A dead give-away

We caught the weekly recital of San Diego's Civic Organist, Carol Williams, last Sunday. The organ has sat in Balboa Park since 1915, and the city has had an official organist for nearly a century.

The position was up to be axed until recently. Like many US cities, San Diego needs to tighten the belt. According to a local councilman, Carl DeMaio, quoted in The New York Times on 26 December, 'We've decimated our basic park services, we've cut a third of libraries, and our roads are literally falling apart.' I'm glad for my sake, though, that the city received hundreds of letters in support of the Civic Organist. Her recital reminded me of the sort of lovely music-making that used to be made in Melbourne when I was a kid - concerts by the likes of the Footscray-Yarraville Band, organ recitals at the Town Hall; music played purely for the sake of the audience's enjoyment.

This nostalgic memory is not the only way San Diego reminds me of Australia however. In the Museum of Art, we came upstairs from an exhibition of modern Mexican painting (terrifically strong-figured stuff, such as Alfredo Ramos Martinez's 'Indian', Mancacoyota, staring directly at the viewer) and saw this through the window.

Where are we? Adelaide? Hobart?

I kind of don't mind. One of the great pleasures in living in the US right now is being recognised very quickly as an Australian. A guy on the train to Trenton pointed to my akubra as a, 'dead give-away,' but Americans can generally now pick the accent. Then they ask lots of questions. Those who momentarily mistake me for English quickly apologise (as they should). But I'm sure that 15 years ago when we'd mention Australia, people's eyes would glaze over about five minutes in. Now they're fascinated.

I can't help finding it flattering. And I can't help reflecting that it's the first time that something beyond any effort on my part helps me stand out from the general ruck. Of course, remembering Mancacoyota's stare I wouldn't dare equate myself with a beleagured or disadvantaged minority.

More to love about LA

'...[A] settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic; daring, decent and fair.'

I've sometimes asked musician friends if they can identify the source of this quote. Aaron Copland, Elmer Bernstein (the creators of 'Big Sky' music)? No, it's from Ronald Reagan's second inaugural address. Whether the speechwriter (Peggy Noonan?) was thinking of 'The Open Prairie' sequence of Copland's Billy the Kid ballet I don't know, but it reminds me that I share Reagan's love of the open spaces of the West.

I was struck by this love when we were at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley earlier this year. It's the reason for the site.

And I caught my breath again recently when we saw the San Fernando Valley from back of the Hollywood Hills.

This landscape doesn't have Central Australia's ribbons of ochre and mauve hills diminishing into vapoury blue peaks, but it still has the heart-swelling invitingness of open space. I love the feeling.

I love also the way you pass through different language areas in LA. Of course there's always Spanish, but you might pass through a Korean precinct

and the other day down Victory Boulevard we saw a script we couldn't identify - Russian, Thai? The woman sitting next to us on the bus filled us in. She was reading Los Angeles' Armenian-language newspaper.

These zones you pass through give the clue to how to see LA. It's not a city in the traditional sense of something derived from the old walled-city concept. It's a conurbation of old ranches (some maps show where they were), farms, orange groves, movie lots...Tarzana was once the ranch of novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, who named it after his most-famous character. Calabasas Junction, where I went swimming at the lap pool last week, was an old stagecoach stop.

As a city, LA's quite diffuse. You have to get most nearly everywhere by car (though we've walked from Kittredge to Ventura Boulevard and back, and they're restoring the public transport). And it may not have the compressed excitement of a Manhattan. But there's citrus and sunshine and birdsong as compensation. And it's no less active nor vibrant for all of that.

Under God

When I saw stars along Hollywood Boulevard dedicated to people like Joseph Szigeti, I realised that classical music was once American popular culture.

There are stars also to people like Stravinsky, Pierre Monteux, Paderewski, and the great Wagnerians Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann.

I love LA. I love the look of LA streets. The distant hills stop them from looking totally like Parramatta Road, or any anonymous-ville else.

I love the fact that you can see coyotes up in the hills and that they warn you about rattlesnakes on the trails.

I love that it often looks like 'that great Alice Springs on the other side of the sphere' (to paraphrase Herman Melville's comment about Australia)

Most of all I love that movies are made here.

This mural on the eastern wall of Hollywood High, Kate's father's old school, portrays some of the famous alumni - Lawrence Fishburne, Judy Garland, Carol Burnett...Check the way the guy on the side is pulling aside the curtain. A reference to the famous American painting of a fellow in his athenaeum (whose title I forget), I imagine it means this 'Old School Tie' is a producer, unlike the eastern wall's front-of-camera performers.

Not everyone likes Hollywood though. I saw this on the way down to San Diego earlier in the year.

A big red slash through the Hollywood sign.

And that's got me thinking about America's religiosity. Presidents these days end their speeches with 'God bless you. God bless the United States of America.' It wasn't also so. And wasn't until recently. Even a president as devout as Jimmy Carter ended his farewell address with 'Thank you, fellow citizens, and farewell'. Richard Nixon launched into a bigger arabesque, 'We come from many faiths, we pray perhaps to different gods - but really the same God in a sense - but I want to say for each and every one of you, not only will we always remember you, not only will we always be grateful to you but always you will be in our hearts and you will be in our prayers.' But then ended, merely: 'Thank you very much.' I wonder if any modern president would dare leave out the 'God bless you' mantra.

An Australian prime minister would not dare put it in! Australians give short shrift to public figures wearing religion on their sleeve. Wave the Bible and you are less likely to be elected. And there are advantages to this lower key. Has intense religiosity ever spared America immoral behaviour? Has it prevented shonky behaviour on Wall Street in recent years? Has it weeded out corporate sociopathy?

But here's an upside. Regardless of the work they're doing, Americans act joyfully. An Australian behind the counter will often give you resentful service; grunt when you say thank you rather than say, 'You're welcome'. You don't find that much here. Americans may simply be making lattes day in and day out, ringing up a cash register, driving a bus along the same route, but they behave as if they're part of the performance, the Divine Comedy. My current theory? I think they feel reassured they're doing what God wants them to do. It may not be forging a treaty or building a dam (always), but they feel that they fit into the grand design.

There's enough of the larrikin in me to be amused by the heckler who calls out 'bullshit' at the end of a ringing religious phrase, but it would be nice if Australians had a bit more of a sense of working for a higher power (or ideal). There are advantages to a higher key. I think this is partly how America built Wall Street, Silicon Valley - and Hollywood.

"Wie, hör’ ich das Licht" (Thus I hear the light)

I have noted before that America is a land rich in sound. You have the accents, the music, the birds, the streets - fire engine sirens several times a day in Charleston, bells from Savannah churches, the tweet of pedestrian signals in Atlanta. We walked through New Orleans one night earlier this week and Bourbon Street was a melange of different types of music.

Next morning though, as fog shrouded the uptown skyscrapers, it was clearly taking a while to wake up.

Not to worry, we have caught the train to Los Angeles, and at one of the meals in the dining car speak to a guy who describes for us all the accents of North Carolina! As we pass an antebellum mansion, an African-American woman behind us whispers through the crack between our seats: 'Miss Alice would have sat on that porch drinking mint juleps, know what I mean?'

The Amtrak whistle is one of the defining sounds of America. Shoot a film in Australia and you could still fool the audience it was set in America if you had the Amtrak whistle on the soundtrack.

In the capsule of the train compartment, however, hurtling across the country, the sound reduces to a rattling on rail tracks, carriage doors hissing open and the ubiquitous whistle.

Let this country pass even in 'silence', though, and it is still spectacular, as we travel through Houston

and West Texas towns

and plains

to the sunshine and snow-capped peaks of California.

In Los Angeles we return to noise at the other end, police helicopters overhead, la gente que habla español, and going to the movies where the intensity of the SurroundSound reminds us we are savouring the fruits of the industry of this town. It is altogether a fitting conclusion to the cross-country soundtrack.

Bringing forth?

Presidential contender Newt Gingrich's comment about the Palestinians being an invented people is puzzling if meant to be pejorative. One of the great things about the United States of America is that it was invented - elevenscore and fifteen years ago. Australians too should know roughly when the word 'Australia' was first used to mean the nation we know today. On 25 August 1804, the explorer Matthew Flinders, who had circumnavigated the coastline, wrote to his brother Samuel: 'I call the whole island Australia...' He later pushed for Australia to be the official name.

The 200 year-old debate

In Savannah, I was often fascinated by the after-effects of the Civil War - the house where General Joe Johnston lived for example:

(Out in North Carolina, we had seen the farm where Johnston had surrendered his army to General Sherman in April 1865)

Whenever we walked down Bull Street, I would also stop and take a look at Comer House, where ex-Confederate president Davis was entertained when he visited Savannah in 1886.

I was always fascinated by the way the vanquished Southern leadership was feted in after-years.

I asked a friend from Georgia how this could be, and the best explanation he could come up with (with a shrug) was: 'Family'. Of course, some family members would bristle at my word 'vanquished'. At a lecture we attended, the president of the Georgia Historical Society, W. Todd Groce, warned his audience beforehand that they might find he has some complimentary things to say about General Sherman, the Union general who occupied Savannah from December 1865 to February 1865. And there was an audible shuffle (of discomfort?) when he mentioned that actually, prior to the war, Sherman had been first president of LSU (Louisiana State University).

I admit I, too, wonder to what extent the Southern leadership was vanquished. To a large extent they were incorporated. The stars and stripes flies outside Johnstone's house.

(Of course, Johnston later served in federal administrations.) But I wonder if this approbation is an example of Lincoln's 'let 'em up easy'?


Or is this process of lauding Confederate leaders a way of legitimizing States' Rights as an authentic strand of American life? In the movie Gettysburg, 'General Longstreet' says, 'We should have freed the slaves and then fired on Fort Sumter.' That would have focussed the issue. Fact is, though, they didn't [free the slaves], and they couldn't keep it [the issue of slavery] 'in the family'.

Which, given that Americans live with this oppositional view in their midst, got me thinking about the place of contrary views in American society. Because, as another example, if you think about it, the major American political parties have become their polar opposites over the years. I know I was dismayed to learn, some years ago, that the 'big government' Democratic Party traces its origins back to Jefferson who was a proponent of States' Rights and 'government is best which governs least'. On the other hand, the greatest presidents from the small government, States' Rightist Republican Party were Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, who enlarged the federal government, enforcing its authority and regulating industry respectively. Do the supporters of either party recognise these flips? Or recognise them as flips? As someone said on the morning chat show Morning Joe the other day the debate between state and federal government and Strict Construction vs Hamiltonian interpretation (the federal government is empowered to do whatever is necessary to achieve its ends under the constitution) is 200 years old. Is embodiment of this debate, without any requirement to be consistent, enough to register authentic Americanness?

On Monday we left Savannah and took the bus to Atlanta (reversing the path of Sherman's march to the sea. I can see why it would have taken him so long to cover the distance.)

In Atlanta, ninth-largest metropolitan area of these united States, we found the following sign proudly displayed on the corner of Spring and Peachtree Streets:

Here were the outer defences of Atlanta in 1864.

The size of the contribution?

A number of musicians have lived in Savannah. Lowell Mason was here for a time. I know him mostly for the hymn, Watchman, which is one of the themes of Charles Ives' Fourth Symphony. So too was the composer of Jingle Bells, who, I see here, served for a time in the Confederate Army.

Leaving aside the pros and cons of having fought for the South, I am always intrigued by musicians who move out of their studio, so to speak. 

I remember reading once that 19th century military men and diplomats who met the virtuoso Franz Liszt would regret that such a brilliant man was wasted on music. When I read that, as a music student, I resented such oaf-headedness. But now I look at the stories that fascinate me.


I am trying to produce an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, the Harlem-born concert pianist, who died ferrying schoolchildren to safety during an attack on Hue in the Vietnam War. I have always admired the fact that Faubion Bowers, Scriabin's biographer, was General MacArthur's aide-de-camp in occupied Japan, and is credited with saving Kabuki theater. The other day I read that the actress Hedy Lamarr worked with the composer George Antheil on a radio navigation system for anti-submarine torpedoes during World War II.


What is my fascination with these stories? Am I somehow concerned about classical music's relevance to life? I also remember reading Richard Taruskin’s account of how, in the era of Soviet oppression, his Russian friends would hang out for the latest Shostakovich. Do we do that for any classical composer now? Yet, it wouldn’t be true to say that music is not important. People get very het up over their favourite music. It’s so much an issue of who we are. 

I do get concerned though when I see orchestral seasons simply re-combining the same 75 or so works.