David R Osborne

25 October 2018, Berlin- “Difficult Music”

David — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 10:45:21 +0000

As of now, my blog has gone ‘video’- Perhaps that might encourage me to do more posting! Starting with a five part series, the not-at-all-provocatively titled “Difficult Music: Fact Checking the Avant-Garde.”

Here is the first episode, “The Tristan Chord”. It features the opening to Tristan and Isolde played in a way that I am certain nobody has ever done before because, why would they?

27 July 2017, Berlin- Unravelling the Complexity

David — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 12:12:13 +0000

In this article and all others to follow, I will refer to our art-form as ‘classical music’. It’s not a great moniker, but just like ‘Raga Dolls’, it’s the one we’re stuck with.

At what stage and why, did we start evaluating music based not only on what it is, but on when and by whom it was written? Surely a creative work is no more or less than the substance of itself, regardless of the ‘circumstances of its birth’. Furthermore, its absolute value as a work of art must surely sit apart from anybody’s preconceptions, except perhaps those of its creator. To put all this another way, what for example might be the reception for a great work like ‘The Enigma Variations’, had it been composed by an ‘unknown’ in 2017 rather than by a relative unknown in 1899?

The world of classical music is heavily populated by ‘true believers’, approach them with caution. Music, including much that on a superficial level might appear simple, is complex. The cultural and political issues surrounding music, even more so. Nobody has yet discovered the ‘key’ to music, no one has come up with even the most rudimentarily verifiable explanation as to how music affects us, and perhaps nobody ever will. That is a good thing.

With that in mind, the best any of us can do is concede that our personal certainties as to how we evaluate various musical works and forms, are unlikely to ever be externally verified. Making this concession allows us to question, and through questioning we can solve problems. For example, exploring scenarios like the one above may help us to understand both where we are now and how best to plot a course for the future. If, that is, we think we have any say in the matter.

If however, we allow ourselves to be dictated to by those personal certainties, or by the certainties shared via the cultural allegiances we form, then not only are we going to be unable to respond to the challenges of a complex and fast changing world, we will very likely be unable to recognise the existence of those challenges in the first place.

Beyond any shadow of doubt, the greatest crisis facing classical music today is the lack of mainstream audience engagement with music created in our times. The tragedy of this crisis on the creative side is that it has robbed the art-form of much of it’s relevance to contemporary life. I believe an art-form’s greatness must be measured in terms of it’s ability to do good in the world. By that measure, new classical music is no longer very great at all. In times of turmoil, of great political upheaval such as we are living through now, this becomes a much bigger problem, and not only for music.

Nowadays, classical music does not play a significant role in the lives of the vast majority of people on this planet, but I’m fairly sure that the fact of it’s absence, does. This problem however is not in itself a complex one and very likely has (what at least on the face of it might appear), a simple solution. If only it were so easy.

It just seems so obvious: People crave great melody. Regardless of what you may have been told, it was a shared natural gift for melodic invention that made the great composers great. And the ability to write great melody, cannot be taught. It is elusive and intangible, a certain uncertainty and for those who have tried to control the course of music’s progress through education, this is a massive inconvenience. I need to point out that there is a clear, undeniable correlation between classical music’s decline on the one hand, and the rise of academicism and academic dominance on the other. This phenomenon is quite unique to classical music, no other art-form has suffered from this to anywhere near the same extent. .

What we are facing today, is exactly what Richard Wagner was warning us of in ‘Die Meistersinger’ and he was very much speaking from experience. Experts have their place but it is ultimately the people who should decide. Music is not a science. Academics certainly play a role in other creative pursuits, but they do not control them. I have used this quote before, but as Constant Lambert put it so well in his book ‘Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline’, (Music is) “an art which, though the most instinctive and physical of all the arts, tends more and more to be treated as the intellectual preserve of the specialist.” I wonder what he would have made of the fact that the decline he was referring to, has continued for the best part of a century.

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What merit can there be in comparisons between the different art-forms? In my view such comparisons are worthwhile in one area alone: The question of how ideas are promulgated within the art-form itself. Most commonly we find music being compared to the visual arts. This is probably because over the past century we have followed a similar, modernist path.

The big difference however between these two art-forms becomes apparent when we examine developments post WWII. Since then, change in the visual arts has been mainly driven upwards from the grass-roots level, whereas in music change has come almost entirely from edicts handed down from the top. To my way of thinking this is a recipe for disaster, and exists in clear defiance of everything we know about the great movements in art history, most particularly classical music’s own golden era in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Progress in music comes only from truly gifted artists being allowed the freedom to follow their own unique creative voice whatever that may be, and those same artists having a clear run at establishing a dialogue directly with audiences. When the nature of progress is artificially pre-determined, those voices too often are silenced. And we end up somewhere not unlike where we are today. Let’s move on now from comparisons with the visual arts and consider for a moment how contemporary classical music stacks up against another great cultural tradition.

In the early part of the 20^th century, two art-forms: western classical music and literature (meaning in this instance new, original works of fiction), were facing major challenges. For classical music: the rise and popularisation of a new, grass-roots generated musical form, namely jazz. For literature: the emergence of a potentially far more accessible method of story telling, namely film.

As the century progressed, both art-forms were continually presented with new fences to hurdle- some unique, some shared. Both for example faced potential devastation from the emergence of new technology. But only one of the two finds itself today in a position whereby emergent new work can enrich the culture of our society in any kind of significant and meaningful way. Indeed not only has literature seen off the challenge of the moving picture, but to this day it continues to provide inspiration for what might have been a rival, in terms of the screen adaptations of books. What is it that they are doing right?

In literature, there has never been a ‘necessity of the new’. Never a clear dividing line as to what constitutes high and low art. The language of literature in all it’s diversity has stayed for the most part, the language of the people. Crucially, new works can be anything their authors want them to be. They can move unselfconsciously back and forward through time, from for example historical romances to science fiction. Of course in literature there is also an avant-garde, as anyone who has flipped the pages of James Joyce’s novel (published 1939) ‘Finnegans Wake’ can attest to, but only a very few have ever felt the compulsion to attempt to emulate it. Or for that matter actually read the thing.

Can you imagine literature’s learned authorities coming together to declare that from this point on, that particular book must be the template for all future writers of fiction? We know something just like that happened to classical music in the early 1950s, and despite the spin that we are regularly fed about a more recent (albeit strictly regulated) diversity, we are still living with the consequences. Once people stop listening, it is very difficult to get them to start again. Especially when they feel as so many do, that they have been culturally estranged from the art-form, that music does not care what they think:

“Well, it’s not always about what the audience wants. It’s about what the audience doesn’t yet know they want.” (Opera director Yuval Sharon, quoted in the New York Times July 20, 2017).

Around 57 years earlier, words very much to that effect were uttered by the staunchly modernist then BBC Controller of Music, William Glock. When asked at the Pilkington committee on the future of radio and television: “What did the Controller, Music want to offer listeners?” his reply was simply “What they will like tomorrow”. It’s condescending nonsense, and it is as untrue now as it was then.

To understand how this situation came about, we need to acknowledge a somewhat mundane but unavoidable feature unique to classical music: the costs involved. For a painter to deliver a completed work to a gallery, all that is required are the media, for example canvas and paint. For an author to present a work ready to be read, they need little more than a common or garden PC. It is therefore very difficult for any one group within these art-forms to assert creative control. With music things are different. Unless they are planning on performing their work by themselves, a composer requires rather a lot more. In particular if that work requires something as eye-wateringly expensive as an orchestra.

Even in our halcyon days these costs could never be covered by the box office alone. It has therefore been seen in most western countries (with the significant exception of the US) as necessary and worthwhile for taxpayers to make up the shortfall through their governments, which these days in practical terms means covering the bulk of the funding. In America the shortfall is usually made up through philanthropic donations, it matters not so much where the money comes from, rather more important is how the decisions are made as to it’s allocation. So it is incontrovertible that whosoever controls the money, controls the art-form.

Governments, having perhaps quite reasonably been reluctant to allocate the funding themselves, have instead handed control of the decision-making process to a combination of common interest groups. For the most part these comprise: Academic institutions and their graduates; and established composers and musicians who are almost certainly also members of the first two groupings. Overseeing all of this is an intensely almost quasi-religious hierarchical structure, at the top of which sit our ‘bishops and cardinals’: the conductors.

The whole system is structured heavily top down and we must recognise that there is only one way to climb such a ladder, and that is certainly not by agitating for change at a fundamental level, or by loudly questioning the accepted truths. The final piece in the puzzle making this all so intractable is the inter-generational nature of the problem.

So, is there a way out of this mess? Absolutely there is. The first light at the end of the tunnel, is that (and I’m speaking from personal experience here) some of these decision makers as individuals are unhappy with how things stand, and are starting to see the need for change. They are no longer willing to accept that we must forever “stick to the chosen way”. Their job, it must be acknowledged is not an easy one. They are not part of a system that easily allows them to question and most importantly, to listen.

Today, In a vast array of forums online, there is shall we say, a quite robust discussion going on regarding classical music’s future direction. Composers, instrumentalists, current audience members (both disgruntled and satisfied), people with a philosophical interest, those arguing for change and those for the status quo. Those distraught at the lack of opportunity to hear performances of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and those signing a petition to have such performances stopped.

Missing from these discussions however, are arguably the two groups that matter most: Firstly, the potential new audiences, the people from all walks of life not currently coming to the opera house or concert hall, those who we need to engage with in order to give this art-form meaning. This sector is not going to join the conversation any time soon, we have to find ways of reaching out to them first.

The other group absenting themselves from the discussion is of course, the actual decision makers. This is where change for the better could happen. You would have to hope that they will come to the table at some stage.They must learn to listen and be accountable to someone other than their immediate peers for the decisions they make. When they do happen to join the conversation, here are some suggestions I hope they will take on board:

1. Listen to your current audience, those who are disgruntled but have stayed the course. These are the people that truly love music, please show them some respect. Ask for their opinions, respond to them, and most importantly factor their aspirations into your decision making.

2. The avant-garde are important and should of course continue to be supported, but it has to be recognised that their work has and always will by it’s very nature, have an extremely marginal appeal. So the policy that their music is the only new work anyone ever gets to hear, a policy in which other ideas are being censored at the avant-garde’s behest, this policy must end now.

3. Prioritise efforts to reach new audiences, in particular people from remote areas and the socially disadvantaged. The best way to do this with immediate effect is to direct resources towards the creation of new work for children. Music composed in a way that does not talk down to them, that has a musical language that they can understand and relate to. So often I hear from opera companies: “we do present work for children, but only on a very limited scale with limited resources”. In today’s day and age, that is simply the wrong answer!

4. Please don’t, as is common practice these days, program 5 to 6 years in advance. A lot can change culturally in that time, and music needs to change and adapt with it.

5. Try new things, take risks, re-evaluate the past and learn from this: Much of the conventional wisdom, many of the accepted historical truths concerning music are in reality highly questionable. Last but not least, honour diversity and embrace change.

The intention of this article has been to create a positive, hopeful view of the need for change. If what I have spoken of here somehow comes to fruition, I genuinely have great hopes for the future. But on the other hand we should be treating all of this as a matter of extreme urgency. There are some awfully dark clouds on the horizon, and I will be dealing with these in my next blog.

22 October 2016, Berlin- Classical Music, don’t believe everything you are taught…

David — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 10:04:33 +0000

I was clearing out some of the dustier corners of my computer and came across this, from January 2013, no less. Not too shabby surprisingly, and quite relevant when you consider there has been a fair bit of discussion around academicism and the role of autodidacts in the arts of late. Suits me, being one myself and all!

The advent of high fidelity sound in the 1950s was a massive shot in the arm for classical music which had struggled through a sustained period of decline due to world wars, economic crisis and competition from new forms of music that captured the public imagination, such as Jazz. I count myself extremely fortunate that I was born during what is now acknowledged to have been a golden age of classical music recording. My life’s passion for music owes a lot to having been raised in a household that collected LP records. Every week or so a new addition to the collection would appear. Always beautifully packaged, records had the enduring feel of objects of real substance. In short, everything an iTunes download is not! Driving this renaissance were two legendary record producers who shared one extraordinary common feature.

In many ways Walter Legge at EMI and John Culshaw at Decca were chalk and cheese. Legge was a dour character who had famous fallings out with some of his biggest stars. His achievements include founding one of the world’s great orchestras- the Philharmonia, and kickstarting the recording career of one of the most influential classical musicians of the 20th Century- Herbert von Karajan. So conservative was his outlook that at first he refused to embrace the idea of stereophonic sound, yet many of the recordings he produced (including the mono ones) remain benchmarks to this day. By contrast, John Culshaw was a gentle diplomat best known as the driving force behind the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In 1999 this massive undertaking was voted ‘greatest classical recording of all time’ by readers of Gramophone Magazine. It was also the subject of a wonderful behind the scenes BBC documentary, a highlight of which must be the scene in the back seat of a limousine where Culshaw calmly puts the notoriously fiery conductor of the cycle, Georg Solti in his place. It’s often referred to as the ‘Solti Ring’ but in truth it was as much Culshaw’s as it was Solti’s. For his part Legge predicted it would fail miserably. It did nothing of the sort, selling well in excess of a million copies and spending time on the mainstream Billboard charts.

Remarkably neither Legge nor Culshaw had any formal training, indeed they both left school at age 16. They were in fact autodidacts, and at the time they were by no means alone. These days such careers seem very unlikely. As audiences have shrunk, music has become increasing reliant on the education sector as a source of employment and the message emanating from this sector could not be clearer: No young person should ever consider themselves to be so talented that they can get by without a formal education. Fair enough you might think, but where is the evidence and could this advice actually be having a negative effect by alienating our most gifted, the most original and creative thinkers? In reality as we go through the substantial list of major figures in the arts and indeed other walks of life who were largely self -taught, we find not only enormously high achievers but also with few exceptions engrossingly colourful characters. You can include on this list to name just a few, composers such as Brahms, Wagner and Walton; authors Austen, Tolstoy and Hemingway; pretty much the whole impressionist movement in art and arguably the most culturally engaged leader Australia has had: 24th Prime Minister Paul John Keating.

Recently when listeners to ABC Classic FM were asked to choose their favourite 100 compositions from the 20th Century there was a clear first choice: The Cello Concerto of Edward Elgar. Composed in 1919, this work is extraordinarily different to any of the other music of it’s time. It is a concise, elegaic, personal statement that in my opinion could only have been written by an autodidact. He didn’t need a degree to compose it, and you certainly don’t need one to be moved by it.

Elgar, who grew up in a small village in Worcestershire where his Father owned a music shop, taught himself to compose by reading books and studying scores. He was the product of a time when grass roots participation in music making was at a very high level. Every town and village had a choir, indeed England was anything but ‘the land without music’ as the German critic Oscar Schmidt once notoriously described it. Elgar got his first big break (if you can call it that) as conductor of the attendants' band at the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum. Could there be a better example of people from all walks of life and social situations getting involved?

Not so fond of Elgar was the conductor Thomas Beecham. In many ways Beecham owed his career to the wealth and privilege he was born into. In 1899 when the Hallé orchestra found itself short a conductor for a concert to mark his father’s inauguration as mayor of St Helens in Lancashire, the elder Beecham simply installed his son in the position. Young Thomas had some limited experience at an amateur level, but as a conductor was entirely self taught. So began a remarkable career. Along the way he founded at least three orchestras, used his family fortune to purchase the Royal Opera House Convent Garden, championed the music of Mozart, Richard Strauss, Sibelius and Delius and generally enjoyed himself by poking fun at the classical music establishment. Through all this it should be remembered that he was above all a brilliant conductor, beloved by most of his players and one who certainly knew a thing or two about engaging audiences.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the extreme technical demands of playing an instrument such as the violin make years of study absolutely mandatory, but consider for a moment the case of Albert Sammons. Self taught apart from a handful of lessons from his father, Sammons was discovered playing in the band of the Earls Court Exhibition at the tender age of 12. He went on to be concert master in Beecham’s orchestras (the London and Royal Philharmonics) as well as pursuing a distinguished career as a soloist. In 1929 he made, alongside Sir Henry Wood and the (new) Queens Hall Orchestra, the first studio recording of Elgar’s Violin Concerto. When you listen to some of his recordings, in particular those of Mozart, they do at first seem very individualistic, very idiosyncratic. It is however important to realise that we have got terribly used to hearing different people playing the same music over and over the same way. Of course it’s nonsense, there is no such thing as ‘correct’ in music. These days, from the moment they first pick up an instrument young people are instructed, judged, examined, auditioned and adjudicated at every step of the journey. What they’re not taught or indeed allowed to do, is question. There are those who prosper under this system but there will also be those, amongst them the most creative who sadly end up walking away. We must ask ourselves: ‘when does education end and indoctrination begin? At what point does an art-form become a cult?’ Unfortunately there are times when classical music crosses these lines.

At the end of the 1920s, the English composer and conductor Constant Lambert (son of Australian artist George), wrote an influential and widely read book somewhat gloomily entitled ‘Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline’. To show how little things have changed, consider these lines which conclude the preface to the first edition: “I hope this brief study...may lead the way to a broader and more ‘humane’ critical attitude towards an art which, though the most instinctive and physical of all the arts, tends more and more to be treated as the intellectual preserve of the specialist.” From where we currently stand it will be a long road back for classical music and it’s hard to be optimistic when the same mistakes keep being made. That said, it will be up to those who love it, regardless of training or lack thereof, to try and find a way.

16 October 2016, Berlin- On Cultural Bigotry

David — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 20:30:39 +0000

For me, this Dylan winning the Nobel Prize thing has been a gift that keeps giving. I mean, I was thinking before about the beautiful symmetry (that surprisingly no one seems to have alluded to just yet) with that famous incident in Manchester 50 years ago when, as he strapped himself into a black Fender Telecaster, the audience fell strangely silent and you could clearly hear a voice call out from the crowd: Judas! His crime of course in the eyes of the serious, borderline puritanical folk music aficionados, was to dare to play his music on electric instruments. We look back now on an incident that seems more recent really than it was, and we think: how ridiculous. The person who claims to have been that voice in the crowd thinks the same, yet at the time there were a not insignificant number consumed by righteous indignation. So will it be as today's outrage fades, the decision to award this prize already has overwhelming public support, running at about 70% according to polls that I've seen, and I am sure that this and it's accompanying controversy will be interpreted in the future as having been a great step forward for all kinds of culture, because it will force the so called fine arts to face up to the fact that they cannot forever expect to be able to exist inside their bubble.

So I have recently taken to commenting on the wonderful Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc site. For those who don't know it, the comments section on this site is a kind of 'group hug' where lovers of classical music come together in a spirit of unprecedented camaraderie to celebrate a shared joy in this wonderful art-form. Only kidding, it's as venomous a nest of vipers as you're ever likely to come across. But I love them all. There's a lady posting as 'Milka' who I swear is the single most negative individual I've ever made the acquaintance of, and yet she is somehow (to me at least) adorable for that, and sometimes we even agree. She's not stupid, that's for sure. There's the wonderful Dutch composer John Borstlap, who I've mentioned in despatches before. John seems to get this perverse pleasure from baiting his antagonists, who are many. He's a very clever and learned man- and an extraordinarily original thinker. Most classical people just can't cope with that at all, so they end up 'playing the man not the ball' by attacking his work. He does not care. About 80% of the time we agree and it's a beautiful meeting of minds. The other 20% he makes me want to scream so much... and I know exactly how the others feel! There are many more (all pseudonyms, Borstlap and myself are the only ones silly enough to post under our real names)- Una, Furzwängler, Pianofortissimo, Holly Golightly, the list goes on. Unfortunately, I've got myself into some trouble there of late, drawing the ire of some with my comments.

Now why am I wasting time with this trivia you may ask? First of all, for me it's cathartic, somehow getting involved in a robust if seemingly pointless discussion on the future of the art-form, switches my own creative faculties on. Sometimes I'm just kidding around, sometimes I make a forthright case for some half-baked, spur of the moment idea only for it later to occur to me that that was not what I think at all! There's no edit button, but I don't mind because unless we've actually stopped thinking altogether, then all of our opinions are a work in progress. Secondly, it's not trivial at all. This is about classical music and what it has been allowed to become, because speaking out of turn in this field has for some time now been a short cut to a very brief career. Hence all the angst. There is another really serious point here that I will get to, eventually.

Which brings me back to Dylan, and to Cultural Bigotry. Norman, who is never one to steer clear of a controversy, posted (none too favourably I must say) on the Nobel Committee's decision. Well, as you can probably imagine with classical people, out came the outrage: (to paraphrase) "How could they, this is the end of civilisation as we know it!" I thought to myself 'this looks like fun' and responded to a comment starting with the line "Hmm and out come the cultural bigots". Now you might think "well that's a bit rude, David" and you'd be right, but you don't know Slipped Disc. I also at this stage need to show you the part of the comment in question that I was responding to. Referring again to the Dylan decision it said: "we all know that there are quite a few-who deserved the prize much more than a pop musician". Putting to one side for a moment the fact that this poster clearly was mistaking the great bard of my generation for Taylor Swift, there is this weird notion that cultural recognition is deserved only by those who are practitioners of the fine arts; and that there exists somehow this sliding scale of cultural value and artistic merit with classical music permanently stationed at the top. All despite the fact (and I'm not in any way applauding this) that these days the wider community is barely aware that the art-form exists.

So came the retribution, and strangely so! I say that because at first I genuinely, honestly had no idea what he meant. Which in itself I find fascinating. This is the reply: "'cultural bigots'? That accusation cuts both ways." I want to respond, I feel challenged by this but feel I need to request clarification. None is forthcoming. So I have to speculate. I think that perhaps this guy has made the assumption that because I am defending the work of a non classical artist, that somehow you can only conclude that that is where my affiliations lie. He is therefore also assuming that I harbour prejudices against classical music. I'm sure that's right, and It's a fascinating and revealing incite into a prevalent mentality within an art-form that sees itself as being somehow under siege. So having reached that conclusion, this would be my response:

Dear Allen (that's the name he posts under) thank you for the reply. I want to assure you that Western Classical Music is and always will be my first love and I would die defending it. If you wish to further categorise me, I am a member of the weird cult of Richard Wagner (aren't we all members of some weird cult or other?). However, in a near 40 year career in music I have made some pretty strange detours and illogical meanderings that have seen me veering wildly off the usual path for a practitioner of this art-form. You see I have worked, and when I say worked I mean I have been paid for my compositional, arranging, playing and performing skills in the following musical forms, genres if you prefer: Classical of course, including but not limited to baroque, 18th century classical, romantic and contemporary (new) classical music. Traditional Anglo/Celtic folk music. Contemporary rock and pop. Country music. Reggae, African Music (both traditional and contemporary). Jazz, Blues, Klezmer, Argentinian Tango, Middle Eastern (Arabic) music, Traditional Greek music, Indian Music, HipHop (yes, I admit it!) and Pakistani Hard Rock. OK that last one is a lie, but I have a friend, Omar Pervaiz who is it's leading practitioner. Having done all of that I want you to know that I have learnt (often through bitter experience i.e. from being wrong myself) to appreciate the greatness, and believe me there is greatness in them all! Now then you were saying, on Cultural Bigotry?

What I am asking Allen, and all you wonderful Slipped Discers, is for you to love the art you love, advocate for it, sing if you like, it's praises to the heavens! But please resist the urge to demean the art you don't love, but others do. Because that is what I meant in my comment, and I apologise for any offence I may have caused.

19 May 2016, Berlin

David — Thu, 19 May 2016 19:45:12 +0000

After 2 1/2 Months of sometimes seemingly comical missteps, Episode 2 of Dot and the Kangaroo is finally here. More of that in a moment.

First a story, typical of the things that have been happening to me. How we love to create a narrative when a lot of things go wrong in succession. Am I being tested? Am I paying for sins of the past? Of course the correlation is 100% illusory, unless perhaps you feel that further down the track there’ll need to be some things to look back on and have a laugh about. Well let me tell you I have plenty of those.

A couple of weeks ago there was a public holiday falling on a Thursday and here, just as you would in Australia, people take the opportunity to skip town for a long weekend. My neighbours downstairs certainly did, and on the Friday my landlord Herr Meissner took off in his car and this usually means he won’t be back till Sunday night. Leaving me happily home alone.

One of the many things I like about where I live is the fact that this house has serious security. Great peace of mind if you own instruments, really heavy unbreakable doors with deadlocks. Picture this, I’m up in my attic on the Friday afternoon when the doorbell rings. I look down and there is the postman waiting to have a parcel signed for. So I grab my keys, run down the stairs, unlock the door and run to the front gate. It is a package for Herr Meissner, I sign the weird little machine those guys carry, make some small talk in my highly dubious German and pretend I understand the postman’s reply by smiling and nodding my head, as you do. I then take the parcel and return to the front door. Locked. With my keys in the door on the inside. Looking back my best guess is that the weight of the keys has turned the key in the door thus locking it.

So here I am, locked out of my impenetrable fortress of a house for the weekend. No glasses, no shoes, no money, no watch, no phone, no keys. In a country where I can barely speak the language and the nearest person I know who could possibly help me is 18 KMs away. To be continued…

Just kidding. One dim ray of hope, Herr Meissner has a cat, which of course means a cat door. So in desperation I hatch a plan. It’s locked one way to stop the cat getting in, but I eventually prise it open. I get a bamboo stake from the garden. I push it through the cat door in the hope of trying to poke it through the ring my keys are on. Working blind, it took me maybe ten minutes to actually find the keys, and another God knows how many to actually get it through the ring. Then a problem, because of course it’s one of those locks whereby the key must be in a certain position or else it doesn’t come out. So half an hour at least of increasingly frustrating jiggling of the key to get it in the right position, not knowing if that’s even possible. I’m sweating profusely, just about in tears and hoping for the ground to open up and swallow me. Imagine how it felt when finally my keys slide down the stake and hit my hand.

Blessed relief. However, it’s not over yet because the house key is bent at right angles. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever bent a key before but they often don’t bend back. They break. So I have to very carefully try and coax it back into shape. Even then it was very hard to get it into the lock and I was worried it would break off in there. But it didn’t and I got the door open, locked it on the inside, went upstairs to my apartment and collapsed on the floor.

So there you go, just a little snippet of the sort of things that have been happening. Don’t get me started on the bus crash I was in on the way to Wiesbaden, or the fact that on my return I discovered that half of the recording I had done had a corruption on the file. So not only is Sarah Jones, my new Dot an amazing talent, but she was good enough to come to Berlin (Wiesbaden is 600 KMs away) at short notice to re-record everything she’d just done.

The moral of the story: I don’t know, don’t be me? Or, maybe I am blessed after all? Or perhaps difficult births produce brilliant children and this crazy opera I’m creating will be every bit worth the effort. I think it’s that one.

Can’t exactly recall when I decided to create a stage work based on ‘Dot and the Kangaroo’ but it looks like being not such a bad idea. For all it’s flaws, here is a story from the century before last that recognises things like habitat destruction, environmental issues and animal rights. On the downside it’s more than a little weak on indigenous issues, but that’s a standpoint from which I am not qualified to speak and won’t be trying. Instead it’s become (in part) a tale about how those who arrive on the shores of a strange land in boats are not always given the warmest of welcomes, and what that must feel like.

What an adventure this has been (to put it politely). This recording has been made in four cities: Melbourne, Berlin, Wiesbaden and Sydney! You can hear episode 2 in English as part of the full Prelude, Pts 1&2, or just Pt 2 in German (with English subtitles). Please feel to comment and share, it has been written not necessarily with opera buffs in mind, in fact it’s for all those people over the years who have said to me something like ‘well actually I don’t really like opera’. About 150 years ago, some idiot called this art form ‘The Work of Art of the Future’. Am I alone in thinking that might actually be true? Yes, probably…

I don’t think we’re going to see this presented in Australia any time soon, but here in Germany the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, I think they really get it. I can’t imagine they’re just being polite, in my experience people here don’t tiptoe around niceties, they speak their minds. So anyway:

Episode 2, complete in German here.

Prelude, Pts 1&2 Complete, in English here.

Or click the ‘HEAR THE MUSIC’ button above.

11 January 2016, Berlin

David — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:56:17 +0000

The first call I got, shortly after I read the news of David Bowie’s shock departure was from my 19 year old daughter Clare wanting to tell how much it meant to her. I think it says so much about the brilliance of that particular generation of artists that our great heroes have also become our children’s.

Just some random thoughts I’ve had during the day:

How did he do it? Kept the last album but one pretty much a secret until it’s release, and now this- such an enigma! And that voice- ridiculously versatile, effortlessly perfect yet always uniquely his. Nobody ever soared like David Bowie did- As an example I couldn’t go past Heroes from his second live album ‘Stage’.

I remember playing ‘Suffragette City’ from Ziggy Stardust incredibly badly at a high school music concert back in about ’77. I’d piggy-backed two atrocious cheap transistor guitar amps together and turned them both up to 11… Mums, dads and kids in the front rows all had their hands over their ears…

We used to play ‘Golden Years’ in the Naturals, and I still think our version was pretty good. Somewhere floating around is a very decent live recording of it from early 1985, Dee Why Hotel in Sydney. I wonder where?

No great composer in history, from Beethoven to Bowie or for that matter Boulez, ever didn’t look back on at least some of their work and ponder “that was crap, what was I thinking?” It comes with the territory when you take risks and if you don’t, your work will never be great. Haven’t heard much of Black Star yet, but looking forward to getting better acquainted.

Don’t be afraid even now to be critical. I think the great man would have wanted people to express a diversity of opinion. I guarantee he had no reason to be insecure about the occasional negative review. The Guardian obituary has the perfect balance, because despite the occasional misfire, the full package was what counts and that was as perfect the life of an artist as you could ever imagine.

11 October 2015, Berlin

David — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 09:58:01 +0000

It’s been a while…
Not my forté I’m afraid, this regularly updating activities thing… Anyway the news is that I’m returning to Australia for about 6 weeks on Tuesday, in order to perform a concert for the ANZAC centenary. It’s part of commemoration events being conducted by the good people at the historic Maygar barracks in Broadmeadows on November 21. It will be a free event, full details, time etc. will be posted here very soon. Music for String Quintet, Guitar and Children’s Choir. I myself will not be playing, instead I will be standing in front of the choir and musicians, waving my arms around until the music stops, then of course turning around and bowing to the audience as they (hopefully) applaud.

Berlin has become a little colder of late, but with many stunning clear Autumn days. The creeper that covers my house is turning an amazing crimson colour but I may not be here to see it in it’s full glory. The enthusiasm for music here in general, (even mine) is a wonder to behold. At it’s heart does seem to be the whole community choirs thing, I went to a lovely evening recently in a church in Neukölln where about a dozen of these performed. Very high standard but relaxed and informal, with a huge variety of styles from early music to contemporary (some of that was a bit weird, but some great). This evening I am going to a performance of Mendelssohn’s Oratorio Elias (Elijah). In Köpenick (Ed.-that didn’t go so well, not to worry)…