Music

Piano lessons have been a source of joy or frustration for generations of Australians. By the early twentieth century, there was a piano for every three or four Australians. Skill at the pianoforte was an accomplishment that bourgeois parents desired for their children, especially daughters.

On paper, jazz critic John Shand’s Jazz: The Australian Accent is a welcome intervention, one of the first books to take Australian jazz seriously. Shand’s prose is well paced and easy to read, if slightly glib. There is little obfuscation in his method, which is infinitely preferable to the pretensions of many jazz critics who fail to translate jazz into prose. Shand’s descriptions of music are engaging enough to make you want to listen to the musicians whose work he is describing, if only to confirm or deny the mutedly rhapsodic element of Shand’s descriptors. Unfortunately, they generally don’t live up to his prose, which you’ll discover when listening to the compilation CD that accompanies this book.

What is it that endows an actor or performer with stage presence? Jane Goodall introduces her exploration of this phenomenon with three disparate examples: Maria Callas commanding an audience of 20,000 at Epidauros, including a ten-year-old girl who would never forget the experience; Bob Dylan recalling the professional wrestler Gorgeous George making an entrance ‘in all his magnificent glory’; and a young Simon Callow, who, employed in the box office at the Old Vic, sneaks into the empty theatre and, setting foot on the stage and declaiming a few lines from Hamlet, is shocked by the ‘physical, or even psychical, power released, a small earthquake’.

Following years of debates with people who denied that Bob Dylan was worthy of serious literary study, I eventually conceded, albeit in a somewhat roundabout fashion. Having brought enjoyment and illumination to millions of people, what on earth had Dylan done to deserve being beaten about the head by literary criticism? But after a hiatus, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan has brought me up to date with the field of Dylan studies, and I can confidently declare that there is hope. This collection consists of nine ‘big picture’ essays on subjects such as Dylan as songwriter, Dylan and collaboration, Dylan and gender, and so on, followed by shorter pieces on eight of Dylan’s most influential albums (how they chose from the fifty-odd on offer is anyone’s guess).

Gordon Kerry’s New Classical Music is a valuable addition to the small body of literature about Australian composers. The author sets out by placing his project in the context of several important earlier books on the subject, notably Roger Covell’s Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (1967) and the Frank Calloway–David Tunley collection of essays, Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century (1978). Kerry’s project is rather different from either of these, however; where Covell was consciously writing history (and perhaps deliberately shaping it at the same time), and where Calloway and Tunley commissioned independent articles on major composers, Kerry attempts something much more elusive – a more or less synchronic survey of the entire field in the last thirty years.

Shots, so the media release claims, is written in ‘mesmerising prose.’ Yeah, right! This is the life story of a rock musician they are talking about. I can recall attempting to read one such memoir, a well-meaning present from a friend who might have known better. It was by Ray Manzarek, of The Doors; it was called Light My Fire (1999) and it was completely and utterly awful. Manzarek’s organ may have on occasion swooped and swirled like a graceful albatross, but his prose is as scruffy and unsociable as a giant petrel. After twenty pages, I couldn’t care less whether it was Jim Morrison or Jack the Ripper buried in that Paris graveyard. Now, here I am faced with the journal of another borderline celebrity with too much time on his hands, a keyboardist from an ‘iconic’ rock band to boot. This book could not be anything other than a waste of everyone’s time.

Yet another book on Wagner. Given the title, you might expect it to be an investigation of Wagner’s complex relationship with Nietzsche or, failing that, a study which, like Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886), attempts to push the examination of a given subject beyond the limits to which it hitherto has been confined. The blurb on the dust jacket appears to suggest the latter: ‘Deathridge engages the debates that have raged about him [Wagner] and moves beyond them, towards a fresh and engaging assessment of what Wagner ultimately achieved.’ Well, yes and no.

It seems astonishing that one of the most important studies ever undertaken on Mozart should have taken almost eighty-five years to reach the English language. Hermann Abert’s monumental, and indeed famous, work was first published in 1924 and was originally intended as an updated edition to that other monumental work of Mozart scholarship undertaken by Otto Jahn, published in four volumes between 1855 and 1859.

In early 1980, Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin undertook yet another concert tour. One of their last concerts together was in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. There was a dismal yellow standard lamp for light and a revolving stage so that all the patrons could get value for money. The master of ceremonies introduced them as ‘Ham-erica’s own ... Yoohoo and Heffi Menhoon’. These exceptional siblings had been playing music together since 1932, usually in more salubrious venues. Yehudi often spoke of their liaison spirituelle and their ‘Siamese soul’. Their first public concert took place in 1934, in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. By 1980 it had become one of the longest and richest partnerships in the history of chamber music.

Rock’n’roll romanticism can stand in for many things: the sense of lost authenticity, lost freedom, lost youth, the good old days before music was composed by machines and performed by underwear models and all the pubs were turned into gambling venues. The passion, the music, the soul: Venero Armanno’s new novel is about all that, though one of its main faults is that it is always telling you what it is about rather than making you feel it. It is not primarily self-congratulatory – Armanno makes fun of rock wannabes always on the verge of failure – but that note is never far off, and the book still seems to be trying to write its own blurb.