20/08/2024
A few words on art and the artist... without the paywall.
In recent days we have seen a shooting in Melbourne. Not fatal, but wounding just the same. It occurred when the medium and the message appeared on the one stage. In the shooting of the messenger, the music, the art suffered.
It began just over a week ago when pianist Jayson Gillham played a five-minute work entitled Witness by Australian composer Connor D’Netto at a Sunday morning performance. Per D’Netto, the piece is “dedicated to the journalists of Gaza”, something Gillham chose to acknowledge when introducing the piece to his audience sitting in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Iwaki Auditorium that day.
“Over the last 10 months, Israel has killed more than 100 Palestinian journalists. A number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets,” Gillham said in introducing the piece to the audience.
“The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world. In addition to the role of journalists who bear witness, the word witness in Arabic is shahid, which derives from the same root word as shaheed, meaning martyr.”
After, attendees received a letter saying Gillham’s personal remarks had not been approved by the MSO and were “an intrusion of personal political views on what should have been a morning focused on a program of works for solo piano.”
Within days, he was removed from a concert scheduled for Thursday, before the MSO said it had made a mistake and, instead of reinstating Gillham, cancelled the program altogether.
The incident itself goes to this: once art has left the artist’s hands, they have no control over how it is interpreted. It’s a two-way street. This is especially true of instrumental music. The imagination kicks in, and you are transported.
But what if the performer steers listeners in a certain direction? If they say, “This is a new piece. It was inspired by such and such. When you listen to it, think of A, B or C. This is dedicated to …”
How then to react? Do you listen and try to hear what the performer is hearing? Do you uncouple the words from the music? Do you ignore the creation because, to your mind, it has been infected with something else? Do you simply not listen to it?
Because of its very nature, art is always bumping up against resistance. To be true to itself it must live outside of society, and yet within the human breast. Dimitri Shostakovich versus Josef Stalin, for instance. Or Frank Zappa against the US government.
You either give an artist free rein or you don’t. To constrict the person, in this sense, is essentially to constrict the art. It’s a fairly simple equation. If a company for whatever reason, artistic, political, societal or just behavioural, doesn’t like someone, don’t engage them. Once you have though, you take the whole package.
This is not about a balance sheet, or some sort of ledger of pros and cons. Literature and music are littered with examples where the art is praised, but the artist as a person much less. The listener (or reader, or viewer) then has a choice: do I continue to like and admire the art, or do I disengage with their work because they’re a horrible human being in my view?
The MSO’s management gave an example of one path in its reaction. It’s proven to be the tipping point for symphony musicians, who unanimously voted in support of calling for the MSO’s managing director and chief operating officer to be sacked.
In a statement, the musicians said: “We no longer have faith in the abilities of our senior management to make decisions that are in the best interests of the company at large.”
The MSO is now undertaking an external of itself.
The prefacing by performers of their work to an audience is not new. Granted most declarations are not political, but even when they are, should it elicit the type of response that the MSO gave? There is a tightrope to be walked between donors, public funding, and the artists they entrust with their vision as an organisation, of course. But the rapidity of the MSO’s kneejerk response was equal to an Olympic 100-metre dash.
The times are discordant enough. The last place you would expect cognitive dissonance is in the magical realm of music. Play on.
