Thursday, August 30, 2012

'...at their several fires...'

I am lukewarm on Thomas Jefferson's politics. Apart from the fact that he kept slaves while 'yelping' (Samuel Johnson's word) for liberty, he regarded himself first and foremost as a Virginian and I always take advocacy of States' Rights with a grain of salt. States' Rights - the cri de coeur of those who would hide from 'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind' (if I may quote TJ's Declaration of Independence right back at him), especially with regard to reforming injustice. Just look at the Civil War and Jim Crow.

I also consider that Jefferson was disloyal to Washington - while serving in the guy's cabinet as Secretary of State! And I reckon he was the godfather of Indian Removal (shunting the Eastern tribes across the Mississippi), although I concede that there might have been some sort of idealism behind his theory that if the Indians could be taught agriculture they would need less of their forest domains, thus freeing up land for the starving of Europe who would soon be seeking refuge in the New World. I remember seeing a jotting of Jefferson's on the Library of Congress website to the effect that life's ideal is for each man (sic) to have a few acres of his own to work. And I do like the fact that many of the American founders were farmers and close to nature; that they would conclude a letter on matters of state with, say, 'asparagus has now come to table'.

In fact, I much prefer Jefferson as a writer, a coiner of immortal phrases. And I am very moved by the fact that late in life, he (the third president) and John Adams (the second), despite having been political foes around the turn of the 19th century, resumed their friendship and re-commenced a correspondence that is now one of the glories of American Letters.

My favourite passage was written from Monticello (the retired Jefferson's home on the hill) on 11 June, 1812. In reply to Adams' questions about Indians, whether 'there [is] any Book that pretends to give any Account of [their]Traditions..,', Jefferson replies:

'So much in answer to your enquiries concerning Indians, a people with whom, in the very early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated. Before the revolution they were in the habit of coming often, and in great numbers to the seat of our government, where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Outassete, warrior and orator of the Cherokees.


An illustration of the three Cherokee leaders who went to London in 1763. Outtasete [Outacity] is on the left.
'He was always the guest of my father, on his journeys to and from Williamsburg. I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people, the evening before his departure for England. The moon was in full splendor, and to her he seemed to address himself in his prayers for his own safety on the voyage, and that of his people during his absence. His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, altho' I did not understand a word he uttered.'

Jefferson went on to say that the Cherokees and Creeks are now well advanced in agriculture and that the Cherokee are now instituting a regular representative government. But those who are not shaping up will fall prey to the British and we will have to drive them into the stony mountains, securing 'our women and children for ever from the tomahawk and scalping knife'.

But the description of Outassete's oration reminds me of another oral tradition. In January 1976 I went to visit some friends at Pipalyatjara in far northwestern South Australia, about a 250 kms southwest of Uluru (Ayers Rock). This was one of the first outstations set up by Australian aboriginal people in order to get out of government settlements. Back then, the only structures at Pipalyatjara were a couple of caravans, a radio shack, store, and a shower 'block' (made of timber). The people lived in wiltjas, their traditional structures. Three years later I went to Kintore (Walungurru) on the Western Australian border and the wiltjas there were made of hessian bags and corrugated iron. Not so in Pipalyatjara then. They were the traditional wood and bark structures. (I've mentioned this before, in the blog about the Lenape wigwam in Inwood Hill Park, New York.)


One day my friend and his new wife had an argument out in front of the store. Most of us standing around, including myself, made themselves scarce, and finally my friend's wife got into their car and drove off.

That night we slept outside. Up till then we had slept inside a caravan. Suddenly a huge argument started in the camp. We coudn't see anything. It was dark, but we could hear a youngfella raising his voice, others joining him in agreement and dispute and finally the booming voice of an old man, one of the tjilpis, several dozen yards away across the wide expanse of the camp, laying down the law.

His speech was rich with serial verbs and I remember particularly the repetition of the word 'walypala' [whitefella] - 'walypala, walypala, walypala, walypala....' Ushma Scales, a Pitjantjatjara speaker, was with us - he'd come across from Amata, 150 miles to the east, for a visit. We asked him what the argument was about. The old man was telling the young people to behave like Pitjantjatjara, not like whitefellas, who had provided him with an example of behaviour he disapproved of today.

But what really got me was how Ushma went on: 'This sort of discussion goes on every night,' he said. 'It's "the news". It's been going on like this in front of people's wiltjas every night for aeons.'  This was what really impressed me.  People discussing the day's events, the old men such as this one this night delivering ornate, almost baroque speeches 'altho' I did not understand a word he uttered'; all this coming at us in the dark, across the wide diameter of the camp while 'the people sat at their several fires'.



Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Reprieved - Inner West scenes 3

These forthcoming NSW local council elections (Saturday 8 Sep) have got me thinking back to the last lot of council elections in 2008. I was doorknocking for one of the candidates in the Inner West.


Fascinated by the different ways people live... when you get to knock at hundreds of doors you would never normally knock at. At one house, the door opened, a noxious vapour escaped and only after it cleared could I make out the pale and speechless denizen who lived in that hydroponic atmosphere. Very hard to launch into a spiel at a moment like that.

Of course there's always an element of 'sorry to disturb your peaceful Saturday afternoon' in this sort of excercise. At one place I knocked and the front door was swung open by a breathless girl who was hastily pulling a wrap around her bare shoulders. 'Oh, uh...' I began. Behind her another girl, likewise quickly pulling on covering, disappeared up the hall. I pretended my focus had never left the front door frame as I launched into my spiel. 'I'm doorknocking for candidate X in the forthcoming council elections and I wonder...' 'No', the girl said with admirable decisiveness and slammed the door in my face. I think I'd seen an exquisite blend of relief and resentment flash over her face. For a brief second, she must have thought they'd been caught by the cuckolded husband, boyfriend, or girlfriend. Nevertheless...they'd been interrupted!

I went back out into the street to relate my experience to a colleague who'd been doorknocking the 'evens' on the other side of the street. Slightly insulted by my curt dismissal, I quickly recovered my self-esteem when he said, 'Oh, how come I don't get to knock on those doors?'

Sousa and the Sioux

Continuing my series of reprints is this one from the middle of last year:

Last week, walking the maze of streets that made up the old part of city downtown, we came across the Museum of the Native American, or at least the part of the collection that was left in New York after the bulk of it was moved to Washington.

Even so 'depleted', the range of exhibits from all across the Americas pays tribute to the inventiveness of human design, as you compare differences in dress and other artefacts from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.

I was particularly struck by this outfit worn by British lieutenant, Andrew Foster when he was inducted ('adopted') into the Anishinaabe in the Upper Great Lakes area in the late 1700s


I would wonder about the sensitivities around showing this image except for the fact that the outfit looks like an  'interpretation' of European dress, a tunic with a collar, albeit topped by a feathered headdress.

Which all reminds me that I should check up and see what's happened with Sousa and the Sioux, another story of contact that I mentioned to an orchestra out West some months ago.

In December 1890 , the United States army killed 150 men, women and children of the Lakota Sioux and wounded 51 others (some of whom died later) at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Ethnologist James Mooney wrote a report on the massacre, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, which was printed in the Smithsonian's fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1896. Mooney located the source of the massacre in army suppression of a religion known as the Ghost Dance which was taking hold in Indian nations in the closing years of the 19th century.The Ghost Dance religion prophesied a peaceful end to white expansion, although the religion's spread at the same time that the government was moving the Sioux onto smaller reservations to accommodate westward expansion, alarmed some settlers.

Mooney's report displays an astonishing sympathy with Native American culture for the 1890s and his empathy is further demonstrated in the fact that the archival cylinder recordings of Sioux and Shoshone songs accompaning the report are not actually by Native Americans, but Mooney himself. Singing them in the Berliner Studio back in Washington must have involved an extraordinary feat of memory.

But what most strikes me most about Mooney's report is that half of the musical transcriptions of the 50+ pages of Ghost Dance chants are by John Philip Sousa - Sousa, the march king, the composer of patriotic, if not tub-thumping, chauvinistic marches, who would produce The Stars and Stripes Forever and Liberty Bell within the not-so-distant future.You wonder how this assignment might have marked him for later life. Where was he in his career at this stage? Did he talk/write about this work? Did he and Mooney correspond/sit down together? Do we know what he thought? After all, he later wrote those patriotic marches.

At the time I was first thinking of this piece I had no answers to these questions. Except that, in a 1920 edition of Theodore Presser's magazine The Etude, there is an article by a Sioux called Red Cloud which says, in part: 'When I came back to America I became more and more interested in music...and finally achieved my great ambition to play [Sousaphone] in the Sousa band. Mr  Sousa must have an inborn feeling for the Indian because in his famous suite Dwellers in the Western World he has an Indian section which, although composed of themes which are entirely original with him, have all the characteristics of Indian music quite as though some departed Indian spirits had inspired him...' Did Sousa and Red Cloud ever discuss their relationship to Wounded Knee?

All these connections suggested music to me. Among other issues, a performance work could try to answer the question: 'how did transcribing the Ghost Dance chants contained in a report on a massacre affect Sousa's sympathies?' The opposite pull of traditional dances and patriotic marches also provides a clue to a musical plan for a piece.

Most recently I wrote to the Sousa Archive in Chicago to see what they may hold in their collection. They told me additionally that Sousa had been named an honorary chief on July 30, 1925 by the Fire Hills Indian Reserve, then by the Ponca Tribe on October 12, 1928, and for a third time by the Pawnee Tribe on May 16, 1931. Were these publicity type demonstrations, or were they expressions of genuine sympathy? Another thread to explore.

The Archive said that unfortunately there was no specific correspondence documenting Sousa's thoughts on Native American music. But there may be interesting references in the Sousa Band press clippings. That it might be worth coming to Chicago to conduct some further research. Indeed it might.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Location, location

I used to say that one of my favourite places on earth was the Alice Springs Drive-In, c.1981. It's derelict now and has recently been slated for subdivision as a new suburb, Kilgariff.

 http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2010/05/13/2898433.htm

But it was a fantastic place to watch movies back then. Six kilometres from town, you'd sit outside in the desert night. If you were waiting for the movie to start you'd look at the brilliant starry night or the dinosaur shapes of the MacDonnell Ranges glowing in the dark (they do glow), pick up the odd whiff of eucalyptus smoke or snatch of Pitjantjatjara or Arrernte spoken around the campfires of the fringe camps around the perimeter, and then watch Hollywood movies while surrounded by Americans from Virginia or Maryland who worked at Pine Gap Defence base.

I remember seeing The Elephant Man there in 1981. The Victorian-era story of the dreadfully deformed Joseph Merrick, forced to work as a carnival attraction until rescued by the surgeon Frederick Treves and allowed to live at London Hospital for the remainder of his days, is heart-rending enough. But in the past few days I've watched again some of the scenes where Antony Hopkins perhaps first became recognised universally as a great actor. There's the scene where Treves sees Merrick for the first time. Treves, played by Hopkins, steps out of the shadows where he's been cowering and in the light a solitary tear runs down his face. How did Hopkins do that?

There is also that great scene where Treves is trying to convince Mr Carr-Gom, the administrator of the hospital, that Merrick is not an imbecile and that his needs are best-served at their establishment. He has coached Merrick in The Lord is my Shepherd, but Merrick is struck dumb when Carr-Gom visits. I'm sorry, says Carr-Gom, but he will have to go elsewhere. Outside Merrick's room, on the landing, Treves is disappointed and pensive. But he hears Merrick go on. 'Mr Carr-Gom,' he says, 'I didn't teach him this bit'. What bit is it? The bit that always gets me: 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me'.

But to get back to the Alice Springs Drive In. Here was the other great thing about seeing this movie there. The Elephant Man was in black and white. In the desert night, there was no way of telling exactly where the screen ended and the desert backdrop started. And at the very end of the film, as the sounds of Barber's Adagio stir and Merrick decides to try sleeping lying down 'like ordinary people', though it will asphyxiate him, a huge falling star fell behind the screen and sputtered spectacularly. Everybody, even those out on the perimeter, gasped at that long-ago event timed beautifully for the end of our movie. 

Monday, August 20, 2012

More Australian icons (a third lot)

I had been hoping to get up again to the Blue Mountains, west of here, before returning to the US, and was finally rewarded. It's only two hours away by train, but has a whole other 'feel' to sub-tropical Sydney (on Saturday, for example: freezing).

The Mountains contain Australia's second-best scenery in my opinion (the best being in Central Australia), and obviously the honey-coloured cliffs would always form part of my inventory of iconic Australian images.

But I had to laugh the other day when I looked into a yard and saw a Hills Hoist right on the edge of the cliff. Barrie Kosky recognised the Hills Hoist's status as an Australian icon when he used it to symbolise his Adelaide Festival in 1996, but how quaint to see it juxtaposed with the Blue Mountains' primeval scenery in this way.


All it needed was clothes to be flapping on it, for the dissonance to be complete.




Sunday, August 19, 2012

Liberty

Rereading some of my blogs, I figure there are some I'd reprint, such as this from last year on liberty.

In Washington, the seat of government, my thoughts turn to the concept of 'liberty'.


There are those who pursue the idea of liberty down to questioning the need for a Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA ('more "Washington"', 'more regulation'). And yet, there is always a point where even the most libertarian politician will call a halt to all-out freedom. It might be a woman's right to choose, it might be gay marriage...

At some point even Liberty's staunchest advocates tolerate some hemming in. In the Declaration of Independence, 'liberty' shares its keynote clause with 'life' and 'the pursuit of happiness'. In the Constitution, as a keyword search tells me, 'liberty' appears only once along with a whole list of other aims. In Gouvernor Morris's great words: 'to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty...'

I suppose 'liberty' is better suited to a clarion call than some of the other aims. After all, Patrick Henry did not cry, 'Give me general Welfare or give me death,' or 'Give me happiness or give me death.' But it would be interesting to find out how liberty came to be almost exclusively the only virtue.

Of course, in life there is a lot of wriggle room to achieve liberty in. In a country like Australia, where we have far more government intervention, an atheist, red-haired, unmarried woman who lives with her boyfriend can become Chief Executive.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

'Doing all of it?' - Savannah and the performing arts


Elegant Victorian villas and gaslit streets lined with Live Oaks draped with Spanish Moss – downtown Savannah is as beautiful as the travel literature leads you to expect.
 
Savannah, established by philanthropist Sir James Oglethorpe in 1733, was intended to be safe up on its bluff, a functional British bulwark against Spanish Florida and French Louisiana, and downtown is still shaped by Oglethorpe’s grid pattern around squares. Echoes of Savannah’s history rebound. It’s in the Deep South (Georgia) so there are memorials ‘to our Confederate dead’, houses where Confederate heroes, like Jefferson Davis (the Confederate president), or Robert E. Lee, once slept.


Savannah is a smallish city – 130,000 in the downtown, 300,000 in the metro area. 55% of the metro population is African-American. There are not many Hispanics, even so close to Florida (only about two hours away by car). But there’s a significant Jewish population, which goes back to the idealistic Oglethorpe who permitted Jews, Lutheran Salzburgers and other persecuted groups to settle in the colony.

It is atmospheric - in summer the city languishes in the humidity - and haunted. I was told that the CVS downtown is the only one of these pharmacies in the US to close at sundown because the staff won’t work after dark. But Savannah is mostly celebrated for its visual beauty. Like most amenable US cities it’s a university town, but SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design (which seems to own and to have renovated a building on every block) specializes in visual arts, illustration, photography, fashion, web design…

How does Savannah sound? Church bells constantly ring. In December the streets pop to the sounds of acorns dropping on pavements or crunching underfoot. But despite the fact that Lowell Mason (whose hymn ‘Watchman’ is quoted in Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony) spent his early adulthood in Savannah, or that Savannah is the birthplace of lyricist Johnny Mercer, until recently you wouldn’t have gone to Savannah for the performing arts. In two weeks I spent in the city in March, however, I got a pretty impressive sense of how much musical activity there can be in even a small US city.

First of all, Savannah is one community that has gone to the trouble of re-establishing an orchestra after a pretty spectacular collapse.  I spoke to David Pratt, the Executive Director, an Australian who formerly worked at the Sydney Symphony.

‘The Symphony falling over [in 2003] rocked the city to its core,’ he says. ‘Every business was involved. And they lost a lot.’ David explains that the new Philharmonic grew out of the chorus that had been part of the Symphony when it went under.’ After the dust settled, the singers who were formerly attached to the Symphony wanted to keep singing. They found an artistic director in Peter Shannon, an Irishman who had spent ten years conducting the Collegium Musicum orchestra in Heidelberg Germany, and in late 2007, Peter decided the singers would do a concert with orchestra. So he drew musicians from all over the southeast (Jacksonville, Charleston, Atlanta, Columbia South Carolina) and got such a good response that they did it again, and then the board of the choral society said, ‘Maybe it’s time to look at forming a new orchestra,’ So they formed the Philharmonic, got their 501(c)(3) status, and were incorporated in August of 2008.’ The orchestra still functions on a per call basis, but players are kept in their chairs as much as possible to foster the sense of regular ensemble.

But how hard is it to re-establish an orchestra where government support is ‘zip’. How do you bring the donors back?

‘Show them the financials. The 990 tax forms that we have to send in,’ says David, who was brought in as Executive Director, once the orchestra was put on a more permanent footing. ‘And they can see them online. It’s also getting potential donors into a performance and seeing a 1200-seat theatre that’s full. Then we can at least get them to start coming again. They’ll buy tickets or they’ll start at a very low level, but these are people who used to give you know $50,000, $25,000, $10,000. Some will never ever come back. They’ve said to my face: “Absolutely not interested in giving to an orchestra ever again.” I accept that.’

With Savannah’s demography, a population that is 55% African-American, does the Savannah Philharmonic worry about outreach?

‘You know, it’s an interesting mix of people. Savannah’s changed a lot over the years. Once upon a time, pre-SCAD, Savannah was a very closed community. If you came here as an outsider, you would never break in.’ This is the Savannah John Berendt described in his best-seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  ‘And there’s still, to some degree, a little of that. If I was a Yankee, it could be a problem, but two things have had an influence. The movie of Midnight put Savannah on the map for tourism, the film more than the book. Two: SCAD has revitalized downtown. You talk to people who were here in the 80s, this entire street was boarded up.’

As for outreach, ‘We’ve done bits and pieces. We’ve done this initiative with the Anderson Cancer Institute. And that’s come out of Peter’s love for music and its role in integrated medicine.  I did some other things with what are called under-served communities here. Second Harvest runs an incredible program, 44 kids’ cafes, essentially after-school programs that run for two or three hours. It’s the only meal these kids get every day. The director of the program said to me, “Most of these kids have never even eaten a McDonalds because their families can’t afford it.” And Second Harvest has a cultural component. So we had musicians come in and play and interact with these kids - a presence every week. And that starts to build a profile with the community.’

David also lists co-pros with Savannah State University, a predominantly African-American institution and participation in ‘two great programs in city’: Bravo. It’s an acronym standing for Black youth Reaching out Vocal and Orchestral music. And then there’s Sonata. ‘They fund private music lessons for African-American kids who cannot afford otherwise afford them.’

But most of my focus is to build financial stability. And the only way I can do that is to make sure all our concerts are sold out, that we are raising money, and that we’re focused on funding our season, with building a reserve.’ David talks about two areas where there may be potential for philanthropic support - Skidaway Island, a gated community which has attracted successful people from the Midwest and Northeast who retired to Savannah to live in a warmer climate, people who supported the orchestras in their own cities. Also Bluffton, 30 minutes away in South Carolina, halfway between Savannah and Hilton Head where there’s another orchestra. ‘Most of my time goes into researching and cultivating individuals and looking for these sorts of pockets of communities,’ he concludes.

In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil much was made of voodoo. There were scenes of the sorceress Minerva paddling through ‘gator infested swamps to sprinkle rooster blood on a grave and pacify its dead resident. And I realize that here on the Atlantic seaboard there can be quite a profound sense of Africa to the southeast. It’s a counterbalance to the Confederate ‘whiteness’.

Given that, it’s worth noting that Savannah hosts one of the best world music festivals anywhere in the world. The Festival’s main focus is on the 17 days each Spring where you can catch a smorgasbord of music ranging from some of the very best jazz, Malian musicians from Africa, Iranians, chamber music – all compressed into the small space of walkable downtown Savannah.

I went to Savannah in March deliberately to catch this festival. On one typical day I heard the Sweet Singing Harmony Harmoneers, followed by the Takacs Quartet playing Beethoven and Schubert, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones at the Trustees Theater. Two days later I squeezed in the McIntosh County shouters, Menachem Pressler playing Dvořàk with Daniel Hope and Friends, and Ruthie Foster and The Campbell Brothers.

The Festival is run by Rob Gibson, a native Georgian. I spoke to him and Communications and Operations Director, Ryan McMaken after coming back from a concert of the McIntosh County Shouters, a group that still practises a form of communal singing and dancing that harks back to slave days on the Georgia coast and predates gospel.

Gibson reckons he’s not doing anything different than he did 32 years ago when he programmed the radio station at University of Georgia. ‘On WUOG we had the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Camerata, the Metropolitan Opera. We had punk rock because it was the height of the Sex Pistols. We had Bob Marley and the Wailers. I had an African music program, then an avant-garde classical program called A Year from Monday after John Cage’s book. So I’ve always had a broad interest in what I would call the musical arts. It’s just not very often that you get to put that inside of a festival.’

The Festival’s got an impressive chamber music component curated by violinist, Daniel Hope. One of the great advantages of hearing chamber music in Savannah is sitting in the 250-seat Telfair Academy (deeded to the city by philanthropist, Mary Telfair) listening to the Dumky Trio and sitting close enough to enjoy the drama of eye contact between players; then walking to the next concert through streets that look essentially unchanged since Dvořàk was composing. (When Robert Redford filmed The Conspirator, all they did was take the parking meters out of Barnard Street and fill it with dirt and, hey presto!, it was Washington, 1865.)



But it’s the mix of programs that really makes the Savannah Music Festival stand out. Gibson is renowned for ‘double bills’, combinations of music that you wouldn’t normally expect to hear together and which make converts of people who would not formerly have listened to an unfamiliar genre. Says Ryan McMaken:  Rob put ngoni (lute) player Bassekou Kouyate on a double bill with Bill Frisell an American jazz player. A lot of people knew Bill and came out for that and were floored the first night by Bassekou Kouyate.’

I myself was impressed by a joint concert given by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band from New Orleans and the Dell McCoury Band, a bluegrass group. This wasn’t just a double bill. It was a collaboration, and, on paper, you mightn’t expect it to work. Except that it did. Half the listeners clapped on the beat, the other half off, but even McCoury now prefers some of his songs ‘with horns’.

Quality and the fact that it has to be ‘live’ music, are Gibson’s non-negotiables. He mentions that if you go to the Spoleto Festival up the road in Charleston, South Carolina, you might see the Shen Wei Dance Company ‘comin’ out of New York but they’re doing the tape and I don’t do tape.’

The SMF is marketed consciously to both locals and ‘out-of-towners’, two different campaigns. With 36% of the people in 2011 coming from more than 200 miles away, staying an average of four and a half days and spending an average of $452 per day, it’s important to reach the non-locals. But locals also love the Festival. ‘Now there is a level of trust with our audience. They might say, “Well I never heard of this African guy, but the last time we went to hear a African guy he was great, so we’ll go and hear this one - and that kind of thing.’ There is also huge element of local pride in presenting music of the South. ‘Gospel grew up in Georgia’, said Gibson before one of the concerts, and later, to me: ‘the indigenous musics that come out of the United States, Blues, Gospel, Country and Western, Zydeco, Cajun and Tex-Mex, all of them are Southern.’

They’re also highly involving. At the McIntosh County Shouters concert I attended, one of the singers stepped forward and sang , ‘Good Lord in Heaven, I know I’ve been changed,’ and the woman at the next table joined in, the guy behind me joined in hands raised. I thought, ‘This is music that gets people where they live. They believe they’re going to be raptured up.’

But opera, too, deals with the basics of life – with love, death... How does opera fare in Savannah? There is no resident company. Once again, I was happy to have found myself in Savannah this March.

Since 2001, the legendary Verdi baritone, Sherrill Milnes has run a singer development program called the VOICExperience (Vocal and Operatic Intensive Creative Experience) with his wife, Maria Zouves. It’s based in Tampa Florida where Milnes retired to, but does workshops in New York City and Chicago. The purpose of the ‘Experience’, in the words of its website, is to advance singers in their careers by giving them the highest level of educators while creating outreach of opera and musical theatre to the communities of the world. Programs include ‘Opera as Drama’, working on operas from the perspective of the text, ‘Generation X’, an intensive week of classes, private coaching, masterclasses and audition preparation for the young singer, and the ‘Voice Workshop’ to help career beginners refine their craft.  This year, Milnes and Zouves brought the Voice Workshop to Savannah and Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, 50 miles inland. Over a week, 17 young professionals singers had the opportunity to study with Milnes, Zouves and former Metropolitan star, Diana Soviero before presenting their accomplishments in two public concerts at the end of the week.

Milnes and Zouves have been considering moving to Savannah, and this was a test run to see if the community support was there for operatic activity. The idea in locating the workshop and presentations in Savannah and Statesboro, was to place the results in front of Savannahians who have the wherewithal to support opera, in the hope that they might be inspired to grab the opportunity. As was explained to me, you have to be careful in launching anything in Savannah. Savannahians have a profound sense of place and do not need to be told what they lack. Savannah even rejected the composer Gian-Carlo Menotti when he was looking for a home for his Spoleto Festival, and he went instead to Charleston.

Milnes and Zouves were therefore approaching this prospect with the hope that someone (that is sufficient donors), would come forward at the end of their week and say, ‘Hey, let’s do more of this,’ Nothing big deal, just an incremental step towards having more regular operatic activity.

At the end of the week the VOICExperience put on a concert in Christ Church, followed by a repeat out at Georgia Southern. In a sense the concert was a showcase of arias and ensembles that the particpants had worked on in the previous week, but Zouves has a background as an opera director, and the excerpts were shaped and staged in such a way as to give the emotional impression of an operatic trajectory. The audience in Christ Church loved it, and there was the prospect of some donations.

The VOICExperience has since put on another concert, in June, and Zouves and Milnes have sunk a considerable amount of money into the project. They intend to bring South Carolina-born composer Carlisle Floyd [composer of Of Mice and Men and Susannah] to Savannah in August. Now is crunch time to know if the city is ready for operatic activity that permanent.

Will Savannah end up with an opera company anytime soon? Is it big enough? That is still an open question but a Savannahian company’s catchment would be three or four states wide and vocal music is a seedbed for other musical activity in the community. The orchestra was resurrected by people who wanted to keep singing.

I went with VOICExperience singers, Rebecca Flaherty and Jessica Best to a demonstration they gave at the Savannah Arts Academy, a high school dedicated to the arts, on Washington Avenue. What struck me most was student response at the end of the session. Four boys jumped up to reciprocate and what did they sing? Barbershop quartets.

‘There’s a real resurgence of a capella male singing in America,’ whispered the guy standing next to me, David Starkey, General and Artistic Director of Asheville Lyric Opera in North Carolina, who had driven the five hours from the mountains of North Carolina to attend the VOICExperience concerts and see if there were any synergies here for other opera companies in the South. Then all the students gathered around us in a circle and sang the Lutkin Benediction: ‘the Lord bless you and keep you’. It was a moving moment. ‘That’s America for you,’ said Starkey. ‘We don’t just do some of it; we do all of it.’

That kind of explains how a city of 130,000 can have so much going on. Savannah can tout Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Treasure Island (yes, it figures in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel) and Forrest Gump. Of course, it can’t boast Porgy and Bess – that’s rival city Charleston’s honour – but perhaps that doesn’t matter. Look how much was going on in the two weeks I was there in March – and that in a city not noted for its performing arts.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2012

This article was first published in The Podium, the e-newsletter of Symphony Services International

http://symphonyinternational.net/

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Short scenes for camera (acting) classes, 4

Feel free to use this (and make suggestions), but please include website address if printing out.


JEN COMES IN TO MARK HOLDING HIS MANUSCRIPT.

MARK
So?

JEN
It’s great. Powerful, vivid. It really carries you along.

MARK
But?

JEN
All these characters look like recognizable locals. ‘Pete Piddick’? Paul Potter.

MARK
So?

JEN
You’re saying these people would turn a blind eye to that sort of crime now.

MARK
They would if they could.

JEN
Who? That you’ve met?

MARK
I didn’t accept this residency so I could shirk controversy, right? To have people say 'he always runs away from a fight'. I’m sick of being seen like that. I want this to make a mark.

JEN
It’ll do that.

MARK
Oh, and you think that’d be a shame? (PAUSE) I thought you said it was good.

JEN
It is. It is. It’s brilliant.

MARK
Good then. So what was your news?

JEN
Ah, well that too is special. Guess what? I’m pregnant.

MARK
It’s mine?

JEN
OF COURSE IT’S YOURS!

www.gordonkaltonwilliams.com

Monday, August 6, 2012

Drowned man in a dry creek bed - Happy New Year 1993


My friends, Neil and David Bell, and I were out on the path of the Kungka kutjara, a Central Australian travelling songline  – one of those epic Central Australian chants that are meant to have come into being in the Tjukurpa (eternity), or Altjira as the Aranda call it. We were hoping, perhaps too blithely, to make a radio program about it for ABC Classic FM.

We had got some recordings down at Mutitjulu, had just dropped N and B off at the Loritja camp at Hermannsburg and were heading back towards Alice Springs. We sang some of the chant as we rattled over the corrugations of the dirt road, a bit of the song that stuck in our memories – ‘Yulatji luma, Kunpatji luma...’ – not so much as to ‘bring the country up’ as Bruce Chatwin observed aboriginal travellers doing, as to make the time go faster.

As we turned a corner near Ellery Creek we came across a burning car. A Western Desert man was standing beside the car trying to beat out the flames which had already spread, quickly in this heat, to the grass by the side of the road.

Ellery Gorge, photograph: courtesy Andrew Schultz
Neil pulled up and spoke to him. ‘Nyaa palyanin?’ and they had a conversation. As we pulled away, David, Neil’s son, said, ‘Did he say someone’s dead down there?’

We descended to the creek and saw two women stripped to their waists, wailing and hurling dirt in the air. In the dry creek bed we saw a man cradling another in his arms.

A carload of people had been driving from Alice Springs to Kaltukatjara (Docker River). They’d been drinking. At Ellery Creek they jumped into a waterhole and this fellow hadn’t come up.

‘How long has he been like this?’ we asked.

‘Half an hour’.

Back at Hermannsburg the police looked as if they’d hurriedly thrown their khaki uniform shirts over shorts and thongs. It was New Year’s holiday. We took the man’s body inside the station. Then there were a series of interviews. Neil translated, but there were still misunderstandings. ‘Name?’ the police asked one interviewee. ‘Stephen Bradshaw,’ he said (I use a fake name). ‘Well, if you’re Stephen Bradshaw, who’s he?’ they indicated the body bag and opened it. They had identified the deceased by the cicatrice scars on his shoulder. But distinguishing Central Australian aboriginal people by scarification on their shoulders will not get you far.

The police had to go back out to Ellery Creek and gave David and me a choice: sit outside in the 50 degree (122F) heat, or in here with the body. We chose the air-conditioning.

We sat in silence. But I was coming to understand what T.G.H. Strehlow had meant when he said that nowhere else in the world are death and eternity bound together so tightly as in Central Australia. The eternal myths, such as Kungka kutjara, are present in the daily lives of living people; death is out-in-the-open and an all-too-frequent occurrence.

At the end of the day, after five or six hours of witness statements, I was standing outside watching the sun set, waiting to finally get back on the road to Alice Springs. The driver of the Docker River people’s car came over, the car that I later learnt had been burnt in grief. I said, ‘Not a good way to spend New Year’s Day.’ He said, ‘Bad day for me.’ I wondered why him in particular, but was told later that as the driver of the car he could pay for this in a big way. In the past he might have been speared. How was it his fault? When the drowned man’s mother had been dropped off at the Loritja camp, the women had come over and struck her. I don’t know how they’d have known what happened. Something specific in the way she was wailing? But why strike her? These were graphic illustrations of the Central Australian concept of ‘duty of care’ and ‘tribal responsibility’. Awesome obligations of reciprocity necessary I suppose in an environment which will kill an isolated human if they’re not paying attention.

And all we had wanted to do really was make a radio program about an Australian form of music. To help Australians gain a bit more insight into the cultural riches of our land. ABC Classic FM never got that radio program on the Kungka kutjara, but we certainly got more than we had bargained for.


If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Carving up the pie, 17 December 2012
Life-changing statements, 16 December 2012
Ah, Nathanael, 29 November 2012
Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012

GW in 1993



Sunday, August 5, 2012

Another icon?

I first noticed this travelling by train to Bowral from Sydney one spring: the violent purple of Hardenbergia violacea threaded through a flowering wattle tree (here photographed by Orphan School Creek in Glebe).



This underlines the observation once made that the characteristic colours of eastern Australia are the blues and yellows, not the greens.



Saturday, August 4, 2012

Iconography

To return to images: After Uluru, the Sydney Opera House is probably Australia's greatest landmark, but there were other images of Sydney that remained in my head throughout America.

Back from the water Sydney is just as much the honey-coloured sandstone of old Victorian public buildings



or the engravings the Eora people made in the stone

Poyt448 Peter Woodard, photograph in public domain

(This 1.7 metre figure, from the Waratah Track in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, is Baiame, the eastern tribes' 'Sky Father'. The rock is triassic Hawkesbury Sandstone, 220 million years old.)

and then at this time of year there are the Gymea Lilies (Doryanthes excelsa), here photographed at Sydney Uni.


I have often wondered if these had ceremonial significance...


For more information on rock art, see:
Josephine McDonald, Dreamtime Superhighway: Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange.
http://epress.anu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/whole_book6.pdf


Thursday, August 2, 2012

Short scenes for camera (acting) classes, 3

Feel free to use this (and make suggestions), but please include website address if printing out.

THE 'LEADER'’S OFFICE. THE LEADER PUTS DOWN THE PHONE AND SAYS TO HIS ASSISTANT, ALICE ALLEN.

LEADER
That was Huey Ray. You know what he said? He said, ‘You aren’t going to bring in this law? I know you. I had you on my knee when you were a boy. You didn’t have a streak of independence. Your parents or your teachers asked you to do anything you said, ‘Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.’ You’re a pleaser, you want everyone to like you and you don’t want me not to like you. I put you where you are right now.

HE TAPS HIS FINGERS ON THE LEGISLATION SITTING ON HIS DESK.

ALLEN
Sir, I –

LEADER
‘And they call you...’ you know what he told me? ‘“The kingmaker’s speechmaker”.’ He thinks he’s rattled me. ‘The kingmaker’s speechmaker’!

ALLEN
Sir, I’m afraid –

LEADER
Do you think I’m like that? Alice? I’m a pleaser?

ALLEN
No sir. I think you’re the most genuine politician of our generation. That’s why I’ve stayed with you ever since the campaign.

LEADER
He thinks he’s gotten under my skin. ‘Look at your poll numbers,’ he says. He thinks I’m on the ropes. (PAUSE) But you came in for something. Why the long face?

ALLEN
Sir, they’ve identified the bodies of those aid workers. Burnt almost beyond recognition. But not quite. One of them, as you know, was my fiancé.

LEADER THINKS, THEN PUSHES THE LEGISLATION OVER TO HER.

LEADER
Schedule it!


www.gordonkaltonwilliams.com