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Peggy Glanville-Hicks address 1999 As part of the Sydney Spring Festival By James Murdoch under the auspices of the New Music Network 14 March 1999 It is a great honour to me to be invited by the New Music Network to deliver the inaugural Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address in these 'hallowed halls' of the Sydney Opera House Studio, which is, and will be once again, the High Temple of New Music in Australia. It has always been noted that when composers die, there is usually a ten-year hiatus before the world begins to reclaim them. And there is a real quickening of interest with Peggy, with several new CDs, both in Australia and in America, performances programmed and even the likelihood of a grand new production of one of her operas. My own biography of her is planned to be published later this year in America. This annual address - perhaps, I may say her Permanent Address - I hope will become the opportunity for some major blood-letting, or at least a Significant Statement from those invited to present future addresses! But for this first one, I feel I should bring forward Peggy herself, and some of the things she believed in. There is another happy point in being asked to present this address today in the new Studio: I believe I was the first to direct a concert of Music Theatre is this Hall during the opening Season, in 1973, with a staged recital by Stuart Dempster, the great trombonist, for whom Luciano Berio wrote his Trombone Sequenza. A Solo Trombone Recital is not something that normally would send a thrill through us (unless it was by a Simone de Haan or a Ben Marks!), but New Music, performed by a master, lit and staged, as one could do here in those far-off days of 26 years ago, indeed was thrilling. Later, I brought Peggy to this very hall for concerts of new music. She had, by then, become Patron of The Seymour Group. I soon had to stop though, as she kept up a running commentary on everything, and as soon as she heard something she didn't like, would demand to be taken home immediately ... "ThatÍs old hat!", she'd sniff, as she swept out of the hall. Peggy Glanville-Hicks established an international reputation during the 50s and 60s with four operas and five ballets, and highly regarded orchestral and chamber works. Some of the most famous writers of our time,. Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell and Thomas Mann, collaborated on the operas. Others, such as Paul Bowles and Wallace Stevens, had provided her with texts for vocal works. All of her ballets were written for the famous American choreographer John Butler, who subsequently worked in Australia with The Australian Ballet and the Sydney Dance Company But her early works for John Butler were for the Spoleto Festivals, the Harkness Ballet and for CBS Television. At the height of her fame and creativity, in full flight, as it were, she suffered a sudden, tragic brain tumour operation, and ceased composing in 1967. Deeply interested in non-Western music all her life, she returned to Australia in 1975 to head the Asian Music Studies Program at the Australia Music Centre, with the aid of grants from the Myer Foundation. She was virtually unknown in Australia then. Slowly there began to appear performances, culminating in two of her operas The Transposed Heads (to the text of Thomas Mann) and The Glittering Gate (to a text by Lord Dunsany), as a double bill at the 1986 Adelaide Festival. At the time of our making of a major documentary film on her life and works, she suffered a fatal heart attack at her home in Paddington in June 1990. The documentary film, P G-H: A Modern Odyssey, by Juniper Films for the ABC, with a script by Nadine Amadio, has been screened by the ABC several times, and has won awards in the USA and in Canada. In the 40s, Peggy Glanville-Hicks was an APRA member, but when she became an American citizen, as did Percy Grainger - for the sake of survival - she changed, first of all to ASCAP, and then, with many of her colleagues, became a BMI member. Her Executors, Shane Simpson and myself, have returned her to the tender care of the Australian Performing Right Association - APRA. She also became a famous writer, and as a notable music critic for almost ten years, on the New York Herald Tribune, whose Music Editor was the redoubtable composer, writer and wit, Virgil Thomson. Her auspices gained for Australian composer and Harkness Fellow Graeme Koehne, access to Virgil Thomson, who became his teacher during the early 80s. One may see that influence to this day! During the 1950s, Peggy's pithy and pungent reviews became famous, if not feared, but she had a way with words that, while they contained the truth, avoided the wounding barb. She is still quoted for many of her succinct sayings. She was mistress of the one-liner, in the best Dorothy Parker manner. Where the academics would grovel at the "Well Tempered Klavier", P G-H (as she became known universally) would counter-attack with the "Bad Tempered Klavier", referring to her regret that in her view, J.S. Bach had perverted 'just intonation' with his systemisation of the tempered scale in his 48 Preludes and Fugues. Yet, she was the first to use electronic music in an opera, and one of the first to incorporate bilingual texts in another opera. One her abiding friends was Yehudi Menuhin, who died this week, and who had many Australian connections, as you know. He told me he has always regretted he never made the opportunity to record her very beautiful Viola Concerto, which she had written for one of the worldÍs greatest viola players, Walter Trampler, and whose recording of the Hindemith Viola Concerto was a sensation. Together, she and Menuhin presented in the 1950s, the first major concerts of classical Indian music in America, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, who appeared with her in the 1990 film on her life. "Play something!" she commanded on film. And he did. She crossed nations. Born in Melbourne, she was only nineteen when she went to London and studied at the Royal College of Music with Vaughan Williams, and then with the Schoenberg pupil and oriental scholar, Egon Wellesz, in Vienna. She hated it. She was one of the first to denounce the then increasingly fashionable twelve-tone music system of Schoenberg. She found her own, great, guru in Nadia Boulanger, in Paris. Later, she was to comb Greece and the Middle East, Israel, then India, again and again, in her quest for answers to the growing dilemma with communication in modern music. Her answer was the age-old one of attention to Melody and Rhythm, promoting percussion and demoting harmony. Not excluding harmony, as some feminist musicologists would have it, but denoting it as a form-building device. During the war, she went to America and then burrowed into the post-war New York scene, where she became a legend, and more recently, almost a cult figure. Keith Jarrett was recorded her Etruscan Concerto, after playing it around America and at the Lincoln Center, where it was encored. He, as a young undergraduate, had been awestruck with one of her 1950 lectures. It had marked him. In 1953, she found a house she named Halcyon, in Jamaica, and would escape there in the New York off-season to write music. She composed much of her opera The Transposed Heads on Errol Flynn's infamous yacht, the Zaca, and swam with Errol's father, Theo, who was a chip off the young block. The opera is dedicated to him. At the end of the 50s, she found she could live cheaply enough in Greece to buy the time to write her major works. Which she did. Eventually she had a house in Athens, under the Acropolis, and which she called the "green room" for the Herod Atticus Theatre, in which her grand opera Nausicaa was premiered in 1961. Naturally, the Greek male composers were furious! Later this year, I shall present the opera on ABC Classic FM. She also acquired and converted a pigeonÍs house on Mykonos, to escape the fierce heat and even fiercer tourists of summer, and then resurrected a tough, rock house on the neighbouring island of Tynos. She had the piano delivered by donkey. It is said she seduced the donkey man! As a woman composer in New York in the 40s and 50s, she had a very very tough time surviving. But survive she did, at times almost starving, living on rice and cocktail parties, too few alas, for real sustenance. She knew the repetitive pain of having to find the rent every month. "You can compose on an empty stomach, but you can compose better on a full one." She knew that one have to get rid of the rent. With that gone, one can always seem to manage. And that is her gift to Australian composers - she is helping some of them to get rid of the rent. The first five Fellows and two Sheilas (as I have called them) of the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Trust have been, to date:
The Australia Council has established a number of artist residencies around the world, notably in Italy, France and in America, but none for music and none in Australia, so this is the first artistÍs residence for music in Australia. Another "first"! When I initially met up with her in London in 1968, having just written my book on Australian composers, in which I had included her, I played to her tapes and recordings of much recent Australian music, which astonished and delighted her. It was the real impetus that led to her return to settle in Australia in 1975. She felt it was safe to come home again! Happily installed at the Music Centre, she was a firm presence, and hosted meetings of local composers with John Cage, Aaron Copland, Lennox Berkeley, Narayan Menon from India, Morton Gould, Lucretzia Kasilag from the Philippines, and many more. She delighted in encounters with young composers and performers, and indeed facilitated the study in India of the instrument maker, Peter Biffin. One of them said: "Ten minutes with Peggy is better than a whole semester at university!" Unable to resist stirring the pot (she was an authentic animateur), she conned the then National Director of the Australia Music Centre - me - into producing a remarkable exhibition of wooden sculptures, each of which had a wrap-around commissioned score from an Australian composer, including the aboriginal David Gulpulil, as well as one from her old friend, Lou Harrison. Another "first"! The sculptor was Pamela Boden, another old friend of hers from Paris of the 1930s, and who once had eloped with Peggy's first husband. Pamela was Lesbian and Stanley Bate, her first husband, was gay. But they all remained friends for all of their lives. As she did with Paul Bowles, for whom she wrote "Letters from Morocco", soon to be released on Tall Poppies. PeggyÍs friendships were exalted, but her lovers were a disaster. In Sydney, the sculptures wouldnÍt fit into Gallery "A", which I had negotiated, and so we mounted them in the empty space behind the first Music Centre, on revolving stands, and spot-lit each one in its turn. The machinery was always breaking down, and once, the tape got out of sync with the sculptures and the wrong piece popped up to the wrong music ... We even took this cross-dressing exhibition to Melbourne. It was wonderful. It was a nightmare! But it was New! It was another "first" for Peggy, one of the many. One looked at the sculptures differently because of the music, and one listened differently because of the sculptures. For Australian composers, there was, and is, much to learn from Peggy, and not only as a role model for the women composers. She always preached the close association of composers and performers; she realised and valued the interdependence on each other. When Walter Trampler wanted to return to the solo concert platform after being imbedded in communal chamber music for some years, Peggy told him the critics would come only if there was a premiere on the program. And so she wrote for him her Viola Concerto (the Concerto Romantico), one of her loveliest works. As she also wrote for Carlos Busotti her Etruscan Concerto, and for Nicanor Zabaleta, her Harp Sonata, which Marshall McGuire has so happily recorded, As she wrote her opera on Sappho for Maria Callas. And, in a way, the opera Nausicaa, for Teresa Stratas, when Callas couldn't learn it in time. Almost always, in the history of music, it has been the composers who have extended the voice and the instrumentalist; that magical jump of the imagination that has conceived of a sound or sounds, previously thought not possible. They usually grump, but they invariably find that they can do it, and so it is. The exciting aspect about the re-opening of the Studio at the Sydney Opera House is for the symbiotic exchange between the composer and the performer, but also with the audience, and hopefully with the music journalists and critics. A glamorous and comfortable venue, such as this one, somehow alerts the attention. In such a place, the New Music teams are better able to "dress" a concert. And it is an old truism, but the ear usually hears what the eye sees. Sponsors should not be fazed by the small audience for New Music, or new anything. Every city can raise the necessary 200 to make the fizz. I have been to concerts in London and the other major cities, where the audience has been fewer, even to 20. But they have been the operative 20 or the operative 200. The New has always turned on a 10 cent piece. When I was presenting new music concerts in London for The Fires of London and other groups, I always prepared extra copies of the scores for William Mann of The Times, Andrew Porter of The Financial Times, Peter Heyworth of the Sunday Observer, and so on, the top music critics of the time, and give them, not only the dates and times of the actual concerts, but also the times of the rehearsals. They unfailingly came to the rehearsals - with their well-thumbed scores. Music at this time had grown extremely complex. By the time of the concert, they were professionally informed and equipped critics. And gave us wonderful insightful reviews. In Australia, has anyone ever seen a critic at a rehearsal, with or without a score? And the media? The arts' press? An early initiative of the Australia Council was a modest grant for the arts community to nurture young, aspiring cadet journalists, to give them some background, some points of reference to the arts, so that when they interviewed Joan Sutherland, they wouldn't ask "And what do you play?... kind of thing. A gaggle of them appeared at an early Adelaide Festival, but the project was aborted when an elephant trod on one of the young lady cadets. Cadets there are no more, but someone is always designated to cover the arts. It is time to re-invent that project ... but also to float a Peggy project that would have been close to her heart, as she had two careers - composer and writer. Where are the young writers on the arts and especially on music? From the army of graduates who are not going to become another Roger Woodward or another Joan Sutherland, where are those who are a full bottle on the musics of the world, and who can string together two words, as critic or writer? I have spoken to many young students about this, and invariably they tell me that the media is a closed book to them, the superannuated writers have collared the market and wonÍt give it up. The young ones say they are never asked. But not one of them has ever written an unsolicited review or article and sent it off to editors. They want to be paid for their very first article! So how can editors know of them? Perhaps the New Music Network could form a mentoring group from its members who would invite reviews and articles from aspiring writers, and so trawl for new writers and put them on its web site when an interesting piece arrives. Peggy always advised composers to get out into the battlefield when young, then withdraw to the viewing hill when older. It is good advice. The big problem is when the young turks take to the viewing hill at the age of 20! A final shot on Peggy's behalf: New Music - its creators, its performers and its networkers - is badly under-funded. The music industry is a billion-dollar industry, and no industry could dare underspend on its R & D - its Research and Development - the way that happens to the arts in Australia. New Music is here to stay. Its thrust, its energy, its ambition and drive will always be with us. It is the nature of the creative act. Always it has anticipated the next development and market. And a society ignores it at its peril. Of the millions of hours of new music composed in previous centuries, how little of it has filtered through to the present-day market? Peggy often wailed, "Oh Those poor bedraggled 80 pieces of the central repertoire. What a heavy burden they carry! Let's write some new ones!" She would have been extremely chuffed to learn of this afternoon's Address, in her honour and in her name. I don't remember that she ever had a work performed in the Sydney Opera House, and always said she needed a toe in its door to get one of her operas on here. Her grand opera Nausicaa was even briefly considered to open the Opera House. Alas ... But it will happen. We shall see it in the new millenium And I couldn't finish this Address, unless I made it clear, if I havenÍt already, how much I love her, admire her, and listen to her. And to agree, how juste, this Address should Christen this splendid new performing altar for New Music in Australia. May it thrive. PGH Inaugural Address
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