One day in 1958 I preached a sermon at the Newmarket Church of Christ -- someone else's sermon probably, but never mind -- on a text from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 12 and verse 16. You will recall that Herod had thrown Peter in prison, but an angel sprung him, and after he had considered the thing he went to hole-up at his friend Mary's place, where his mates were having a prayer meeting. Well, he knocketh at the door, and this sheila Rhoda came to hearken unto who might be calling at this hour of night, and she was so tickled pink when she recognized Peter's voice that she rushed back to the meeting and said Hey, youse blokes, guess who's outside! And they said unto her, Thou art mad. Well, you can imagine the scene: a real barney, on for young and old, with chapter and verse flying about and Amen and Thus saith the Lord, you know how these Christians carry on. And all this time Peter is out in the cold, probably thinking there's something wrong with the organization when it's easier to get out of Herod's prison than into your cobbers' house. But did he despair? Not a bit of it. Verse 16: "But Peter continued knocking: and when they had opened the door, and saw him, they were astonished." Mind you, in the very next verse, after he'd told them his amazing story, he decided to hole-up somewhere else -- "And he departed, and went into another place" -- and you couldn't blame him after the treatment he'd had from these nongs. Anyway, there I am, preaching about steadfastness or something, illustrated by "But Peter continued knocking!" And about the third or fourth time I said it, there's this bloke up on his roof, next door to the church, and right on cue he starts hammering. "Better let him in," says some wag in the congregation, and everyone packs up laughing and the entire homiletical effect is ruined. A few months after that I left theological college and returned to civilian life, but that's another story.
I never thought that I would enjoy John Cage's music. But there was a time when I thought I would never enjoy Schoenberg's music, or Monteverdi's. I gather there are still a few people around who don't like Bartók, or Stravinsky, or even Rameau. It's easy enough these days to decide whether you like these older composers, because their music is readily available on records, and if you listen long enough to the classical-music FM stations you'll eventually hear enough to form some sort of opinion. But the music of John Cage (who is only 71, younger than the President of the USA, and therefore still dangerously active) is not easily come by. I do not know, for example, how long we might have to wait before any of us hears his Branches for amplified cacti and other plant material. So what I am really saying is that I like most of the music of John Cage that I have heard.
I have about four hours of his music on tape, scattered
here and there
throughout the collection, and what I'm doing today is bringing it together on cassettes
so I can listen to it more often. I must remember to leave 4 minutes 33 seconds blank
somewhere: that's one piece of modern music that I can perform, and anyone can
perform -- and as Stravinsky is supposed to have said, there should be a lot more of
it.
This is not the view of the Brunswick City Council.
Cage's ideas about
chance, environment and indeterminacy in (and as) music lead you to, among other
things, sound-sculpture; and among the composers and musicians who live in
Brunswick is one of Australia's more inventive experimenters with sound and
environment, Ros Bandt. I understand that she received a grant to create a sound-sculpture in
one
of the local parks, and that there was such a fuss made by the
ratepayers about the unsightly and dangerous junk she erected that it was very quickly
dismantled. Luckily, one supposes, no child fell off it or was mutilated by it, physically
or spiritually. It says something about my relative awareness of musical and municipal
affairs that I knew of Ros Bandt long before this sculpture went up but didn't realize
that she was involved until after it came down, so I missed all the fun. Unless someone
recorded it, but that seems unlikely.
Ros Bandt is not yet a household name in Australia.
Apart from her
work with acoustic environments (and the fact that she lives about three blocks from
here), all I know about her is that she is a member of the group La Romanesca, which
is based at the University of Melbourne, and which recently made a superb recording of
the "Seven Songs of Love" by the thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Galician composer
Martin Codax. No-one knows who Martin Codax was. The edition of Grove I have says
he was a Spanish or Portuguese thirteenth-century troubadour, probably a native of
Vigo; his seven songs were discovered in 1914 in the binding of a fourteenth-century
manuscript of Cicero's De Officiis. It is possible even that "Martin Codax" is a
mistake for Martin Codex -- "Martin's Book". But there is no mistake about the
music: it is glorious. I don't know anything quite like it. It reaches out over all those
centuries and says You aren't alone, friend: we felt as you do, here in Vigo, in our time.
You don't have to know the language to know this: the music says it.
There are two other things I know about Ros Bandt.
She was one of
the composers chosen to represent Australia at the Autumn Festival in Paris last year.
And she is not mentioned in James Murdoch's Handbook of Australian Music
(Macmillan, 1983). I must resist the urge to comment at length on this strange,
overpriced, indispensable book. Thérèse Radic has been more than kind
to it in the March issue of Australian Book Review. It's one of those many books
that promise to give us so much that we need, and fall short by a mile. Most of what's
in it is useful, but it isn't the book of that title we wanted. Since at least three members
of the Society of Editors were involved in it, and are as sad about it as I am, I'll say no
more about it.
What strikes me about the activities of people like Ros
Bandt and
John Cage, and so many other contemporary composers and musicians, is that while
they are reaching out for the new and not-so-precisely-articulated-before they are also
going back to the roots of our music, to discover and re-experience what it was about
before, say, Sir Thomas Beecham, or Mahler, or Berlioz, or Beethoven, or Bach, tuned
our ears toward their new, away from our collective old.
There are dangers in this attempt to get back to the old.
The greatest
of them perhaps is that touched on by Albert Schweitzer in his monumental work on
Bach when he said that "age confers on all music a dignity that gives it a touch of
religious elevation". And so we hear the music of the troubadours -- often lusty, longing,
un-Christian songs -- as quaint and venerable, and put them on the shelf next to
Palestrina and Lasso, because they sound similar. And yet they are as similar as
Britten's War Requiem and Jefferson Starship, as Glass's Einstein on the
Beach, Miles Davis in full flight and "How Much is that Doggy in the
Window?"
But then, think of the way Joe Cocker sings "A Little
Help From My
Friends". Isn't there an element of "religious elevation" about that already?
Religion. From the Latin religio. Meaning,
among other things,
that which binds together.
Schweitzer attributes to Martin Luther the sentiment
"Why should the
Devil have all the good tunes?" -- which I always thought John Wesley said, but that
only goes to show my very-English place in the scheme of cultural things. Schweitzer
goes on to say that some of the Devil's tunes can't be tamed: despite Luther's
and Bach's best efforts, those tunes were soon back in the gutter where they came
from. Luckily, I don't attach any supernatural significance to sequences of notes and
am fairly open-minded about the whole issue.
So when John Cage devotes his time and genius to a
work for organ
based on an old American collection of hymns, as he did in his The Harmony of
Maine (1978), I do not look for religious elevation -- and yet I find it, as surely as I
find it in Bach and Mahler, Haydn and Stravinsky, Charpentier and Messiaen.
Is that not an unexpected thing to find in the music of
John
Cage?
It's easy to make jokes about contemporary music. You
could even say
it's essential: it's our way of coping with it. But when a piece of music not yet six years
old, by a difficult dead-serious quirky ageing American who goes in for stunts like
amplified cacti, and pianists sitting silent on stage for 4 minutes 33 seconds, comes
groping out of the loudspeakers and entwines your heart and spirit as Bach's Mass in
B Minor and Mahler's Second Symphony did all those years ago when you were young
and would let music do anything with you -- then, I say, then you are in the presence
of God-in-Man, and let there be no more jokes until we have grappled with this
mystery!
It's not the sort of grappling that can be done on paper, I
can tell you.
I have done a fair bit in the way of attempting to write about music (most of it,
thankfully, unpublished), and the more I try, the more I listen and the more I read, the
more I am reminded of the character in Strindberg's The People of Hemsö
who needed a fiddle to say exactly what he meant. And if you didn't understand, all he
could do was play it again.
I suspect that some such sentiment is responsible for
the excesses of
the minimalist school of composition.
And what has all this to do with the art and science of
book editing
anyway? To be frank: not much. But Jackie said I had to fill two pages this month, and
here they are. That aside, as someone involved in publishing, and one aware of the
exciting things going on right now in Australia's music life, I am appalled at our
publishers' lack of interest in music. We are supposed to be so good at identifying
markets for books, too: it's what publishing is about, we're told. So where are all the
books about Australian music-making?The Society of Editors Newsletter, March 1984
A FEW MORE BARS
I sent a copy of that issue of the Newsletter to Ros Bandt, care of the Music Department at the University of Melbourne. Four years later I started work as assistant editor of Meanjin, and was delighted to learn that "my" first issue was largely devoted to music. Not only that: I would be working with a number of composers and musicologists, including Dr Bandt. How, I wondered, had she reacted to my article? Had she even seen it? I was a little apprehensive about meeting her. I needn't have been. Ros mentioned the article before I did, and said she was particularly pleased to appear in a piece about John Cage because she had written her Arts Honors thesis on his work. In an untypical onrush of gallantry I produced a copy of "Chance, Silence" and inscribed it "For Ros". She put it on a wall in her lavatory. I felt singularly honored: the walls of Ros's lavatory are covered with musical memorabilia, and my humble PCV is in some very distinguished company.
Ros very kindly did not point out the mistakes I made
in "A Few Bars
of Cage". From talking to John Jenkins, and with the assistance of his book 22
Contemporary Australian Composers and Ros's book Sounds in Space, I can
now do that myself. The sound-sculpture in Temple Park, Brunswick, called the "Sound
Playground", was dismantled because it had been damaged by vandals, not because of
any outcry from the ratepayers. While it remained intact it had been much enjoyed by
the children it was designed for. My reference to "unsightly and dangerous junk" was
very wrong: there's a photo of the Sound Playground in Ros's book, and it looks
delightful. There is also a photo of it being recorded, so I was wrong about that
too.The Metaphysical Review (Bruce Gillespie, ed.), no.14, November 1989
John Bangsund
Melbourne, Australia
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