale versus Sculthorpe partisan battle analogous to the one which was fought between supporters of Brahms and Wagner in the late nineteenth century. Needless to say the music of both Brahms and Wagner has survived the literary excesses of their respective supporters and denigrators, and I have no doubt the same will transpire in respect of the music of both Meale and Sculthorpe.

One of' the honoured Dons of the new music's Cosa Nostra was Professor Roger Covell, and I now propose, at the risk of having a contract taken out on my musical life, to continue my review of his influential opinions, as expressed in his 1967 publication "Australia's Music: Themes of a New Society", opinions which, in retrospect appear to have acquired the force of law for the new generation of composers. Having severely heavied Australian composers of the past for their conservatism, Covell then proceeded to apportion praise and blame selectively amongst his peers according to how they did or did not conform to the new rules of the game.

Thus Richard Meale was commended for adopting the "new, incoherent doodling quality" peculiar to "much contemporary music", an interestingly colourful way of describing the principle of indeterminacy beloved of the then avant-garde. (The practise of this principle probably reached its apogee in Australia with the performance of David Ahern's "Journal" (commissioned by the ABC in 1969), a work scored for three actors, three actresses, didgeridoo, electric bass, violin, ring modulator and other live electronic equipment, and lasting fifty-five minutes. The score consisted of one page of symbolic notation in the style of Stockhausen, thus saving the ABC considerable expenditure in the copying of parts.)

Meale's thirty-five minute orchestral work "Nocturne" (1967) was applauded by Covell for its "static luxuriance" (as opposed to the suspect "irrelevant luxuriousness" of Goossens "The Apocalypse"?) Similarly, two works by Nigel Butterly, his instrumental Octet "Laudes" (1963), and his String Quartet (1965) both won approval as being "species of mystical contemplation in sound". Listeners who found either work "overlong or passive to a fault" were chided for "lack of temperamental co-operation" with the composer.

By contrast, expatriate Malcolm Williamson was "apt to puzzle" listeners because, in addition to writing "serious, intense pieces", he also showed a "fondness for the notion of the 'big tune' which induces a kind of happy surrender in its audience, even (sic) at first hearing." Williamson was not actually condemned for wanting to make his audiences happy, but he was firmly categorised as an "entertainer" composer, not, we were made to feel, an entirely respectable thing to be.

By contrast there was no hiding the endorsement accorded Meale because "the audience he is seeking is not the comfortable, tune-loving body of concert-goers, seeking diversion or entertainment of which they can remain intellectually in control." How many concert-goers were aware, I wonder, when they bought their tickets, that Australia's approved composers were seeking in them "a public which is prepared to submit (sic) to a total involvement in a group situation"?

James Murdoch, in his book "Australia's Contemporary Composers" (1972), confirmed Meale's "refusal to be an entertainer as a composer" and added, to make the matter quite clear, "now that he has the measure of his powers, writing with an eye to the Australian public is not going to be a consideration".

At this point, surely, we must stop and re-think. Is there not something odd, inverted even, about conferring approval upon a composer's philosophy because he, supposedly, despises his audience to the point where he does not wish to write for them, yet, at the same time, desires that the audience should "submit" to his music ?

Must we not ask ourselves, and by we I mean composers, audiences, critics, academics, music management and art bodies - must we not ask ourselves to reconsider what is the purpose of music in Australia? Is new music to be written solely for the purpose of illustrating academic models of what direction music "ought" to be taking ? Is this not another example of Australian deference to authority ? Having stamped out the "cultural cringe", has it not now been replaced by the "academic cringe"?

Even Wagner, the original exponent of the "music of the future" bandwagon and no mean innovator himself, was enough of a businessman to know that if you want people to buy subscription tickets to hear your music, you must allow them some expectation of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic enjoyment ! Are we now so alienated from the universal heritage of music, here in Australia, that we can ignore Mozart's dictum that "the essence of music is in melody"; or Beethoven's own definition of his work: "I write music from the heart for the heart." Coming from Beethoven, you cannot dismiss this as mere sentimentality, even allowing for the florid excesses of nineteenth century language.

Peter Sculthorpe, one of Australia's best known composers, seems to have faced this issue very early in his career. In his teens he presented his music teacher with his first atonal composition with the comment that music had now to be written like this "because the world has run out of tunes". To which she, the teacher, replied: "Does God ever run out of faces?" Sculthorpe apparently took the remark to heart. But one suspects that he would have written "tunes" anyway, because he has, in no small measure, the innate gift of melody, to use when he chooses.

Not surprisingly he has, thereby, incurred critical displeasure. James Murdoch, comparing Sculthorpe's Asian-influenced work with that of Meale, complained that "some of Sculthorpe's Balinese pieces ... sound like travelogue music" ! Well, they have travelled well, ail over the world, in fact, and Sir Robert Helpmann Iiked "Sun Music" enough to set dancers travelling across stage to it. Such Sculthorpe versus Meale comparisons were part of that healthy rivalry to which I alluded earlier, and which enlivened the music scene during the sixties. No similar controversy has replaced it since.

In retrospect it is unclear how much of this controversy was real and how much invented. Some musicologists encouraged us to believe that some Australian composers, unlike Sculthorpe, confronted ghosts of the past with trepidation. Thus James Murdoch, in 1972, described Meale's compositional process as one of "re-assessing his responses to much of the available musical material, in order to clarify what personal function it can serve him, even to the extent of coming to terms with a major chord!" This was in reference to the orchestral work "Very High Kings" (1968) in which an Eb major chord is indeed strikingly used to good effect in that most original piece, and is not noticeably out of place amongst its other intriguing sonic effects. Another reviewer might have commented, with equal justice, that there is really nothing mysterious or threatening about a major chord; that it is simply the name given to the concurrent sounding of the first three distinct tones of the harmonic series, as it exists in nature; and that from this primal series also emerged the basic scale of notes from which all the world's music evolved, and, in imitation of which every ethnic culture learned to extend speech into song; and that, therefore, the use of the major chord need not involve any major trauma.

Why some "serious" composers should have been so terrified of using this natural phenomenon, or the sophisticated sliding scales of relative tonality which developed from it, is a question better answered on the psychiatrist's couch than in the concert hall! A propos, and to be even-handed, it should also be pointed out that Stravinski, a tonal composer, refused to write atonal music until after the death of Schoenberg! One might be excused for concluding that Stravinski's lifelong espousal of tonality had less to do with musical ideology than with his ego as a composer! In any case, my concern in these articles is certainly not to offer any kind of qualitative judgement on the work of my peers. That task must fall to posterity, and, in the meantime, we must all compose as we think fit. Rather, it is my concern to uproot academic dogmas which, like weeds, have so overgrown the ground area of our musical life that Australians no longer see them as such, but mistake them for native earth.

At the beginning of the 1980's, then, there was a danger, for the future, that with nothing growing but yesterday morning's glories, nothing else would be able to grow. However, for every revolution there comes a counter-revolution and,

surprisingly, during the 70s, musicologists themselves had already begun to dismantle the barricades! One suspects that this was a pre-emptive action, taken so that they could appear to retain the prescriptive initiative. But it also calls in question how strongly held were their convictions in the first place. In my next article we will examine their retreat from dogma.

AUSTRALIAN MUSIC PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE



A Review in six parts by DEREK STRAHAN 



3. COUNTER-REVOLUTION: RETREAT FROM DOGMA

In the first two articles of this series I outlined the process by which entrenched academic opinion, preaching a philosophy of austere modernism, created during the Australia of the sixties a climate of rigid musical puritanism in which certain reprehensible musical acts carried with them the stigma of original sin: the indecent exposure of a major chord; the lewd pulsation of a repeated rhythm pattern. And as for writing anything so vulgar as a tune, this was like being caught with your musical pants down, and hard at it.

On the credit side, one of the brighter canons of musical thought was that Australian music should start to reflect an awareness of our true geographical situation, by absorbing influences from our northern neighbours. Both Peter Sculthorpe and Richard Meale brought sonorities new to the public into the concert hall through their compositions using Indonesian instruments and carefully considered musical affiliations.

Even in this area, however, the modernist's distrust of rhythmic vitality was evident, The potential of the astonishing polyrhythms of Pacific cultures, of the intricate beat cycles of the Indian subcontinent was not tapped. Instead we were treated to works of a still, sonic timelessness. A kind of musical zero gravity, which certainly had its own ethereal charms. But beat, in the sense understood by jazz and pop musicians, by Milhaud, in "La Creation Du Monde", by Schumann in the Scherzo of his Op. 44 Piano Quintet (to take some random examples) was not present. Beat, in that sense, has been a no-no in contemporary music. Here, to be fashionably avant-garde, one might only use, in Roger Covell's phrase, "perpetually variable rhythm" which means, in practise, for the listener, tempo so anatomised and so rarefied, so fractured as to exist only in the sense that a shattered pane of glass still exists in the sum of its pieces.

In summing up the musical output of the past quarter-century in Australia, one can point to works of rarefied sensibility, of agonised self-revelation, of contemplative introspection, of sonic brilliance and economy of statement. On the whole it has been music of the essential moment rather than music of progression through time. On occasions the essential moment has been unbearably prolonged for a considerable period of time. It has been music defined in its parameters by academics and critics who have sought to educate the public in what they ought to appreciate, and brainwash composers into supplying the product. There has been little attempt to furnish composers with feedback from that important, but neglected element in the musical transaction: the audience.

As a consequence of this policy - and it has been a policy, invented by a paternal academia, applied by government funding bodies - what is now missing in the repertoire of original Australian compositions, is works of populist persuasion, works reflecting the passions, preoccupations and tastes of that not unintelligent and certainly not irrelevant Australian individual - the ticket-buying concert-goer, who would probably appreciate, at minimum, courtesy and consideration from a composer, and, at maximum, vitality, enthusiasm, melodic and rhythmic invention, and possibly even a little inspiration.

If works which involve by virtue of passionate statement are not forthcoming from the traditional Australian sources of sponsorship: arts bodies, statutory bodies, municipal bodies, corporate bodies, then there remains one other and most honourable option: individual patronage. It worked in Austria two centuries ago, and it can surely work in Australia today, especially in Sydney which shares with the Vienna of old a complex and Byzantine socio-economic structure, and an extravagant love of musical entertainment. 

The only problem which a composer faces in securing private patronage today in competing with other causes, and which Mozart and Beethoven did not have to face, is in offering tax deductibility. The short answer to this is that any enterprise which creates income qualifies as a business, and as music works are written for performance, and performances can take place anywhere, even in private homes, this is a matter which can safely be entrusted to the patron's accountant. Even tax deductibility can be arranged through the good offices of the Australian Elizabethan Trust, so, in principle, there are really no obstacles.

POSTSCRIPT 1998 - In 1990 the Australian Elizabethan Trust went into receivership taking with it $100,000 of "donations" intended for support of the arts. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia had "use" of this money for four years before it was finally distributed to the intended "recipients". Donations to the Arts can now be made to Registered Arts Bodies. But individual artists cannot be registered to receive donations. (See PROPOSAL: REGISTRAR OF PRIMARY CREATORS)

The advantage of private patronage is that he who pays the piper calls the tune. I suspect that if there is to be a new wave in Australian music over the next quarter-century, it will come from creative sponsorship by private individuals deciding unilaterally what kind of new music they would like to listen to and paying a reasonable fee to have it written and performed.

I refer now to the Concert Music Department of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Once upon a time, in 1982, before it imploded, this Department had a stated policy of supporting new, adventurous, entrepreneurial musical endeavours, so that new works of a suitably high standard created by private sponsorship would have a sporting chance of subsidised performance. The criterion, as outlined to me then, was excellence in craft, in both composition and in performance. Content and style were recognised to be matters of creative prerogative. This policy, stated but unwritten, was honoured more in the breach than in the observance. It was fulfilled in an isolated instance, in the programming of Sculthorpe's new work "Mangrove" which the composer donated to the ABC for its 50th anniversary year.

Shortly thereafter, circa 1983, ABC Concert Music imploded, and has not yet sufficiently recovered to have formulated anything other than an ad hoc policy in respect of commissioning and programming new Australian works.

In 1989, under the direction of Antony Fogg, there seem to be

1) an adamant refusal to commit to any statement of policy in respect of the commissioning and/or performance of new works

2) a related fear that any expression of policy might be construed as partisan support for a particular school of music.

The effect of a refusal to commit is, of course, to give ABC Concert Music the unrestricted power of partisan support; in other words, a maximum of discretion allied to a minimum of public accountability.

POSTSCRIPT 1998. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs within the music community reached such a peak by 1992 that, after a series of placatory public meetings, the ABC appointed a new director of music , Nathan Waks. I quote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald of March 25, 1993. Announcing Mr. Waks' appointment it continued: "Mr. Waks, a cellist, was asked by the managing director of the ABC, Mr. David Hill, to undertake a one-man review last May after a group of 97 musicians and composers called on the Federal Government to intervene in the ABC's concerts department. The group - including Larry Sitsky, Roger Woodward, Miriam Hyde, Bruce Smeaton and Patrick Thomas - had claimed that a small group of composers were unduly favoured by the ABC under its director of ABC Concerts, pianist and artistic director of the Seymour Group, Mr. Anthony Fogg.

In his report, Mr. Waks found no evidence to substantiate a conflict of interest in choosing concert music but he recommended that decision-making needed to be "more transparent and informed by a wider range of artistic input" ... While Mr. Fogg will remain responsible for schedules and detailed programming, Mr. Waks will oversee overall artistic and musical direction".

In 1996, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra became an autonomous body, working in conjunction with the ABC, but under its own administration.

According to Professor Roger Covell, writing in 1967, ABC Concert Music has always had a tendency to operate in a manner which is both self-serving and autocratic. Commenting on the role played by the ABC in furthering the cause of music in its foundation years, when programming was safely conservative, he wrote that monolithic ABC leadership was "appropriate to a country in which paternal authoritarianism has tended to be the prime source of (musical) enterprise and initiative"

It seemed that an adverse criticism of ABC administration was intended in these remarks. It is ironic therefore that when, from 1960, academic opinion took over ideological leadership in matters musical, university lecturers and newspaper critics in turn became father figures of whose authoritarian opinions even the ABC had to take note, in commissioning new works and in its concert programming; and, as we have noted, still perforce does take note, displaying today, three decades later, the customary stalinist authority, but without the former initiative!

Covell acknowledged the shift in leadership which occurred during the sixties when, in a 1977 article in Quadrant Magazine titled "An End To Modernity In Music?" he wrote retrospectively, of that period:

"Musicians and listeners were made aware, through a process of moral blackmail, that support of the new music was their duty to the present and their obligation to the future". Moving belatedly with the times he then observed: "All periods, all styles (of music) are simultaneously co-existent as never before", concluding therefore that ''innovation is no longer credible as a belligerent and intolerant cause for which other music has to serve as a whipping boy".

Such wisdom after the event was incongruous from one who, as his writings testify, was an enthusiastic enforcer of the (now condemned) "intolerance" and "moral blackmail"; from one who, in 1967, in one breathtaking generalisation dismissed the whole of the nineteenth century as "aberrant" because in that period composers were honoured as "cultural heroes" or "demigods", Covell displayed then, and perhaps still feels an egalitarian distrust of the notion of the "hero-composer". For him "a concern for the health of the musical community is of infinitely more importance than an attempt to pick winners in a Parnassian race". This attitude smacks of an artistic pseudo-socialism in which all composers are deemed to be "equal", a la Orwell, and may not presume to be otherwise; a doctrine which both Orwell and that arch-socialist Bernard Shaw, who revered the creative impulse, would have found most risible. Covell spelled out his priorities even more specifically by stating: "The vision splendid of Australian musical education and by extension, of Australian music is that it should occupy a leading role in the study and synthesis of the musical idioms of the Asian and Pacific areas".

In this interesting and self-revealing pronouncement Covell made clear his view that if there were to be Australian composers they might exist only as part of an education process and that their work must be written only in conformity with the prescribed syllabus. Only thus could they hope to bask in the reflected glory of the "vision splendid".

To have limited Australian music to absorption by osmosis of' the musical cultures of adjacent Asian land masses was a patently ridiculous notion even back in the sixties. It is even more constricting today when we live in an age of instant global communications; where both time and space have been annihilated; when the music of all cultures past and present is now immediately and instantly accessible. If Australia has a folk tradition to draw on it is the tradition which reaches us through the media. That this tradition also belongs to every other nation does not make it any less ours. The process of assimilation has, of course, already begun. However, in Australia, as you might expect, given the Australian tendency to defer to authority, the process has orly been allowed to occur within very strictly defined ideological parameters.

In a later article I will bring my survey into the 80's and explore how the advent of minimalism brought about a re-use of structured melody and rhythm, but only in such a way as to reduce audiences to a state of comatose boredom, when subjected to new works written in conformity with the strictures of that particular school. Composers of concert music, it would appear, are still denied license to entertain. In my next article I shall endeavour to identify the political cause of such denial.

AUSTRALIAN MUSIC PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE



A Review in six parts by DEREK STRAHAN 



4. MUSIC AND POLITICS

4. MUSIC AND POLITICS

In my first three articles I offered a review of the role played by musicologists, academics and critics in formulating prescriptive policies for the guidance of composers during the 60's and 70's, in an attempt to provide guidelines to be followed in conceiving and composing music of an inherently Australian character. We noted that many of the guidelines were negative, that is to say, were expressed in terms of prohibition. Composers were given a long list of don'ts to observe, and not many do's. Permitted were "perpetually variable rhythm and non-conformist melody", which, of course, amounted to a discouragement of "repetitive" rhythm and "conformist" melody. In banning these ingredients, proponents of what came to be called "contemporary" music, were in fact banning essential elements, not only of traditional folk music, but also of that other and very important stream of "contemporary" music - popular music. Taking, as one must, a broad view of the music of this century, popular music must be defined as encompassing every kind of pop music which has evolved since the very first manifestation of transcultural fusion. This emerged at the turn of the century in the form of afro-american folk music, otherwise known as jazz.

In my fifth article I will explore exactly what elements are being banned by the exclusion of jazz and pop elements from concert music. The terms of prohibition, as given by musicologists are necessarily evasive, but let me hint at the target by referring to the original social meaning of such terms as "to jass", "to jive", "to rock'n roll" and "jelly-roll". Before they came to be used as generic labels referring to a kind of music, these terms were all employed, definitively, in Negro slang, to mean sexual intercourse. The social condemnation which jazz music provoked in the 1920's is entirely related to its association with those twin social devils, sex and liquor! (And, of course, race!) The prohibition of alcohol, in America, has since been repealed, and "jass" music has become so respectable that it is now taught at Conservatoria. But the instinct to prohibit survives in the minds and spirits of those who seek to formulate and enforce policies and programs which will bind and inhibit the imaginations of composers, and so control and filter the content and impact of music written for the concert hall. Respectability reigns. In my fifth article I will explore the extent to which such fastidiousness involves a monstrous betrayal of the passion of composers of the past. But first we must examine the causes of such contemporary puritanism in our musical culture.

Our search is of a sociological nature, so it is not surprising that our quest for the motives underlying repression takes us into the area of politics. Politics is, after all, the art of social manipulation.

If there is political bias to be found in arts administration policies in Australia, one would expect these to be covert; one would expect the bias to be of a quasi-political nature, and to exist only as hidden agenda. This would be necessary, for the reason that government funding bodies are supposed to appear to be even handed. It must be thus. Covert bias cannot survive public scrutiny and taxpayers money should not be seen to be spent in the service of politically motivated ends, at least not in the arts. However, occasionally, political bias is articulated, and two examples from the Australian film industry will illustrate what I mean.

The Australian feature film "Mad Max" was a privately funded production and, noting this, Melbourne film-maker Tim Burstall, writing in Cinema Papers circa 1980, commented: "it is doubtful that a right-wing vengeance fantasy such as "Mad Max" would have attracted funding from a government film body." Is one to deduce, from this conjecture, the obverse: that persons of left-wing persuasion would consider the expression on film of such an intense, private motivation as "revenge" to be ideologically unsound; and that such persons were, at that time, in control of the disbursement of federal funds available for the support of Australian films?

Another example from my own experience, reveals an even more explicitly expressed bias, and concerns the comment of an (anonymous) assessor of the Australian Film Commission (AFC) on a project of mine (for a film musical in which a computer operator falls in love with the boss's daughter; I committed the error of not portraying the boss as a monster of greed and immorality.). The assessor complained: "How would ''youth' feel about a plot-line where ... the hero is a middle-aged (albeit benevolent) capitalist ?" Predictably the project was not funded. Did the above comment indicate an agenda practised by the Australian Film Commission at that time in its decision-making process, as related to script development funding? An agenda which, in this case, was not as well hidden as it should have been? Normally a rejection is justified on purely aesthetic grounds!

In respect of music funding, both composition and performance, the federal government s equivalent body to the AFC is the Australia Council, and, more I specifically, the Performing Arts Board. If there exists bias of a political nature in funding policies as they relate to composer commissions in the Performing Arts Board analogous to that of which there are indications in the AFC, these are much more difficult to identify because concert music, by its very nature, does not deal in "stories" as do film scripts. However, one can observe a lingering tendency to favour a particular kind of "new music" in terms of the kind of audience to which this music caters.

Generally, despite the advent of minimalism, to which I refer later, one may observe, in the nature of new music funded during the 80s, an absence of music of direct expression of emotion, achieved, specifically by the use of those two vital ingredients of popular music demeaned as "conformist melody and "repetitive" rhythm. We note, in the discouragement of music of direct emotional appeal, a policy similar to that which discourages, in film, the expression of intense personal emotion. Can it be that among a certain sector of the population which comprises the elitist audience which attends concerts of "new music" and "new wave" films, there exists a puritanical distaste for the expression of deeply felt, personal emotion? Is an artist suspect if he/she "indulges" in such expression? Is it sociologically undesirable, is it ideologically unsound, to wear your heart on your sleeve? Is this distrust an expression of left-wing ideology? If so, is this distrust based on the conviction that personal desires are less important than the social good? And that therefore personal desires must be repressed in the cause of the greater good? Has left-wing ideology so permeated the arts that creative individuals, without realising it, are being conditioned to preserve this order of priorities in their personal art work?

Is this the hidden agenda which musicologists, academics and music critics have, for three decades, been fighting to enforce on new Australian music?

Almost certainly the repression has even deeper causes. Emotional repression is only a symptom of a malaise which finds its cause deeply rooted in the Australian psyche. It is possible to identify the anti-emotional elitism which dominates new Australian concert music as a politicised attitude which has its origin in left-wing economic dogma. 

Another analogy with the Australian film industry may be helpful in the task of identification. I now refer to a remark made by producer Joan Long (a notably successful applicant for AFC funds! ); a remark made at a recent seminar on film funding (January 1989) held by the Arts Law Centre of New South Wales. Ms. Long was speculating on the effect which new federal funding policies might have on the quality of Australian films, and, in this context, she referred to the "market-driven rubbish" which was produced as a result of the tax incentives initiated by the Liberal Government in 1982 under Section 10BA of the Tax Act. Were we to understand that any film produced with the intention of succeeding in the market place must, by definition be flawed in its conception and categorised as "rubbish"? Perhaps Ms. Long overstated her case in order to serve a deeply held conviction. If so, what was the conviction? In the area of film, there is only one market place, and films are categorised by "genre" according to the type of audience to which their appeal is directed. In music, there are many different market places for many different genres. At opposing ends there are pop music and concert music. Practitioners of pop music regard concert music as, at best, obscure, and, at worst, lacking in soul. Practitioners of concert music regard pop music as "market-driven rubbish". A mutually exclusive gulf separates these two areas of music. Such a gulf did not exist in previous centuries. Given the sophistication of communication by media in this century, there would seem no logical reason for this gulf to exist. Yet it does. There must be a cause, and it must be a cause which did not operate in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The cause is a political one, and it derives from recently evolved political dogma.

Let us assume, for the purpose of argument, that there has existed, in arts administration in Australia, the same political bias in music funding, as we seem to observe in film funding. We would then expect to find a prejudice against the funding of "market-driven rubbish". How might we define this prejudice, this discrimination? It must be elusive, since the discrimination is directed not against the music itself, but against the intention of the music! If it is the intention of the music to be popular it must be suspect, in that its intention is to appeal to the market! Argued thus, it becomes possible to identify an underlying political attitude in the discrimination, and the attitude may be summed up thus: Monetary profit is, by definition, morally suspect, and all those who are motivated by the desire to make profit are also, therefore, morally suspect. In the industrial area, it is possible to make a division between, on the one hand, the (immoral, profiteering) bosses and, on the other hand, the (moral, exploited) workers. in the arts, such a division is less easily made, because the dividing line between bosses and workers is more confused. Therefore, in the case of the creative artist who is psychologically and temperamentally aligned with left-wing philosophy, the only way he/she can square work practises with social conscience is to forgo writing and/or producing works which, through public acclaim, attract sufficient monetary return to provide profit!

We deduce from this that the left-wing artist may risk severe problems of motivation. Normally the creative artist is nourished by public acclaim. If this is not forthcoming, the artist may derive solace and energy from the Intention to create art for posterity. However, the left-wing artist is denied even this option, since to presume to aspire to immortality is to commit the ideologically unsound sin of "monumentalism" (building a monument for oneself). Thus, there is only one possible source of motive-reinforcement, and that is from the approbation of peers, and it becomes a psychological imperative to ensure that such approbation takes an effective form.

Naturally, it is both preferable and essential that this approbation should be conferred in the form of funding, and, naturally, such funding can only be available (for works which are not "market-driven rubbish") if members of an approving elite succeed in being appointed to positions of authority in arts administration where they have control over the administration of public funds.

Thus we observe the paradox that left-wing political thinking has produced an arts oligarchy which is elitist, and which decries art works of a populist nature as being "right-Wing" This is ironic seeing that socialism has its origins in a populist movement and decries laissez-faire liberalism as favouring the elite! In music it is doubly ironic that, in the west, socialism in music should have emerged as a force denying populist elements when, in the east, it had quite the opposite effect, as witness the persecution of Shostakovich by Stalin, because he was too modern!

In my next article, as promised, I will explore how the repression of emotion in concert music has resulted in a suppression of the sexual impulse, and in a betrayal of the heritage of the great composers of the classical and romantic traditions.

AN INTERLUDE: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR



SYDNEY MUSIC DIARY, JUNE 1989





Dear Sir,

The claims made by Mr. Derek Strahan about left-wing domination of the Australia Council (May edition) and their refusal to fund new music containing "deeply-felt personal emotion", I find rather preposterous and irresponsible.

They are preposterous because I can discover no hard supporting evidence whatsoever. Instead he cites a Tim Burstall article "circa 1980", expressing doubts whether, the film "Mad Max" would have been funded by a government body because it was a "right-wing vengeance fantasy". Perhaps this ties in neatly with "quasi-political/covert/hidden agendas" not to mention "underlying repressions" and "contemporary puritanism". How exactly it relates to arts funding, I am less certain.

We later learn that the bias against funding new Australian music of a popular, "deeply-felt" nature extends even to the author's contribution to Art. With the greatest respect to Mr Strahan, had I been the funding assessor handed the plot of his film musical in which a computer operator falls in love with the boss's daughter, perhaps I too may have been more keen to feed the shredder than further the cause of New Australian Music. Such "evidence" aside, Mr Strahan's claims simply do not stand up to the reality. Over the past several months I have attended concerts featuring works by Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale and Richard Mills - all of whom have received considerable funding by the Performing Arts Board. Does Mr Strahan seriously accuse these gentlemen of "an absence of music of direct expression of emotion achieved by the use of those two vital ingredients of popular music ... melody ... and rhythm", as he describes the type of music the P.A.B. prefer?

I also suggest that Derek Strahan is being irresponsible. I say this because he uses a quasi-academic, objective style of journalism to describe purely personal opinions -- something I find personally irritating. His writing is not in the least objective nor academic because it lacks any sort of documentation or solid supporting evidence, and resorts to sweeping generalisations. For instance, "practitioners of concert music regard. pop music as 'market-driven rubbish' ". I believe a great many people would disagree -- assuming we understand (which I don't) how he defines "concert music" and "pop .music". I trust Mr Strahan will do better than this in his remaining features. 

Peter Farmer.

 

 

SYDNEY MUSIC DIARY, JULY 1989 





Dear Sir,

I am pleased that my articles in Sydney Music Diary have stimulated debate on topics of import to the future of Australian music. I refer to Mr. Peter Farmer's letter in the June issue, in which he takes strong exception to a basic premise of my argument on the grounds that I have not supported it with sufficient evidence. The premise is that ideological bias in funding policies has militated against the composition of music of a predominantly melodic and rhythmic nature over the past three decades, because music employing these features tends to be music of "direct expression of emotion" and, as such, is regarded as morally suspect by those whose left-wing sympathies cause them to favour, in art, expressions of public rather than private sentiment.

I pointed out that such bias is very rarely articulated directly by the music establishment, and, for this reason, I drew upon analogous examples of bias in funding of another art form, film, where ideological content is more openly displayed, it being an integral part of the story content of film. Mr. Farmer reveals some bias of his own when he recommends consigning a film musical project of mine to the shredder! Many plots for opera and musical involve a disagreement between father and daughter over her choice of mate (which is all that could be deduced from the two-line plot summary I provided); however, perhaps Mr. Farmer deems a personal conflict of this nature to be an unsuitable topic for music theatre. If so, he reveals himself to be a typical proponent of the kind of prejudice to which I draw attention. In any case, the point of my example was that the objection raised by an AFC assessor of the project) was to the political credo of the right-wing father.

As regards existing concert music which contra-indicates my thesis, Mr. Farmer cites without specific examples) the work of Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale and Richard Mills. The reverse is the case if one understands "direct expression of emotion" as referring to emotion derived from and relating to a personal situation such as being in love (as distinct from the zeal derived from a public attitude such as espousing a quasi-political cause. There is much intensity of feeling in Sculthorpe's music, but the programmatic content of his work tends avowedly to be of a public nature - that is to say, he writes in support of social and environmental causes having to do, especially, with the relationship of the Australian continent to its aboriginal past. Meale's music, programatically, has revealed a personal mythology having to do with Spain, with colours, and, latterly, in Voss, with a love relationship pertaining more to symbolism than personal contact. The music of Richard Mills does, it is true, draw on melodic and rhythmic devices, but, such devices are employed in the service of "public square" utterances, pieces reminiscent (intentionally?) of the last movements of some of the symphonies of Dimitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was always sardonic in his use of musical bombast. To be fair to Mr. Mills, he has, In recent music works, shown some concern for vegetation. (POSTSCRIPT 1998: This was an oblique reference to Mills' ballet music for Edna May Gibbs' stories about the Gum Nut children, "Snugglepot and Cuddlepie")

It is true that recently, some Australian composers have begun to compose in a style known as minimalism, in which melody and rhythm are important. However, this represents a very belated recognition of a movement which began 20 years ago and may now be seen to be a spent force. In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald last December, composer Andrew Ford commented: "It should be added that, for many listeners, the result (of minimalism in music) can be irritating or just plain boring''. Obviously, when I am referring to "deeply felt" music, I do not refer to music which is boring! "Pop music" is certainly minimalist, but it does not induce tedium, it induces excitement, and I maintain that concert music could use an injection of populist excitement.

Mr. Farmer claims that he suffers from an inability to "understand" the difference between "concert music" and "pop music". Such archness ill-behoves one who accuses me of pretension in using a "quasi-academic style of journalism to describe purely personal opinions." Any child could enlighten Mr. Farmer by explaining to him that "concert music" is performed by "classical" musicians In a concert hall, whereas "pop music' is performed by "pop Stars" who compete to be heard on the Top Ten.

I repeat my view that what has been missing in the repertoire of new Australian music over the past three decades has been music in which both emotion and intellect are employed in works of significant melodic and rhythmic content which specifically reflect the vitality of current dance music. The reason why such music is lacking is because funds have not been provided for those who wished to compose it. The "evidence" that such music is lacking, Mr. Farmer, lies the fact that such music is Iacking.

Derek Strahan, B.A.Cantab.

AUSTRALIAN MUSIC PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE



A Review in six parts by DEREK STRAHAN 



5. MUSIC AND SEXUALITY

At the conclusion of my fourth article in this series I stated my intention to explore how the repression of emotion in concert music has resulted in a suppression of the sexual impulse, and in a betrayal of the heritage of the great composers of the classical and romantic traditions. I suggested that this repression has been achieved by indirect means; that is to say, not by banning, in principle, the expression of sexual feelings in music, but by banning, in principle, a range of musical devices which are useful, indeed probably essential, to evoke such feelings. In broad terms, these devices may be grouped under the headings of melody and rhythm. Musicologists and critics assumed the prescriptive initiative for composers, who were made to feel that they were lacking in invention and creativity if they employed an extended melodic line or a repetitive rhythm. If I may draw a behavioural analogy, the effect of this Cromwellian ban on the relationship between composer and audience has been similar to the effect on the relationship between lovers of allowing sex but disallowing movement. (In medieval times priests were allowed to join in communal dancing so long as they did not lift their feet from the ground.)

No such inhibition has effected the evolution of popular music during this century. Indeed, it is symptomatic of the total divorce between popular music and concert music, that the more the former becomes dominated by extrovert manifestations of sex, drugs and rock'n roll, the more the latter retreats into a kind of shell-shocked immobility. It is this divorce which is damaging to art music, and which is a relatively new development, at the most three decades old. There is no sign of effete withdrawal from the world in the music of Stravinski or Bartok; and composers as different in style as Walton and Milhaud welcomed and absorbed the influences of jazz and pop music. As to the question of why musicologists have enforced the prohibition outlined above, I expect it has something to do with the fact that academics are not encumbered in their personal lives by the demons which drive artists to self-expression, and, therefore, have no first hand knowledge of the psychopathology of the creative impulse. Perhaps, when given the power to dictate creative parameters, they obey an unconscious compulsion to destroy in others what is lacking in themselves. The remedy is simple: in music, as in others arts, the academic must be denied such power. The academic is an intellectual forager, whose role begins after, not before the creative event.

Having returned the academic from the studio to the lectern, we are now (at last!) free to explore the effects of a composer's sexuality on the music he or she composes. At the outset, I must point out that this involves looking beyond the programmatic content of musical compositions. Love, in its myriad manifestations has been, is, and always will be a popular subject for all kinds of art work, for two reasons. Firstly, because love, the need for it, the ways of finding it, the joy of giving and receiving it, and the pain of losing it, are common preoccupations of the human race; and, secondly, following from that, there will always be an audience for artworks which reflect and express this preoccupation. However, precisely because the subject matter is guaranteed an audience, the factor of fashion enters the equation. It is perfectly possible for an artist to write a work on the subject of love, without his or her emotions being engaged; to fulfil the commission requires only facility of invention. Music theatre of all kinds, from grand opera through the stage and film musical to rock opera is a graveyard of works which purport to be about love and sexual relations and which, after initial success, have proved to be as disposable as the handkerchiefs used at their brief run of performances.

Because Eros is perpetually in fashion, is no guarantee that the composer has been pierced by the arrow.

In any case, if we were to restrict our enquiry to an exploration of those works of music which have as their theme love or its twentieth century conjuration, sex, we would have to exclude from our enquiry the works of those composers who, like Bach, devoted the greater part of their lives to writing sacred music.

Even so, let us initially refer to programmatic content for signs of an equation linking quality of work to the power of the composer's sexual drive. We know, for example, that both Mozart and Wagner were extremely sexual beings. Mozart's first love was opera, and most of his other music was written to keep him while he tried to arrange for commissions to write theatrical music; and when such commissions came, he constantly endangered his work by choosing subject matter which was quite unnecessarily risque; unnecessary, that is, from the point of view of the entrepreneur. Consider: "The Marriage of Figaro" - a play banned in Vienna by the Emperor because of its scandalous satire on the sexual practises of the aristocracy; "The Abduction from the Seraglio" - whose action is set in an Arabian harem; "Cosi Fan Tutte" which is, frankly, about fiancee-swapping and "Don Giovanni based on the famous Spanish novel about male promiscuity. From whence came Mozart's need to confront these themes, and, in doing so, to risk his own livelihood ? His obsession with sexuality exceeds the requirements of the program content of opera, even in an era when social morals were notoriously lax. Is there a link between the enduring quality of Mozart's music, and the inner tensions which it expresses, and which derive from the inner tensions of Mozart's own personality? And were these tensions ultimately derived from his sexual drive?

One can ask the same question of Wagner, who was even more explicit in his musical treatment of the theme of love, and even more scandalous in his personal behaviour. Our exploration is made easier, once again, because Wagner composed opera, and because, in writing his own libretti, he made so many of his own attitudes to love, sex and morality, quite clear. "Tristan und Isolde" remains the supreme icon of eroticism in music, and we know that its inspiration came from Wagner's affair with the wife of one of his benefactor's, Mathilde Wesendonck, an affair which was conducted in close proximity to both Herr Wesendonck and Frau Wagner. Once again, is there a link between Wagner's sexual drive and the use to which he put his musical talents? And is it this use which determines the appeal of his music? (It has been said that Wagner fell in love with Mathilde because he was writing "Tristan" rather than vice versa. Is this penetrating psychoanalysis or self-serving sophistry?)

Interesting as this line of enquiry is, it cannot produce any conclusive answer to the very specific question we have asked. We will do better to borrow an approach from the methodology of science, and apply it to our questioning technique, in order to arrive at a less equivocal way of assessing our evidence. Instead of asking the question: is a composer's sexual drive the primary impulse in his compositional process? we should perhaps be asking instead: is there evidence of a great composer having ceased to compose because of a trauma which caused a drastic rechannelling of the sexual drive? The case of Beethoven provides such evidence.

In 1812, aged 42, Beethoven's hopes of forming a permanent heterosexual relationship ended with the failure of his relationship to a lady known to history only as the "Immortal Beloved" (after a letter found in his private papers at his death.) This trauma precipitated a mid-life crisis. Increasingly Beethoven's anguish and frustration were expressed in acts of hostility towards his brothers who had succeeded in marrying). In the summer of 1812 he visited the Austrian town of Lint with the express purpose of forcing his brother Johann to stop co-habiting with his housekeeper. Local authorities were pressured to expel the woman from the town: Beethoven's only achievement was to force Johann into marrying her.

In the grip of negativity, Beethoven's creative force began to weaken and, over the next three years, he wrote only "commercial" music, such as the deliberately simplistic Wellington's Victory Symphony, and some celebratory cantatas, music designed to "exploit" public needs during the Congress of Vienna and attendant celebrations following the defeat of Napoleon.

Worse was to come. From 1815 to 1822 Beethoven wrote very little music. The period coincides with Beethoven's litigious dispute with Johanna, widow of another of his brother's, Caspar Carl, over the custody of Beethoven's nephew, Karl. Space here does not permit a detailed report on the composer s pathological behaviour in this affair. For this I refer you to my article "BEETHOVEN; TRAUMA AND CREATIVITY" and to full biographies of the composer. In his 1978 publication "Beethoven", Maynard Solomon gives the key to the trauma when he comments: "Beethoven's aggression against Johanna can be seen as a denial of his desire for her." That Beethoven's conceptual faculties were still functioning during this tormented "dry" period, is evidenced by the quality of the few works which date from it, such as the Hammerklavier Piano Sonata. The fact is that for seven years he lost the urge to compose, and this loss is directly attributable to severe mental disturbance and re-channelling of his sexual drive.

Two valid objections may be voiced to the foregoing survey. Firstly, what have the sex lives of dead composers to do with Australian music today? Secondly, why is there no mention of women composers?

Firstly, the purpose of this article is to identify the sexual drive as an important component in creativity; to suggest that if this component is missing, an artwork will be thereby impoverished, that it will be less able to evoke a positive response in audiences, irrespective of the craft displayed in compositional technique; to point to the baleful effects of closet puritanism on Australian music of the past decades, resulting from prescriptive prohibitions on stylistic sources enforced by influential musicologists and academics. Clearly it would be quite invidious to support this thesis by offering psychoanalyses of living persons, therefore, to obtain supporting data, I am obliged to look to documentary evidence from past eras. Such evidence is, moreover, quite acceptable since, although social conditions may change, the psychopathology of composing does not.

Secondly, it is true that this exploration is deficient in that the emphasis has been on male sexuality. The reason for this is obvious: most of the evidence available from past eras is from the lives of male composers, for the reason that there have been very few female composers, or, at any rate, very few whose lives have attracted the attention of music historians.

On why this should have been so there has been much debate to which I now add the following observation: historically, the composer has been treated as a second-class citizen, in much the same way that women have been. (The only composers who have achieved notably easy material success have been those who specialised in writing light-weight and fashionable music theatre. This pattern holds good from Rossini through to Andrew Lloyd-Webber.) In considering composing as a vocation, I would suggest that women have been deterred by the threat of double jeopardy! Clara Schumann, who, as a composer, was on a par with her husband, Robert, put composing in fourth place after (1) giving psychological support to her temperamentally unstable husband (he died of syphilis in a mental asylum at the age of 46); (2) caring for her eight children one of whom war mentally retarded; (3) continuing her more lucrative career as a concert pianist. Clearly, it has, in the past, been more practical for gifted women to become novelists or poets, since the only transaction required between creator and audience in literature is that the work should be read. The reader becomes, in a very real sense, both performer and audience. (Space does not permit a discourse on the problems women have experienced in finding a publisher!)

As female emancipation takes effect, more and more women are electing to become composers, and world music will be thereby enriched; and we will have, increasingly, opportunity to observe if there is any subtle difference in the end product reflecting a difference in the nature of the male and female creative libido. The remedy to all forms of discrimination is, of course, equal opportunity, and now that this is the socially acceptable norm in Australia, both male and female composers should unite to prevent any infringement of their creative freedom through the imposition, by music ideologues, of the kind of strictures examined in this series of articles.

In my sixth and final article, I will try to evaluate various music futures which may be on offer in world art markets, during the final decades of the millennium!

AUSTRALIAN MUSIC PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE



A Review in six parts by DEREK STRAHAN 



6. TRANSCULTURAL FUSION 

In previous articles I have suggested that the attempt by musicologists and academics to prescribe guidelines for the direction of composers has resulted in a suppression of the lyrical and melodic impulse in music, over the past decades, in favour of a more fragmented music described as avant-garde but in fact bringing up the rear of an Euro-American front line. Of course, within these parameters, some composers have happily and successfully developed their own idioms; and there has been some attempt at cultural transfusion through the absorption into Australian music of Asian influences. But, I have suggested, certain elements have been excluded from the evolutionary stream in concert music, in particular, primal influences from popular song and dances. In that these influences have not been excluded from the art music of previous centuries, our present era offers a unique case for study.

On second thoughts, though, perhaps the present rigid division between, on the one hand, a simplistic and often vulgar popular music and, on the other, an increasingly stand-offish art music, has its parallel in the centuries before the Renaissance, when all art was polarised. It was perceived to be either sacred or secular, and if secular probably had in it some elements of profanity. The evolution of art music may be seen as a process whereby this barrier was dissolved. The end result is the music of the Baroque, the Classical and the Romantic periods when the craft developed in the writing of sacred music was lavished on secular music; and when, synchronistically, quasi-religious fervour was invoked to endorse the essentially political concepts of Europe's underground stream - whose standard bearers were mythic male rebels such as Prometheus, Faust, Manfred, Don Juan together with actual revolutionaries such as Egmont and William Tell; and the self-willed heroines of opera, from Beethoven's Leonora onwards.

It is possible to view the twentieth century as providing the consummation of nineteenth century music, not so much musically, as in terms of emotional and psychological acceptance. Seen in the perspective of history, one observes that the revolutionary and individual impulse of romantic music is still very much relevant in a world where the battle to achieve human rights is only just beginning to acquire both moral and practical leverage. Much twentieth century music, however, reflects alienation and disenchantment to the point where one wonders which has been the primary motivating force behind its composition - the desire to use decomponent devices resulting in alienation of the audience; or the desire to alienate the audience, resulting in the use of decomponent devices. Although the end result is the same, there is a profound difference in self-awareness between the two approaches. The former suggests an irremediable habit of composition, the latter an emotional stance of pessimism which determines the musical language which the composer uses.

It is also possible to view the subjugation of the creative impulse in this century to ideological imperatives as being a reflection, in music, of analogous processes in politics. In this century politics has effectively replaced religion as a device for manipulating and controlling social behaviour. Thus, one may view much twentieth century art music as expressing the same subjugation to political doctrine that an earlier music expressed in relation to religious doctrine. Seen in this perspective, the music of the Classical and Romantic periods may be seen to offer a unique flowering of the human spirit and it is this, rather than any specifics of musical language, which explains its continuing popularity. Moreover, it is through such music that the emerging countries of the world are learning to feel and apply the subversive imperative of the free human spirit.

Is there any area of music in this century which has consistently expressed positive energies and which has consistently invoked the desire to break constricting social and economic shackles. There is, of course, and this music is jazz, and its almost infinitely schismatic variants In pop music. As written art music, jazz reached its greatest flowering in the three decades from 1936, which saw the emergence of black arrangers, such as Fletcher Henderson, working for white bands, such as Benny Goodman's, and in the emergence of black composer-arrangers of genius such as Duke Ellington. As I mentioned in an earlier article, all linguistic terms used to denote a jazz style, rhythm or often a specific dance, did double duty in black slang as terms denoting sexual activity, and this is completely understandable and in accordance with the role of jazz, from the turn of the century, as a social catalyst. Dancing to jazz not only provided, and in its contemporary forms, still provides the definitive environment where people go to meet and form relationships; it also quite literally provoked and still provokes release mechanisms which induce sexual excitement, and which enable people to overcome their inhibitions and any inherent insecurities. This it does by inducing changes in body chemistry, and its power to do so derives explicitly from its origins in African tribal music, where elaborate polymetric drumming is used for specific social and ritual purposes.

Upholders of the puritanical western tradition were and are quite correct in condemning jazz and rock music as being of the devil, in as much as they found themselves helpless to prevent the social liberation of which jazz music is both an agent and an expression. Jazz represented a subversive attack on the puritanical moral principles taught by missionaries , and one which was successful because it offered no verbal argument which missionaries could neutralise with counter-argument. Jazz invokes the reality of an alternative culture by reproducing it existentially, in the nervous system, through audio-visual stimulation. Western culture was and is helpless against such an onslaught because it has derived its strength by banning excessive social use of such stimulation. Jazz offers the most dramatic example of transcultural fusion, and of the power for social transformation which such fusion holds. 

Seen in this perspective, it becomes clear that it is jazz and popular music which have inherited the socio-political banners of the nineteenth century romantics. Romanticism was, of course, always will be a political movement, The term derives from the French word for a novel ('roman'), and nineteenth century literature was profoundly subversive. Novels and plays and opera celebrated the concept of "love for love's sake" and this, in a class-stratified society, was an invitation to anarchy. We forget that, in their time, the tragic heroes and heroines of the 'roman' were, in their doomed loves, seen as victims of social injustice. The writers and composers who, through art, endowed love with such transcendental power, were creating a force which would smash down class barriers much more effectively than the political ideologues which were to follow them. Later, then, it comes as no surprise to observe how just as in jazz, the populist revolution found expression in music of transcultural fusion, so that same force, jazz, transformed music theatre to create a genre of entertainment in which "love for love's sake", twentieth-century style, was enthusiastically celebrated. It was in America that operetta evolved into the stage musical , and it is no accident that it reached maturity in Jerome Kern's "Showboat" and in George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess", both dramas which addressed the issue of class awareness in U.S. society, in terms of colour. As technology developed, the initiative moved to cinema, which, through the American film musical, became as important a force in the development of music theatre as any other medium.

Cinema itself, is the true inheritor of nineteenth music drama, and, in its eclectic use of music from any source, so long as It serves the interest of the drama, film music offers a much healthier philosophy for art music, than the dogma-bound strictures provided thus far by concert music. However, if a Berlin-like wall still divides concert music from jazz and popular music (with only the occasional escapee surfacing in each opposing camp), the fault does not solely lie with the composers of concert music. Jazz composers and arrangers are as much to blame, for practising their own perverse form of obscurantism! In the May issue of Sydney Music Diary ('The Essence of Cool' - 2) Freddie Hill, to my delight, offered two musical examples to illustrate a notational difference between jazz as it is played, and as it is normally written. I refer you to Freddie's quotation from Charlie Parker, and make the additional observation that Fig. 2, written in 4/4 time with alI the phrases marked in triplets, could, with equal accuracy, have been written in 12/8 (without the need to mark triplets). 

A thesis yet remains to be written comparing jazz as played with jazz as written, revealing the obdurate refusal of jazz arrangers to write with metric accuracy. This mostly involves the avoidance of compound time (because it looks messier? Why not write in 12/16?); but one suspects that, behind the use of sloppy metrlc shorthand, is a quasi-masonic plot to guard the mysteries of the craft from outside intruders - such as interlopers from the world of "serious" music! Of equal obduracy is the insistence or art music composers that, in the final analysis, jazz cannot really be written down, as played. In the cause of this thesis, "swing" phrases are played into a music computer, and solemnly measured to, say, fractions of a seventeenth, purportedly to prove that "true" jazz cannot be accurately notated! Is this motivated by a desire to deter composers from attempting to incorporate polymetric subtleties in their work? One suspects that if a live performance of Chopin were similarly fed into a computer, any phrases played with artistic 'rubato' would fail to accord with the written music. Conversely, for a really bizarre experience, let me recommend that you gain access to a 'state-of-the-art' electronic piano in which the first movement of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' is stored, press the appropriate button, and listen to the machine playing Beethoven's notes with metric accuracy. The moonlight shimmers with all the-magic of strip lighting in a roadside cafe!

It seems clear that there is some other force at work here which motivates both jazz and art music composers to preserve their terrain. Jazz composers have no rational reason for refusing to notate compound time as compound time; equally, to assert that jazz cannot be written down suggests an intellectual incompetence by which avant-garde composers are not usually disadvantaged. Behind such obduracy lies a mutual assent to division. Behind such assent lies a docile conformity which has not existed in music since pre-Renaissance days. What it adds up to is atavistic music tribalism!

It is indeed ironic that, in this century, once again we find music divided between the sacred and the profane. The sacred is no longer specifically associated with religion, but the practitioners of the craft of concert music are as concerned as the clergy of yore to exclude the noisy music of the streets from the devotional cloisters of their private retreat. The profane is no longer restricted to taverns, festivities and the hideouts of renegade priests, because it now has its own establishment, and its products are now packaged and marketed along with other consumer items. But the two streams flow in separate channels. Exist in separate ghettos. Examples of fusion still surface only as novelty items.

What has been lost to concert music - and it is a loss that began approximately after the end of World War 2 - is a universality which results from fusion. Two distinct but interrelated kinds of fusion are necessary to achieve the global awareness which is our heritage from the Classical, Romantic and Early Modern periods of music. Firstly, the fusion of the sacred and the profane, and secondly, the fusion of art music and popular music, or, if you like, supra-tribal and tribal music. We observe that this twin fusion, which I choose to term Transcultural Fusion, was achieved in Romantic Music by two distinct but interrelated social forces: on the one hand, the supra-tribal ideals of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment (which underscore the supranational ideals of democracy and the human rights movement) and, on the other hand, the essentially tribal ideals of the Nationalist movements. Musically, this gave us, firstly, music of global idealism, epitomised in Beethoven's work; and secondly, nationalist music, in which composers employed source materials of ethnic origin, a genre which persisted into this century, culminating in the work of Bartok.

The abandonment of global awareness in concert music, and, to some extent, in all music since 1945, may be attributed to two distinct but interrelated causes. Firstly, the trauma of two world wars has produced a reaction against the notion of aggressive nationalism, at least in western culture, and it is this alienation, this disgust at our heritage, which is the root cause of alienation in avant-garde music. Secondly, music has been increasingly subject to industrial processes, to specialist marketing techniques. These encourage division in the market place. The record industry seeks categories of music for easy sale. Music which crosses boundaries causes confusion in the minds of buyers, and creates difficulties for everyone in the music industry (except composers). Composers who seek to create fusion in music are regarded as industrially subversive.

Nevertheless, it is only in Transcultural Fusion, that any pregnant future for music can be found. One cannot really quarrel with the musical output of the last three decades, since it is a true and useful record of its times, and it contains much work of value in all areas of music. One can, however, and one must rebel against its narrow parameters, and seek to redefine the social and personal purposes of music, with the aim of creating one's own aesthetic. This cannot come solely from jazz, which is still recycling concepts evolved over the last one hundred years; it cannot come solely from the avant-garde, which has become more concerned with sonics and the orthography of scores than with audience communication; still less can it come from minimalism, a movement which is twenty years old, and still defies definition (probably because there is, by intent, so little in the music which lends itself to analysis!); it cannot come solely from what is now termed (commercially) "world music", that is, pop music of specifically local and ethnic origin, although this is probably the most valuable form of source material. However, with one additional ingredient, music can draw on all these sources to create a synthesis of twentieth century music, for the concert hall and for music theatre, in the decade left to us before the new millennium.

The additional ingredient is passion, without which music is an empty shell. To feel passion (from the Latin passionem, suffering) is to feel with the human species, and to desire the best outcome for our destiny, as a species. To feel passion is to admit to having desires and needs, to feel no shame in expressing them, and to find, in these needs, a community of purpose. In such passion composers may rediscover, in their own terms, the heritage of past music; such passion alone will fire the crucible in which the music of the future will be forged: music of the senses and of the spirit, music of both personal and social passion; music to unite peoples of all cultures. Such unity, such fusion will not happen automatically. It will only happen if it is desired. It is the role of music to express this desire. 

POSTSCRIPT 1998



In the seven years which have elapsed since the last article in this series was written, signs have emerged that younger composers are less bound by the strictures of the (outmoded) avant-garde of the 60s, 70s and 80s. They feel freer to compose in a variety of styles. There are, however, still ghettos within concert music and rival schools. Thus it ever was and will be.

Within the last three years I have come to understand that much of what I objected to in the standover tactics of roost-ruling academics can be summed up as post-modernism. The term has been kicking around for several decades and is more usually applied to art and literature than to music. I concede to being slow on the uptake here, but it finally dawned on me that the modernism which post-modernists claim to follow is the 18th Century Enlightenment! In its own time this movement developed out of literature and philosophy into a political movement which gave rise to revolution. Its principal thesis was that superstition is bad and reason is good. Reason allows for harmony, proportion, and beauty which qualities have their moral equivalence in behaviour which results in society also manifesting these qualities. Hence, liberty, equality, fraternity. 

In the nineteenth century one of the social expressions of the new freedom was capitalism, since a free enterprise system gives everyone the opportunity for self-advancement, and prevents wealth being the prerogative of the classes who are advantaged not by reason of merit but of inheritance and rank.

Capitalism, in its turn, came to be seen as a source of oppression and its values, in turn, subject to analysis. The dogma of the inevitability of progress came to be questioned, and all social structures and art aesthetics which seemed to support it, or which expressed its values had to be deconstructed.

Analysis is a valuable and necessary tool to avoid being enslaved by the beliefs and values of others. However, all human activity is subject to atavistic impulse and, as I have suggested elsewhere, nowhere is this tendency more manifest than in academia, where turf wars are intense, and where ideas and concepts become a form of territory which must be defended. When war is declared, the mind becomes locked into dogma, and for three decades the deconstructionists declared war on the very process of construction, very much like the "Blue Meanies" in the Beatles cartoon "Yellow Submarine". The "Blue Meanies" hated colour. The postmoderns hated form. Having been taught to deconstruct they devoted all their energies to find structures to deconstruct. They lost sight of the purpose of analysis which is to disempower tyrants. They became tyrannical themselves.

It is to Decca Records that I am indebted for the other revelation of the past three years. Decca's "Entartete Musik" series (a still unfolding project) presents on CD the works of European composers of the 20s and 30s whose careers were terminated by the Nazi Government, because of the racial origin or political beliefs of the individuals. Chiefly, the victims were Jewish or Communist, and often both, since Communism offered a universal form of Socialism whereas the National Socialists (Nazis) were of course, aggressive proponents of German nationalism.

"Entartete Musik" translates as "degenerate music" and this was the term used by the Nazis to denigrate the music (and art generally) of its ideological enemies.

The Nazis disapproved of atonal music, because serialism was a Jewish invention (of Schoenberg). The Nazis disapproved of jazz, because it derived from a people (Negros) whom they deemed racially inferior, and, as it happened, Jewish composers in Germany were at the forefront of "experiments" integrating jazz in concert music. The name Erwin Schuloff springs to mind, in this context, and there were others. Schuloff died in a concentration camp. The fact that it has taken fifty years to rediscover his music is significant. It means that Nazi repression succeeded. When we think of composers of the 30s who used jazz we remember Ravel, Walton, Stravinski, Milhaud, Copland and Gershwin. And we think of it as a quaint period manifestation. In other words, the use of popular music as an ingredient in concert music was blocked. It ceased to be part of the mainstream.

Only in film music did any kind of synthesis continue, and it is no accident that this was mainly the work of Jewish composers who managed to get out of Europe and found a niche working for film in the US. 

As I mentioned more than once in this series of articles, jazz, for this century has been music's main source of vitality. It has been the universal "folk" music of the planet. It is a frankly sexual music, as all dance music is, since dancing is a form of courtship. To ban it, or to discourage its "movements", its "repetitions", its "vulgarity" is to be repressive, puritanical and anti-life. 

It seems ironic to me that, although their ideological reasons were quite different, the Nazis and the Postmoderns had effects on music which, though successive, were very similar.

DEREK STRAHAN JANUARY 1998 

All Rights Reserved Copyright (C) Derek Strahan 1998