Satie

N.N. not no-one never naïve notes.

Somebody not just anybody please.

Poor Tom-like his mantelpiece of keys.

Whatever floats your boat your overcoat

Toy soldier marching down up down upstairs

Engineer of origins, tradesman of space

Once upon once upon once upon thrice

Hammering hardware, his waltz on a chair.

Was it ever gods treading ivory paths

Golden age pieces from the Attic attic

Where sunlight unloosed long staccato laughs,

Or only just Monsieur with one umbrella

Cool boulevardier, flaneur of static,

Paris where rain taps and fingers turn yeller?

Cage

9.     John Cage. Sometime in my forties I became strangely aware of a strong reaction against Romantic Music, i.e. the enormous heritage of 19^th century composition that filled the concert halls and living rooms of my childhood and youth. I had become habituated to its predictable heave-hoes and slower passages and more heave-ho. The discovery of Early Music pre-Mozart was fresh air, as was this amiable composer, who represents for me the end of old Romanticism. There’s a lot of hoo-ha and slower passages and more hoo-ha about Cage. I prefer hearing his music. A. Etudes Australes, played by Greta Sultan on piano. You want ambient? Cage took charts of the southern night sky and annotated the stars onto music paper. Over two hours of twinkle twinkle at unpredictable distances apart musically and astronomically, ideal for long road trips, or even just down the Geelong Road. B. Ensemble Modern and Ingo Metzmacher play Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of 3. I quote from the website of the Merce Cunningham Trust: “John Cage’s music was for piano and small orchestra, with a set of 64 sounds for the first dance; for each pair of dances eight sounds were replaced by eight others, so that by the end there was a completely new set of sounds. The colors of the costumes followed a similar sequence, from dark to light.” C. Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, the 1979 recording for Cologne Radio, is how James Joyce should be reinterpreted, complete with tape loops of natural and artificial sounds and Cage reading the polyglot words over the polyphonic flow using his invented mesostic metre. This extended piece of spoken word radio art has the stunning effect of making you feel like you’re in Dublin on one of those big blustery days, complete with hilltop dog barks and nattering in the pub snug. D. The Seasons, and other pieces performed by Margaret Leng Ten on prepared piano and toy piano, with the American Composers Orchestra. Winter through Fall, as Americans say, is the progression for this radical classic of modern ballet, first performed in New York in 1947. Again, the history itself is fascinating but the music makes all things new.

Photograph of John Cage in ‘Images of Music’ by Erich Auerbach, published by Könemann of Cologne, 1996, pages 34-35.

Gurrumul

8.     Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. This album is the result of an inspired collaboration between Michael Hohnen, Eekki Veltheim and Dr G. Yunupingu. The discoveries of contemporary minimalism are used to support, drive, and colour traditional manikay of Yolngu music of north east Arnhem Land. The more I listen to this particular album the more I am made aware of how the spoken voice of any locality forms and informs the singing voice, and so the composition of music itself. There is inspiration, imitation, improvisation, and so the whole play of voice and sound continues through time. The composers have listened attentively to the tone and inflection, the rhythm and style of Gurrumul’s lyrical singing before setting to with the instrumentation. They are creation songs, singing up the world of crow, scrubfowl, tuna, octopus, and crocodile, and everything that gives them and us life: air, light, fresh water. My mother never gives music CDs as presents, we’re likely to have them already, but she gave each of us each a copy of this album for Christmas.

The CD is pictured on a two-page detail illustration of a work called ‘Distant glimpses of the great floodplain seen through a veil of trees and hanging vines’ by John Wolseley, in the magnificent book ‘Midawarr Harvest : the art of Mulkun Wirrpanda and John Wolseley’  (National Museum of Australia, 2018)     

Sonic

7.     Sonic Youth. The Melbourne alternative music scene, alternative to Countdown and everything awful, “greatly influenced my taste in music,” though today I don’t listen to that music much but to what came next. 1976-1982 is when punk turned into new wave turned into goth, techno, industrial, thrash, grunge, shoe gaze, before growing up into further radiations of musical originality. Worldwide, musicians tested limits. Of all those, Sonic Youth is the band I return to most often. I’ve heard them live twice, once at the Prince of Wales in Fitzroy, a club which never knew the term ‘spatial distancing’, and another time at the Forum in Flinders Street. The electric guitar is the omnipresent instrument of the second half of the twentieth century and this band, tracing its way from Jimi Hendrix and Lou Reed through Frank Zappa and Neil Young, made over thirty years of recordings of unsurpassable and elevating sounds using alternative tunings, dreamlike feedback, intense rhythms, transcendent noise. It is the shifting sounds and aural walls that continue to astonish me. Here are six of their albums. I have inserted inside cover art as the cover, which is why they don’t look the way they do on download outlets. Photocopy: ‘Sister’ (1987). Bunny: ‘Dirty’ (1992). Pillows: ‘A Thousand Leaves’ (1998).  Street: ‘nyc ghosts & flowers’ (2000). One Way: ‘Murray Street’ (2002). Clocks: ‘The Eternal’ (2009). Oddly, I cannot locate my copy of their album that “greatly influenced” me, but their wiki says of ‘Daydream Nation’ (1988) that “it was chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the National Recording Registry in 2005.” Yes.

Ambient

6.     Ambient. The term ambient music is a tautology if we hear music as being sounds that exist and move everywhere in our general vicinity. In that sense, all music is ambient. Technology and our modern living spaces lent Brian Eno the chance to formalize his invention of ambient music, something that in practice had been socialised already for some time. Merriam-Webster’s second definition of the word ambient is “music intended to serve as an unobtrusive accompaniment to other activities (as in a public place) and characterized especially by quiet and repetitive instrumental melodies.” Far from being background or elevator music, it was the start of an entire mode of composition, with its inspiration in Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No 1 (1888) and other such ‘modal’ music, and easily adapted by contemporary sound studios and computer programming. On the liner notes to ‘Ambient 1. Music for Airports’ (1978) Eno heralded a whole new way of thinking about music-making in general: “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Today it is an entire form in its own right, whether for meditation, elevation, or late-night study. Pictured is Bridie’s copy of ‘Ambient 4. On Land’ (1982) and her copy of the original ‘Apollo’ (1983), one of her favourites, music inspired by film and sounds of the moon landings; apologies for glare of the sun on the CD-case. April is walking across cherry-tree leaves.

Bonnard

Bonnard Windows

The opened window lets on about clouds

Swelling up like the tree clouds below them

These evanescent leaves existing on light

These miniscule colours upon colour undiminished

These sunlight shifts where grey become blue hills,

Neighbours’ houses never more opaque than today

Their windows looking in on a story all their own.

Then, when cold, closed again against snow-like air

Window where birds wing past as dabs of Prussian

And the cat that seemed but a breeze of brushstrokes

Later walks through the door and sits on my lap.

I could write to you for days in isolation

About these Bonnard effects on the cerebellum

The optic nerve hardwired for every glow and shade

Email my findings on atmospheric water

Text over my word limit a plurality of palette

Message you the face that carries a weight on its shoulders

Effects that motion through shut window to garden

Table inside laid out with the usual favourites

A book turned face down where it inspired some thoughts

Which is pleasant enough except you’re not here

Where the shape and colour and light are real.

Rembrandt

Rembrandt Faces

Face frowning, fierce, feeling, florid, a fulsome landscape

The golden boy of a certain Amsterdam age

Handsome devil, while it lasted

Half-philosopher, half-performance-artist

His eyes on the spectacle of speculum

Hair frays or displays, eyes glint, gaze or sadden -

Turning the pages of his gallery catalogue.

The line of the mouth speaks a hundred moods

The search is rarely skin-deep truth to tell,

This is the question and this is the answer full frontal

Dutch landscapes brought indoors, to candlelight.    

I, so, oh so isolated here in the old mirror

With shaving brush or tortoise-shell comb,

Face familial familiar and not any younger, yet young

As this morning: tongue, teeth, eyebrows, darn cheek.

The story goes on, resolutely less Narcissus

Thinking of another, you and others, out from isolation

Who together made this face just who it is.

Eye sag, here ear hair, holy moley, furrowed forehead

It hardly seems a moment since that moment

I broke also down isolation into failsafe friendship

Had all the answers, hair all question-marks.

Bach

5.     Johann Sebastian Bach. If you have been listening to a composer in church, at home, and everywhere else from the year when you were born, then that composer has formed your musical taste. When we listen to Mozart we are Mozartians. What do we hear listening to Bach? We are told we are hearing the formation of a whole musical language, that there is before and after Bach. We know we are listening to the early eighteenth century. The keyboard is a mechanism but country and city co-exist with an unmechanical ease and productivity. Community is at work, with opportunity to speak solo or share new harmonies given all the time in the world. One could go on saying more, as Bach was aware. Then, there is Glenn Gould. Here he is on the plinth (construction: Charles Anderson) in the form of 38 CDs and 6 DVDs in a box. I have Susan Southall to thank for this gift, she seeming to have decided it was time to move this amount of information someplace else. I am eternally grateful, as I can now listen to any amount of Bach from the Canadian prodigy, aware that this music only came to my attention (it had already all happened) after his death in Toronto in 1982. Exits and entrances. The photograph shows him “choosing a piano at Columbia’s 30^th Street Studio, New York City, April 1957.” Piano being the operative word and the operating instrument. Gould does things with Bach we were never warned about. The works of Bach are the university, the testing ground, the fresh canvas for him to try new things. It’s like listening to someone like Keith Jarrett stretching the standards, the standards in this case being the keyboard works of Bach. One moment we question if two hands can go that fast, the next moment find ourselves somewhere so slow, yet familiar, we don’t know when he will or will he won’t he strike the next note.    

Jazz

4.     Jazz. My earliest encounter with jazz was this eclectic album, which my father would have brought into the house in 1960. It includes ‘All Blues’, a cool school work by Miles Davis that my father found took things a bit too far, but I found the most fascinating track on the disc. (I should say here, this is the same person who listened for hours to Messiaen, Bruckner, and Mahler, very loud.) My education in jazz began twenty years later when living with Paul Grabowsky and other musicians in Carlton, when I did jazz shows on 3-RRR. These people pursued the meaning of bebop, free form, seventies funk, and other styles through the night and all of the weekend. I saw for the first time that ‘All Blues’ was an improvisation performed by artists who themselves epitomise jazz music’s endless possibilities, part of what became a classic, ‘Kind of Blue’ (1959). There is Miles himself, central to the invention of hard bop, modal cool, fusion, electric funk, you name it. “Cannonball” Adderley, another leader in his own right, a master of the bebop form; he plays alto saxophone. Bill Evans on piano, a musician I play all the time at home, so many records, an inimitable artist who some people think is the central cause of the ‘Kind of Blue’ mood. Jimmy Cobb on drums, the last surviving player from the session, now in his nineties, but at that time a sign of the future of jazz performance. Paul Chambers on bass, as we would say matter-of-factly on late night radio. And then the majestic figure, both musically and physically, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone. To this day his entrance on any track inspires a nervous laugh of wonder at what is about to happen. The depth and feel of his powerful playing, always in sync with what’s going on but at the same time on some other level of expression, is one extravagant gift on top of all the others that these great musicians have brought to this listener, and millions more.

Monteverdi

3.     The 1610 Vespers. French, Spanish and Italian music of Claudio Monteverdi’s time, especially anything Venetian, has been a passion of mine since my early thirties. At home we sometimes play nothing but Venice (Lassus, the Gabrielis, &c.) whole weekends, especially at Easter, which has the effect of floating continuously hours on the second glass of prosecco. The operas and madrigals delight in their discovery of a colour, light and movement (‘mo-bi-le’ as the Italians say, also ‘so-a-ve’) not previously translatable into sounds. Jerusalem is the centre of the world, but when I hear Venice singing about Jerusalem in 1610, Venice is the centre of the world. I had cassette copies off the radio of this 1966 recording, which is a landmark of Early Music. Concentus Musicus Wien (pictured on sleeve) play on original instruments under the inspiration of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and direction of Jürgen Jürgens. ‘Original instruments’ was an emerging concept that assisted in the almighty war of attitudes about how to play and sing this music that has raged ever since. That’s their problem and our good fortune if it makes more prosecco music. I have several recordings of the 1610 Vespers that chart fifty years of progress, from Monteverdi-if-he-was-Beethoven to Monteverdi-if-he-was-Ligeti. I bought this set (‘Grand Prix du Disque’) for $5 at the Spensley Street Primary School Fair in Clifton Hill in 1997. I could hardly believe what I was looking at in the milk crate.        

Reich

2.     Tehillim. Auditory canals were awash with the sounds of Philip Glass in my twenties, not for wanting to hear them always but because they were unavoidable. I didn’t quite know at the time that Glass was just one composer in so-called American minimalism that included Terry Riley, John Adams, and Steve Reich. Minimal is the last word you would use to describe the gargantuan, even Wagnerian, efforts made by some of these people subsequently. Steve Reich’s music confronted me from the start because it was at once raw, repetitive in beautiful ways, and simultaneously free and structured. His ensemble music must be a workout for the performers but for me, who is musically incompetent, this music is a ride. I play Reich’s piece using parts of Psalms 18, 19, 34, and 150 at least a couple of times a year. Although full of effect and affect, it is completely unaffected. TehiIlim was released on ECM in 1982, so I would have purchased it about then from the Melbourne University Bookroom, which had a record department upstairs. You can see its orange SECURITY sticker. That creambrick add-on to the Law Buildings has since been demolished, in the interests of better public space and visual harmony. The round red sticker denotes that the album belongs to me and not someone else in the shared student housing we turned into Carlton bohemia during that period. You can’t do that anymore, the rents are too high. Hal-le-lu-hu ba-tzil-tz-lay-sha-mah, as the Psalmist sings, Praise Him with sounding cymbals.

Shostakovich

Russian jazz flourished a time then vanished,

Memory of what could have been, that now

Too soon keeps beat to how the state allows

Tightrope sonatas, acclaimed or banished.

Fluttering phantoms of the silent screen

Pay the impoverished improvisor

With minutes of trills, hours the wiser:

Entrance hat-trick steam-train exit has-been.

Songs exiled in the middle of the night

Never to return, return on the keyboard –

Listen to them, paralysed once with fright.

Preludes a survivor has-been has

And slams against a wall (for the record)

Momentous threnodies, some Russian jazz.

Beatles

1.     A Hard Day’s Night. This is happening because I was asked and because I'd like to. I must post ten albums that “greatly influenced my taste in music.” I will defy the rules and talk about these recordings, drawing only from albums in my own collection. All the Beatles albums are brilliant. Time and familiarity does not dull them because we are in the middle of a creative storm direct to tape. This one is my first big sound at-home encounter with the Parlophone masterpieces. They are doing several things at once. They are merging the elements of existing American rock and roll into combinations of voice and sound that transform it into something higher and more thrilling. They are replacing hackneyed English lyric with a cross of street talk and BBC comedy that takes everyone by surprise. They comprise a band of four vocalists who can all compose and improvise at a moment’s notice. Our family saw the film at the Queenscliff Cinema that summer and I remember the main effect being well, the music, but equally the fact that these people everything they said and did was utterly hilarious. That Goons-like infectiousness is another underlying element of their perennial charm.