In recent months Limelight has been examining the issues arising from Ciaran Frame’s 2020 Living Music Report, as to whether the music played by our orchestras reflect us – and to what extent it ought to. The series so far has featured articles by Ciaran Frame, writer/actor/composer/pianist Phil Scott, composer Felicity Wilcox and musician and author Peter Tregear. They follow a major feature by Amanda Harris, which ran in our May 2021 issue, which examined issues around representation and cultural appropriation in Australian music history. These pieces have sparked debate among our readers and led to a number of comments via email, social media and on our website. Here are some of the responses we have received.
Image: cottonbro, Pexels
I’ve been following the intelligent and passionate debate in Limelight over the past few months, about the need to include more orchestral repertoire by female composers in our orchestra’s programs. Many good points have been made about the reasons our orchestras play the existing cannon of masterworks, as well as their value to us as a society. The issue of “what...
It’s good to see the debate is continuing–long may it do so! A more diverse repertoire of music in our public life would surely be a great thing, but what that should mean in practice should also remain properly a matter of open debate.
I am not sure that a claim to be ‘contemporary’ –for instance–is, in and of itself, a self-evident good. If we want our art to reflect ourselves, who, and which bits of it, precisely? Should our art reflect our The Post-Truth bits? The hyper-commercialised neo-liberal bits? Or, should it not in fact help up question and critique current norms and values. And even then, surely the question of what is ‘good’ art remains to be considered–we can’t simply resolve it by drawing attention just to the identity of the artist. Indeed, while it is self-evidently true that “music has always been created by living beings with lives and contexts that are not separate from the work they create”, it is also true that the opposite is not the case. Musical works self-evidently accrue layers of meaning and contexts removed from the musicians who create them, and one marker of ‘good’ music, I think, is its capacity to do just this. Music is thus _not_ ultimately limited to the confines, or politics, of identity of who creates it (Wagner’s operas being one obvious example of this).
In one sense, then, discriminating (in its widest sense) is the most important thing we do as artists (composers, performers, programmers, etc) Without it, we risk simply measuring our creative life to the rule of Narcissist’s reflection.