by Andrew Ford
Cage’s ___, a ___ ___ Circus on ___ is almost the opposite of this, remaking itself with every performance. It is a set of instructions for turning any book into a piece of music, and there is a recording of a radiophonic version entitled Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on ‘Finnegans Wake’. The starting point is to take a book and randomise its text by means of a mesostic – like an acrostic, except that instead of running down the edge of a text, a mesostic runs down the middle. The word or phrase is applied to the book, one letter at a time, to isolate a word in the text so that a new text emerges. The original book is also read for its mentions of sound and place. The sounds are recorded and the places visited and recorded, the recordings played back while the new text is spoken or intoned. The book we chose was Charivari, the first novel by Martin Buzacott, who had recently joined the creative writing team at Wollongong. It was a good choice because the book’s title describes the sound of rough music, while much of the plot is set in a circus, so Cage’s idea of a music circus became nicely self-reflexive. Martin read what was left of his text while the ensemble played back recordings of the various sounds, some of which had been recorded on a field trip to a circus. Jingle, a Bicentennial Circus on ‘Charivari’ was the title we gave it. This was in 1988, the year in which nearly everything had to be a celebration of the bicentenary of White Australia.
I suppose Edward Cowie had invited me to Wollongong because of my own interests and activities across the arts. While I knew my limits as an actor – I’d had no ambitions in this area since childhood – and had stopped writing poetry after trying to set it to music as a student, I still painted and drew. I’d had a solo exhibition at the Bradford Playhouse before I left England and now I had another in Wollongong. I worked with a mixture of water-colour, ink, pastels and charcoal, and the results were not embarrassing like the poetry, but they also weren’t consistent, depending too much on happy accidents. I had the sense that with a mighty effort I would have improved, but decided my time was better spent writing music. In 1994 I produced my final mixed-media work. It hangs in the spare bedroom of my friend and librettist Sue Smith, and whenever I stay over at her place I recognise both its merits and its shortcomings.
My composing was slow to get going in Australia, at least from a professional point of view. I knew no one and no one knew me. Moreover, I was aware that as a Pom I wouldn’t be automatically welcomed by Australia’s existing composers. A couple of years after I arrived, I was in the green room of the Sydney Opera House and got into conversation with some well-known Australian musicians, all of whom, by now, I’d worked with. One of them referred to me, in passing, as an ‘Australian composer’ – which technically I was, having acquired citizenship earlier that year. ‘He’s not Australian!’ said another, not nastily, but firmly.
Perhaps this is the place to say that I don’t much care for nationalism or patriotism. I didn’t when I lived in England, and I haven’t since I’ve lived in Australia. Nationalism always seems an excuse to exclude people more than welcome them, and while I know that patriotism implies a love of one’s country, I’m never sure what it is I’m meant to love. The people? I don’t know most of them. I love some of those I do know, but some I dislike. The land? Much of the Australian landscape is awe-inspiring, but I seldom feel part of it. Perhaps it would be different if I’d been born here. Yet most days there’s nowhere I’d rather live than my bit of Australia – it’s felt like home almost from day one. Perhaps that is all that patriotism needs to mean, but I suspect there’s more to it than this, and I’m suspicious of whatever that might be.
In my final year living in England I’d seen a bit of Oliver Knussen, both before and after he conducted my Concerto for Orchestra. The last time was in a pub near his home in London, just before my leaving for Australia.
‘The thing about your music,’ he said, ‘is that I can’t pick the influences.’ I was surprised and must have looked it, because he went on to explain that with most young composers you could say, fairly quickly, if the music aligned itself stylistically with Harrison Birtwistle or Nicholas Maw or whomever. My music, apparently, came from nowhere. I took this to be the compliment he intended. But I often thought about the remark. For one thing, I could hear the influences – particularly Birtwistle, but also Tippett and Maxwell Davies. There was a trumpet figure in the Concerto for Orchestra that I had effectively stolen from Maxwell Davies’s first symphony (to be clear, I had first written it, then recognised the provenance of the idea, then decided not to remove it). But, more troubling, if my music didn’t display its influences (surely a good thing), did that mean it couldn’t be readily pigeon-holed (also a good thing)? And would this, in turn, result in my music being ignored (obviously a bad thing) or thought worthless (a very bad thing indeed)? I was looking forward to living in a country where such categories didn’t matter, but it turned out they did.
In 1983, my first impression of Australian composers was that they were always asking themselves what it meant to be Australian composers. I’d never come across a composer in Britain with similar concerns. It’s true to say the issue was predominantly of interest to composers who were older than me, and it was probably inspired by Peter Sculthorpe, who in the 1960s had turned to Asia for cultural nourishment, finding inspiration in Indonesian gamelan and the court music of Japan. He wasn’t alone in this or even the first. Percy Grainger had been attracted to the music of South-East Asia and so had Peter’s friend Peggy Glanville-Hicks, in old age a vital spark in Australian music and after her death a significant benefactor who left her Sydney home to the nation for composers to live in rent-free. But Peter was the most prominent, and his students became caught up in his Asian explorations, Anne Boyd especially drawn to Bali, Japan and Korea, while Barry Conyngham had actually gone to Japan to study with the composer Toru Takemitsu.
The embrace of Asian influence was often considered to be anti-European in inspiration, notwithstanding Debussy’s fascination with the gamelan, and some days Peter would encourage this interpretation – or not discourage it. Similarly, he came to believe, or at least repeat the notion, that Australian music was distinguished by long, flat melodic lines above slow-moving blocks of harmony, and that this was redolent of the Australian landscape. It was hardly true of all Australian music, but it was a good description of Peter’s own, and such was the strength and individuality of his work that its sound implanted itself in the national consciousness. Peter, for many concertgoers, was the voice of Australia.
But if Peter and his colleagues and students felt they knew the nature of Australian music, and what it meant to be an Australian composer, there were some of my own generation – Gerard Brophy, Michael Smetanin and Mary Finsterer, for instance – who were rather antagonistic to what they regarded as a sort of parochialism. Most of them had studied with Richard Toop at the Sydney Conservatorium and been exposed to a wide range of music from postwar Europe and to a lesser extent the United States, and many had gone on to study in Europe. It is important to understand that the discussion about national identity in music was at least as much to do with modernism as with geography, and those who we might broadly think of as nationalistic (in the sense that composers such as Smetana or Vaughan Williams or Copland were nationalistic) were also at odds with the modernism of the European avant-garde. Some, including Ross Edwards and his teacher Richard Meale, were recovering modernists. It’s also important to note that the duality I appear to be describing was really nothing of the kind. There was, for instance, a third strand of composers, including Graeme Koehne and Carl Vine, who, while antagonistic to modernism, were pursuing a sort of cosmopolitan neo-romanticism far removed from Sculthorpe’s aesthetic. There was a fourth strand of experimental composers, most of them in Melbourne, who had little to do with any of the music I’ve described (though they held Grainger in great esteem). And there were plenty of individual composers – Larry Sitsky, Nigel Butterley, Moya Henderson – who stuck to their individuality and were never drawn into the debate
. I like to think this is where I sat.
Why did any of this matter? To the general public, it didn’t. But in musical circles it escalated, until around the time of the Australian bicentenary a sporadically entertaining guerrilla war had broken out – ‘style wars’ someone labelled it. On the one hand there was an article by Toop referring to the official bicentennial commissions as a ‘whore’s carnival’; on the other, there was a succession of leaflets poking heavy-handed fun at complex modernism, mailed to composers around the country by the so-called Adelaide Pastoral Company, an anonymous source that as far as I know remains anonymous still. While the strife was primarily internecine, it also spilled over a bit to the ABC, which was criticised for favouring certain composers in its orchestral programming. The favoured composers were those of the Sculthorpe school and the neo-romantics; the critics were everyone else.
My feeling is that none of this would have happened had Peter Sculthorpe not been a great composer. Because of the strength of his musical voice he gave Australian musicians something to care about (one way or the other) and Australian audiences something they felt might be their own. His music has a richness and detail that aren’t always immediately obvious, though they are very much part of its power and distinction. But the sound is unmistakable, and outwardly the music is simple and direct.
I suppose you might have said the same about Peter himself. I was never a close friend of his – I certainly wasn’t part of the inner circle of (mostly) former students – but I had many conversations with him over thirty years, and when I was a near neighbour in Sydney for the two years I spent in the Glanville-Hicks house, sometimes the conversations stretched into the early hours of the morning, fuelled by bottles of Australian sparkling wine. What emerged were contradictions, and while we all have those, in Peter’s case they were surprising because he and his music had such a strong reputation for being nationalistic, anti-European and devoted to all things Asian. It wasn’t always true. He was, for example, quite the Anglophile, and one particular night, following the launch of his memoir Sun Music in 1999, we sat in his backyard discussing the forthcoming referendum on the Australian republic. I was for it, and he was against it, saying it was ‘window-dressing’, though he wouldn’t be drawn on what he meant by that.
‘I can’t believe you’re saying this, Peter,’ I kept repeating. ‘You’re meant to be the voice of Australia. Do you want the Queen of England as your head of state?’
‘But you’re English!’ he kept countering.
The conversation went round and round, his notion of Australia, this night at least, more old-fashioned and even colonial than I’d supposed.
Peter was good company and impossible to dislike. He was well known for being polite and always remembered the names of others’ girlfriends and boyfriends, spouses and offspring. But he was a terrible gossip, and you learnt not to tell him secrets. A couple of things he shared with me about mutual friends turned out to be completely untrue, and occasionally he could be unkind about people, though always in the guise of a joke.
His favourite joke was to drop his trousers at parties. I witnessed this three times, the first in a crowded restaurant. I assumed, as I was meant to, that the trousers had fallen down of their own accord, but Belinda Webster, who was present, said she’d seen it all before. Peter’s technique was to go into a corner of the room and surreptitiously loosen his belt, then return to the others in the room and look astonished when the trousers fell round his ankles (‘Oh, no! My pants have fallen down!’). The last time I saw him perform the trick was in the street outside the Glanville-Hicks house following a party. It was five o’clock on a summer’s morning and Peter, typically, was the last to leave. Since it was broad daylight, there was every chance that someone would look out of their bedroom window and see Australia’s most famous composer, seventy years old, standing in the middle of the road in his white boxer shorts, and maybe that’s what he was hoping for. I can’t believe it was just for my benefit.
For all that, I think Peter was probably shy. He loved the acclaim of an audience better than anyone I’ve known, but in his dealings with me, at least, I detected a reserve, a protective layer that stopped you getting too close, and some of the things he said had a rehearsed quality about them. I’m pretty sure Peter didn’t like my music, and I wasn’t certain he liked me until one day he rang out of the blue to ask if he might dedicate his Beethoven Variations to me. This was one of his last orchestral works and I’m proud to have my name at the top of its first page.
With expatriation and immigration, perspectives change. You see your old country differently, while expectations of your new country have to be modified. Things that had seemed important in Britain – including Britain itself – no longer seemed so important from the other side of the world. Where I had once found Margaret Thatcher appalling, not so much for her policies as for the gleefully heartless manner in which she executed them, now all that Iron Lady stuff looked faintly ridiculous. She also sounded ridiculous. I think it was George Melly who described her voice as like a ‘perfumed fart’. That’s certainly how it sounded from Australia.
One expectation of Australia that had to be revised was to do with the way people lived. Everyone outside Australia knows about the Outback and the cities – especially Sydney – so it comes as a shock to discover that most Australians live in suburbs. I also expected Australians to be forthright and bold, possibly based on the way they played cricket, and was surprised to discover a degree of timidity and conservatism. Not wanting to let go of the monarchy seemed part of that.
Before coming to Australia, one of the strongest attractions I felt about the place was its multiculturalism, and this did not disappoint me. There was multiculturalism in England, too, but it was fundamentally different because it went back so far. The first waves of British immigrants were invaders: Celts, Romans, Angles and Saxons, Vikings and the Norman French. If we speak of Britishness today, we are really describing a thousand-year consolidation of those influences. Midway through that thousand years, Britain became an imperial superpower, and in the middle of the twentieth century, its empire in rapid decline, more waves of immigrants came, some assimilating, some not. But by now there was a strong, mostly unspoken sense of what it meant to be British, as well as a strong seam of racism to which it gave rise.
In Australia, anyone who isn’t Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is either an immigrant or the descendant of a fairly recent immigrant – what, after all, is 200 years? – so multiculturalism, though not without its frightened detractors, is taken for granted and mostly easygoing. I like the way cultures hang on to their traditions, and I like the way they adapt and sometimes mix together. If there were ever to be a genuine Australian musical style, it seems to me it would surely be the result of this melting pot of international influences.
After a few months in Australia, I began to meet colleagues and make friends. I also met my first wife. Margaret Morgan was a law student when she lobbed suddenly into my life, and she later practised as a solicitor, before moving, for a while, into television writing. We didn’t have a lot in common and our marriage lasted only seven years, but we were good friends and shared a love of books and films. By 1992, we’d both reached the conclusion we could do better than each other, and in time we both did, but we parted on good terms and for the next seven years wrote pieces together.
When couples separate cordially, it’s always difficult for friends. Acrimonious divorces are far easier to understand. I think we all have a stake in the success of others’ relationships, and when one simply fizzles, it’s like an early death – it makes you aware of your own vulnerability. Some of our friends seemed sadder than we were at our parting.
Three people who were particularly good to me in my first years in Australia were the clarinettist Murray Khouri, who organised my Australia Ensemble concert, the composer Vincent Plush, who gave me one of my first Australian commissions for his group the Magpie Musicians, and the entrepreneur Jam
es Murdoch, who gave me a list of people I should meet. I discovered much later that each man disliked the other two, though I never found out why. Among the people on Murdoch’s list was Belinda Webster, a sort of patron saint of musicians in Australia, working tirelessly on our behalf, always either underpaid or unpaid. At the Sydney community radio station 2MBS, she interviewed composers and performers and recorded their concerts. At one point, she drove a taxi to support herself. In 1991 she formed Tall Poppies records, acting as producer, engineer, designer, head of A&R and manager, and building up an indispensable catalogue of Australian music. She was always honest in her opinions – if you asked what she thought of your new piece you had to steel yourself for her reply – and in contrast to some of the petty squabbles I found elsewhere, Belinda was one figure in Australian music who seemed to be universally loved.
Gradually I began to feel part of a community of musicians, and in 1985 I was appointed composer-in-residence at the Bennelong Programme, the education scheme run by the Sydney Opera House Trust. The idea was to devise a multimedia work with a hundred ‘young people’, aged from fourteen to twenty-five. We would meet at the Opera House every Sunday for six months, putting on a show at the end of the year in the Recording Hall (now the Studio). It was an ambitious project, never more so than at the beginning when the applicants had to be winnowed. Approximately 250 people turned up on that first Sunday and I had just a day to choose the ones I wanted. We split into small groups all over the Opera House and played some pretty intense theatre games – trust exercises, movement exercises, improvisations – as well as vocal and rhythm exercises. Anyone who played an instrument had been asked to bring it, and there were improvisations that involved voices and instruments. Storytelling was the final element in the auditioning process, and in some ways most important, since urban myths were to be the subject of the piece.