7th Annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address 2005

under the auspices of the New Music Network

Some Thoughts on Words and Music
"Prima la Musica, Prima le Parole?"

by Richard Mills

19th December 2005
The Mint
given by Richard Mills Australian composer, conductor
and Artistic Director of the West Australian Opera

All great text setting achieves an enclosed fusion of elements; a fusion which finally defies analysis, even for a composer who has effected such a fusion, for an analysis offers only partially constructed, plans of and for understanding. Of course technique is explicable, but unless a song has an element of the inexplicable, it will have nothing to reveal. Schubert and Bellini are good examples of a finally inexplicable, sublime simplicity, composed in heaven perhaps and, as so, a necessary poetry for mortals, offering … along life’s journeys and a passage to a region of the marvellous where our souls are enriched and we are made more fully human.

My belief in the necessity of poetry informs my work as a song writer whose primary source of text is Australian poetry. I am too busy, too pre-occupied with composing and studying music for performance to read novels, so Australian poetry is my essential literature. Our poets are the succinct repository of our wisdom as a people, the dualists of our audibility, the records of the only stories which finally matter, the stories of the journeys of our hearts and minds, in formes past and present. Our pasts have told me and continue to tell me what I am interested in knowing, what it is like to have lived here and to live here now, what it is like to be Australian, in its reckless, distructness and even banality. To celebrate and enrich my apprehension of the world, they stimulate and reawaken a reverence for living things: for animals, birds and trees, especially those unique to this continent. They share with me and extend my understandings of youth, age, beauty, loving, and loss, living and dying.

As I walked to the mint today, I can see Sydney through their eyes, from Henry Lawson’s Faces in the Street, Mary Culmines’s The Archibald Fountain, Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells, Douglas Stewart’s Daddy feeding the cats, to Les Murray’s An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow and Ocean Baths. These tissues and shards of feeling and perception, articulated in incantatory speech are given to me by these poets and become part of my memory, my perceptions I am enriched by them and more aware because their words have encouraged me and enabled me to experience a sense of wonder of ordinary things, I have been given words for my feelings and have words means, in a certain sense, to know and them perhaps, to value.

These moments of perception and feelings, these ‘song lines’ are being lost to generations of school children, because insufficient attention is given to the reading of poetry in schools. My love of literature, especially poetry was kindled at school and I eventually found the book of poems we studied for the junior public examinations forty years ago in Queensland I searched for it because I was unable to find a poem which mad a vivid impression on my memory, The Jacaranda by Douglas Stewart. Here are the first and last verses, it is five verses.

The Jacaranda Douglas Stewart

There is some sweetness not to be seen in air,
Not to be trapped in rain, nor to be found
In earth, that made this sky of blossoms flare
In blue and sparkling daylight out of the ground;
Some struggle of more than earth is in triumph here
In that gesture of joy and fulfilment lifted on high
Where, dancing with pale blue fire, the branches rear
And the dark twigs hold the sky up to the sky.

All things move in time as they move in dream;
Abrupt, symbolic, like mountains seen through a rift,
They tower and vanish. I watched the wavering gleam
As the branches paled in the blue sky’s darkening drift,
And more than a tree before me ebbed and returned.
While I could hold it, before I was dazed and blind,
The jacaranda sprang in the sky and burned
And the flare of it lit in the mind a sky without end.

This poem is out of print, there is not a collected Douglas Stewart, nor a collected Francis Webb, one of our greatest poets; this is a disgraceful neglect of our heritage. All I can do is try to preserve some of this heritage, as possible and practical, in song.

To study language is to experience the uniqueness as well as the joyous plurality of humanity, to study the language of music is an essential education for anyone wishing to become a composer, well it used to be. Last week I attended a formation course on writing for orchestra for Symphony Australia; the kind of course that should and could be given by any of our conservatoriums. Five bright young artists, all with a B.Mus., had never heard of invertible counterpoint (about the same as a doctor not having heard of the large intestine). What is happening in out tertiary music schools?

It seems to me that the distinction between knowing music and knowing about music has become unclear. Musicological studies are formulated via verbal analogues to the music staff, and musicological studies are valuable in themselves; but the institutions seem to have abandoned the desire to teach the formulation of the language of music in its own right, through the study of harmony strict counterpoint and detailed stylistic imitations o model from the common practice periods. In our schools of music, words seem to have overtaken music to an extent I find unfortunate. Moreover, the use of computers for writing music can discourage students from using their inner ear. ‘Counterpoint’, as Berio says “…is a simultaneous training of the ear, the eye and the imagination”, a pity it seems in terminal decline in the very places which should be preserving it, our conservatoriums – so called.

The recent government enquiries into music education are a timely response to the poor standards of music teaching in many of our schools. Queensland led the way many years ago with a comprehensive programme of instrumental teaching in schools, which provided access to a genuine encounter with music. I still remember the fine performances of the Trinity Bay High School Orchestra, Cairns, conducted by a Mr Favell, who taught his young changes to play in tune, with good rhythm and sense of the spirit of the piece. The Youth Orchestra movement has also achieved remarkable results – because the students are actually making music – not sitting around talking about it. But we still have much to learn from countries like Finland and Hungary, with their outstanding established methodologies of music teaching – which are always related to singing and rhythms. I absolutely disagree with the notion of cultural relativism that can equate, or, worse still, substitute Elvis for Beethoven. This is an immoral and criminal position – on two counts of theft; it either takes from young people the encounter with spiritual grandeur and greatness that is Beethoven or Initialises and In devalues it; and it steals from them the power of discrimination, which, to educate fully, needs to be nourished. It is also unflattering to Elvis. Taste should be formed by example and leadership in the classroom, for leading has a lot to do with education.

Needless to say, my feelings on the teaching of literature echo my position on music. Three decades of … (Gore Vidal’s ‘French Letters’) and psycho-babble in our tertiary studies of literature have now infiltrated the classroom with tragic results.

Perhaps the neglect of poetry in our schools and the proper teaching of Harmony and Counterpoint in our conservatoriums is a symptom of a process of forgetting that some posed to be happening in the West. Computers, x-boxes, continuous TV violence, the potentotzidancy of popular culture obliterating more civilised accounts. Perhaps we are losing our ability of listen and to hear. We live in an environment of continuous noise and continuous music. Mozart and Beethoven never heard a steam train, let alone a jet plane. Music has become a commodity, purchased in a time envelope, the CD, through which we move backwards and forwards at, will. Maybe we are losing a sense of the uniqueness of performance, of its sense of the extraordinary, of magic and shared ritual. Maybe we are losing the ability to listen to each other, for listening involves thinking as well as hearing. But then – maybe I’m just plain old fashioned – spending all day writing music.