Women, Land and Improvisation Andrea Breen BA (Hons) Dipt (Prim) AM Usa
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creating a place: women, land and improvisation andrea breen BA (hons) DipT (Prim) AM usA Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania September 2000 This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis or in footnotes. This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Abstract Being a woman-in-the-world is a cacophony of experiences in which place and improvised events ceaselessly vibrate. For artists this resonance can be consciously generative or circulate at a deeper layer of creativity. At whatever level they voice their presence, sense of place and improvisatory practice are in constant process of becoming. In this interdisciplinary thesis I seek to present a more enriched way of being-in-the-world for women through presenting sonorities of emplacement and improvisatory practice as rhizomes of transformation. The intertext of the biophysical world is infused with phenomena which parallel improvisatory events, and so in the first 'sounding' the concept of place is explored by way of 'outside' space and its common referents 'nature', 'landscape' and 'wilderness'. These terms have been feminized in the traditions of Western representation and I attempt to recuperate them through a sense of the feminine that comes from attunement rather than from objectification. Improvisation for women is fraught with 'garrison' rules that almost preclude participation. I argue in the second 'sounding' that non- idiomatic improvisation may offer a non-gendered space in which women improvisers can voice their desires without the constrictions of masculinist models of desire and closure. An important facet of this process has been interviews with non- indigenous women composers who use improvisatory gestures and 'land' resonances in their compositions. Drawing on interviews with Miriam Hyde, Ros Bandt, Hazel Smith, Anne Boyd and Moya Henderson, I propose that diversity and multiplicity in women's serious art-music in Australia are often expressed through improvisatory gesture or in a subtext of improvisatory intentions through which signifiers of openness and interrelatedness are sounded. My own journey, has been a cyclical process of displacement and emplacement. By way of improvisatory practice I have been able to express that process in my compositions. In the final 'sounding' I describe the process of making the two recordings included with this thesis: the sound installations for the collaborative women's exhibition Will the real Australia please stand up.. .a travelogue, and the CD improvisation-image-voice, a collection of improvisations to the readings of four Tasmanian women poets who respond to sense of place. As creativity for me has incorporated performance, I conclude with reflections on performances with the poet Sue Moss that grew from the recording process. acknowledgements In the five years it has take to write this thesis I have been unequivocally supported by the School of English, European Languages and Literatures in my efforts to take an interdisciplinary course. My thanks to Ruth Blair for the launching and to Philip Mead for challenging me to think harder. I am indebted to Lucy Frost for her enthusiasm and for believing I could do it when things looked way out of reach. Margaret Hicks and Julia Baird in the office deserve a special mention for their unswerving kindness and good humour, as do my fellow postgrads for sharing the pain and the red wine. Special thanks to the team of family and friends who stuck with me: my son and daughter, Barnaby and Arwen, for endurance in the face of near parental abandonment; my mother Myrtle for teaching me to fight on; my brothers: Peter for keeping me in humour, Marcus, who set an example by writing a PhD under ridiculous odds, David for bothering to ask what my thesis was about, and Leighton for planting trees; sister- in-law Debbie for keeping the faith through emails from America; and to friends: Alex Farrow, for not giving up on talking over cups of tea, Margie Latona, for laughing with me and listening, and to many more for cheering from the verges. Thanks to my collaborators for the joy of creating together: Sarah Day, Sue Moss, Margaret Scott, Angela Rockel, Julie Hunt, Cath Barcan and Christi Berg; sound engineers Wayne Rawlings and Eddie Malovek, and graphic designer Gordon Harrison- Williams. Special thanks too go to Miriam Hyde, Hazel Smith and Ros Bandt for their generous time given to interviews; to the ABC for the tape of the Improv Awards and to Anthea Parker at the AMC library for exceptional service. And thanks to Don Kay for his helpful composition suggestions and to Rae Marcellino for use of the Conservatorium Studio. To my exceptional violin teachers, Elizabeth Morgan and Stella Nemet (who is now singing with the angels): gratitude for sharing the love of sound- making. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my father, Stewart Gordon Breen (4.6.23 - 29.4.76), truck-driver, shop-assistant, preacher and gardener, who gave me the fun of word-play and said, often, and with typical optimism, 'reach for the sky; there's only dirt under your feet'. andrea breen contents introduction 1 sounding 1 female figuring in nature 17 sounding 2 improvisation: a way of being t/here 89 sounding 3 composing women in (their) place (attachment: cassette #1) 144 Miriam Hyde Ros Bandt Hazel Smith Anne Boyd Moya Henderson sounding 4 sonic explorations 248 A. sound installations (attachment: cassette #2) Sonic Arc and Head Piece from Will the real Australia please stand up.. .a travelogue B. improvisation-image-voice (attachment: CD #3) C. performance: bringing out the sounds of private soundings (attachment: cassette #4) conclusion 308 references 312 appendices A. Letter to composers B. Questions to Hazel Smith C. Invitations and 'sites' from Will the real Australia please stand up...a travelogue attachments #1. cassette: extracts from compositions by Miriam Hyde, Ros Bandt, Anne Boyd, Hazel Smith and Moya Henderson #2. cassette: Will the real Australia please stand up.. .a travelogue side 1 Sonic Arc side 2 Head Piece #3. CDx2: improvisation-image-voice #4. cassette: performance by andrea breen and Sue Moss for the Improvisatory Music Festival June 5, 1999 (courtesy Australian Broadcasting Commission) creating a place: women, land and improvisation 'I' seems more vulnerable and so is more in keeping with how I feel in the bush. I work alone in the orchard and I walk alone in the bush. I am temporary here and vulnerable and in this must only speak for myself (Elizabeth Jolley from 'The Goose Path' in R. McDonald (ed) 1990: 11). introduction Lived experience of place and the improvisatory impulse are concepts so integrated with life force that their presence and intersection are rarely contemplated. But how do the connections actually work and more particularly through what process do they work, for women? These questions have set me on a course of exploration risking a product that could either be slipped into the margins of madness and nonsense or considered a contribution to feminist aesthetics. As I believe that the process of discovery is as important as the finds themselves, I have reflected on my own process and relational world as a researcher and improviser-composer while presenting a critique on the contributing research. Self-reflexivity is pivotal to a phenomenological perspective that argues for being-in-the-world as the process of co-creativity. I propose that artistic responses to participation with the natural worldl are improvisatory impulses, mirroring nature's implicit reciprocity and non-dichotomous being. This 'space between' is one of 1 My use of the word 'natural' is as a specifically 'biophysical' concept. 2 depth and diversity that signifies interrelatedness and openness, qualities that could be interpreted as resonators to being- a-woman. As an immersion in women's experience of place, poetry, and improvisatory impulses in musical composition, this thesis enacts the process of sounding those depths and multiplicities. research methodology and background Does a dissertation based on binarisms created by a historiography of patriarchal codes free the participant to be exploratory and yet still meet the standards set by the genre? That is, can women interleave self-reflexivity, creative work and research for a product that, through its interdisciplinarity, voices eclecticism? I have answered 'yes' to both these questions and have layered literary and musicological research, events, poems, creative work, critical inquiry and ecological concerns. The result might be called a palimpsest (layers = space) or a periplus (journey = time ) or something moving between: pa Jim-plus. In my search for a 'between' model I have been enabled by poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches to blend, reshape, cut, paste and subvert generic traditions. Postmodernism is a slippery concept and it is its resistance to meaning that not only reflects what it embraces but that also allows the artist and consumer of art to explore between spaces and trifle with reductive meaning. As musicologist Lawrence Kramer says, 'the term postmodernism.. .is at the centre of a momentous intellectual debate', making definition beyond reach. Kramer, taking from Jean-Francois Lyotard, says that the term 3 designates a conceptual order in which grand schemes of explanation have lost their place and in which the traditional bases of rational understanding - unity, coherence, generality, totality, structure - have lost their authority if not their pertinence....Postmodemist strategies of understanding are incorrigibly interdisciplinary and irreducibly plural...[It is] not a system but an ethos (1995: 5).