Polymedia b l o g s p o t

For anyone who ever considers, in a moment of weakness, to make a comment on an ABC program, my advice is “Don’t Bother.” My experience has been that they edit out stuff that is even mildly critical of the program. Unfortunately they act like they own the public ‘literate’ debate in Australia and their middle-of-the-road mentality is only exceeded by their mind-numbingly mundane arrogance. We deserve better!

In late 2009 author Douglas Kahn gave a number of lectures in Australia. I attended the one he gave at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in Canberra on Tuesday 17 November entitled THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC EXPANDED CINEMA
I couldn’t find a direct link to a promo, so here is how the NFSA promoted it:

Douglas Khan is Director of Technocultural Studies at University of California at Davis and an international authority on the history and context of sound in the 20th century. A guest of the Australia Network of Art and Technology and Art Monthly Australia (for whom he has guest-edited their new issue), Khan will talk about “The Electro-Magnetic Expanded Cinema” and his new book, which examines the artistic and cultural interactions between acoustics and electromagnetism. The evening will be moderated by Mitchell Whitelaw.

A friend and colleague from Melbourne asked “How was Doug’s talk?” I had such a mixed reaction that I wrote the following informal notes, partly to help me understand some of the issues immediately apparent. It has been slightly edited to make it more appropriate for a wider audience.

Here goes…

He has a number of different lectures apparently. We got the one on Watson and ionospheric discharges.

• (1) He is clearly a writer of books, maybe primarily?
• (2) Too few audio examples
• (3) Terrible communicator – I received this as FB from others less well-versed in the material. I’m pretty tolerant myself, but, to be petty, the constant slightly amplified jangling of coins in the pocket was not conducive to active listening.
• (4) Some interesting ideas – mainly of historical connections.

(Here endth the short version.)

• (5) He appeared to set up a (false?) dialectic between music, technology and nature then proceeded to argue why ionospheric discharges was music so the dialectic was false. QED.
• (6) Might have been interesting if there was a coherent argument but I failed to see it. Lots of data, but connections seemed shallow and mostly obvious.
• (7) No real emphasis on listening. I asked at the post-Q&A whether he had considered approaching the topic from an active (Cagean) listener perspective and if so, why he had decided to take the (albeit incredibly simple, accidental) technology angle. I couldn’t understand his answer. Some afterwards told me he didn’t (answer it).

(Here endth the medium version.)

• (8) There is a double-bind with acquisition/adoption of this field by the visual arts. Similar problem exhibited in w. multimedia and something I was actively trying to counterbalance at ACAT:
  • +ve: In the absence of music institutions actively promoting the field (and a 1000 shames on them for not so doing), at least it is being acknowledged at some institutional level, especially in light of the devastation wreaked on it by the university (music) sector in Australian in the 4th 1/4 of the 20C.
  • -ve: There was too much focus on the physical _objects_ and not enough on the (qualities etc) of the sound. So sound gets to play to second fiddle yet again.
  • -ve: Is the act of listening so unimportant? – perhaps because the visarts crowd do not have a history of listening until now (pop- afterall, is mostly about other things) and so do not have anything to compare it with. (eg. active, whilst playing, concert rituals etc)
• (9) I thought he should (show some evidence of having read Ros Bandt’s book. Carefully and while sitting on his ego. Fo example, and as Bruce Cale pointed out to him in the QA, he made no mention of Lamb’s work etc despite it being right “on-topic”. Apparently Joyce Hinterding is the interesting one in Aust. Don’t get me wrong, I love her work, but what assumptions are being made here? Thank Ganesha that Carla Teixeria @ NFSA is removing some obstacles in this regard. Let’s hopes she is supported and encouraged by the community whose work she seeks to document. Ditto Sarah Last. A thousand petals would bloom if they had some sound mentoring, in both senses of the word.
• (10) I kept thinking “Why am I sitting listening to this when Ros Bandt would have done it so much better?” I guess it’s not his fault that Australians are frightened of the soundness of their own voice, so this is not a critique of him. As a culture we seem still so insecure we want to hear others tell us what is interesting in the world. So it is no surprise, given the opportunity, for other to tell us that their culture is what is important. So we are defined in our own minds by them. And their image of us is projected onto us and we respond as puppets on strings. No wonder many of our artists still need to leave Australia in order to work, and the homegrown flowerings are often weedy. Don’t get me wrong-I love those weeds, but you have to ruminate a lot of them to sustain life, and expend a lot of energy scrounging for them. He said afterwards that he was looking for a job so he’ll probably walk into something.
• (11) Level of intellectual engagement: Shallow. Even the opening slide, which was of a series of concentric arcs emanating from a microphone onto a zebra, was shallowly visual – no understanding of the difference in kind between the reaction-diffusion process that causes the (unarc-like) patterning on a zebra and those illustrating sound dispersion. A vague connection if everything is reduced to a 2D image pattern and you don’t think about it. ‘Nuff said. See (8).

I did an interview with Michael Cathcart on ABC RN’s bush telegraph today. In it I talk about the need for an accessible archive of Australian Natural and Everyday Sounds (ANEAS) You can listen/download an mp3 of it from the ABC’s website: http://www.abc.net.au/rural/telegraph/content/2009/s2763868.htm

Richard Meale inspired and influenced several generations of Australian composers through his music as well as his engaging mind. David Worrall and Ross Edwards both studied with Meale – They share some of their personal memories about their passionate teacher on the Australian Music Centre’s Resonate site.  The valedictions.

Basho:
ailing on my travails
my soul wanders
over withered mores

Lorca:
Yo canto su elegancia con palabras que gimen
y recuerdo una brisa triste por los olivos

(I sing of his elegance with words that groan
and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.)

I’ve added the link to them at the bottom of the Phenomenology page, but you can jump to them directly by clicking here.

That’s 75th birthday, not symphony (or vodkas)!

The National Library with ANU celebrated Larry Sitsky’s 75 birthday last Friday (20090911) with a public presentation for about 300 people of The Musical Journey of Larry Sitsky. This twilight event, programmed by Robyn Holmes, the Curator of Music at the NLA, consisted of a series of works interspersed with conversation authoritatively lead by her. The music in the programme was:

• Roy Agnew. c. 1939. Sonata Ballade: Sonata No. 3. Performed by Larry Sitsky (LS)
• LS. 1959. ‘Mystic Interlude’ from Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin Opus 1. Performed by Christopher Latham.
• Valdimir Deshevov c. 1926. Rails, Op 16. Performed by Adam Cook.
• LS. 1987. ‘The Eternal Set’ and ‘The Celestial Waters’: 11th and 12th movements from The Secret Gates of the House of Osiris. Performed by Vernon Hill (flute), Tor Fromyhr (viola), Susan Powell (piano) and James Larsen (cello).
• LS. 1984. Vartarun for solo clarinet. Performed by Alan Vivian.
• Hooper Brewster-Jones. 1923-24. Selection from Twelve Preludes. Performed by Kate Bowan.
• LS. 2007. ‘Abbot Zhan’s Cell’ and ‘Listening to the Harp’ from The Jade Harp: Seven songs for voice and fortepiano. Words by SuShih and Li-Bai. Performed by Angela Giblin (voice) and Geoffrey Lancaster (piano).
• LS. 2008. ‘The Chant of Gatha Ushtavaiti’, 1st movement from Dimensions of Night. Performed by Michael Kieran Harvey.
• Anton Dvorak. Humeresque, Op 101, No. 7. Performed by LS. Unscheduled encore.

In addition to the performances, the NLA displayed a new LS website, donated by Dr Marcia Ruff Hewitt, a former student, that also includes some new photographs of him, including this one,  by Heide Smith.

Here are some random thoughts/highlights (i.e. not a comprehensive review):

Three-score years and fifteen. I worked with LS at the School of Music for some 15 years, so it was a pleasure celebrate his entrance into a fourth quartile.

As the lead author (with Patricia Shaw, and Peter Campbell) of Larry Sitsky : a bio-bibliography, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997, and an undisputed authority on Australian music, Robyn Holmes clearly knows her subject and his contribution to Australian music. She masterfully managed to craft the evening into much more than one of anecdotes and reminiscences, and in doing so made it an edifying as well as entertaining experience.

One of Sitsky’s legacies is the education of a generation of musicianswho combine musicological research with stylistically authentic performance. Kate Bowan’s lyrical performance of the Brewster-Jones selection from Twelve Preludes was a suitable complement to an intelligent rendering of what is obviously a masterful and under-rated composer. Her edition of Brewster-Jones’ piano music is avaliable from The Keys Press in W.A.

Michael Kieran Harvey’s performance was spellbinding. This mature work is the finest I think I have heard from the pen of LS. I can’t wait to hear the complete work, which Michael has recently recorded for Move. His performance evolked so many different thoughts. Perhaps, despite his own masterful pianism, LS now has a superior interpreter of his piano music. In any event, listening to this work through MKH, who was not under LS’s direct tutorship as a student, the work takes on another dimension; one that I have long been listening out for in his music. I have always sensed that LS inherited, not just Busoni’s brilliant editing and performance practice (especially of JSB), but his compositional struggle to breakthrough the materiality, the notes, especially the notes; to transcend. If the rest of the work lives up to its opening, my own sense is that, not only is Dimensions of Night a major work,but a significant contribution to piano music.

In his performance of the Dvorak, a work he learnt as a youth, LS demonstrated, in a direct and lucid way, the importance of a vital (lit. living) tradition; that tradition is something that one works within not studies from some supposedly more objective ‘outside’. I was not alone in being captivated by every phrase. In every fermata, when time didn’t ’stand still’, it intensifyingly raced back-and-forth in concurrent recall and expectation. A live demonstration of the dimensional difference between any one recording, no matter how masterful, and a living performance. Such is nature of corporeal embodied intelligence c.f. studio-collaged objects and naive performer emoting. Indeed even Brentano’s and Husserl’s descriptions of musical phenomena don’t even approximate it by several dimensions. If only this was the norm for live performances, one might be tempted to attend more concerts.

Happy 75th, LS. May there be many more!

The National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia is a public registry of recordings that celebrates the unique and diverse recorded sound culture and history of Australia. On Tuesday, a lecture on the launch of digital radio in Australia was followed by minister Peter Garrett’s announcement of the NFSA’s 2009 additions to the registry and that fabulous living icon of Australian sound, Robyn Archer, accompanied by Michael Morley, presented Radio and Me – a programme of songs, poems and personal anecdotes, especially created, with the research assistance of Robyn Holmes from the National Library, for the occasion.

Sounds of Australia was first launched in 2007 with a foundation list of 10 recordings. Each year, public nominations are called for and 10 new recordings are added to the Registry, selected from the nominations by a panel of experts from the recorded sound industry and cultural institutions. You can find out more about the registry here.

The announcement seems to have been well reported by the mass media, including Aunty ABC. The 2009 list is

1924 – London recordings – Newcastle Steelworks Band, conductor Albert Baile
1954 – The Vegemite Jingle
1955 – The Adventure of the Singing Bullet – Smoky Dawson
1958 – My Country – read by Dorothea Mackellar
1962 – Georgia Lee Sings the Blues Down Under – Georgia Lee
1966 - In the Head the Fire – Nigel Butterley
1968 – Lionel Rose Wins the World Title
1972 – I Am Woman – Helen Reddy
1973 – The Loner – Vic Simms
1991 – Treaty – Yothu Yindi

All well and good, you might think. Except not all entries have been reported equally. Even at the launch, Minister Garrett was prepared to reflect on his contribution to the Yothu Yindi, and mentioned, if my memory serves me correctly, all other entries except one. Anyone care to guess which one? It’s the same one that all the other media I’ve seen have also ignored? Come on now, it’s not all that hard, given the lobotomised media producers in this country seem incapable of recognising more than one Australian composer of art music between sleeps.

And I wonder how long it will be before a computer-generated piece makes the list. I’m not holding my breath.

They’ve been playing an Ad. for their Science Show all week on on ABC RN in which this phrase appears:

…but that doesn’t mean anything about whether it’s a real phenomenon…

So what’s a real phenomenon? – as opposed to an unreal one? My dictionary defines a phenomenon as

any state or process known through the senses rather than by
intuition or reasoning

So, given what we know about the psychology of phenomena, is the Science Show promoting a realist philosophy of science, or do such matters just get swept under the carpet in the name of journalism? I’d put my bet on ignorance.

And while we’re at it, Danielle Clode’s piece on megafauna has this gem:

The giant horned tortoises of Queensland may have trundled about like armoured tanks with spiked tails, but they were probably peaceful herbivores, the last survivors of a family that once spread across the Pacific.

Well, I can understand how she can deduce it was a herbivore, but peaceful? I wonder how she worked that out. Poetic license or bad science? I mean, its not as if all herbivores are peaceful. Hippos, elephants, zebras…. for eg.

The last item Songbirds arose in Australian region made up for it though. Excellent!

There I was, taking my evening ambulation; there was yacking about sport on RN and so ABC-FM (bewdiful musick) got my ears for an hour. Classic drive. Broom broom–swept off my feet!–and Julie Lester was reporting on an experiment the NSO tried whereby the audience could get the back story or some bright spark’s interpretation of Beethoven’s 6th “bird music” by logging on to twitter with their blackberry, raspberry or whatever…
You can read about it and the press release etc here if you want. “NSO”? You guessed it: National blah blah

Got me thinking. Perhaps this is a modern day – technologically assisted- version of twiddling your thumbs. Why not make it really interesting and set up a surtitle machine somewhere obtrusive for the audience to read/twit to? At least that way concert would take on a local flavo(u)r. And novelty could be had without having to listen to ANY of that awful nasty modern stuff.

The more things change, the more they stay the same… Perhaps I should have stuck with the yack on sport, or just listened to the traffic.

Composer Gordon Monro, via Warren Burt, has pointed me to Philip Galanter’s manifesto-like piece in which he proposes what he calls “Complexism – a new science-friendly paradigm for the arts and humanities”. Read Gordon’s blog post/summary and/or Galanter’s original text.
It is refreshing to see this position continuing to be put! I agree with lots of PG’s position. In the spirit of discourse, and certainly not for cheap antagonism, I’ll make a few quick, and thus unbalanced, remarks. I don’t know him, though I occasionally see him on the Supercollider list.

• He does make the distinction between complexity and complicatedness, yet his examples are all of complicated systems (frog’s guts, weather etc). A good example to clarify the distinction is the inability to predict the path two connected pendula will traverse when set in motion
• His discussion of information theory is encouraging, though a little glossy. But I would say that, I suppose, given my extended writing on the matter. (See Chapter 3 and Appendix A here. ) Ditto Enlightenment thinking which can be differently (better?) expressed as the reconciliation by Kant of contemporary empirical and Idealistic impulses.
• I’m not clear whether the asymptotiic discontinuity (the peak) in the graph is intentional or meaningful. I would have thought a bell-shaped curve more appropriate, though perhaps I’ve missed a vital point.
• It is often not clear whether he uses the terms “Art” and “arts” exactly or loosely. Visual art commentary commonly elides the two; the reasons for which are another non-apolitical topic. Unfortunately, the disregard (whether through lack of knowledge or whatever) for the musical precedents on this topic make much of it appear more journalistic than scholarly. Think, for example, of the different positions on randomness (taken and as expressed in their compositions) in the 50s-70 between Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez and Xenakis. Relative to music, the visual arts have come late to the use of computers in the making of work and so their (art) theoretical context has been more influenced by PM than has music composition. Because W. culture is so overwhelmingly dominated by the visual, not acknowledging this historical precedence has the effect of silencing it and visual art theory, as well as the wider cultural debate is considerably weakened in its so-doing.
• The discussion in section 15.3.3 Postmodernism in Crisis reflects a much deeper understanding, IMO, not withstanding the claim that modernism and politics are orthogonal, if that is what he is saying. The expression “Modernism, by contrast, is politically orthogonal” is not clear to me – orthogonal to what? Further, I think in music, it is not accurate to PM as essentially “left-leaning”. Often it is the opposite. In truth, M and PM inclinations seem much less easily oriented. Think of the closeness of Xenakis and Boulez on the M-PM spectrum, yet politically,they are poles apart. It is certainly the case w. Cage, yet he is/was not an island.
• While the opposition between M and PM is useful for clarifying impulses, as per Apollonian/Dionysian, ingestion/digestion, exploration/settlement etc, and my own inclinations are more hunter-gatherer than cultivator, it seems to me that PM is but an incarnation of mannerist / neo-classicist impulses expressed in contemporary language. That the arguments seem to be so vehemently put by the PMs (death of history etc) is more because it is “our” incarnation of these forces, than de-vitalised historicised memories.