We learn from the show’s co-producer Stephen Adams that Australia’s only national radio show dedicated exclusively to contemporary music will not be scheduled next year as a result of the $254 million in cuts to the ABC. Funds will, according to this morning’s spin jam, be reallocated to online new music offerings. Even if this were to eventuate, where will this content come from, seeing as New Music Up Late is fed by ABC Clasic FM’s invaluable live music broadcasts, which have also been cut? New Music Up Late is an essential source of high-profile interviews, well-researched features and bleeding-edge musical content. Australia’s thriving new music scene will be weakened, disintegrated and alienated in its absence.

You can sign a petition to express your disgust for this cowardly attack on all things new and beautiful here.

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Nils Frahm
Old Museum, Brisbane
Wednesday 8 October, 2014
By Alistair Noble

Walking on stage to perform, Nils Frahm kicked off his left sneaker to play organ pedals. The abandoned shoe sat on the front of the stage for the duration of the concert, and seemed to slowly take on some significance greater than just a casual redundancy, forming at once a simple human level bridge between audience and performer and also a small barrier, a distancing device. It was a nice simple sneaker, like the ones you’re wearing now. On this level Frahm is like you and I, and yet he was alone up there creating music with this one-shoed sensation. The sneaker seemed a quiet reminder that he is on a basic level one of us… and yet also very much not like us.

When Frahm talks between ‘songs’, as he calls his pieces, he adopts a casual, friendly banter. Self-deprecating and teasing. He’s like someone you might have met in a pub once, and maybe you did.

“Turn up your mobile phone so when someone calls you it’s really loud. I love that.”

“I don’t like to call myself a professional, because it sounds like I don’t love what I do, but…”

The stage set-up, like Frahm’s music is both generous and rigorously designed: one man alone with his piano and keyboards on a big, dark stage under a cosy, warm-toned spotlight. It feels somehow both intimate and remote. He plays with his back to the audience, so we can see what he is playing and how he plays it, but he doesn’t see us. For some songs he is clearly playing for us, and sometimes playing with us (“this is the point where at a techno festival you’d all be drunk and screaming ‘yeeeeeeaah!’ and thinking about fucking. Now we need to bring it up a bit.”). Occasionally, as with the beautifully expansive encore for solo piano, he seems to be playing for himself—floating in the comfortable embrace of fold-back speakers with us as privileged eavesdroppers.

You’ll have noticed by now that I’m writing this review a bit back-to-front. Instead of throwing out a first line about how great the music was, I’m circling around a bit. A very direct approach seems awkward for Frahm’s music, and I’m feeling that it is necessary to sneak up on it. But to be clear: this was a terrific performance of fascinating music from one of the more interesting musical minds of our post-everything time.

Seeing the Berlin-based Frahm for the first time in live performance was a revelation. Knowing his music only from recordings, I was surprised by the sheer energy required to perform some of this music live, and by the subtle shadows and moments of darkness. The relatively placid surfaces of his pieces in terms of sound quality, musical material, design and development rather disguise the underlying challenges and tensions, but this calm surface is very much an integral part of Frahm’s aesthetic. It is no accident that he often talks about the great influence of both the look and sound of ECM recordings on his early musical thinking. This is a composer-performer who thinks in terms of good design. Presentation is perhaps as important as structure and content. Introducing one song as ‘just a little idea I had during the sound-check”, he launched into a rather well-developed and complex improvisation, virtuosic in terms of both keyboard textures and musical thinking. Frahm’s work is full of pleasant surprises, twists and turns, and yet there is never a loss of control and the (dare I say) professional polish is maintained relentlessly. On every level, Frahm clearly sets a terrifically high standard of expectation for himself (and, I suspect, for his listeners although he might be too polite to say so). Near enough is really not good enough.

In his 2014 tours, Frahm is performing concerts built around material from his recent ‘Spaces’ CD which is itself made up of live recordings (or field-recordings, as Frahms prefers to call them) of songs from earlier releases. This reworking, revising and reframing of material is characteristic of Frahm, for whom the evolution of songs in different iterations of performance is perhaps an important aspect of creative process. In interviews, for example, he has spoken of the challenge of having to learn his own improvised pieces from studio recordings in order to play them in concert.

After a strong, loud electronic opening piece, with inflections of dub and distant echoes of Burial, Frahm settled into ‘Says’—a work in which delicate piano lines move across the implacable face of an auto-arpeggiated harmonic pedal-point. The melody seems to have some DNA inherited from Satie—not in the sense of quotation, but rather in tiny inflections of phrase and the way in which the melodic line moves against the static harmonic background. About 7 minutes into the piece, Frahms leaves the piano and turns to his electric keyboards. Suddenly the chords begin to move, and the previously flattened harmonic space opens out. The chord changes are simple and slow yet, coming after the long minutes of unmoving harmony, this sudden gear-shift in the harmonic rhythm seems vertiginously exciting, like a long, sweeping turn on the Grand Corniche at Monaco.

‘Said and Done’ is one of Frahm’s best-known piano songs, opening with a single note repeated fast and hard, to the point where the tone becomes brassy and pitch starts to bend as the string gives out under pressure. More than a full minute into the performance, a gloriously solitary bass-note heralds the beginning of the song itself, which unfolds slowly and deliberately around the continuing repeated note in the middle of the texture. Compositionally, one might suspect this fascination for pedal-points owes a debt to the harmonic stasis of electronic dance music, and no doubt it does to some extent. Here, however, the piano sound gives a clue to a more important aspect of Frahms’ music heritage: Keith Jarrett. But not just any Keith Jarrett. It seems to me that there is a very specific recording being referenced here in Jarrett’s 1980 ECM album of music by the early 20^th century mystical teacher Gurdjieff. In these harmonies and in the structure of these melodies and chords there is a rather complex artistic and philosophical heritage. As Frahm himself said in an interview last year, “Each chord I play is not a bunch of certain separated notes, but it’s a symbol.”

Frahm’s identity as a contemporary pianist sits somewhere within a broad genre of present-day performer-composers who work with piano in different ways. His music is a little more abstract and less tune-focused than Rachel Grimes, and less involved with prepared-piano grittiness than Hauschka. Frahm seems quite comfortable playing piano alone, but in some ways his most distinctive voice is heard in the context of the piano augmented by electronics. Here, his well-defined creative aesthetic is once again clearly audible. He loves vintage keyboards, and eschews overt laptopping for more directly plugged-in effects driven from a modest interface of knobs and dials.

Essentially, it strikes me that part of the distinctive Frahm sound and style stems from the fact that it is vitally keyboard-driven, no matter what else might be going on. In ‘Hammers’, for example, he sings to emphasise a melodic line, but the piano always remains central. He has a rather breathtaking ability to play across and through his carefully set electronic delays, in such a way that the delay is not a mere colouristic effect but an integral part of the composition in terms of rhythm, harmony and even melodic structure (as in the central four-song set ‘For—Peter—Toilet Brushes—More’). He sometimes says, with typical modesty, that these pieces are easier to play than they sound but personally, I doubt it.

Musically, Frahm’s work sits in a special position that draws inspiration from composers like Erik Satie and John Cage, from much of the ECM catalogue of artists such as Jarrett, from vintage new age acoustic music, and also from electronica of various styles ranging from dance music to more abstract or ambient genres (sometimes quite seriously, but often as a wry parody). His melodies seem to grow organically, unfolding from very elemental materials: an interval, a chord or two, a bass note. When they have run their course, they again devolve into their constituent parts. This clever play with very fundamental aspects of musical material is one with very strong resonances in the classical music tradition but also invokes the late 20^th century minimalism of Glass and Reich, and its more far-flung spin-offs in techno, dub, and some darker regions of metal. Western tonality and its tired old repertoire of triadic chords can be boring in contemporary music, but Frahm’s work has just enough edge to it, just enough abstraction, for me to forget about this most of the time. Still, I wonder what would happen if his harmonic possibilities ranged a little further afield.

Alongside the keyboard playing and electronics, Frahm’s work has a third crucial aspect: he is also a brilliant and imaginative sound engineer. The sheer quality of sound at this concert in Brisbane was some of the best I have ever heard. Frahm tours with a very fine engineer, and his own sound system (again, we see a careful and very personal control of all the aspects and parameters of a performance), but this is only part of the secret. Engineering factors such as microphone placement are an integral part of Frahm’s music, and his piano is surrounded by a finely-crafted web of mic arrays in different registers, under-string pick-ups and probably other things less obvious to the audience. In some pieces, such as the aptly titled ‘Toilet Brushes’ (yes, this involves hitting the piano with toilet brushes—John Cage would have been delighted) it almost sounds as though there are contact mics on the piano frame itself. The result of this is a unique ability to control the sound of the piano in different registers (the very low bass register, for example was gorgeous and unearthly, like a 32-foot organ stop), and to feed specific channels through effects.

At times, as one is drawn deeper into the world of Frahm’s musical thinking, uncanny things seem to happen. The distant drone of a semi-trailer exhaust-braking hits the pitch of a bass-note. A pair of passing police sirens flutter through an open space in the treble register. It is as though Frahm has a sorcerer’s ability to absorb these ‘outside’ sounds into his unfolding performance, as if he had fore-heard them inwardly.

Certainly, the full-house audience (with many bushranger beards and vintage party frocks in evidence) seemed to be strongly affected by this concert, judging by the careful attention with which people listened. Even the most simple of Frahm’s songs do seem to touch something deep in us, at a collective cultural level if that is possible. At times his music felt like a physical presence moving across the hall, the deep, slow breathing of something bigger than all of us, a zeitgeist. For all the horrors of the present day world (and there are dark moments even in Frahm’s work too, like the knob-twiddling that created a sound alarmingly like a heavy military helicopter coming in low), his performance seems to remind us that humans can be informed and intelligent in their work, that art can be beautiful and still true to the spirit of our times, that a person and perhaps also a society can be both critical and generous.

It ended, however, with a simple and unpretentious gesture: picking up that left sneaker and wandering off the stage a little lop-sidedly. “I’ll see you all outside after to say goodbye”, said Frahm. And he did.

– Alistair Noble

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre
The Riders by Iain Grandage
Libretto by Alison Croggon
Based on the novel by Tim Winton.
Merlyn Theatre, 4 October 2014

By Alexander O’Sullivan

Tim Winton’s enigmatic novel The Riders seemed at first an odd choice for an opera. Operas are usually the domain of loudly-expressed, extroverted feelings, confrontations and unsubtle, big ideas. In the novel, the typically Wintonesque protagonist Scully is an unsophisticated Australian man with prosaic ambitions. Reimagining him as a roaring operatic Heldenbaritone (the powerful Barry Ryan) might have proved problematic, if it weren’t for Croggon’s skill as a librettist. Her libretto succeeds in drawing focus away from Scully’s inherently unoperatic character. Instead, the focus is on his process of dealing with the past through this odyssey.

This is a challenging work, not least because of its uninterrupted length of two hours and intimate dimensions (an orchestra of fourteen and a cast of six). Grandage and Croggon have produced an opera with clearly defined structure, and I wish I had the opportunity to see it again to understand its relationships on a deeper level. Perhaps I’ll have to settle for reading Winton’s book.

There is usually a process of deabstractifying literature while adapting it to the operatic medium. Perhaps this is due to the standard treatment of libretti, with sentences dragged out over such long durations that meaning becomes difficult for the listener to comprehend. Or perhaps it is due to the greatly reduced word-count of a libretto compared to a novel, as Croggon mentions in her notes. In this case, it would have been challenging for the creators to convey the mysterious and highly oblique mood of the novel. Instead, they present one of many possible readings of it.

In the novel, Scully is renovating a small cottage in Ireland, where his wife, Jennifer, and daughter, Billie, will join him from Perth. However, his daughter arrives alone at the airport, completely mute. Scully travels to Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and France attempting to find Jennifer, but never succeeds. By contrast, the opera’s creators decided to include Jennifer (Jessica Aszodi) on stage unseen by other characters (with the notable exception of a flashback). Through this choice, they constrain the interpretation of the work to something more concrete: an exploration of the redemptive power of love. The Riders here are phantasms, manifestations of Scully’s relationship with the past.

Grandage’s score is inventive, variegated, and catholic in its borrowings from popular, folk and more avant-garde styles. At times, the relentless pounding and churning of the score left me weary, but these were relieved by the electrically contemplative recorder solos of Genevieve Lacey. Lacey’s recorder cleverly depicted Jennifer throughout the work, saturating the work with her memory, and reflecting the novel’s motif of birds (caged and free). This is Grandage’s first opera, and at times I felt as if he could have toned things down a bit. While the writing was clearly attempting to depict Scully’s confusion and weariness, the excessive loudness and tessitura of the vocal writing followed the law of diminishing returns. This was especially true in the Paris scene where Marianne (Dimity Shepherd) came off as a French caricature – a moment of drama became unintentionally comic.

On the whole, The Riders is definitely a win for Victorian Opera. The set design took Scully’s saw-horses, and assembled them into actual horses – an arresting image when the Riders make their first appearance. The chorus of Shepherd, David Rogers-Smith and Jerzy Kozlowski ably assumed a variety of roles, and the young Isabela Calderon, while clearly exhausted after a long run, was effective as Billie, Scully’s daughter (and is even about to do her VCE exams!). One must think now about the work’s future. Is this it? Will The Riders be seen again, anywhere? Or has it appeared briefly only to disappear, like VO’s other commissions (Rembrandt’s Wife, Midnight Son, The Magic Pudding)?

-Alexander O’Sullivan

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Matthew Lorenzon
“Why we are so nice”
Public talk about music journalism
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
Bendigo Library
10am, 6 September

I’d like to thank the Bendigo Library for hosting and David Chisholm for suggesting this talk, which I’m proud to say is the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music’s first fringe event. Writing it has been a great opportunity, as many of the panels and talks at the festival will be, to reflect upon what we do all year dispersed across this continent and around the world. In this talk I am basically going to explain, if not defend, the “kid-gloves” style of Australian music criticism by pointing to the economic circumstances that have shaped it. I will then show how writers and readers subvert this paradigm and how the circumstances could arise in which a new form of criticism becomes necessary.

My efforts as a journalist are currently concentrated on a contemporary music blog called Partial Durations that is supported by RealTime Magazine, which is one of the last bastions of contemporary music criticism in Australia. As you will have realised, I am terrible at coming up with titles. I was trying to think of a name for the blog but all the good puns had already been taken. I had been rifling through an archive of sketches by a composer called Xavier Darasse and came across a formal plan of a work including a section labelled “durations partielles.” When my partner suggested “Partial Durations” as a title for the blog I said “no, no, that’s really bad. I would never call the blog ‘Partial Durations’” A day later I could not think of anything better so I said “Okay, Partial Durations it is.” I then sent the title to Keith Gallasch, the editor of RealTime. He responded “No, no, we can think of something better.” A day later I called and he said “we can’t think of anything better, we’ll have to go with it.” So there it is. There’s a pun in there about partiality and impartiality, as well as the ephemerality of performance and judgment. The idea that short-form criticism is somewhere on the way to a more established and qualified judgment. Only later did I find out that it’s also a term in economics and to that I can probably attribute about half of the blog’s international traffic.

Providing a record and discussion of contemporary music in Australia is an enjoyable project in itself, though its financial prospects are not promising. Music journalism in print media went through the sort of wholesale cuts decades ago that we are only now seeing in other parts of newspapers. The effect on music writing has not been completely terrible, because writing for smaller publications frees critics from the postures of sensationalist journalism common from the nineteenth century through to the demise of newspaper music journalism in the 1980s and ‘90s. Music criticism is still, however, enmeshed in a web of conflicting commitments to performers, funding agencies and perhaps even the writer’s critical integrity.

There have always been tensions between critics and musicians. The first professor of music at the University of Melbourne, G. W. L. Marshall-Hall, told a parable to the Victorian Artists’ Gallery in 1893 (Table Talk, 12 May, 1893 [delivered 5 May]) to illustrate this eternal antagonism. He imagined “a respectable looking middle-aged gentleman, decently dressed, affecting a slight limp” entering the world on the seventh day of its creation. The critic proceeds to sit through a celestial symphony with “occasional head-shakings accompanied by half-suppressed grunts” that one can still hear in auditoriums today. The critic, whom we find is called “Mr. Satan,” proceeds to limp through heaven and the Garden of Eden, casting half-baked dispersions upon the sun, moon and the peacocks on the lawn, offering titbits of advice cloaked in self-deprecation. He takes his leave saying:

As you well know my home lies in Chaos, and our critical labours leave us no time to exercise our talents in other directions. In fact I must wish you good morning. I have to produce at least two columns by tonight and sometimes one hardly knows how to fill them up.

 There are artistic reasons for Marshall-Hall’s attack on newspaper criticism. Marshall-Hall, a radical Wagnerian in the day, was resisting the anti-German and pro-Arthur Sullivan tendencies of the “English musical renaissance” and their cheer-squad of newspaper critics. These included Joseph Bennett, who wrote of Das Rheingold that “[r]arely, indeed, do we come upon a passage that can strictly be called melodious, and, for the most part, the ear has to endure the musical equivalent of ‘bald, disjointed chat’” (Letters from Bayreuth, 41).

Marshall-Hall gives some advice to the critics, which I shall paraphrase because he gets a bit carried away at this point. He suggests that critics should withhold their critical judgment long enough to “correctly and honestly” describe their impressions of the work. Marshall-Hall assumes here Herbert Spencer’s theory of the link between musical expression and the evolution of human gesture, so that an unprejudiced hearing will inevitably reveal the emotional content of the work. I’ll translate this into contemporary terms by saying that one should try to understand a work on its own terms. Marshall-Hall argues that such an account would interest both the public and the artists, as well as edify the critic. “There is no doubt,” Marshall-Hall writes, “that in this case while the public would derive no little pleasure and benefit, the work would have a better chance of being understood, and the artist would be spared a vast amount of impertinence.” Evolutionist baggage aside, Marshall-Hall would be pleased to know that his suggested method is now the mainstay of Australian contemporary music criticism.

It could be called the “describe, explain and if you must, criticise” approach to music writing. The idea is to give the audience a sense of what it was like to experience the concert, followed by an explanation of the work on its own terms. This means trying to figure out what you thought the concert was trying to achieve. Programme notes or a chat to the performers can be quite enlightening in this regard. Criticism then follows as an evaluation of whether you thought the work actually achieved its own goals. This could be a purely musical goal, such as bringing out a particular characteristic of a work (its contrasts, its rhythmic organisation and so on) or a conceptual one. The “describe, explain and criticise” method avoids overly subjective opinions, at least to begin with, though can fall into the trap of not saying much at all.

This method of criticism lends itself to the Australian situation because the music scene is broadly distributed. It is the unofficial house style at RealTime precisely because the magazine seeks to bridge the gap between art scenes across the continent rather than to divide it into regions and camps. The style, which can often be seen as too nice or soft, is not without its critics. It is reflected in Norman Lebrecht’s observation that in Australia “the arts are still regarded as a fragile plant perpetually threatened with extinction or maybe a child with mild disabilities.” (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August, 2007). Its principal and most successful proponent, Andrew Ford, was the subject of criticism himself in a review by Philip Clark. Clark described Ford’s book, Try Whistling This, as consisting of “affable prose, laboriously reasonable opinions, cosy fireside chats written for whatever the Antipodean equivalent is of Middle England” (Gramophone, 91.1102). To me it seems that if “laboriously reasonable opinions” are what are needed to communicate a multifaceted impression of a work then Ford may continue to chat affably and Clark can go back to retweeting click bait.

Clark clearly feels more comfortable within the long tradition of sensationalist music journalism that, in Marshall-Hall’s words,

is the fault not so much of the critic but of the public at large, which, in order to be amused at its breakfast table, insists that a witty epigram fully excuses the most flagrant injustice, and that it is less important to speak the truth than to turn a sentence neatly—in whose eyes, moreover, the most ridiculous thing of all is to be in earnest.

 (It should be acknowledged that Marshall-Hall was not unknown for sensationalist antics. His casting of Satan the critic of heaven was just one public pronouncement that outraged Protestant Melbourne and led to his contract at the university not being renewed in 1901.) Marshall-Hall is referring here to the sort of nineteenth-century journalism that gives us such gems as:

We recoil in horror before this rotting odor which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint. His imagination is so incurably sick and warped that anything like regularity in chord progressions and period structure simply do not exist for him. Bruckner composes like a drunkard! (in Slonimsky, The Lexicon of Musical Invective, 80–81)

Marshall-Hall is reacting to the sensationalist style of nineteenth-century journalism whose modern heir is click bait. The Viennese writer Karl Kraus saw this style of journalism as part and parcel of the self-deception of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and the corruption of its institutions, especially the media. Kraus’ response, published in his self-funded paper Die Fackel, was biting satire couched in impenetrable prose. I don’t think Australian music journalism can lay claim to any great satirists to rival Kraus, but one would find ample fodder in the flagrant bias of Australia’s News Corp publications. What Australian music journalism can at least lay claim to is Kraus’ underlying principle of honesty in journalism and, Marshall-Hall put his finger on it, earnestness.

Despite the slightly sensationalist bent of the newly restructured Limelight Magazine, music reviewers in Australia are largely free from the requirement to write click bait. But perhaps more than in other countries, Australian critics perform the function of, if you will excuse the oxymoron, impartial peer reviewers. Critics are forced into this position because public arts funding panels are so short on music specialists. When assessing a musician’s application, the rest of the panel must rely upon supporting documentation including reviews from authoritative sources. If a musician with an excellent project has no previous reviews, then their application is adversely affected. Not to seem disrespectful to my fellow writers, but is a snappy epigram from a critic really a replacement for the expert advice of an esteemed musician? This depends, perhaps, on which esteemed musician is on your board and it is great to see, only recently, the hard edge of contemporary music in Australia receiving more recognition by national funding bodies. This situation is only exacerbated by the changes in motion at the Australia Council for the Arts, as recently reported on by Jo Caust in The Conversation (5 September via RealTime). Genre-specific boards will be merged into a single pool of “peers” who will judge works based on “artistic merit” (read hunches and newspaper reviews for non-specialists), “organisational competence” (read private funding) and “contribution to the strategic goals of the Australia Council” (who knows? But the possibility of the Australia Council becoming a propaganda machine are worrying). It is clear that the funding cuts to the Australia Council will principally affect individual artist grants and small to medium organisations where the majority of contemporary music takes place.

There may even be a sort of “congratulatory inflation” at work as the reliance upon reviews leads to competition between applicants from different art forms to find the most hysterical hyperbole describing their work. Writers thus experience pressure to pepper their reviews with sound bites. This puts the reviewer in an awkward spot, because even if one were inclined to farm out sound bites, only so many composers can be the “most original voice of their generation” or an ensemble “Australia’s most dynamic interpreters of the twentieth-century canon.” The only respectable response is to ignore that whole game and give praise only where it is due. Australian writers and readers have thus clued in to the Art of Restrained Encouragement. That is, an almost Krausian strategy of discussing a work so matter-of-factly and making one’s writing so devoid of decoration that there is no way of extracting a flattering remark from it. No doubt the artists respond with ever more creative uses of ellipses in their pull-quotes.

We do this because there are other ends to music criticism than grant applications. There is awareness about the breadth of musical activity in Australia and our ability to talk about it. We need music writers because there is so much contemporary music being performed in Australia that is not being shared and discussed. Composers remake the wheel in different states and our ears stagnate. When I was compiling a weekly calendar of contemporary art music concerts for Partial Durations, before my PhD thesis got the better of me, there were at least half a dozen concerts every week. The problem was, as always, the tyranny of distance. It is the job of music writing to overcome this distance and bring all of this activity together in one place. But distance today has a weird effect on Australia! It’s not the old isolation from the world. It is now isolation from each other. In a weird way, Australian musicians are more aware of what is happening in other countries than what is happening on the other side of the continent. Musical movements that are a blip on the international map become huge here and swathes of history never reach us. I hope one day there will be a streaming service that will allow artists to easily, perhaps with the aid of an app, broadcast their concerts around the country. I should recognise here the excellent work of the ABC in recording and broadcasting some of the most important concerts. This would take the place of the first part of the “describe, explain and criticise” method and allow critics and the public to get down to the second two more quickly. For the moment, magazines like RealTime and blogs like Partial Durations will have to do. I would also one day like to be able to commission work for Partial Durations in other cities, so that it became less Melbourne-centric.

But good writers have to be trained and paid. Since journalism is thought to be less a public good than a commercial activity, there are no development grants for music journalists. RealTime often runs invaluable writer mentorship programs and some of the best guest contributors to Partial Durations have gone through that program. Nor are musicology departments naturally the place to train music reviewers, though some find an outlet for more vigorous investigation there. Musicology and journalism perform entirely different activities. Musicology departments are the only places where the in-depth analysis and research can be conducted that journalists then draw from. Until there are full-time music writing positions in Australian newspapers, this research cannot be conducted by journalists. Without more critical writing, musicians around Australia will continue to be deaf to each other and public discourse around music will suffer.

Bibliography

Bennett, Joseph. Letters from Bayreuth. London: Novello, Ewer and Company, 1877.

Ford, Andrew. Try Whistling This: Writings About Music. Collingwood: Black Inc., 2012.

Slonimsky, Nicolas. Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Zubin Kanga
Cushion Concert
The Bendigo Bank Theatre
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
10:30am, 5 September

What better way for the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music to get under way than with a new music concert for kids? Pianist Zubin Kanga didn’t hold back, but gave a full-blooded new music recital including movements from George Crumb’s Makrokosmos, Helmut Lachenmann’s Guero, David Young’s graphic score Not Music Yet, Claudia Molitor’s Tango and part of George Benjamin’s Piano Figures. The result was somewhere between a social experiment and a performance art piece as forty or so children clambered around the piano, ran around the room and coloured in printouts of piano keyboards.

I would err on the side of performance art piece. The “Bendigo Bank Theatre” may not sound like much, but it is in fact an opulent nineteenth-century salon adorned with golden Masonic suns, moons and eyes. The dark wooden door frames sport squares and compasses and in the corner lurks what appears to be a marvelous old square piano (but it could just as well be some sort of ceremonial dais). With that in mind, imagine Zubin Kanga bent over a grand piano in the middle of the room, growling and strumming his way through George Crumb’s indescribably creepy “The Phantom Gondolier” while children run in circles around a square of wooden rises intended, at least symbolically, to separate the throng from the performer. On the side of a social experiment, it was great to see how children react naturally to contemporary music, even when they appear not to be paying any attention at all. When Kanga played surging, flowing lines in response to Young’s swirling graphic score the children ran around the room. When he played thumping chords they jumped on the wooden rises and when he played a loud cluster with a forearm they, not surprisingly, yelled. Interestingly, when Kanga vaulted across the piano in Molitor’s Tango, the children stayed well away, apart from one impossibly small infant who put a pause to the entire proceedings. It was nice, amid the noise, to be able to make comments in a concert without worrying about being told off. I imagine the atmospheres at eighteenth-century concerts were not dissimilar, apart from the colouring-in, though that would be a great addition to concerts everywhere.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but Victoria does not actually have the most cyclists per capita in Australia. That award goes, according to the 2013 Australian Cycling Participation survey, to the Northern Territory, which has the highest percentage of regular cyclists in both metropolitan and regional areas. The NT is followed closely by the ACT, with its novel footpath-riding laws and network of bike paths. Canberra could not, however, be considered Australia’s most “bike-friendly” city. From my own personal survey (though I have never been cycling in Darwin), I can claim that Melbourne is the city where you are least likely to have a bottle, a handful of fast food wrappers, or abuse hurled at you. It might be said that Melbourne’s attitude to cycling is more passionate than it is widespread and if, like me, you form part of the immense cross-section of people who both love cycling and love contemporary music, then you are thinking about how to get your bike to the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music on Friday.

If you hadn’t thought about the ease of coasting between venues on your own two-wheeled steed, then there is another reason to do so. BIFEM will be hosting a performance of Mauricio Kagel’s work for 111 bicycles, Eine Brise.The “Transient Action” requires the riders to form a single, noisy peloton and careen through the streets performing pre-established sequences of sounds including ringing bells, whistling and so on. Unfortunately the organisers are a little short of the desired number, though the performance can still go ahead with reduced forces.

If you’d like to participate, sign up here. The only commitment required from you is to attend a rehearsal at 1pm on Sunday at the Tom Flood velodrome (which will be very close to the action on your bike). This is one hour before the performance wreaks its ecstatic havoc upon the city of Bendigo.

Now, to the problem of getting your beloved bicycle to Bendigo. The good news is that bikes can travel free on VLine trains from Melbourne. The bad news is that the trains running to Bendigo have limited space for bikes and there could be a glut of Brisers on Friday morning. I would therefore like to ask anybody driving to Bendigo with spare room on their bike rack or ute (you’re taking your ute to BIFEM, right?) to please offer that space to cyclists, perhaps in the comments below, who might otherwise not be able to participate.

I hope to see and hear you in the Eine Brise peloton!

A big congrats to Phoebe Green, Joshua Hyde and Alex Raineri for winning prizes at this year’s Darmstadt International Summer Course. That’s three Australians out of eight individual awards. Ashley Fure from the United States (composition) and Distractfold Ensemble from Great Britain have been awarded the prestigious Kranichstein Music Prize.

Until next year! Can’t wait to catch up with returning Darmstadters at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music next month.

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

The latest issue of RealTime is brimming with contemporary music. Greg Hooper has reviewed a concert by the hyperactive and hypertalented Syzygy Ensemble for DeClassifiedMusic in Brisbane, including works by Ives, Romitelli and David Dzubay. Hooper has also been able to get along to Kupka’s Piano‘s farewell gig (works by Murail, Eötvös, Lim, Kurtag and Dean) before half of them moved to Belgium and they all nipped over to Darmstadt for a spell. Clinton Green has written on the Liquid Architecture festival, including an interview on sound art with Danni Zuvela and Susan Phillipz. Chris Reid has reported back from a concert of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen composed during May 1968, which was directed by Stephen Whittington at Adelaide University. For the annual music education piece I review Peter Tregear’s essay “Enlightenment or Entitlement.” I also review Inverse Spaces: Elizabeth Welsh and Kim Tan’s concert of spatially-oriented works by Clementi, Scelsi, Nono, Donatoni and Hosokawa.