Something Old and Something New

I'm not sure why, but I've always loved history.  Not necessarily history in the Big-Events Significant-Landmarks type of way.  I have always found the traces of our personal histories compelling; the images and objects that remind us of particular occasions or life events.  As a child I used to love rummaging around second-hand shops and looking at the old collections of family photos and wondering who these people were and why their photos were in a second hand shop and not a prized family treasure.  

When we bought our house, I found it very moving that only one family had lived there before us and that out home was obviously a loved home.  

When we were having some work done on the house, we found some fragments of old photos of the family that used to live there.  

A couple of years later one of the sons of the house popped by with some more photos of the house, his mother and his brothers in the garden.
It makes me think of all the other houses in our street, in our suburb, and all the other family photos and family stories.  

I love these photos.  I look at them and compare them to our own family equivalents - our girls out the front, posing for a photo with the same pillars behind them.  

I remember one elderly neighbour had my kids enthralled by telling them he could see horses  from his bedroom window when they built their house in the 1940s - two doors down from where we live.  He has since died and it has made we want to collect some of those stories and gather photos and other memories relating directly to our neighbourhood and turn it into a new piece of sound/video art.  

So, that's what I'm going to do. 

Why I love Alain de Botton

I love Alain de Botton.  His writing is so clear and sensible and logical.  His Religion for Atheists was something of a revelation – I thought I was the only Atheist who felt that religion-shaped hole in their lives.  His latest book Art as Therapy (with John Armstrong) is not only one of the most beautiful books I’ve seen in a long time, but looks set to challenge and enhance the way I understand Art.  I haven’t even got to the end of the first chapter, ‘Methodology’,  and already I’ve had one of those light-bulb moments about how I respond to art, and for me most particularly, how I respond to Music. 

In a section about ‘Growth’ de Botton opens with the following observation:

It is one of the secret, unacknowledged features of our relationship with art that many of its most prestigious and lauded examples can leave us feeling a bit scared, or bored, or both.

 Who of us hasn’t felt this at one time, and then felt guilty or inadequate for feeling this way in the face of ‘Great Art’ or ‘Great Music’ or ‘Great Literature’?

De Botton questions why we may have such a negative response to particular art works when others may find them beautiful or moving, and he proposes that this may be based on some negative experience that we have come to associate with a particular work or style or genre.  This is of course a very subjective and personal perspective to have of a work or art but then a huge part of how we approach art is subjective and emotional – so it shouldn’t be surprising that there is the potential for a negative response.  This hostility that we may experience towards a particular work of art or genre has the potential, de Botton claims, to “taint” our experience of aspects of life because they can trigger “…a variety of defensive behaviours in us”.  If we take a defensive stance towards a piece or art and by association an entire genre or style, we are in effect depriving ourselves of potentially enriching experiences.  We move from a particular negative experience and generalise and project this onto our experience of a whole range of related works of art.  “We employ a powerful, erroneous emotional logic.”

Part of de Botton’s project in this book is to suggest ways in which we can gain more from our experience of art – how it can be potentially ‘therapeutic’.  He invites us to move beyond our initial negative emotional response and ask ourselves why we respond that way – to be open to our discomfort or ambivalence or distaste and its root causes.  In this way engagement with art can help us to address past negative experiences and their ongoing emotional legacy and move beyond our defensive response. “The first and crucial step to overcoming defensiveness is to be highly alert to its reality: to be generously aware of how normal it is to harbour strongly negative views about things.”  From there he suggests that we try to gain some insight into the artist’s perspective and “…look out for points of connection, however fragile and initially tenuous, between the mindset of the artist and our own.”

This all seems totally sensible and reasonable and in some ways obvious, but it took Alain de Botton to point it out to me.  I find it all to easy to hold on to an initial negative response to a particular artist’s work or genre, often stemming from an initial negative emotional response of not ‘understanding ‘a work and feeling irritated or inadequate.  There are composers whose work I almost instinctively reject because of my ‘defensive’ response – and for some reason it never occurred to me to move beyond my flawed emotional logic.  I had always put it down to individual ‘taste’ – I just don’t like it because it is not my kind of music.  This in not to say that there is no such thing as individual aesthetic preferences but I wonder how much of our assumptions about what we like or enjoy or respond to in art are tainted by a negative response somewhere in our past that we probably can’t even remember.  I have always thought that I was quite open minded and eclectic in my musical tastes but reading this book has led me to challenge quite a few assumptions about how I respond to different kinds of music. 

So thank you Alain de Botton, for again asking me questions and suggesting new ways of looking at things.  And for reminding us that we all have flawed judgement from time to time, because we are human, but that we can find ways of moving beyond these self limiting defensive responses and become more open and receptive to new experiences and all the world of art has to offer.

Working in Small Forms

Miniature. Study. Etude. Novella.  Haiku.

Across media, these forms share certain characteristics.  Brevity.  Succinctness. Focus.  A willingness to experiment.  An intensity of utterance. 

I feel drawn to these small forms.  I would often rather listen to a short chamber work than a large orchestral piece.  Contemplating a small, beautifully crafted object can be more satisfying than trying to take in a huge expanse of art.  A short poem can capture an essential truth that may get lost in an epic novel.

The reasons why artists work in small forms are probably as varied as the works themselves.  Perhaps it is a necessity of time or space.  Perhaps it is a preference for minutiae over expanse.  Maybe it is the singular focus required when working on something small.

I have at times chosen to work in small forms because my time was fragmented and sustaining a large-scale work seemed beyond me.  But more often it is the essential nature of small forms that appeals to me.  When your parameters are limited, you need to focus on what is important.  There is a particular challenge in working with constrained material as well – discovering the potential of limited means.   At the moment I am working on a series of video ‘miniatures’ - short works of sound and image that are no more than 3 and a half minutes long.  I am really enjoying the immediacy of working in this way – I can create a new work in a couple of days as opposed to a couple of weeks or months.  And the immediacy for me is also in the fact that I can hear and see the finished works as soon as they are complete – I don’t need to wait months or years to hear the works realised by performers.  Each small work poses new technical challenges and they are very much learning pieces for me, not having worked in this way before – composing the sound and image together. 

There is a long history of making small-scale studies or maquettes or etudes or samplers or miniatures, often as a preliminary or preparatory work for a more extended piece. The embroidered ‘Sampler’ is kind of test piece or demonstration or embroidery skill, a ‘small form’ that many girls and young women were expected to master in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and earlier.  We have an example of incredibly fine Victorian embroidery in the form of a small, embroidered pillowcase, made by a Miss Aitken in 1851.  I am amazed at the tiny neat stitches that make my eyes ache – a rather lovely miniature demonstrating technical skill – as well as an edifying religious message! 

As a student of piano, I also remember playing many studies or etudes which were intended to develop certain technical skills but which were also often beautiful pieces in their own right. 

I like this idea or experimenting, trying things out, learning new techniques, refining ideas – with the possibility of using what is discovered in a later and possibly larger work.   But also allowing that the ‘miniatures’ or sketches have aesthetic value in them selves - whether or not they are stepping stones does not detract from their intrinsic worth or appeal.

And small forms offer the listener / reader / viewer a glimpse of something, another world. They don’t have to stay long but the experience can be as intense and the memory as long lasting.

Sound and Space

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For much of this year I’ve been composing music that is traditionally notated  – I write the notes on paper and the musicians bring the notes to life in the performance.  Working this way means there is a certain distance between me and the music – I can have a reasonable idea what the music will sound like (thanks to my music notation software) but the music doesn’t really live until it is played or sung by real living people in a real acoustic space.   So it has been great to shift into the world of digital sounds (and images) for the pieces I have been working on over the last couple of months, where I can create sound worlds that are immediately realizable in a virtual acoustic space. 

I dabbled with electronic music many years ago as an undergraduate student but it wasn’t until I was doing my Masters degree in Glasgow that I had access to a digital sound studio where I could really start to explore and manipulate recorded sound.  One of my first electroacoustic (to be heard through speakers) pieces was largely built of recordings of me walking up and down stairs and unlocking, opening and closing my front door.  This wouldn’t seem to be particularly inspiring source material but once in the studio I became completely absorbed in the process of dissecting and reassembling the sounds to create my own imaginary sonic space.  Something quite magical happens when you record a space – when you listen to it later, your imagination recreates that space purely through sonic information.  I can listen to a recording of a reverberant stairwell in Glasgow while I am sitting in my study in Melbourne and feel transported back to that very particular space.  (I've written about this in more detail in a paper, 'Imagining Space Through Sound'.) There is a whole sonic subculture that deals with ‘Acoustic Ecology’ – capturing and preserving acoustic environments and creating sound scapes from these recordings.  I’ve certainly created a collection of sound works that fit into this category – I made a series of soundscapes during an Artist Residency at Bundanon (NSW) where I recorded the soundscape of Cicadas at different times of the day and a the unfolding sounds of a heavy downpour of rain.  Environmental sounds often have their own shape and structure over time, requiring little ‘composing’ of the sounds after the event.  This approach to creating a recorded soundscape is more about capturing a particular time and place. 

In other works I have enjoyed using various recorded sounds to create my own imaginary sonic space, editing and digitally manipulating sounds and combining different sonic elements to ‘compose’ a new sonic environment.  In my music theatre work ‘An Opera of Clouds’ I created a series of soundscapes that weave around the live performance elements and spoken texts of the work, taking the audience to quite a different imaginary space and creating a rich web of suggested meanings.  Most recently I have been working on a soundscape ‘accompaniment’ to a three part vocal work.  The text for the work is a Scottish Haiku that delicately captures the particular qualities of sound and light of a Scottish spring.  Having lived in Scotland for a few years, I just happened to have some lovely recordings that worked well as a sound bed for the vocal piece, evoking something of the qualities of the text and hopefully creating new layers of meaning in the work.

Sound is such a powerful way to evoke memory and create associations between what is seen and what is heard.  Combining sound and image can result in an amazing alchemy whereby the sound and the image are both transformed and enhanced.  I’ve just started working on a series of video miniatures (for want of a better description) that combine images and sounds with the intention of creating moments in time in which we can just contemplate simple elements or ideas.  There is no narrative, no ‘take home message’, just something open to the viewer/listener’s interpretation.  The first of these, ‘Remembering Water’ combines simple layered loops of video (water in a Scottish burn, with water the colour of tea) and a layered 3-part canon of a recorded viola solo from an earlier work.  The elements are simple but I am really pleased with how they work together.

Bach and Perseverance

For as long as I have know them, my children have shown no interest whatsoever in me playing the piano.  When they were very little they would wail ‘stop mummy’ or ‘let me play, mummy’, so I quickly gave up on my romanticised view of musical motherhood where I would play Bach as they played on the floor beside me.  But recently something has changed.  The last two evenings after homework is done, they have actually ASKED me to play for them.  ‘Play the Waltz’, ‘Play the fast one’, ‘Play the one you played when you were a little girl.’  This last request was the reason I climbed up to the attic today to seek out my box full of old piano music and find my copy of The Children’s Bach.  This particular collection of piano pieces has an almost mythical status among those of us who learnt the piano as children.  Helen Garner chose to use the title for her 1984 Novella.  I remember being particularly moved when, at a musical soirée, Anna Goldsworthy played a piece, probably a Minuet, from The Children’s Bach and read extracts from her memoir Piano Lessons because it took me straight back to my early years learning the piano.  When I found my copy of The Children’s Bach today I was similarly transported back to early piano lessons.  My copy is dog-eared, faded, sellotaped, with my name on the front cover in my piano teacher’s familiar handwriting.  I was filled with love for this music and fond memories of my piano teacher, Mrs Spratt, who was in many ways my musical mother, someone who understood me very well.  The reason I went up into the attic to extract this particular book was an ongoing ‘discussion’ (argument) I am having with my older daughter about the importance of perseverance.  She is learning the piano, and like every 7 year old, is not overly interested in practising, and being a clever 7 year old who often finds things easy, she is struggling with the realisation that learning a new piece is DIFFICULT.  Having tried the Robert the Bruce and the spider story (“if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”) without much traction, I told her how I had struggled with a particular piano piece when I was little bit older than her; ‘A Little Air’, from The Children’s Bach.  I clearly remember how frustrated I was, how the piece tripped me up and just didn’t make sense and that it nearly made me give up the whole endeavour.  But after a stern word from my piano teacher and probably my mother too, I knuckled down and played it over and over and over again until I got it.  I also remember the fantastic sense of satisfaction and pride in my achievement when I could finally play the piece from beginning to end.  I told my daughter all of this.  And then she wanted to hear the piece.  I will play it for her and her sister tonight, along with a waltz and a fast piece and maybe a Bach Prelude.  And I hope my story of the ‘tricky piano piece’ will stay with her every time she starts a new piece and meets that wall of frustration.  Perseverance, along with resilience, are perhaps some of the most important lessons I hope to teach our children.

Love Song

for Eleanor and Freya

The warmth of your fidgety body
Nestled against my spine

The softness of your fairy kisses
On my cheek

The sweet nutty smell of your hair

The shape and smallness of your hands in mine

These things I carry with me

Like the strange collection of shells and stones
Leaves and cicada skins
That find their way to the bottom of my bag

Unseen
Ready to surface and take me by surprise

Like the great waves of my love for you

The Fastness of Forgetting

I'm gradually fleshing out my new website and I've just added a video clip from a video performance piece I made in 2004. It's called The Fastness of Forgetting - inspired by a passage in Milan Kundera's novel Slowness:

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting… the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

This final section of the work is a very personal exploration of memory and how it fades. The images are largely photos of my family; my mother, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents and great aunts, most of whom are now gone. I remember playing this section to my mother and it made her cry. Now she's gone too and it makes me cry.

The music is played beautifully by Brisbane-based Topology ensemble.