under the auspices of the New Music Network

TURNING THE TABLES - musical imperialism reversed

By Roland Peelman

Artistic Director of The Song Company
Monday 28 October 6.00pm
Australian Music Centre

During the address there was performances of traditional Chinese music:

Xin by Liza Lim
Nanxiangzi by Tan Dun
Jin Qiao (1960) arr. Yan Hai-deng (b.1930) for sheng solo

Performed by

CHU Siu-wai, xiao (Chinese flute)
NG Hiu-hung, zheng (Chinese koto)
WANG Chun-wei, qin (Chinese zither)
Loo-sze Wang (sheng - Chinese mouthorgan)

The four musicians are members of the Chinese Music Virtuosi, a group of young musicians from Hong Kong, widely acknowledged as belonging to the top echelon of Chinese instrumentalists and chamber musicians today. The group's repertoire consists of both contemporary and traditional works, with an emphasis on exploring new musical language, innovative style, and fresh interpretation. They are in Australia as guests of The Song Company for the premiere performances of 'Six Hermits' in Sydney and Melbourne.

ARTISTIC DILEMMAS IN THE NEW CENTURY

Currently on view in the Queensland Art Gallery as part of the Asia Pacific Triennial is a classic Buddha staring at himself into a television monitor. Without making it really clear who watches what, whether it is the Buddha looking at the monitor, or the camera looking at the Buddha, we are left looking at both and not knowing where to look first. This iconic image by the Korean artist Nam June Paik, simply entitled ÎTV Buddhaâ, conveys better than anything else the artistic dilemma of our times. The Buddha as an age-old symbol of the East, in characteristically reflective mode, selfless and disengaged, is everywhere. You can buy it at the Paddington markets (not far from Peggyâs old house) in all sizes and colours and it might occupy a number of sacred spots but you might find it as well sitting on peopleâs bedside tables, on their mantelpieces or even their televisions. And what about the television, that ubiquitous symbol of Western technology? After conquering the living rooms, kitchens, hotel rooms and, most private of all, our bedrooms, it is now continuing its unstoppable invasion of our public spaces. In Sydney we are looking at it in the train stations, in Hong Kong you watch it on the bus and you will be hard pressed to find any Asian village where blaring televisions have not yet replaced the telling silence of a seated Buddha.

In Paikâs installation of course, the Buddha is entirely within the television, and given that the Buddha is looking at himself on the television, you can say that the television is entirely within the Buddha if it wasnât for the discreetly placed camera, which makes this encounter possible. Here is the hand of Paik, the Îyellow perilâ as he called himself in 1965, the hand of an artist who left the perhaps all too comfortable surroundings of a wealthy family in Korea to join a less predictable lifestyle in the European avant garde milieu of the fifties and sixties in order to end up in New York, producing an oeuvre with profound resonances to artists across the board. This includes musicians. In relation to a work called ÎSextroniqueâ he once said: ãI wanted to stir up the dull waters of sexless men and women in black suits playing musicä. Paikâs partner, Charlotte Moorman, was a cellist and some of the performance art they were involved in triggered off a series of installations involving filmed performances of what he called the TV Cello ö music, performance, video-art, installation all in one. Working in the same city a mere 10 years later, Paikâs zen-to-zany Eastern aesthetic is miles away from anything Peggy Glanville-Hicks was involved in, stylistically still steeped in a mix of American neo-classicism and pre-war European romanticism. But her advocacy of a return to the basics of rhythm and melody as she experienced them in folk music from the middle East and her subsequently radical embracing of Eastern idioms contains many parallels with the Korean artist who so enthusiastically manipulates the symbols of Western art music (cello) and the new technology of an industrialized world (the camera/television).

Interesting observations can be made about the performance aspects in the work of both artists. For Peggy Glanville-Hicks that performance, particularly in connection with drama and dance seemed to be the final objective, the point of arrival, the area where she made her strongest and most ambitious statements. I remember vividly how excited she still was in her last years recalling over the inevitable whisky and soda the theatrical solution to the problem of Rapunzelâs hair in Lou Harrisonâs opera, or the finding of Teresa Stratas in the Metâs chorus ranks for the lead role in Nausikaa, or the creative relationships with choreographers such as John Butler. Those operas and ballets sadly remain as a fading score, thick volumes of yellowing paper manuscript in the archives of Melbourneâs State Library and Sydneyâs Library of NSW. For Nam June Paik, the performance is his point of departure, the initial spark, immortalized or annihilated (depending on how you look at it) through a process that only the new media made possible. And here I refer not only to the performance of Charlotte on the cello but also to the performance of the artistâs invisible hand directing the camera onto the Buddha and the Buddha onto the television.

Having directed our camera on these two artists, it is my intention to zoom in on a few aspects of what made their voice different and why they struck a chord that is still resonating.

Both Peggy and Paik found their voice at the other side of the world. Peggy, born in Melbourne, had to go to England to develop her talent and eventually to New York to formulate her own special brand of music. It is only after her creative talents came to a sudden tragic halt that she returned to Australia. Paik left Korea, and via Europe again, he arrived in New York to take an active part in what was then a hotbed of radical new ideas around people such as Cage, Rauschenberg and others. Sixteen years ago in New-York a composer arrived from Macau, Bun-ching Lam. Not only has her work consistently and creatively developed the fusion of western and eastern instruments, her second opera Wenji, premiered in New York and Hong Kong in the beginning of 2002, deals with the very story of displacement. Abducted from her parentsâ home by the invading Mongolian army, Wenji was brought to a foreign and desolate land. After twelve years she is given the choice of returning. The dilemma is stark and the choice painful: a choice between Îhomeâ in China or Îhomeâ with her new family, a husband she is fond of and two children she loves. The opera uses two different languages for the two protagonists, curiously but not surprisingly choosing English for the Îotherâ. The legacy of more than one century of Western philosophy dealing with the Îotherâ is simply and poignantly shown the other side of the cultural coin. Indeed, Lamâs work does not try to re-invent Western idioms. It rather re-interprets the stories and traditions of her native Chinese culture from the perspective of a Chinese artist in America. I myself stand tonight in front of you as an artist who has found a home in a country my parents never told me about. Their horizon only ever went as far as France or Holland, just across the border from Flanders. Yet, through circumstances and by choice, I ended up researching Flemish polyphony from Sydney rather than Louvain, and it is from here that my exploration of various corners of Asian and Australian culture started. Admittedly I did have the good fortune of being male, white, educated and I was able to slip relatively smoothly through the net of Australian immigration. Also, I have been blessed by a long-standing association with a group of gifted and regularly traveling performers, capable of developing new work for Malay gamelan and voices in Kuala Lumpur in one week and the following week delving into the foreign territories of traditional Chinese instruments for a project called ÎSix Hermitsâ. I am only too aware of the privilege involved in bringing these things to fruition. However, the personal experience of my own displacement, the subsequent challenges and changes to my perception of the Western canon as it had been taught to me have brought about an active Îcuratorialâ pursuit of music which is less determined by Euro-centric modernist attitudes and more reflective of a multitude of viewpoints simultaneously at work today. Rather than a crisis of identity this may have provoked, it has deepened and strengthened my sense of self as well as my sense of belonging within this community, socially and musically. As Liza Lim pointed out in her address last year, the many territories that co- exist within a culture and by extension, the self must be acknowledged if multi-culturalism is to have any real meaning. In Australian cultural life, these territories are manifold and complex. My native culture has no visible presence here at all. Through the absence of recognizable signs it is distinctly foreign yet, through a number of shared characteristics with related European entities, it is also oddly present. Whatever my upbringing, education etc have instilled within me, it has been gradually transformed through the contact with the Îotherâ as well as rendered powerless and static as an identity through the relative absence of engagement with the social source of this original voice. 18 years after arriving on these shores, my native language has become a clumsy watering down of what once was what I thought an agile tool for reasoning and discourse. It has lost much of its subtlety and, I confess, even most of its structural backbone. Yet this albeit paling form of identity still colours many aspects of my behaviour and therefore still defines my experience of the Îotherâ. With this I mean not so much the generalized Anglo-Saxon culture I first thought I encountered but the now familiar world of Australian public life, this hybrid and circus-like phenomenon which I call home. In as far as I partake on that platform, my identification with the Îotherâ may seem complete. Yet, the extra-ordinary and fascinating thing is that different Îothersâ keep emerging, that the boundaries between Îselfâ and the Îotherâ are increasingly blurring and that the understanding of my own understanding - or lack thereof - is harder and harder to define.

In relation to cultures which are generally described as Îminorityâ here in Australia, yet who loom large within the international community, the question is complex. Thirty years of de-constructionalist post-modernist post-colonialist thinking have not erased the issues that arise from the fundamentally fraught differences in power between a dominant culture from which a speaking position may be derived and a foreign culture, linguistically, socially and aesthetically different, exotically alluring perhaps but resolutely stubborn in its capacity to yield or not yield its secrets. Jacques Derridaâs use of the hymen as an undecidable figure of comparison springs immediately to mind. I will save you Derridaâs philosophical expose of the phallic versus penile implications on this metaphor. The point is that the hymen has the capacity to be both itself and not itself. It can be metaphorically broken, yet literally intact. It is both inside and outside the body, it hides as well as reveals. I am tempted to describe my own first encounters with Asian culture as the fumbling efforts of an over-charged adolescent keen to explore as well as to prove his own virility. In reality and in hindsight however, I probably was the virgin, soiled and excited by something much larger than I could have ever imagined. My first encounter with Chinese instruments goes back some eight years ago when I conducted a then leading contemporary music ensemble in new work combining Western instruments with three Chinese instruments. I recall this event as a profoundly sobering experience. It was humiliating for the three Chinese musicians involved in that not only were their parts poorly written for the instruments, they were hardly equipped to match the collective power of a group of top notch Western-trained soloists hardened in the rough and tumble of Australian orchestral life. The Chinese players probably ended up seriously hating our music as well as our entire process of music-making. It was sobering for the other musicians and myself in that this effort to integrate the Îothersâ within our world had provided no room for dialogue and thus left us with the typically frustrated aftertaste of the initially well-meaning but ultimately patronizing predator. Eight years later, in 2002, my encounter with Chinese musicians, some of whom you can hear tonight, is a wholly different experience. In many subtle and not so subtle ways they are in charge. The Six Hermits project is steeped within ancient Chinese culture going back to a tumultuous but fascinating episode in Chinese history at the end of the Han dynasty, a period of political instability but also of Taoist revival, artistic innovation and a great almost romantic outpouring of various artforms. All seven composers involved in this project have a direct and thorough understanding of the instruments, their musical, aesthetical and philosophical rationale. Above all, the collective presence of these musicians easily matches the professional expertise the Western or Australian part of the project represents. Conceived and developed in close collaboration with Hing-yan Chan, arguably the most outstanding composer in Hong Kong, I have often felt more like the colonized rather than the colonizer. Let there be no mistake, the sheer size, depth and resilience of Chinese culture is such that, after revolutions of all kinds inside its territory and after establishing a presence in so many parts of the world, its power to hold on to its central core in the face of many centrifugal odds is formidable. Chinese musicians have been remarkably apt at absorbing our Western musical heritage yet their supremacy in a whole range of regionally developed operatic styles is unlikely to be emulated by Western musicians for quite some time.

Naturally, the question is not who in the end will come out on top. There is no end to this game. The question is how do we change, who and what will be the agents of change and what effects this will have on the broad cultural life in the future. The world is no longer a clearly defined and polarized duality (North-South or East-West). Most of these dual propositions (rich vs poor, or educated vs non-educated) have outlived their usefulness by now and increasingly, as we can see in contemporary politics, this type of dual polarization has turned out the perfect tool in the hands of poll-driven politicians, either serving extremist ideologies or offering simplistic, politically marketable solutions to complex problems. The continuous flow of ideas, styles and cultural values is part and parcel of the globalised world we live in, cogently described by the Indian sociologist Arjun Appadurai as a set of growing disjunctures between what he calls fluid and ever-moving Îlandscapesâ of ethnicity (ethnoscapes), technology (technoscapes), capital flow (finanscapes), mass communications (mediascapes) and ideologies (ideoscapes). Each of these Îscapesâ have widespread implications for us musicians and it is with a series of broad-brush comments on these five categories that I wish to conclude this address:

• The phenomenon of world music is as much an exponent of the commercially driven tourism industry and the critically ailing record industry as it is the playground of more enlightened democratic forces. Popularized new-age Buddhism, aboriginal rock or film-music kletzmer are a direct result of people around the world either having to move or building up fantasies of moving.

• Electronics and digitized technology have irreversibly altered the face of music-making. New instruments are at our disposal and old instruments are being re-assessed as a result. Scores and sound files can be electronically sent around the world. The days of pencil-and-rubber-composition are numbered.

• The financial aspects of music-making have never been more than obvious. Arguably, large music organizations benefit both from a globalised economy and the association with the accumulative nature of large capital as well as a globalised view that government should actively pursue corporate partnership. Meanwhile, smaller companies, where most of the new ideas are developed, remain without ready access to this network and neither do they find a willing ear in government, which sees little electoral gain in this line of work.

• The narratives, real, constructed or imagined, which we daily encounter through the press, our home-computer, on the big or the small screen are both cause and effect, actor and reactor, producer and product. Let us not forget that popular music remains the most powerful narrator to young people around the world and that the kind of forces behind this enormous production machine generally are out of reach for most musicians.

• This leaves the ideological aspect of music making, one that has been so discredited in the course of the 20^th century and one that still demonises our hearts and minds. It is hardly surprising that so much of the late-twenty century music has fallen into the category of political correctness posturing as post-modernism or has turned into a new kind of escapism, beautifully fitting the ideals of Club Med and perfectly lining up with the directives of expert marketers. Much of the musical plunder that takes place under this banner I deplore, yet eventually we will probably all have to reconcile ourselves with the old saying Îhomo homini lupusâ, Îman to man is like wolfâ.

The wolf that is sitting in the Queensland Art Gallery is worth looking at again. Gently and quietly eating away its viewer, nothing will interfere with its inexorable hunger and its determination not to explain.

Notes

Nam June Paik, ÎTV Buddhaâ, Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane 2002

Arjun Appadurai, ÎDisjuncture and difference in the global cultural economyâ from ÎModernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalisation, University of Minneapolis, 1996

Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20^th Century Art, Thames & Hudson world of art, London, 1999

Jacques Derrida, ÎLa double sŽanceâ 1972

Liza Lim, Third Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address, October 2001