Journey Within
(continued)
Greg Kingston Courtesy of Antboy Music
Maybe we overlook the expression that exists between speech and song. Australia has its very own Sprechstimme – speech song. You can find it in the horse race commentary but above all you can find it in auctioneering. Being a born pom, I don’t speak it...but I recognize it. The tone, the language, the speed, the inflections of pitch, the delivery, differ from State to State…It’s the most definable State by State Australian musical resource I can think of – incredibly exciting and vigorous, based in history, unutilised. If you tell me that auctioneering is just about flogging living flesh, then you haven’t witnessed MTV. The issue here is that Australian hip hop doesn’t have to sound like an American copy, and a new Australian opera doesn’t have to sound like the leftovers from a voice training class at the conservatorium.
Can you still find live music imbedded in a communal activity? Well if you are an atheist, the church service will have to be ruled out. Even if you are a Catholic, you’ll have to rule the church service out as they got rid of all the good music back in 1965 at Vatican Two. I guess that leaves shopping and, much as I loath the activity, I’m please to report that at David Jones you can find an example of functional live music that still exists. Michael Hope is a pianist who provides hundreds if not thousands of shoppers in their various states of depression, loneliness, delirium, ecstasy with unique moments of the recognition of their plight. Delving into a repertoire of between three and four thousand songs, Michael’s musical function expands from the role of background music, through the role of surrealist entertainer, into that of social worker – keeping members of our often dysfunctional society from collapse.
Significantly a few years back, some new suits in middle (meddle) management thought that Michael should be booted out and replaced with some buy, buy, keep on buying electronic hip-hop. Michael’s shopping fans responded with a petition, he was reinstated, he’s still there.
Imagine if every major store had live music, or even a lunchtime concert? It’s not fantasy. In Tokyo in the 1980s, there were concerts of new music going on in department stores on a regular basis. And they paid well too.
Clearly people would still shop whether there was music or not. So let’s look at some examples where music, in traditional Aboriginal terms, is life supporting – or as important as life itself. Not quite up there with the concept of “if you don’t sing the universe into existence, it doesn’t exist” but close.
David Harvey is a musical savant. He was born in 1989 with quite severe autism. From 18 months onwards, his mother noted that almost every action by David was concerned with music. Not only playing and singing music but making drawings of musicians and musical instruments, and conducting music. On his first visit to an orchestral concert at the age of 5, he jumped up onto the rostrum and proceeded to conduct much to the amazement of all there. Later visits to parks involved David finding an ersatz rostrum and conducting trees, graves, people – the city as his own giant musical composition - making sense of his world through music. I’m not suggesting that we all go round conducting trees or traffic, but I find David’s perception of a homogeneous musical environment much more compelling than any performance I’ve heard at the Opera house.
Others turn physical disability into musical ability – the Tasmanian guitarist Greg Kingston, who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome would be an example of that. Greg is an improvising guitarist whose speedy and explosive style of playing he directly attributes to Tourette’s. Greg plays the music of his condition in a symbiotic relationship. If only guitarists without Tourette’s could play with half that kind of energy.
Multiple Sclerosis sentenced John Blades to a wheelchair, where no doubt it was expected that he would spiral slowly out of view. The contrary happened and with committed zeal, he has become a major figure in the Sydney alt. music scene organising & conducting his Loop Orchestra, promoting & supporting new music and outsider art. Not only have his activities kept his mental state together, he tells me that his condition has actually been reversed through his involvement with music. Physical healing with music is not just the province of new agers – music can be as practical as taking aspirin.
When I met Scott Erichsen, he was 18 years old and studying jazz piano at the conservatorium of music but, unlike most of us, Scott carries with him a series of sonic maps each one of which is certainly much more complex to memorize than any tune, standard or set of changes. For every journey Scott makes, no matter how complex or trivial, long or short, he relies on his ears to tell him where he is at any given geographical point. His survival sometimes depends on it. Scott has been completely blind since he was 4 months old. He has a knowledge of resonances or sonic shadows that guide his every move. Further more, these sonic maps, once learnt, must be constantly upgraded as objects and obstacles are moved in or out of his regular journeys. He must be able to hear the arrival of the unexpected and react to that. Armed only with a stick, he must be able to hear a world of total and unremitting darkness.
Scott’s perfect pitch helps in identifying the horn on his father’s car, or any friend’s car, from a dozen other similar horns from a dozen other identical models of car in the broad band noise of the urban environment. '’Oh that must be Steve, his car horn is an Eb major triad," he told me.
Again, I’m not suggesting that we all have to be blind in order to create a more musical society. But I am proposing that if we developed even a fraction of the sensitivity of Scott’s oral skills, our sonic environment would automatically improve beyond recognition.
Which takes us to the big outdoors. There are good models in our recent past, but these are fairly isolated events when you consider that all music was an outdoor affair up until 1788. I’m thinking of examples like the Wottamolla happenings organised by George Gittoes in The Royal National Park in the late 1970s;
“The Maritime Rites” of Alvin Curran, performed in Sydney harbour in 1992: the Totally Huge festival taking place on a West Australian sheep station in 2001. And, it’s the towns of the outback that currently make Queensland’s Music Festival, not necessarily what goes on in Brisbane; The Sounds Unusual Festival in the dry riverbed of the Undoolya river at Alice Springs is a new addition. The NOWnow festival next year, held in the Blue Mountains, has organized outdoor events in its program. I have already mentioned the spectacularly successful Gama Festival in North Eastern Arnhem land –.
Here’s what land rights activist Galarrwuy Yunupingu says about the festival: “…it's about learning from each other the unique indigenous culture as well as the contemporary knowledge that we learn from the white man's world. This is about uniting people together and the weighing and balancing of their knowledge.”
How can we weigh and balance knowledge of music when only 23% of Australians get any kind of specialist music instruction in our public schools? It’s not just that the standard of what there is, teeters from the bad to the abysmal, it’s the fact that music is just not rated as a necessary life skill; not rated in the same way that the notion of music as a profession has become laughable. Vast sums of money can be spent on the bricks and mortar of Opera Houses and conservatoriums but no-one wants to pay the musicians. The punters might pay for celebrities but they resent paying for the real cost of live musicians and by that, we know what the value of music really is in our society. Rock bottom.
Here’s some statistics taken in 2004 from the Music in Australia Knowledge Base.
Out of a population of over 20.1 million people, only 230,800 persons said they were involved as live performers of music. That’s a lot less than the number of pianos in Australia in 1888 when the population was well under three million.
So how unmusical have we become? That figure 230 thousand includes unpaid and paid, hobbyists as well as professionals. That’s 1.47% of the population… and I would suggest that is an exaggeration. You know how people are…they want to give a positive answer “Do you play music” “Oh yeah I still play a bit of guitar now and then”.
Out of that 1.47%, 37.4% of music performers worked less than three hours per week, 47.4% worked three to less than ten hours, and only 15.2% worked ten hours or more per week. That means that less than 3,500 musicians were employed anything like full time in this country during the Howard boom year of 2004.
What was their worth? There are no figures but of that initial boast of 230,800 people who said they had been involved in music somehow. Only 11,500 said they received more than $5,000 in that year. And that number would be seriously warped by the millions handed out to Opera and the five orchestras. I disagree with the pronouncement from an ABC presenter who thinks that Classical Music needs defending – classical music does not need defending. Classical music has a hotline direct to the power elite of this country and has nearly the whole of the available subsidized cake and eats it too.
Anyway, tell that to the politicians and lawyers who have put the noose of public liability around the neck of anyone in Australia who tries to put on a public musical event outside the rigid confines of an official controlled venue. In a place like Sydney live music has been legislated to the edge of non-existence. The vibrant Pub culture of 30 and 20 years ago, was on the end of a vital live music history that started out as the ‘free and easies’ of the late 18th century, which became the music halls, which became variety and Vaudeville of the 19th centuries, which spawned the Palais orchestras of the early 20th century and the clubs of the post war era.
Why is the night life zone of Kings Cross so dead? It’s not just that Oxford Street has become the place to be seen, it is because there is no live music left on that strip.
Licensing laws are about to be changed in NSW, let’s see if live music can come back from the dead.
For a musical praxis in the future to have any hope it must involve a high level of reciprocity; the ability to socially combine on a local and global level. It would have to be a catalyst that makes us more human. This has dangers – at its worst music helps us wage war more effectively; at best it brings us into communion with other selves, other species, the natural world from whence we came.
As Aboriginal models can teach us, it should be part of a continuum of creative practice involving sound, stories, and image. Something integrated and interchangeable with geographical location. Something that draws on all media – well we are all aware of that notion through the internet. Capitalism brought us the hierarchy of the specialist and the adoration of the masses, and now it brings us a paradigm where all consumers, at the click of a computer key, can pretend to be Hollywood directors, pop stars, whatever. That’s not what I’m advocating. To become skilled in a continuum of creative activities does not mean jumping on the reductive band wagon to mediocrity, it just means you have to work harder – rigorously engaging with the physical materials of music and the processes whereby they can be experienced.
I’m also not suggesting a culture where there is some attainable level for the polymath, a measurable syllabus to ensure consistent creative output. As Oscar Wilde noted “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative”.
But we might be able to move from a position of musical impotence to one of strength if we chose to listen to the past. We are in a unique position to learn from the indigenous peoples of Australia. That doesn’t mean Nimbin hippie-style delusions of back to the bush; I’m proposing a society where there is, if not universal musical suffrage as was the norm in traditional societies, at least a situation where if you want to share knowledge, as when a Warlpiri women tells a sand story, the most natural thing is to paint and sing this knowledge into existence. Technology can be used well to promote such notions but it cannot replace original content, social connection, environmental context, and the wonder of first hand experience, any more than we can replace the earth on which we have become uncontrollable parasites.
Digital technology could be an interface that links many human activities to a direct musical expression. Imagine that every time you witness music in a public encounter such as shopping, sport, or even a government debate, it is actually someone physically playing music – visceral contact. It is early days yet, but when the haptic feedback and kinaesthetic perceptions experienced on a traditional musical instrument becomes possible through interactive devices, we will be able to incorporate electronic media with an expressive physicality not yet possible. I’m talking here of a direct interconnectivity to each other and the physical world – as was practiced by traditional societies for countless generations - the opposite of virtual reality.
A few years ago Germaine Greer in her book White Fella Jump Up proposed that Australia’s salvation might lie in becoming an Aboriginal Republic – an idea for which buckets of manure were poured over her head by the usual commentators. Well I’d back almost anything that got rid of the British hereditary ruling class and that ridiculous Australian flag. However, the rub of the issue is this; our current models of music have not and are not serving us well. Instead of importing the latest theoretical cultural package from the US or the UK, perhaps there are many elements in our indigenous and colonial history that contain empirical guidance for the future of music as practiced in this country. But we are going to have to believe first, that it is worth trying.
An Aboriginal guide Gerald Quale once told me: you white fellas got the three ‘R’s: well blackfellas got the three ‘L’s – look, listen, and learn. This strikes me as a good approach to our history and a methodology for the future if we want there to be music making of any value.
Jon Rose©2008