In our ongoing debate about the music that Australian orchestras play – whether it properly reflects Australian identity and cultural diversity, and whether it needs to – Peter Tregear discusses the rise of identity politics and argues that if we wish to defend our orchestral culture, we cannot avoid questions of musical value.
Not all that long ago it was a commonplace to hear it claimed that music was a ‘universal language’. Now, thanks in large part to the internet, it is possible to encounter a vast range of the world’s music with spectacular ease. As a result, we more readily recognise that the meanings we ascribe to music are far from universal. They are, instead, profoundly shaped by our own cultural and social contexts.
So the bottom line is: if you’re looking for anything other than straight, white and male in cultural expression, look to pop music?? Beware however that you might be ‘self-centered’ if you do?
Surely the focus should be on the music itself, rather than the person who wrote it? Personally, I don’t care whether the composer is male, female, white, black, trans or pansexual, and to skew live or on-air programming to try to represent all-comers equally is to do music itself a disservice. There are only two types of music – good or bad, and at the risk of offending some minorities, I would rather just hear the good!
Thanks Peter for this thoughtful stab at a difficult subject. It’s one that many of us have complex and contradictory opinions on, but they’re not easy ones to articulate publicly – or for that matter even between friends who are in the biz, who struggle to reconcile their love and practice of the music with the various institutional, funding, and political constraints, perverse incentives and frameworks that are generated by people and entities for whom, I think it’s safe to say, most of what you (or I) care about is Martian gobbledygook. There’s a lot of painful knots there, and that’s before you even get to the toxic currents of the -isms or our political class’s seeming aversion to the arts.
Thanks for weighing in!
The question already presupposes the answer, does it not? With such a premise, that we must come to art always-already seeking a version of ourselves, or, equally, offended when we don’t, we can only see or hear what we are prepared to see or hear. Can we no longer allow, rather, for the possibility of objective truth in aesthetic experience? Or is our experience of art all now nothing more than a form of solipsistic self-reinforcement?