The meeting of the sort-of-weekly rare opera club has been such a great way to get through the pandemic. We have watched a wide variety of works, many I wouldn’t normally engage with. And the discussions that arise from them are fascinating. I want to acknowledge some of these excellent people I’ve been sharing ideas with in the group - composer Kym Dillon, flutist Kim Tan, pianist Dean Skye Lucas, singer Heather Fletcher, singer Daniel Todd, director Daniel Sinfield and singer and performance coach Cailin Howarth.
One recent discussion was from viewing Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now. This is a remarkable piece of theatre. The discussion we had with this piece touched on how many modern “operas” are really difficult to categories. The term opera doesn’t really fit with many pieces, and this one. The whole experience is extraordinary and I would recommend you engage with the piece. I would love to experience it in person. The video did not give it justice, especially from an aural perspective. There is an incredible patchwork of sound going on, and I felt that I needed a better acoustic to experience the stunning complexity. I would also recommend this lecture from Chaya about the piece.
I’m not going to do my usual exploration of the composer and the piece for this blog post. I still feel this work is settling in me, and I haven’t gotten to the core of my response to it.
However, I do want to talk about one ideas that was raised in our club meeting - that of the artistic tyrant. In the video below, I was really pleased to witness the collaborative nature of Chaya and the work with other artists involved in the project. It sparked a discussion around the joy in the room one could feel toward the piece and the collaboration. It opened and enlighten some thoughts I have been having recently around collaboration and cooperation in artistic work, which is probably the thing I miss most of all about working from home and having no live performances to experience at the moment.
While I was completing my masters in conducting, we would often talk about how the age of the tyrant was over. Art organisations have been corporatised, and with that came more power to the musicians, the representation to management and the presents of unions. The famous stories of the great artistic tyrants of the past, Gustav Mahler being a well known one, can no longer happen. Organisations no longer allow the bullying behaviour that was accepted, only until relatively recently. Sometimes you get people talking about how this may mean that we wont have genius’ again, but it’s interesting to unpack that parallel. Does a “genius” artist have to be this sort of Beethovenian torched artists, fighting for their vision? I think in the age of post-modernism there isn’t a place for that, and now days people just won’t put up with pretentious, dictatorial visions.
I feel we learn and are encouraged to collaborate and negotiate more as artists, especially as musical performing artists dealing with big groups of experienced individuals. I had an experience while completing my masters where an experienced conductor of youth orchestras completely grilled me while I was on the podium in front of an orchestra, completely belittling me of any respect that the group of my peers had for me. I had and have respect for this person and their work, but I had always questioned their work manner - yelling at people in rehearsals, lack of reasoning or negotiation in their teaching method and a very unapproachable manner if you weren’t a favourite. I learnt a lot from this person in my undergraduate, both about music but also how not to run a rehearsal. But, this run in during my masters really winded me. It lead me down a path to questioning my ability to conduct work from the cannon (it was Beethoven’s Eroica that we were doing in the masterclass). In the long run this has lead me to a very fruitful path in contemporary music (most likely because I find it a much more collaborative and welcoming environment, and I just like the music more). But it’s a shame to think that all the potential I had for focusing more on the cannon went with a few disparaging remarks, made with little tact and no sense of care as a teacher. I am made of pretty tough stuff and it certainly didn’t disparage me from my path as a musician, but as I said it did effect my approach to conducting works from the cannon. It did also have some positive outcomes - it challenged me to go out and try and better my lack of knowledge for those areas of music, and it galvanised me to get better. But to this day I often think about what if this person encourage and taught me, rather then ridiculed me for my opinion? The opinion I had at the time was wrong and didn’t have correct musical judgement behind it, but instead of guiding me to a different opinion or suggesting other options it was insinuated that I hadn’t received the right sort of education. It was a glimpse into a very old fashioned value system, peppered with snobbery, status and power.
I hope to think that we have a more collaborative understanding about how to learn and how to work with people and that no one experiences what I did. It taught me a lot, but at the expense of a lot of my confidence. It also showed me about how a lot of the classical music world operates, or used to operate and how that effects structures and systems still in place in the community now. Again I feel that contemporary music is inherently more open, optimistic and pluralistic and is a huge draw card to me and the way I want to work, rather than trying to dismantle and work against the artistic tyrant legacy.