Martin's general rave ("Musings"):
Now we are sixty ... how did it come to this?? I remember fellow composer Ross Edwards and I agreeing, when we were students together, that 35 - the age at which Mozart died - would be a good limit: [a] people over 30 can't be trusted, [b] 35 seemed ages away, and [c] who wants to be an Old Fart? Two observations from this side of 35: being an Old Fart is fun, and whereas Mozart wrote 40 symphonies, I'm still to write my first one - I'd better get moving! But I've composed lots of other things. Looking back, the works I'm most pleased with (I mean, least displeased with) are those composed with no nod at all to what was then currently fashionable in contemporary music circles. Like For Marimba & Tape, Who Killed Cock Robin?, and Boojum!. It wasn't always easy, in terms of getting commissions, performances, broadcasts etc, to break free from the shackles of the Contemporary Music Thought Police, but I was uncomfortable with their strictures relatively early on. I remember giving a seminar paper, as a student, on Webern's Opus 9. The night before I'd been playing banjo to all hours in a dixieland jazz band, and was somewhat worse for wear, prompting a colleague to advise me that I would have to choose between Webern and the banjo. I went home, thought about it all, and decided that I couldn't give up either: Webern (representing so-called "serious art-music") was a passion, but so was making good toe-tapping music for fun and entertainment. I decided to keep both, thinking that if my music ever amounted to anything it would be because of, not despite, my catholic tastes and interests. As it happens, I haven't listened to Webern or played the banjo for years, but I still love, and am influenced by, a wide range of music. Current favourite music: New York Voices' recording of Duke Ellington's Caravan and birthday boy (same day as ours) Ian Munro's recording of Ross Edwards' Kangaroo Valley Blues!
I must say that within the Australian composer fraternity, I've rarely come across the bickering and back-stabbing in which most artists are supposed to indulge. Perhaps that's because the cake is so small that it's not worth fighting over. One crumb or two? It hardly makes much difference. Times are tough for Australian artists today, and the outlook bleaker (although with tonight's concert I could hardly be happier!). I believe that a society whose creativity in all areas has been fostered by its enjoyment of - and participation in - the arts will prosper even in times of economic gloom. Thus I long for a government that insists that there be a vibrant arts scene and provides the required resources. Similarly, it should encourage a vigorous intellectual environment by, in part, valuing education for its own sake rather than seeing it merely as vocational training. And by insisting that the ABC fulfill its charter and be a source of debate and dissent, welcoming rather than suppressing programs and ideas that challenge accepted wisdom, that challenge even the government itself. Democracy, in whose name we send troops overseas, demands no less. In short, we need government that sees culture, broadly, as something more than a sloppy meat broth in which bacteria grow.
I've recently been re-reading Edward W. Said's Orientalism. In his 2003 preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his classic 1978 book he writes: "Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle ... have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with derisive contempt." Such thinking lies behind doublethink, Weapons of Mass Distortion, Black Ribbon, Songs of Australia, and other works of ours, including the East Timor pieces. Poor East Timor! Its brutal occupation by Indonesia was accompanied in Australia by the brutal taking over and subversion, by successive Labor and Coalition governments, of Australians' insistence on a fair go for all, our disrespect for authority, and our penchant for standing up for the little bloke. Howard, who took action in 1999 only after years of denying the reality of what was happening in East Timor, and only after being bullied by public opinion, emerged triumphant, typically turning the situation to his advantage. This has enabled him to complete the process of turning those traditional Australian characteristics on their head. Where now our penchant for standing up for the little bloke? Gone with the perceived need to pander to the big bloke. Er, West Papua, anyone? What happened to reflection, debate, rational argument, and moral principle in the lead-up to our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? And what's happened to the thing that I grew up believing, courtesy of my parents, to be the very first principle: respect for, and desire for, the truth?
My father Harry's advice was generally sound, except for this: stand up, son, for what you believe in, and speak your mind without fear or favour. This attitude has got me into a lot of trouble! I was put under considerable pressure to leave the Sydney Conservatorium of Music when I expressed views contrary to what the new managers wanted to hear (I wisely succumbed, and am now living in the serenity of beautiful Kangaroo Valley, a million miles from the mind-numbing "efficiencies" of what now passes as education). And my East Timor pieces have not advanced my "career" as a composer. There's X, and there's Y, and there's Wesley-Smith over there in the ratbag corner. But no worries: with excellent performers such as The Song Company prepared to stand up along side, the pieces are being performed more than they would be if they'd been abstract pieces instead. Last year the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra courageously commissioned Peter and me to write yet another one (A Luta Continua), and clarinettist Ros Dunlop and cellist Julia Ryder are constantly performing, with great skill and flair, the East Timor multimedia pieces. I salute all performers who accept the challenge! I'm privileged in being able to work with some of the world's best: not only can they play whatever I write, they can make it mean something even when I myself don't know what it means. Cellist David Pereira said of the last section of Welcome to the Hotel Turismo that when playing it he felt like an old Portuguese whore with too much make-up dancing by herself around the trashed remains of the hotel's dining-room, and asked if I thought that appropriate. I pointed out that just as Lewis Carroll was happy to accept good meanings that other people found in his epic nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, I was very happy to accept David's interpretation, which works wonderfully well. But I'm also happy to accept other performers' good interpretations. Creating live music is a partnership where I'm an important member of a team that has other equally-important members. That team can include performers, lighting designer, sound and image projectionists, director, actors, and so on - and lyricist and librettist. Those last two roles have been combined, for me, in the person of twin brother Peter, whom I've been able to bully and cajole over many years with great success! We fight over lots of things, of course, being brothers, but we've been able to come up with at least a few things aspects of which still please me (if no-one else), some after many years e.g. Mister Thwump (1965), Pi in the Sky (1968) and Boojum! (1986). My thanks to him, and to all other fellow voyagers - particularly Roland Peelman and The Song Company - on the good boat "Discovery" as we navigate often-stormy artistic seas.
Other valued colleagues include Belinda Webster, whose Tall Poppies Records has enabled some of us to get our work heard more widely, who has put together the program you're now reading, and who started, ten years ago, what now appears to be a dec-annual tradition of concerts of all our stuff (you have been warned!); the pioneering nerds in the now-defunct computer music collective watt; and various freelance free-form improvisers who, mostly, somehow survive as they explore the musical unknown with great ideas and ingenuity, challenging the rest of us. Grainger's sons and daughters, all. But it's not just colleagues, and fellow composers, to whom I owe a debt: I'm privileged to have many good friends, many of whom having contributed - usually unwittingly - in some way to my compositions. My family, including ex-wife Ann, is a bedrock of support and love, even when I don't deserve it. To Sheila Wesley-Smith, who at 89 still drags herself off to all my premieres (she's here tonight): thanks for having me, Mum. I acknowledge with gratitude the work of various journalists, philosophers, writers, activists etc who provide us with alternative views to, and plausible explanations of, the world according to most mainstream media (to name a few: Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, John Pilger, Arundhati Roy, Brian Toohey and our very own Rob Wesley-Smith). And cartoonists such as Leak, Moir and Nicholson, masters of the art of making incisive political comment while making us laugh. And, of course, there's Leunig ...
Aaaah, Lewis Carroll, mentioned above: the master of nonsense and a source of great inspiration over the years. I am particularly drawn to nonsense as, paradoxically, a source of good sense. Contrast this to official good sense, which can often be arrant nonsense e.g. "We had to destroy the village in order to save it", quoted in doublethink. Carroll would have appreciated, though not welcomed, the paradox in Tony Blair saying "I have never told a lie in my life". Humpty Dumpty ("When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less") plays an important role in the audio-visual Weapons of Mass Distortion, for clarinet and computer (2003), another look at propaganda, doublespeak and lies where I was able to combine Carroll's fantasy and nonsense with real-life fantasy and nonsense. That piece is also, I think, one of my more successful attempts to integrate sound and image, which has been one of my main compositional interests.
I have often been criticised for bringing politics into music. My response is usually along the lines of this: [a] why not?; [b] composing a piece of music is already a political act; [c] if the plight of the people in East Timor, say, inspires me to compose, then as a composer trying to reflect in music, as honestly as possible, my relationship to my time and place, I should not ignore that impulse; [d] unlike Nero, I don't want to fiddle around writing abstract pieces while the world transforms itself into an ugly authoritarian market place of everything except ideas (but I would love to get back to abstract music, one day, and I applaud those who compose pure, beautiful music, bringing light into the darkness); [e] I still have the right, I think, as a citizen of a democracy, to express my views in whatever forum I can get access to; and [f] I don't see the offending pieces as overtly political but, rather, as pieces that show, or try to show, humanitarian or humanistic concern.
Edward Said, again: "Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticise, influence, and judge. Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power ... Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority ... (it) is ... the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history." If, through a combination of critical thought and subjective intuition, I've occasionally been able to come up with something that moves people and/or objects to inhuman practices and injustices and/or offends either state power or the Contemporary Music Thought Police or both, then the last sixty years haven't been entirely wasted.
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