nicole canham

Beautiful Dreamer

2011-10-05T04:53:00.000-07:00

This year I've been thinking a lot about the idealistic, dreamy side of me (which informs and inspires much of my creative work), and the ways it might have happy experiences when coming into contact with the challenges of daily life. I suspect there would be many people who might suggest that I could be more realistic in my expectations, perhaps, or more understanding of the different kinds of very real limitiations that impact the existence of a freelance artist. There can be a lot of tension in that equation accompanied by a reluctant feeling that reality will win out at some point. But what if the solution actually lay in relying even more on the imagination and the world of ideas? Not just my own, but of the people all around me?

I've just had an essay published by Currency House Press. It's called Democracy versus Creativity in Australian Classical Music, and in the paper I propose some new ways of engaging people with the arts in general, but in this case, with classical music. I was talking about the paper with some lovely friends of mine today, and one of them asked me what the title meant. It was a little bit like one of those moments in a Woody Allen movie where someone has just said something very heartfelt and passionate and the other character says, 'but what does that even mean?'

The title of the paper refers to the Australian Government's Creative Nation cultural policy document from 1994 which outlined a vision of excellent creators – artists – making work that would be available to everyone - appreciators. Artists and arts organisations would be responsible for both the quality of the art product and democratic access to it.

I think this has caused two things to happen:

1. Is that our own traditions together with the idea of democratic access to the arts has focussed our creativity within classical music in very specific directions which are out of touch with contemporary culture. That's frustrating because many people have worked very hard to cater to the appreciator and through this to generate a feeling of the arts being something that we can all connect with and through somehow.

2. In catering for the appreciator in people, we have limited the development of techniques that reach out to the inner creator or artist in people. We are all creative, in a thousand little ways, every day. We are also often great collaborators – but we do this in the private realm rather than in public life.

Creating opportunities and experiences for appreciators (audiences), where they can spend a bit of time considering things from the perspective of the creator...that’s where the real value of the artist lies in our society.

The future of the world will increasingly be based on ideas and the value of those ideas. Artists have an important role in society because they often approach things in unique ways and they bring quite particular and valuable insights to many different situations. A society of spectators alone will not find solutions to the challenges that we currently face, not only in terms of maintaining traditions of art making like classical music, but also in preserving our planet. Giving people the opportunity to discover the creative, collaborative aspect of themselves through new kinds of arts encounters is the way to bring wonderful art forms like classical music back into people’s lives in a much more powerful way than simply getting someone to buy a ticket. My own creative work increasing focusses on this area of connecting artists and artforms with new audiences of creator/appreciators - check out Polyartistry's Polyopera project with Opera Australia to see our team in action, creating experimental video operas with people from all over Sydney. So here's to all those beautiful dreamers out there...I'm looking forward to meeting you soon.

What Classical Music could learn from Doctor Who

2011-07-31T02:36:00.001-07:00

I’m a huge Doctor Who fan, having seen many of the old episodes growing up and now loving the new BBC series. It is interesting to observe the ways in which the developments in television and technology have enhanced the production values of the show. No more aliens that look like they’ve been made out of papier mache, being pulled along on wheels with fishing wire attached somewhere so that we don’t see it. There is something about the earlier, lo-fi versions that is now quite charmingly dated, even though we recognise that many of the effects were quite cutting edge for their day - especially some of the experimental, electronic sounds in the music which makes the original series well worth checking out from that perspective alone.

What hasn’t changed, however, is the Doctor flying in, quickly taking in a situation and immediately setting about righting a wrong or giving a helping hand armed with the resources of his own intellect and experience, his sonic screw driver as his only tool, a trusted companion and then whatever (or whomever) else comes to hand. How does this relate to classical music? Well, sometimes it might be more helpful to approach the question of how we might connect with more people from the perspective of the outsider with a different set of tools and experience, rather than being encumbered by the knowledge of the insider/specialist. It slows us down in the quest to find new and imaginative ways to give people positive encounters with the arts. And in a country like Australia where our population comes from 200 countries around the world, and 50 percent of us were born overseas or have one or both parents born overseas, we can’t assume that everyone has had equal or even a limited amount of exposure to the classical art forms – western or eastern.

What would be our ‘sonic screwdriver’ in this equation? Tapping into what we all have in common in order to create greater appreciation, understanding and resonance might be it... beginning with the idea that the creative impulse which might drive us to work in our garden, or save up for a fancier car, or renovate our bathroom stems from the same source as great art. Our most revered and cherished music, paintings, operas and ballets contain messages for us all on both an entertainment and social level, in addition to providing spaces where we might mull over a broader agenda of bigger issues. All of us have a certain degree of inbuilt technology for receiving that wisdom - those silent, everyday acts of creativity are proof of it. The challenge to artists and arts organisations who want to lead, and to meaningfully share classical art forms with other people is to generate opportunities for people to callibrate their thinking to understand that.

On the importance of teachers

2010-04-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

My beloved first piano teacher, Nance Brennan passed away towards the end of last year. At almost 90 years of age it was hardly surprising I suppose, and it had been over 20 years since I had studied with her. But I was struck at the depth of my feeling and my sadness at the loss of someone who had made such an impression on me at a particular time in my life.

We spend so much time talking about how we can measure the impact of the arts, and assess the benefits of music or arts and culture in the education of a child. We want to see statistics, to superimpose the kinds of structures and methodology we find elsewhere over the top of experiences that simply do not belong in this realm. Did my piano lessons make me better at maths? I have no idea. What I do know is that for about 8 years of my life, going to Mrs Brennan’s house to play the piano, discovering Bach, and Chopin and Debussy with her in her suburban house with a big garden full of trees and birds, was the highlight of my week. ‘What have you got for me today?’ she would ask, and off we would go. I always liked to learn other new pieces on my own but was sometimes too shy to admit it; she came to understand this pretty quickly and would often ask me if I had tried this or that other piece, and would then be full of praise for work I had undertaken off my own bat. Nurturing my fledgling sense of initiative I guess.

My father, who took us to our lessons, formed a great friendship with Mr Brennan’s husband, Frank. They talked about the land and farming and other passions. I like to think that the time we spent there was beneficial for our whole family – my father, a single parent, having some time out for a chat with a friend, whilst his kids were engaged in studying music.

Through Mrs Brennan, I have an abiding love of Chopin that will continue until the day I die and a deep appreciation of the poetic beauty of his aesthetic. She really awakened me to my own profound love of music. I remember my first lesson on a Chopin Waltz when she showed me how to play rubato, and the most delicious moment where she taught me that sometimes it was very much in the style to play the right and left hand downbeats of the bar NOT together (!). A technique I probably totally abused to my own extreme enjoyment for years afterwards.

With all our technology and methods of measurement, we still have no way of capturing the value of what I learned from that extraordinary, wonderful lady. The quiet appreciation of beauty, the benefits of consistent effort, patience; a positive weekly presence, as much a part of my life as brushing my teeth, or my grandmother’s sponge cake with passionfruit icing. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to measure things like that, but that in no way means that we shouldn’t value it. What we can and should do, is acknowledge it when we have the good fortune to meet people in our life who bring out something in us that we can admire.
Vale Nance Brennan.

A beginning

2010-04-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

Last night I was shamed into making my first blog post. Everything has been sitting here, set up for a while, but life seemed to take over and in between writing other things, playing the clarinet, performing, discovering my new tarogato and planning for the coming months somehow my first blog post never made it into the ether. So here it is now, along with an invitation to join a conversation with me about art and the place that it has in life – my life, your life, the life of our immediate community and our country. I think those of us who are artists or working in the arts can too easily forget that for many people what we are so passionately involved with is not considered important, and certainly not necessary. The purpose of stimulating any kind of ongoing conversation or debate through a forum like this is really to see if we can’t collectively try to ‘MacGyver’ a new arts radar and system of measurement for ourselves and for others. It might make a good iphone app. actually...