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In the world of music, we live in a time of great abundance. Music is a rich, multidimensional source of information, if only one learns how to listen. The continual exploration and search for new kinds of sounds and structures to support them is our crucial mission and our greatest task. It’s what we, as musicians, can contribute to the ongoing spiritual quest of sound to discover what our potential as humans is.
Earlier this year, I organised a version of the 60×60 project for the Australian Computer Music Conference in Melbourne. This is a project where 60 composers write a piece one minute long, which are then put together to make a one-hour program. We had such an enthusiastic response to the project that we had to put together a second compilation. In the end, over 110 composers contributed to the collections presenting more than 85 different music styles. Everything from piano improvisation to screaming distorted noise bands, and everything in between. If in just one city we can see such variety, imagine the amount of stylistic riches existing in music across the globe. The abundance is truly astounding.
Does the success of this project hint at what a future society might look like? The Melbourne 60×60 event cost as little as $100, with musicians contributing freely to the project. The plethora of improvisers and other creative types who are doing artistic exploration for very little or no money is a small sign of people beginning to think in an agnostic way about economics.
Most of this work by artists is self-funded, and somewhat marginalised by the media. While I have no ideological problem with being on the margins or with the arts being self-funded, I do believe art should only be self-funded if society is structured in such a way as to make it possible. That is, after a day of work, one has enough energy and money left over to do creative things in a rewarding, fulfilling way.
At the moment, the situation is not like that. Economic conditions have deteriorated to such an extent, and the conditions of employment have decayed so much, that self-funding presents a perpetual struggle, with total exhaustion and defeat around every corner. I echo the words of a Canadian-Lebanese composer, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, who said, ‘I’m tired of working 70 hours a week just to pay the rent!’
In Noise, the Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali makes the point that the behaviour of musicians now is a good indication of how the rest of society will begin to organise itself in the near future. He also talks about music moving from a commodity based economy into a state which he calls “composition” whereby all of life is subsumed into a series of creative acts.
One of the most interesting and positive things about the experimental music scene worldwide is how much it is off society’s radar. It’s a very vibrant, intellectually engaged scene made up of many dedicated people that largely exists outside of the concerns, venues, and publicity practices of much of the rest of the music world.
So much of what I’ve done over the past 46 years has been under the economic radar: concerts in pubs and dance venues for audiences of between nine and twenty, and over the years they have added up to a considerable number. But there is an economic hierarchy to the arts world which determines what has the potential to get reviewed. Having a budget big enough to play the Melbourne or Sydney Festivals, and you have a chance of getting reviewed in the Age or Sydney Morning Herald. Unfortunately, the experimental music scene, including improvisation, electronics, performance art, sound poetry, and so on, mostly exists below that level of economic hierarchy that’s critical to get you noticed.
Yet, I think we can work our obscurity to our advantage. As Daniel Wolf said recently of Charles Ives on his 140th anniversary, ‘Take advantage of the freedom offered by isolation to compose the impossible.’ Politically in Australia, where the media often treats the arts as simply amusement, our obscurity can be a benefit. I was telling students the other day about the troubles Shostakovich had with his boss, Joseph Stalin, and remarked that we don’t have that problem in Australia. It’s true, I said, that Capitalism will probably ignore you to death, but at least we don’t have to face the problem of a hostile homicidal boss.
If the alternative to being pilloried by shock-jocks (or critics!) is obscurity and small audiences, I’ll take the small audiences, thank you.
This article is an edited extract from the 16th Annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address 2014. The full address is available at www.newmusicnetwork.com.au
