Recently, a prestigious Australian institution announced the list of finalists for an award. This award is designed for young performers, and a musician I greatly respect was selected for the initial round but did not make the finals.
Aside from the obvious dangers posed by the award’s selection process (the fact that it is structured in a way which leaves it open to nepotism), the artistic fallout resulting from this is demonstrative of a larger problem — an insidious culture currently infecting the Australian arts scene.
The culture I am talking about is mediocrity.
What I am about to say is not fashionable, nor will it be popular during a pandemic to have a go at Australian artists and arts organisations who have been struggling. But it is a sore spot for a reason and I’m going to pick at it.
What is fashionable at the moment is to say things like “there is too much elitism in classical music”. “Elitism is the problem” is nothing but a smokescreen for the well-founded insecurities we have about our artistic abilities as a nation. And the more we undermine quality classical music to make it more palatable for the toddler-like tastes of a musically uneducated public, the worse we will perform, literally, on the world stage.
The musician in my anecdote can play the back off her instrument. Without a doubt she could outplay any of the candidates who made it to the finals. The fact is that as an artist she is miles ahead of most people, and everyone knows it too. Okay, you might say, but isn’t art subjective? Sure. But it is also a practised discipline, and this performer is not only more technically and artistically skilled than all the others, but she also has a thing called integrity. She will not tick the boxes if she does not believe in the music, and the fact is that performance opportunities like this are mostly given to people who are simply good at ticking boxes.
There are various boxes that apparently need ticking in the Australian arts scene. They include Australian contemporary music, ‘historically informed performance practice’ (a problematic term, in my opinion), female composers, female musicians in general, multi-media projects, anything to do with climate change or social justice issues, and pretty much anything that falls on the left-wing side of the political spectrum.
Ideologically there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these things per se, and it’s not that I don’t think Australians don’t have something potentially profound to say artistically, but let’s first address the elephant in the room.
A lot of the time, we just aren’t very good.
And we’re insecure about that. We don’t feel like we belong in the international community of classical music. And I think it’s self-sabotage to brand ourselves as “new” or “different” or whatever the adjective may be. Because if what we are selling is fundamentally average, no amount of branding is going to help.
Let’s just look briefly at the bigger picture. The fact that we are so wealthy and comfortable does not do us any favours. Artistic laziness exists because we can afford it. As a country, we have never experienced extreme mass poverty, or world war on our soil, or dictatorships, or (statistically speaking, relative to the rest of the world) lack of opportunity, and a lot of what we produce artistically is a reflection of that. The fact that people can go out and ‘protest’ about their ‘freedoms’ (read: urinate on a monument and spit on healthcare workers) and not get shot on the spot is an example of this cultural recipe of ignorance and privilege.
For a start, there are a few problems with the world of contemporary Australian composition, generally speaking. To write well for an instrument, a composer must have an intimate knowledge of its mechanics. Unfortunately, there is a concerning number of composers who have never been high-level performers. Further to that, it is clear that many of them have not studied the basic principles of harmony, theory, orchestration, four-part writing. Voice leading. Counterpoint. When I was studying at university, composers in my cohort were also at the bottom of the pack when it came to aural skills — surprising, given the fact that those are two of the most basic and important tools of the craft.
That’s like if I were to strut into a courtroom to legally represent someone without having studied law. I could probably fumble my way through but I’d probably lose the case, and my client would probably not want to pay me. And fair enough. As a musician who routinely has to perform music of such questionable standards, I certainly have an issue with my tax dollars filtering through to the people who are writing graphic scores because they think they are being visionary and that theory is a cage from which they are breaking free. Anyone who has seen Picasso’s early works will know what I mean. It’s not really their fault — it’s more a damning indictment on this country’s abominable education system.
Witnessing the tragic direction in which the higher education sector is heading in this country is like watching a very slow train crash. I was shocked by a recent article in Cut Common magazine, which stated that “there really is no place for traditionalist elitism in music” and lambasted classical music as “purism”. The article was basically an advertisement for a new Bachelor of Music degree at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), which more closely resembles a glorified TAFE course than a degree in music.
According to the article students in this course will “learn to work across disciplines and to collaborate with other musicians, right from their first year.” Ok — but here’s a little fact: did you know “collaboration” is also known as “chamber music”?
It strikes me that course designers who use buzz words like “interdisciplinary” and “portfolio career” seem to have missed that those are not actually new concepts at all in classical music, and furthermore that fancy-sounding subjects like “Music Business” and “The Art of Teaching and Learning Music” are nothing more than otiose versions of what students could be learning if they just studied music.
“Part of this degree will include developing the personality skills the students need to facilitate collaboration,” said a representative of WAAPA. Oh, good… personality skills. When these students enter the profession not knowing how to play their instruments, at least they’ll have a winning personality.
And it’s not just WAAPA — this is a nationwide trend. The fact that the number one priority for universities is revenue and not education is a wider problem which requires an essay of its own, but the out-of-touch approach of their music departments (which, by the way, are run by academics, not musicians) is contributing in a major way to the decline of quality music making in Australia.
The issue pervades performance and programming too. Why do people still think that electronics in classical music is somehow novel? The use of recording technology and electronics has been around since Varèse (the ‘Father of Electronic Music’) — he was writing for electronics in the 1920s. That is now basically a hundred years ago. Aside from Varèse and his contemporaries, I have scarcely ever been inspired by a multi-media performance in classical music. Not only are people not doing anything new, but they’re doing it worse than it’s been done before.
And then there’s improvisation. Why is there suddenly all this fuss about improvisation? Again, since when has this been a novel concept in classical music? Are we just going to ignore the centuries of rich history on this front?
Performers who limit themselves to ‘early music’ specialisation are no different from the ones who limit themselves to contemporary music specialisation. Last time I checked, Mozart and Haydn didn’t call themselves “specialists” — they just called themselves musicians.
Programming female composers is no longer a novelty either, and that is a wonderful thing. But let’s please drop the pretence that it’s still going against the grain. While I understand the importance of quotas to account for systemic inequality, when people are not being taught how to write or play properly, the result is far too many sub-standard performances of sub-standard works. And that is only doing further harm to whatever minority group they are representing.
But people feel safe in these various spheres. Whether it’s new music, early music, or some other niche. They can hide in them. It’s a convenient excuse for not having the technical skill that other repertoire would expose. And they have a significant chip on their shoulder about that, which is what makes them so toxic to work with.
There is also an attitude of entitlement which accompanies the Australian style of insecurity. We want the accolades without having to do any real work. Those who have become successful are constantly in fear of being toppled off their thrones. And so they should be, because they’re just not very good, and chances are someone out there is doing a better job.
A colleague of mine said she was reluctant to speak about this, and expressed her concern that musicians with these views are judged as being “jaded, conservative and colonialist” (the ludicrous and rather racist implication being that devotion to practising a discipline is somehow a Western concept). She is not wrong to be worried about that*. There is a cultural hegemony we are seeing in Australia at the moment, but it is not elitism — it is mediocrity.
I could not find anything less inspiring than a half-baked performance of extended techniques and aleatoric backing tracks performed by someone who can’t play a scale, or an anaemic regurgitation of a concerto grosso, performed by baroque string players with wet fish for hands. And don’t get me wrong — I am not talking about everyone in these niches (#notallmusicians), but there is definitely enough of it to warrant a conversation. What I do find inspiring, however, is a highly skilled performer approaching great repertoire with freshness, depth and uniqueness.
What is a highly skilled performer? This is not some abstract concept: a highly skilled performer is not limited by the technical aspects of their instrument. They have total freedom and total control. The fact that their audience can understand the story that they are telling is what makes them great (whether or not the audience likes the way the performer is telling that story is not really relevant). And what is great repertoire? Again, not an abstract concept: the sign of truly great repertoire is how endlessly one can explore it and yet still find something new. That repertoire is timeless because it’s about the human condition, and that gives it an ongoing relevance. There is a reason people still study and perform Shakespeare, and continue to reference it throughout the ages.
The grit that is required to become really good at something, especially an art form, forces that humble pie down your throat, day in and day out. The Australian arts scene is one of pretending to eat the pie, talking about eating the pie, half-eating the pie, and being seen to eat the pie — but never consistently, quietly just eating it.
The Rent Axiom by Rory Vaden goes like this: “Success is not owned. It is only rented, and the rent is due today”. Australian artists believe that they own success, that it is rightfully theirs, and yet they are behind on their rent payments.
People who are good are not talented, they are just better at being consistent. There will always be a plethora of excuses to choose from, and the cost for the people who want to make those excuses rather than do the work is that they will never be any good. I believe they need to be held accountable for that, but unfortunately not only do they get away with it, but they are celebrated.
As tempting as it is to slide into the warm bath of mediocrity, if we want to be good we must push ourselves into a cold shower every day of our lives, and just do the work. If we are good we will not need to tick the Contemporary Music box or the Female box or take a university class called “Music Business”. If we want to call ourselves “artists”, we better get used to the taste of that pie.
*And honestly, I’m worried about it too. No one to whom I sent the first draft of this piece had any qualms about my arguments. In fact, they found it a “cathartic read”, but each of them commented that it is “scathing” and warned me never to reveal my identity as the author, out of a well-meaning concern for my career as a performer. Some suggested I completely re-write it with a positive spin. I did start another draft, as a challenge, and also made some edits to this version. The other version was soft, more passive, and (probably due to the fact that I’m not a particularly skilled writer) lacked the kind of gravitas I feel is necessary for such a widely avoided topic of discussion. In the end, the very fact that my colleagues felt that the above words were potentially dangerous is what ultimately convinced me to leave it, mostly, as is. It isn’t my intention to be “negative” for the sake of it — I simply write what I believe is the un-sugarcoated truth. The exasperated tone is part of that, and my decision not to hide that is deliberate. Perhaps it will only be an uncomfortable read for those who most need to read it.
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