Practical, or poor advice?

I read a very interesting post on Don Aitkin's blog this morning which was inspired by the National Arts Summit which recently took place in Canberra, Australia.  I have a lot of respect for Don, and he offers an interesting perspective on what took place at the summit.  You can read Don's post here.

I wasn't there myself, but I've attended many similar kinds of events in Australia on previous occasions and what Don reported sounded like the usual kind of discussion.  I found Don's post interesting from the perspective of the complex issue of careers for artists. Some ideas, however, seemed to be worth a little more unpacking, hence my own post.

One issue raised at the summit was that of arts expenditure, and that people would like to see greater investment in the arts.  Don suggested that doubling the funding would only double the number of disappointed applicants.  I'm not sure I agree for three reasons.  The first is that applications are peer-assessed, so projects that are not of a suitably high standard are not funded.  The second reason I'm inclined to disagree is that a recent Australia Council study found that there is a large amount of unfunded independent talent in Australia - that is, projects that are of a high standard but there aren't enough funds to go around.  The third point to make is that there is a major discrepancy in arts funding in Australia in the way that the existing funding pie is divided.

Most trained artists will not find jobs in major performing arts organisations, but most of the funding for music goes to a small number of large organisations that in general (in the classical music field at least) present standard repertoire in the most costly formats - that is large scale works in major concert halls, with significant management and administrative infrastructure attached. So when an independent artist asks for more funding, or suggests that more funding would make a difference there are huge differences of scale. A relatively small amount of money, say $2000, made available at the right time to an emerging artist, can completely change the direction of their creative life. The same amount, invested in a major company would probably cover tea and coffee supplies for a year. A life-changing investment?  I'm not so sure.

I also hold the view that the majority of innovation in classical/fine music in Australia is currently taking place in the independent sector. We ignore to our own detriment the value of the work of independent artists who are truly at the coal face, encountering the reality of 21st century life in ways that better funded, large institutions can ignore to a certain degree.  Independent work merits greater acknowledgement and respect within the current funding framework because that sector is better placed to deliver the kind of innovation and developments that arts sector reports often recommend.  Discussions about arts funding, given the enormous size of the independent sector, need to consider lone artists much more seriously as genuine stakeholders in the Australian cultural conversation.

Another theme Don mentioned was the low standing of the arts in our community and how this impacts the demand for artists.  Don hinted at a future in which he thought there would be many more participators than spectators.  As such, it was suggested that young artists needed to accept that there was not a need for so many practicing artists, but rather more interest in young artists becoming teachers because that is where they could be of most use.  Though that may be the case, in obtaining a degree, many undergraduate performance students hope that their qualification and their hard work will eventually give them access to professional status and performance opportunities. When other industry professionals and leaders express that it would be better for young artists to develop their own creativity in ways that might be employed in fields other than their field of choice - education was the example offered - it is perhaps understandable that some of the younger members of the summit audience might have been disappointed.

This is particularly important in relation to the points made about creativity.  Elitist art making and individual creativity are not as separate as Don describes.  To begin with, what might drive a young artist to want to become a professional often stems from a powerful early encounter with the arts and one's own creativity (Jane Davidson's research on musician identity is illuminating here).  If we really mean what we say about the importance of creativity then I'm not sure it's right to be suggesting to young music students, who have already undertaken the first major steps on the pathway to a creative life, to reconsider the self-interest behind what they are doing quite so easily.  I think this leads us to give advice to young artists that is often received as demoralising and unhelpful.  I offer this perspective as someone who has both received the advice from others, and also as someone who has been in the position of teaching career skills at University level for music students.

This brings me to my final point about the way in which we approach creative careers and practical realities.  If we view things from the perspective of an institutional infrastructure under strain because there are not enough funds to go around, or because it is becoming increasingly expensive for Universities to sustain Conservatorium-style studies, then it makes sense to say that there are simply not enough jobs and that students should consider pursuing other avenues.  However, if we look at the problem from the artist's perspective things change.  Acknowledging the considerable level of personal and financial investment that goes into pursuing an artistic career as the basis for a discussion requires a rethinking of the ways in which we counsel artists to develop their careers.  Not preparing students enough about real world challenges is one problem.  But it is also just as problematic to advise young artists that they need to think of having a day job AND an artistic career without proper consideration of the long term implications of that idea in the context of building an ongoing artistic practice.  There are damaging psychological effects of present approaches to higher education of music students which are evident in recent Australian research.  Dawn Bennett's work is one example.  Jane Davidson has also completed some longitudinal studies in the UK in this area as well.

I have no doubt that it would be very convenient for both Universities and funding organisations if less people wanted to be artists, and some of the tone of Don's blog suggested a pragmatic approach of trying to funnel people into different channels and models of work and creative expression.  This isn't quite as easy as it sounds, however, from the perspective of the young artist at the beginning of their career.  The research of Creech, Papageorgi et al in the UK and Parkes in the US show 'reality' from the point of view of the aspiring artist to be quite different from the advice that seemed to be put forward at the summit.

There is a lot more that I could add here from my own vantage point as someone who has chosen to maintain my artistic practice.  I'm very glad that not all my career choices have been realistic.  I'm also very glad that there have been many times when I have chosen to ignore well-intentioned advice about being more practical or strategic which would have led me away from my artistic work and into other domains.  I have approached my career from many angles over the last 15 or so years and I think if I had been there as a panelist, I would have taken a slightly different approach in the conversation that might go something like this:

The first thing we should be asking young artists is:  'Given you have invested all this time, what are you hoping to gain?  And given that the environment is tough, how do you plan to respect and continue to develop your talent?' These are questions of an entirely different genre to 'Have you thought about becoming a music teacher instead?' or 'What will your day job be?'.  These are the broader philosophical questions that young artists need to be encouraged to take on if we want to improve the standing of the arts in our community, or to increase meaningful participation (or spectating) in the arts.  This kind of reflection is better able to provide the tools for young artists to decide their own way forward, and to determine the skills they will need.  Being a good professional artist for me involves a very considered view about what you and doing and why, and developing the techniques with which to express that understanding.  I think encouraging students to move too quickly into other fields for practical reasons (to ease the demand on arts funding bodies or in order to manage expectations or meet demand elsewhere) carries with it the risk that this essential thinking does not take place - and then we have a generation of young, future leaders working in arts organisations and schools who don't fully know why they are there except for some vague notion that they somehow 'failed'.  (See Bennett's thesis for a detailed Australian study, and Huhtanen for her Finnish study).

I felt that the final remark in Don's post about telling people to follow their dreams, but to have a day job was a bit like advising people to go straight to Plan B.  There were obviously a number of experienced leaders present at the summit, but given that the discussion was clearly making the younger artists present unhappy, I wonder:  to what degree are we responsible for being honest about the perspective from which we offer our view of 'reality', and to what degree do we need to be aware of the bigger picture for artists, including the management of their own motivation?  Listening to a group of panelists telling you that your dreams are unlikely to come true would be hard for many enthusiastic and passionate young musicians to hear.

I'm certain that this isn't the only message young artists should be hearing, though.  Despite the real difficulties inherent in creative professions, we still do need artists and not only teachers, or waiter/artists or accountant/artists.  To be really excellent in a given field, one needs to be devoted to it, and that takes time.  Although I wasn't present, I felt that some of what was reported seemed to encourage 'careers of compromise.' The problem with this approach to building an artistic life is that leaves a major hole in our field because we risk ending up with lots of emerging artists who eventually give up...leaving us with very few mid-career and senior artists because everyone went back to that second job Don refers to.  Culturally, that's a frightening idea for the long term development of artistic activity in Australia and we lose a lot of talented people and great ideas in the process.  I had a wonderful harmony teacher during my students days, and one afternoon we were discussing the notion of talent, and how to tell if a student was talented enough to make it.  I remember very clearly her response:  'Who am I to say who is talented enough to make it, and who isn't?'  Something worth keeping in mind.

Please contact me if you'd like more details on the references given here.

Composers make the best lovers

At the moment, much of my work centres around new music, within the context of performance environments that are somehow altered or enhanced from a traditional concert experience.  I’ll give a few ‘standard’ recitals this year, but for the most part my work has involved me dancing and playing or singing and playing or working with video and sculpture and surround sound.  My attraction to extending the performance space for both myself as a performer and for audiences is simple:  I’m a contemporary artist.  I happen to have a traditional, classical training, and all the great things that come with that understanding of musical craftsmanship, but I’m applying those skills in creative ways with a creative ‘family’ of people that I’ve gathered around me.  Some of them I meet at festivals or other performances, many I have met overseas. 

I know, however, you might be curious to know why composers make the best lovers? ‘Not saxophone players? Or Trumpet players?’, you might ask... :) Well, when someone writes a new piece, or writes for a specific performer, I’m going to suggest that there is a lot of love in that transaction regardless of the final selection of sounds.  There is a completely different understanding of the music to be gained if we listen to it and approach it as a lover’s gift instead of something to be tolerated when sandwiched between the Mozart and the Beethoven. 

I've commissioned or performed a lot of new works in recent years and I wanted to reveal something of what it feels like to play music that is written for you by a person that you know well enough to get glimpses into the compositional process.  Three current works I’m preparing for premieres in December all have that characteristic.  Drew Crawford, Sydney based composer, has written me a gorgeous, joyful work for tarogato and electronic sounds which are entirely sourced from the instrument itself.  We made a sound library together.  We’ve discussed ideas for about 18 months and last week we were finally having the first rehearsal of his piece.  The same day, I sat at the piano with Elena Kats-Chernin until midnight while she revised a piece she wrote as a gift for me in 2011, painstakingly going over every note and chord to make sure everything was just right.  Just this morning I woke up to a new work from Carlos Lopez Charles for clarinet, electronics and video.  I live with Carlos, and I’ve lived through much of the growth of the early life of this piece, the ‘a ha!’ moments, the beginnings of ideas and sounds.  Drew and Elena are friends so I have a slightly different insight than simply asking for a piece and receiving it in my inbox sometime later.  So I have some sense of how much time these works took to write – and it is both thrilling and humbling to get to be the person who is going to perform these works and sharing them with audiences for the first time.  This blog post is really about wanting to express my own feelings about being part of this process and how I feel privileged to be a part of it, but it does get me wondering about how audience views of new music might change, and indeed new art works of any kind, if they had a greater sense of the level of effort that goes into their creation.  I’m seeing it first-hand everyday in my own work. I find these new works – both sonically and conceptually – really inspiring.  To me they are love letters to creativity, both in terms of honouring one’s own, and in sharing that with others.

I’ve been reading a lot.  A. Lot.  I started a PhD last year and for quite a few months now, I’ve been in my literature review phase where the objective is to gain an awareness and understanding of the major themes in scholarship surrounding your chosen topic.  One of the areas of literature I’ve been digging into is concerned with the demise of classical music, and so I read today with interest an article by Philip Hensher with the title, Will nobody mourn the death of classical music?  It was, as death-of-classical-music articles go, standard fare:  society is changing, declining audiences, nobody cares anymore, who will be listening in 100 years etc etc.  Whilst there is evidence that suggests that both society, and consequently audiences for classical music, are changing, I wanted to point out something that was absent from Hensher’s list of concerns about the health of classical music.

It has to do with what his article reveals about some of the biases of classical music through what he doesn't say.  In this case I’m writing about the biases that get in our way.  I'm tired of reading about people who are mourning the death of classical music, or talking about declining standards when they could be writing constructively about the issue from another angle.  A more illuminating angle that would make classical music sound like less of a hard luck case, heading for extinction.  What about an article, for example, from the perspective of the generation of musicians who are caught up in the middle of what amounts to a major paradigm shift, that will be at least or probably more influential than the industrial revolution, and the creative ways they are responding to the changing priorities of our society?  When you consider the magnitude of the shift we are experiencing, Hensher doesn't even begin to articulate what's really going on.  Nor does he mention the people who will really make a difference to the classical music equation.  I love the Proms, but a big classical music festival isn’t going to ‘save’ the art form.  It will be the vast body of unrecognised talent that is largely unfunded (see the recent Australia Council review for an estimate of the dollar value of this unfunded talent in the independent sector - and that's just people who apply for grants).  In that sense I find Hensher’s article highly disrespectful to all the artists I know who do brilliant work, are often underpaid for it, and whose contribution to the artistic life of their communities goes largely unremarked.  Maybe the problem isn't one of declining interest in classical music.  Maybe it's more about the limited interest we show, through our broader discourse, in the people who are quietly saving classical music one person at a time.

Beautiful Dreamer

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

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 charmingly dated, even though we recognise that many of the effects were pretty 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

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

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...