Music

In the course of its seventy-five years, the ABC has maintained a variety of in-house live music ensembles, including symphony orchestras, radio choruses, dance bands, a show band, military band and string quartet. In its capacity as a concert agency, the national broadcaster has been responsible for touring an astonishing array of artists. Claudio Arrau, John Barbirolli, Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer, Rafael Kubelík, Yehudi Menuhin, Birgit Nilsson, Eugene Ormandy, Artur Schnabel, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Isaac Stern, and Igor Stravinsky all made at least one visit to our shores, thanks to the concert-giving activities of the ABC. High-end classical music traffic in and out of the country has been so intense over the years that, at one point, piano legend Arthur Rubinstein crossed paths with violin virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman in remote Daly Waters in the Northern Territory (their inbound and outbound planes were refuelling at the time). To the Polish-born classical music celebrities, outback Australia in 1937 must have seemed as strange and unlikely a meeting place as deepest, darkest Congo. Rubinstein couldn’t resist exclaiming to his startled friend, ‘Dr Huberman, I presume!

Attempting to theorise or intellectualise rock‘n’roll, one could argue, is to miss the point. As Almost Famous’s egomaniac Stillwater vocalist Jeff Bebe put it, ‘I don’t think anyone can really explain rock‘n’roll – [except] maybe Pete Townsend’. In which case, Bebe would probably get a kick out of editor Theo Cateforis’s lovingly composed The Rock History Reader, which, unlike other publications in a similar vein, allows the theorising and intellectualising – the explaining – to nestle alongside autobiographical passages and personal anecdotes, providing a complex view of rock’s annals. If you didn’t already know who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp, you’ll probably find more than a few clues in this volume.

A little over a year ago, the contents of George W Bush’s iPod were made public. The revelation offered momentary respite to the beleaguered president as the international press seized upon the playlist, scrutinised its contents and, much to the relief of the White House, made tallies of song titles and popular music genres instead of the latest casualties in Iraq. IPod One, as it was dubbed, was shown to be heavy on country and western music and 1970s rock, and light on just about everything else. ‘No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles,’ reported the London Times.

During the last dozen years of his life, from the initial diagnosis of leukaemia in September 1991 until his death in September 2003, Edward Said continued to lead an astonishingly active life: travelling, lecturing, writing, conversing with seemingly undiminished energy, even as his physical powers sharply declined. When his New York physician gently suggested it might be wise to slow down, he replied that nothing would kill him more quickly than that; boredom seemed a more lethal adversary than the cells invading his body. What kept Said quite literally alive was an unflagging engagement with what he saw to be the most pressing cultural and political issues of his time. That engagement is fully evident in the works that have appeared since his death, such as Humanism and Democratic Criticism and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map, both published in 2004. On Late Style, another posthumous collection, reflects a further and unsurprising preoccupation throughout these final years. The book explores the manner in which artists and writers often acquire a new idiom or mode of expression – what Said terms a ‘late style’ – during the last stages of their creative lives.

Tracing both the frisson between city and outback realities and the impact of politics on the music scene, Singing Australian is not only about the intersections between folk and country music and their appropriations from a raft of other genres; it is also an insightful chronicle of Australia’s struggle for identity as a post-colonial society, the search for nationhood through song and an expansive panorama of this country’s social history.

Plastered makes an ambitious claim for band posters ‘as barometers of cultural relevance [which] can offer real-time social commentary and political satire’. Although the book never quite substantiates this claim, it is a valuable work, not least because of its beautiful reproductions of band posters. Most of the posters derive primarily from the collection of Nick Vukovic, an inveterate collector. Vukovic is so keen to show off his collection that even posters of little artistic value, ‘designed to get bums off seats and nothing more’, are impeccably and inexplicably reproduced in the book.

ABR readers may be more familiar with Louis Kahan’s illustrations for Clem Christesen’s Meanjin or with his portrait of Patrick White (which won the Archibald Prize in 1965) than with his sketches of musicians, but this stylish book from Macmillan Art Publishing reveals not just the fluidity of Kahan’s style but also his passion for music and music-makers. And what a range of artists he could draw on (mostly at rehearsals) during the second half of his life. Present-day concert-goers, inured to leaner rostrums resulting from high fees and a faded currency, will marvel at the list of luminaries who performed here during the three decades after the war. There is Claudio Arrau (1947), grave and poetic; Otto Klemperer (1950), Olympian, bespectacled; a young Lorin Maazel (1961), gaunt and driven like a Schiele self-portrait; Luciano Pavarotti (1965) before the years of glory and girth; and Marian Anderson (1971), mighty in her sensible hat.

To state the case bluntly, is there in fact any place for opera in the twenty-first century? What is the use of opera? Many would say that it is a moribund art form, traditional and arthritic, class-ridden, a minority and élitist pursuit of an arcane society harbouring secret rituals in the mode of cabbalists with their adherence to vision and the genealogy of seers. My questions suggest some kind of crisis. Yet they are unanswerable because, like all art at a profound level, opera is useless.

Charles Osborne, who was born in Brisbane in 1927 and moved to London in 1953, is a prolific writer, broadcaster and opera critic. His latest offering, The Opera Lover’s Companion, sets out to guide its reader through 175 of the world’s most popular operas. Osborne correctly states that ‘the staples of the operatic diet today are the major works of five great composers – Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss’ – and certain works by other luminaries. The operas of sixty-seven composers are included, but that core quintet gives us almost a third of the operas in this volume. Interestingly, in opera’s four hundred-year history, the vast majority of the most frequently performed works fall within the period between Mozart’s first featured opera, Mitridate, rè di Ponto (1770) and Strauss’s last, Capriccio (1942).

As with The New Kobbé’s Opera Book (1997), the list reveals a re-evaluation of many previously neglected operas, in particular some lesser-known works of Handel, Rossini, Donizetti, Massenet, and Strauss, which have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Doubtless this also reflects the dearth of modern operas and the scarcity of contemporary composers who know what their audiences want. Any opera company ignoring box office appeal does so at its peril, and a book such as this should be mandatory reading.

A 'ground-breaking’ analysis of the Beatles through their lyrics? One is put irresistibly in mind of  the cover of Abbey Road: barefoot Paul McCartney out of step with his fellows, apparently confirming the sad circumstance at which John Lennon had hinted in the last line of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’: ‘I buried Paul.’ Except, of course, that what Lennon really slurred was: ‘I’m very bored.’ And that McCartney, far from dead, was alive, well, rich and ripe with sappy tunes sufficient to see him through another couple of decades. Scholars in the field of popular music have an unfortunate way of seeming pointlessly po-faced, rapt in the intertextual resonances of ‘A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom’. Not everyone can be Greil Marcus – sometimes not even Greil Marcus.