On Saturday morning I scurried uptown to 126th Street, the home of the National Jazz Museum, for a symposium on the relationship between writing and jazz music with the unfortunate title The Pen is Mightier than the Sword. As usual I was wearing multiple hats for the occasion: as a sometime reviewer of jazz gigs, as a writer looking to better understand the mind of the musician for her next book, and as a former volunteer administrator in the Sydney jazz “scene” seeking to understand the dynamics of this corner of New York’s musical culture in order to contribute usefully to a similar discussion in Australia, which for various reasons continues on a rolling boil.

The symposium outline mentioned the recent demise of Jazz Times magazine and the cancellation of the major New York jazz festival as two events calling into question the state of jazz as a “viable institutional force”. At the same time, it pointed out that in the face of relentless announcements of jazz’s death, the number of students studying jazz in college continues to rise. The symposium promised to explore whether journalists and musicians see eye-to-eye on a vision of a jazz future, and what role race and cultural background plays in the often contentious discourse between and among musicians and journalists and critics.

When I got there, the panellists outnumbered the audience, and did so for an uncomfortable while thereafter. (It was 10am on a Saturday, after all.) Their stars shined brightly, however: Gary Giddins, who for 30 years wrote a column on jazz for the Village Voice; Howard Mandel, a prolific jazz writer and current jazz blogger for the online Arts Journal; and scholar John Gennaro, who has made a study of critical responses to jazz music. They all looked whiter than white against the multiracial profile of the participating musicians, who included Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer and Lewis Nash. Moderator Greg Thomas did his best trying to keep a formal shape to the bulging conversations, but there seemed to be more interesting questions and challenges bubbling among members of the audience, who unfortunately were given limited opportunity to contribute to the “debate”.

I took copious notes but left at lunchtime because the discussion seemed chronically limited to “what musicians think of jazz critics” and the critics’ defenses of their work  in a rather ecumenical context of “we’re all fans of the music”. Who needs to hear this again? Perhaps the discussion heated up in the afternoon, but I was looking for a much more politically conscious, provocative exploration of the position of jazz in relation to other types of music. There was no mention of jazz music produced outside the US – and there is so much interesting music coming out of Europe and Australia - and there was no discussion of race, either. This should not have surprised me after spending so much time in New York in recent years, but it did. It also struck me later that the looped question of the relevance of jazz music and jazz criticism – it has been going around for decades – is very similar to the allegations of the death of the novel, which have been uttered regularly ever since Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author in the late 1960s. Just as university jazz programs continue to accept increasing numbers of students, so too do would-be writers flock to Master of Fine Arts programs (across the US in particular; see Louis Menand’s wonderful piece in the New Yorker on MFA programs). Whether you’re an aspiring jazz musician or novelist, you pursue these interests because they are your passion, and if you care enough about it, you are trying to work on your craft and eventually produce something that might be called art by someone whose professional opinion you respect. You do so, like all artists, in the face of the profound indifference of mainstream culture, and that is unlikely to change any time soon.

In terms of a comparison with the Australian jazz scene, there are more similarities than differences. In both music cultures jazz occupies a small but significant place; it is routinely ignored by publications that believe they cover the arts; when it is written about, it is often done so in a shamefully ignorant manner that would not be acceptable in other art forms or music genres; and that the iTunes-led transformation of music consumption needs to be accepted and leveraged, rather than resisted, in order to cultivate existing and future audiences for the music. The role of the critic in such a climate is part publicist, part educator, part interpreter. This seems to me an appropriate portfolio for any cultural critic, regardless of your musical taste.

This week I was fortunate to attend a performance of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town with a playwright friend visiting from Sydney, who bought tickets to the show on the personal recommendation of none other than Edward Albee. “He’s seen it twice and loved it,” Suzie said. It seemed endorsement enough.

In many respects the play has suffered for its ubiquity – so many American school students are forced to digest the text like cereal and forever associate the play with tedium and the classroom. Its small-town scenario, full of people leading small-town lives, has sometimes led it to gather mould in theatre’s corner, as if it were an old uncle you had to invite to dinner but with whom you had nothing to talk about. Like a secret, Our Town has been hidden in plain sight waiting for an exceptional imagination to draw it once more to our lazy attention. That imagination belongs to director David Cromer, who also plays the pivotal role of Stage Manager in this production. Through his direction the wit, gravitas, terror, love and beauty in the play is unleashed, with a stunning surprise for the audience revealed in the third act. I could barely hold myself together in the final heartbreaking sequence, where the newly deceased Emily is granted her wish to revisit just one ordinary day in her life, and the audience – so close to the actors that those of us in the front rows could reach out and touch them – is unexpectedly transported into another realm altogether, a realm that only the theatre (and only rarely) provides.

On the eve of my final day as President of Sydney PEN, I am very proud of some quick work by my Management Committee member Charlotte Wood to put together a press release highlighting recent attempts by Chinese officials to pressure the Melbourne Film Festival into not screening the film The 10 Conditions of Love. The film profiles the Uighur businesswoman and leader in exile, Rebiya Kadeer. The Uighurs are a Muslim Chinese minority. The Chinese government describes Kadeer as a terrorist and blames her for instigating the riots in Xinjiang earlier in July. She is coming to Melbourne for the screening of the documentary, and must be delighted with the publicity that the attempted censorship has generated.

Sydney PEN condemns censorship attempt; congratulates Melbourne Film Festival (16 July 2009)

Sydney PEN, the influential body of writers and readers devoted to freedom of expression, has congratulated the Melbourne International Film Festival for its firm stance against Chinese attempts to censor its 2009 festival program. Continue Reading »

Having spent much of June in gumboots and raincoats, a large chunk of New York’s population streamed on to Central Park’s Great Lawn on Tuesday night to hear the New York Philharmonic perform Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Beethoven’s Symphony No 7. I joined some friends who had thoughtfully staked out a comfortable spot under a tree using a large red-checked picnic blanket. We secured our perimeter with cast-off shoes, a bottle or two of wine, and chatted amiably for hours, thankfully spared much of the trampling-upon experienced by other groups in less favorable locations.

Despite my preference for cooler weather, Tuesday night in New York was perfect. The most gentle of breezes caressed our shoulders, and for a long period of time, as the orchestra played in the warm evening air, around 100,000 people who usually feel harried and hemmed in by each other simply relaxed and slowed down in the company of so many strangers. I’m certain the repertoire had something to do with the crowd’s behaviour, too; it’s difficult to feel stressed listening to Mozart, and even Beethoven’s musical passion could not help but be dinted a little by the sheer beauty of the weather. It’s been years since I’ve attended an outdoor concert of classical music. In Sydney each January during the Festival the SSO performs a concert in the Domain, but they insist on programming Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture to finish, every single time, which I find quite sad.

A cellist from Manchester has successfully sued a venue under the Trade Descriptions Act for failing to provide live musicians at a “magical familiy musical”. Adrian Bradbury took his family to the Lowry Theatre at Salford, near Manchester, to see a live staging of The Wizard of Oz, only to find the performers singing and dancing to pre-recorded backing tracks rather than a band of live musicians. Outraged on behalf of professional musicians everywhere, he sued the venue.

In court Bradbury produced an expert statement from contemporary composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, which proclaimed that without an orchestra or musical director “a performance of The Wizard of Oz is best described as karaoke”. The Lowry argued that of the 133,000 attendees of the concert, Bradbury’s was the sole complaint. But the judge said Bradbury’s expectations of the concert were reasonable and ruled that the venue must repay him the cost of the tickets. (Here’s the original article in The Times.)

While Bradbury has won the admiration of musicans everywhere for staking this small victory for the enduring value of live music-playing over the mass-production approach of pre-recorded music, his win is local and nostalgic. Outside the Lowry Theatre, backing tracks have become endemic to the mass-consumption of music. It’s simply another step in the evolution of musical culture, which goes hand in hand with technology – as it has done for centuries. 

In The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali says that music “provides a rough sketch of the society under construction” and describes the musical evolution thus:

Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning.

 

In a bizarre twist on the recent history of the automotive industry, Audi has decided to mark its centenary by commissioning its youngest designers to come up with a new … piano. I’m as much a fan of the piano as anyone who’s played the instrument regularly from the age of six, but this decision strikes me as a classic “Titanic deckchair” moment from an industry that has been consistently incapable of finding the horizon on a flat surface. Surely Audi’s creative team, let alone its sales department, would at least have researched what’s happened to sales of old-fashioned pianos over the past century (the same century Audi has been in the business of selling automobiles). It must certainly be aware of how many customers it might reasonably expect for a flash new grand piano with the price tag of 100,000 Euros. Even after reading Audi’s official announcement about this “innovative” project, I’m at a loss to explain its purpose. To wit, project director Philip Schlesinger on the Audi piano:

Generous surface areas ensure formal clarity; there are no decorative applications, the edges and lines are sharply drawn, the joints logically positioned. All these are important aspects of the Audi design.

Forgive me Emperor Audi, but these “important aspects” have been part and parcel of acoustic piano design for at least 150 years; possibly even longer, as upright and grand pianos alike have undergone next to no technological development over that period precisely because of declining sales. Instead, sales of pianolas in the early 20th Century, then in more recent decades digital keyboards and electronic instruments, have found favour with practising musicians due to their portability, convenience and price. Perhaps that lesson would have been a more significant one for Audi’s designers to learn: coming up with an alternative to the car that meets our needs without being so burdensome in environmental and financial impact.

Having a few years ago abandoned the 9-5 office life for the life of a project-based consultant and writer (whose working schedule resembles nothing so much as the extreme ups and downs of a polygraph), I am still amazed at the extent to which my expectations of my own productivity as a writer adhere to those of office culture. I try to be at my desk by 9.30 am, and if I haven’t exercised by then I simply won’t do any exercise at all that day (save for an occasional evening tennis match when I can find an opponent or three). The fact that I often waste hours with inconsequential online activity, the making or purchase and drinking of coffee, suddenly important domestic chores and so on fails to trigger in me the realisation that sometimes I’m not achieving anything at all by sitting at my desk, willing the words to come.

Over the 4th of July long weekend I conducted an experiment to see how much writing I would do each day. As it turned out, I wrote more than 1,000 words every day. But each time I wrote them between 3.30pm and 7.30pm. So if I could turn myself into my own client, I should be strongly advising myself that I get all my research tasks, personal admin, business development, exercise, grocery shopping and so forth out of the way by lunchtime, then have lunch with someone to network professionally or simply to catch up with a friend – and then get down to my real work. It would be great if I could take my own advice. Can I make this my resolution for the new financial year?