8th Annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address 2006

under the auspices of the New Music Network

Tolerances for Experimentation

by Daryl Buckley

14 September 2006
City Recital Hall Angel Place, Sydney
given by Daryl Buckley, Artistic Director of the ELISION Ensemble

I would like to thank John, Anna, Marshall McGuire, every-one in the New Music Network and all those supporting this address. I would also like to thank you in the audience for making the effort to be here. It is an honour and a privilege to share the stage, for the first time, and I hope not the last, with Jim Denley, a major Australian improviser to say the least.

Tolerance - it’s a word associated with values, those often surrounding politics, ethnic-, gender- and sexual-differences, difference in family and community.

I am curious however, about the meaning of tolerance in the scientific sense, the word as it’s applied to the testing of metals, of machines and their working parts. In the domain of metallurgy and engineering, tolerances are spoken about when seemingly solid structures are placed under stress to determine at what point they will break, collapse, change and lose their integrity. At what point do objects fail and become something else or perform in ways other than desired? How is this change accomplished? And what conditions in the environment must change in order to bring this about?

Indeed, tolerances can be understood as observations about changes brought about under stress: a breaking point, a freezing point when something becomes cold, brittle and snaps, a melting point when a solid becomes a liquid. And through this lens of transformation, like the mage’s search for that alchemical moment when lead becomes gold, there is a sense of wonder: one can observe the inner quality of an object revealed under duress. This seemed to me be to be a useful set of guiding reflections in focussing this address.

I want to ask, ‘what are the qualities necessary for a dynamic experimental and contemporary practice within Australia?’ Especially, what are the tolerances and requirements for sustainable arts culture and environment in what is often bureaucratically and clunkily characterized as 'the small to medium sector', the small organizations, the groups, and practitioners who make up the bulk of Australian contemporary practice and who are the heartland of creation. Where are the stresses and breaking points and what do we need to achieve in order to promote positive growth and change in the sector? I feel that my metaphor allows me to argue not so much about avoidance of strain and stress as much as making the best of them, of changing with and because of them.

Firstly, to the value to be found in contemporary art.

For me the great thing about art, about all arts practice (especially in the experimental) is that any one element of any one work can move the viewer and listener towards a realisation of something entirely different than expected. I find that it’s not the duration or quantity involved, but the quality of an experience which can reside in the briefest chink of time, that can shift one’s understanding, shatter expectations, enthrall, perhaps infuriate but never ever leave you feeling complacent. It can change the way you think about and understand the world. One of my favourite moments of this kind of enthralling shift came in one of Barry Kosky’s Gilgul Theatre productions from the early 90’s in Melbourne, The Operated Jew. There was one point in the theatre when humble, unadorned sprigs of parsley were inserted through wooden slats on a table to become the continent of Australia as observed from a convict ship at sea. The Jewish bitter herb of exile became the landfall of the boatpeople of 1788.

Another such moment for me was experienced during the Adelaide Festival in ADT’s production Devolution. A robotic scorpion tail, a mechanical prosthesis seemed to provide the animating force for the body of a dancer and in so doing paradoxically mechanised the human in a nightmarish image worthy of a David Cronenburg apocalypse. Yet another was sitting in at the Cite de la Music in Paris and seeing for the first time that point in Liza Lim and Patricia Sykes’ songcycle Mother Tongue, a lament of the loss of language diversity. This was a moment where the sweeping arms of soprano Piia Komsi playing a cello with two bows while singing a Bjork-like melody, gave rise to the fragile and impossible image of ‘boats of commerce/ boats of skin’ setting out on a sea of language with the tongue as oar.

The gift of experimentation is often the gift of play with complex representations and mis-representations, of ideas suggesting and sparking off totally different constellations of thoughts, feelings and passions, of one completely simple thing taking on a totally different appearance and meaning. It is an area of ambiguity, where uncertainty and the lack of clear statements can compel an artistic ‘grey zone’ to be read in multiple ways, which can be accessed time and time again, by different audiences in different times and places. I would suggest that this is one of the great strengths of many canonic works, and why Shakespeare, in our time, can be absorbed and re-absorbed into our culture in dynamically various ways by filmmakers as different as Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarentino and Baz Luhrman.

What qualities of ‘play’ does experimentation need, to be vital within Australian society? Reinvention, time, and friction are three factors that come to mind.

Quality one: The reinvention of the wheel.

Each generation must discover cultural territory by reclaiming it, by making it their own, and in so doing re-inventing the wheel in challenging or seemingly uncaring ways, to the eternal despair of the ‘older generation’. Cultural and artistic knowledge is never re-learnt or translated exactly by rote. Nor should it be. The intentions, possibilities and understandings of succeeding generations change. Within the transmission of knowledge, errors and creative errors are made. Discontinuities and leaps appear, artists are forgotten, then re-evaluated and rise and fall in importance. And all of this is crucial.

I attended the last Peggy Glanville Hicks address given by Richard Mills in 2005. In a disquieted Sydney, only days after the violence of the Cronulla street riots, Richard lamented the lack of knowledge of Species Counterpoint amongst students, the lack of awareness of the poetry of Douglas Stewart and Francis Webb, and the ubiquitous and dominant presence of the laptop. Within an urban man’s lament for a pastoral world of quiet, dominated by the purple haze of eucalypts, I thought, there lay some interesting considerations.

It seemed to me that what disturbed Richard Mills most was that the circumstances surrounding the classical music he knew and grew up with and valued is changing, and changing irrevocably at that. The impact of common technologies such as the laptop, mobile telephones and other platforms have heralded profound changes in learning, communication and artistic possibility that have without doubt disrupted traditional linkages and ways of learning while enabling other new understandings and practices to emerge.

The other point in all of this, perhaps implied within Mill’s concern, is the importance for practitioners and people who use these new and emergent technologies to come to terms at some stage with their own histories, and the very underpinnings of the tools they work with. I am always curious about the seeming persistence of ‘classical music structures’ within improvised sound art performances, the recurrence in the use of Max-MSP software and other technologies, of ‘classical’ structures such as rondo form, climaxes at the golden mean, or simple ‘theme and variations’. If the creators were more aware of their histories, would these be the compositional choices they would make? Would they be empowered to create differently?

Queensland art theorist Rex Butler’s recent criticism of new media art that appeared in The Australian newspaper ran as follows, “But what if we argue that these new technologies fundamentally change nothing? That for all of their promise or threat of a revolution in our lives the truly fantastic thing is that absolutely nothing has changed?”

Indeed. But perhaps one relationship that has changed subversively is the site of dichotomy between high and low cultures. Australian idol and reality television shows are dependent upon mobile telephone platforms and understand them very well. And personally I view these new forms of entertainment as the new opera. Like Rigoletto, La Boheme, they contain on a live televised stage all of the elements of culpability, human vice, weakness, friendship and betrayal, the testing of loyalties, stupidity, and tales of the underdog or challenger rising and exceeding their limitations heroically and with great passion and emotion. To win! And what could possibly be better and more exciting? And the audience through sms text messages can participate, can take the most basic act pertinent to the fabric of a democratic society and vote to determine the outcome. How close is this experience in emotional intensity to that of an audience attending an Italian opera house in the eighteenth and nineteenth century! So why do we need an Australian opera when judge Mark Holden supplies drama of operatic intensity on our evening television? Perhaps the answer is a combination of both my and Richard Mills’ concerns.

Together we make a counterpoint: (Mills first)-contemporary practice does require heritage to inform it - (and Buckley) but not by disempowering or marginalizing contemporary practice.

Currently the largely heritage-focused organisations of the Major Performing Arts Board are capitalized by Federal Government to a strong extent. According to the 2004-05 Annual Report, MPAB funding (all artforms) was $71,726,043, plus $45,000 under the Federal Government's Young and Emerging Artists Initiative. Of this amount, close to $45 million was delivered to pit and symphony orchestras (Australia Council Annual Report, 2004-2005 p.55).

The Orchestras Review 2005 - Australian Government Response of 10 May 2005 recommended that the nine Australian orchestras receive an additional amount of 25.4 million over four years. And this has increased substantially since, possibly rising to as much as 50million. By comparison, in 2005-06 the Music Board's Support for the Arts expenditure, nationally and in all genres and fields of music in the small to medium sector, was an impossibly stretched amount of $4,769,397.- (4.7M) plus a further $102,990 under the Federal Government's Buzz Initiative.

These discrepancies are quite dramatic. I want to emphasise that investment by government into the MPAB is crucially and inarguably important to Australia’s artistic traditions. But what importance should be accorded to the small to medium sector, that centre of arts activity where contemporary Australian expression has the priority, and to what extent should that priority for contemporary practice be acknowledged and supported by Government?

Personally, with the exception of the Myer report in the visual arts, I don’t think Australian governments of any decade have been cognizant enough of the dynamic relationship between heritage arts and contemporary practice in performing arts. Simply, you need to maintain and invest in both, in the health and in the quality of the cultural expression of both. They form a continuum. But to-date it has all been somewhat one-sided, with one side, if you like, being institutionalized, resourced and financially supported without much awareness of the spectrum and linkages between contemporary and heritage activities. There is an ecology of relevance here that should not be neglected.

A Western society such as Australia, that wants its artists to reclaim and make anew-older European forms as their own and create new artistic expressions, in a confident cultural climate, will invest in contemporary practice.

Quality two: Time!

The small to medium sector is the powerhouse of play and experimentation but a crucial element often missing through lack of resources is time, time spent on creating, realizing and connecting new Australian work to the broader Australia public.

Certainly, the small to medium sector is often characterized as a part-time sector. This was noted most recently within the survey Derek Watt conducted, commissioned by the Music Board of the Australia Council. This sector is typically dependent upon very substantial and very generous voluntary efforts and the energies and efforts of one driver, one person. And when that individual tires, has lifestyle changes or seeks to move on and pursue other activities, the entire set of energies and histories and creative development and audiences that surround that organization can easily collapse. If contemporary practice is funded as a part-time and marginal operation, then the result is activity that is spasmodic and periodic, and an engagement with the public that is spasmodic and periodic. Well, you’re not going to build up bigger audiences until you give these performing organizations in the small to medium sector capacity.

capacity: defined as the ability to have an ongoing and sustained dialogue with the public on a full-time basis, in the way that the major organizations can produce year-round programs.

This capacity building, to my mind, should be and I would very much hope it will be, a strong point of focus for incoming Australia Council chair James Strong in his deliberations upon any compact between government and the arts. This capacity building is necessary for the sustainability and dignity of Australia’s artists and for maximizing the potential of contemporary Australian expression at a national level.

In the 1999 final report of Securing the Future, Helen Nugent and others noted, “The major performing arts companies of Australia make a significant contribution to Australia’s cultural life, they help to define what it means to be an Australian and they send a message to the rest of the world that Australia is a vibrant and innovative society”. The opening letter also noted economic benefit but that these companies were under ‘severe pressure’.

Well, the same arguments can be applied on behalf of the small to medium sector.

The Howard Federal government, since 1996, has arguably invested greater resources in the arts than any other since Whitlam’s era. This stabilization (capacity building) has been driven by successive sector-based reviews and reports, Nugent, Myer and Strong. In completing this process, the one area that remains is the small to medium sector within the performing arts. This is the next step. And a crucial one in amplifying the resonance within Australian society of the achievements of Australian artists over the course of their life.

Garry Stewart, choreographer for the Australian Dance Theatre, in a recent interview, describes how his dancers are able to commit to and learn and develop new movement vocabularies drawn from martial arts, breakdance, gymnastics and contortionism. Out of time engaged in research come new techniques and dance languages specific to each new production. Anyone who has witnessed ADT’s ‘Devolution’ will readily comprehend the benefits of this. Within the Australian small to medium sector, dance has a number of companies that generate regular contemporary activity. In Townsville there is Dance North, Brisbane has Expressions, Melbourne has Chunky Move. Amongst the flagship Australian companies the notion of ensemble, of regular activity with a team of people creative people, underpins the orchestra, the opera and our state theatre companies, their enterprise and audience development. But to go back to that part of the sector closest to my heart, new music, and you can readily observe there the lack of fullti me or regular ensemble or group activity that can educate, build and create national audiences, that can maximize the creative talents of this and the next generation of performers, composers and conductors.

There have been major successes with the careers of composers Peter Sculthorpe, Brett Dean, Jon Rose, Liza Lim, Ross Edwards and Peggy Glanville-Hicks herself. Australian instrumentalists such as oboist Cathy Milliken and violinist Graeme Jennings have played a pivotal role in forming and participating in some of the great European new music ensembles such as Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt or the Arditti String Quartet. Australian conductor Simone Young is now based at the Hamburg opera house with yet another younger Australian conductor Simon Hewett, who has shown a keen interest and commitment to new music, working there as Kapellmeister.

It is incredibly vital and important that Australian artists pursue opportunities globally and make their abilities and creative presence felt internationally. But there is another issue there and that is one where Australia becomes a net exporter of talent that it has raised and nurtured but does not fully receive the benefit of its international successes.

If Australia is to receive benefit from these internationalised talents and offer points of reconnection, if the stop-start cycle of a part-time sector that is so detrimental to both audience and artistic development is to cease, and if the energies of those people committed in the now decades long struggle to grow new music in Australia are to be given a leg-up government needs to consider a new approach to the sector and one that invariably demands a degree of ‘institutionalisation’.

As in a good gymnasium programme we need to bulk-up, build mass, and the one way to achieve this is to actually consider augmenting the resources of and institutionalizing the fulltime operations of contemporary ensembles. We need to ‘invest’ in considered and substantial conduits between the creation of work, especially work of scale, research, audience development, and the long-term dissemination of work.

Quality three: Friction

Richard Tognetti spoke wistfully some years ago of ratbags. I would rather think of them as the inconvenient, that part of creativity that challenges, rubs up against and by not fitting, by not being comfortable, annoys the hell out of our preconceptions. The ratbag is infuriating and he or she simply will not go away. It is a quality not endearing to the bottom line of budgets; it wreaks havoc with an organisation’s key performance indicators, turns the hair of administrators grey and is often only timely in its untimeliness. They can also be destructive and distracting. The degree of friction can sometimes even be a measure of relevance but not always.

Germaine Greer succeeds in creating a high level of constant public irritation (witness her recent remarks upon Steve Irwin’s demise) as did and still does Percy Grainger with his confronting sexual peccadilloes. Visual artist Richard Bell provokes and prods a white world with slogans such as ‘white girls can’t hump’ and ‘Aboriginal art is a white thing’. Various Australian composers have created storm and fury with Australia’s orchestras and their conductors. Michael Smetanin was felt to have taken LOUD to new inappropriate levels with Black Snow and Chris Dench’s Propriocepts drew a refusal to conduct such a complicated work from a concerned and outraged Gunther Schuller.

Two tales of a city-Darmstadt stories.

In 1992, early one bright Sunday morning in Melbourne, I caught a taxi with composer Richard Barrett to travel from North Fitzroy to Monash University. The skies were blue; the world was bright, fresh and new. It was a classic autumn Melbourne morning. The driver enquired of us as to the purpose of our travel and coyly the response came from us that we were going to record music at Robert Blackwood Hall. The driver then asked what kind of music to which we even more reluctantly gave the reply of ‘contemporary music’. The driver immediately turned around and violently and at full voice screamed. “Those f###### c#### at Darmstadt”, looked at Richard and exclaimed, “I hope you are not one of those”! Richard shrank back into the corner of the cab in surprise. Our driver claimed to be a wine merchant and drinking companion of composer Keith Humble and so we were treated to one full hour lecture of how music had gone terribly wrong since Brahms.

Ten years on I was up late, watching television in the early morning hours. Flicking channels, I came across one of the many American evangelical programmes. What caught my interest was that the evangelist was about to cross over and talk to some nuns in Darmstadt, Germany. The discussion was of evildoers in the world and the tragedy of 9/11. The evangelist asked the nun as to her thoughts on that significant date and she quietly replied that her convent remembered it well. In 1944 American planes flew overhead in a bombing raid, their convent was blown apart, as indeed was much of the city, and twenty-five thousand people died.

The shock of that discussion on television was palpable. All countries are united through the experience of blood and grief. Of course. But Western non-indigenous society in Australia has never had the task of rebuilding and re-imagining itself in every dimension after such devastation, although many of its citizens are migrants fleeing war and its social consequences and upheavals. In the late eighties and early nineties, in Australia’s compositional community, debates about modernism in music, complexity, and undesirable musical influences from continental Europe erupted. The new music festival of the city of Darmstadt seemed to be the epicentre of these influences. The Adelaide Pastoral Company emerged, engaged in passionate and ironic lampooning, while pages and issues of the Australian Music Centre’s journals were devoted to argument and counter argument around the topic of ‘Style Wars’. And many Australian commentators since have attributed so-called small audiences for new music to schools of thought and composition surrounding Darmstadt’s festival.

What bemused and intrigued me, and still does, is the amount of fear, concern, and insecurity that drove this discussion on aesthetics. These far distant cultural imperatives that arose out of particularly savage histories whose resulting musical thought was simply not present within Australian live-performance at the time. The music under discussion was absent, not heard and little known. For instance, ensemble work of that doyen of complexist composers, Brian Ferneyhough, was not performed here until 1997 when ELISION gave the world premiere of Incipits, a work for solo viola and chamber ensemble in Richard and Jonathan Mills’ Brisbane Biennial of Music.

I am at this point going to revert to the usual sense of the word tolerance referred to in my opening remarks. And that is a tolerance for artistic diversity and pluralism that demands civility but does not decline passion, which can embrace contradiction and difference in points of view even while acknowledging and articulating concern, opposition and fierce opposition at that.

There are the stresses and artistic impacts and influences that change and induce new possibilities and forms. Not one of us can predict or seek to control where artistic practice might travel. Nor should we. To do so would be to reduce possibility and avoid a prime responsibility, which is to enable new energies and new artistry to emerge.

Tolerance and importantly understanding, to refer back to the second aspect of my talk, requires time. New practices and innovation are not imprisoned to an initial Archimedean ‘Eureka’ nano-moment of conception. Contemporary artistic development requires exploration, consolidation, re-expression, argument and debate and then all of the above all over again. Development of new technologies and an exploration of their potential and implications requires a lifetime. Too often we forget that a violin (as much as a laptop computer) is a technological object, that it has had over four hundred years of investigation into its potential and that that potential is still rich and immense. In the last century, composers such as John Cage, Helmut Lachenmann, Franco Donatoni and others spent decades or longer arriving at points of creation considered later on to be breakthrough or influential. Further decades were spent elaborating, consolidating, codifying or articulating concepts to the point that a student can in a year’s course study create a performance in the style of Cage!

And thus what is new enters tradition.

For many years now a favourite and guiding story of mine comes from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, an imagined conversation between Emperor Kublai Khan and traveler Marco Polo.

At the conclusion of Marco Polo’s tales of human possibilities the Khan asks ‘is that all?’.

Marco Polo replies that there are two ways of avoiding the Inferno. The first is to become part of it, to be like every-one. The second is to recognise that which is not part of the Inferno and enable it to flourish.

And that indeed is a principle, which I understand as informing my role in the arts, an understanding I have sought in informing my direction of ELISION over the last twenty years. I have had, on many occasions, the opportunity of witnessing the inner qualities of people and art objects revealed under stress and duress, and adaptive powers leading to positive change. Making time for, creating the space and resources for invention and re-invention, having tolerance for new possibilities which allow the unimagined, the unsought realisation or insight to flower, the glittering capture of a beautiful impossibility has inspired me.

Thankyou for listening.

Daryl Buckley