Introduction
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Introduction In 1977 NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, on parallel missions to explore the outer regions of the solar system and beyond. Having obtained vital information during close encounters with the four Jovian planets and several of their moons, in 1989 both passed beyond the orbit of the outermost known planet (Neptune). As of 2008, they are approaching an area known as the heliopause, some 14 billion kilometres from Earth, and proceeding at a rate of 17 kilometres a second. Even so, it will be many thousands of years before either vehicle reaches the vicinity of another star. But what does all of this have to do with music? Each Voyager contains a golden record, conceived as a greeting to any space-farers who may come across them, and concealed within those grooves is almost 90 minutes of music – 27 items in all – selected by a committee of scientists, musicologists and others chaired by the late Carl Sagan. The disc features several compositions by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, an excerpt from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, a token jazz piece (but what a token: Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues”) and, laudably, an assortment of material that today would be lumped under the corporate moniker “world music.”1 All selected to calm the extraterrestrial beast and show him, her or it the depth and breadth of our musical wares. However, a further question arises: exactly who is likely to ever listen to this record? Sagan himself thought it quite possible that both spacecraft would still be wandering the Milky Way five billion years from now, long after the civilisation that launched them has ceased to exist (1995, 153). To hope that either probe might be intercepted by beings passing within the vicinity of our solar system, who just happen to have a phonographic hi-fi player on hand, would be like looking for a needle on a planet made entirely out of hay. Given all this, it has been sensibly argued that for Sagan and colleagues the selections on the Voyager 1 For a full track-list and extensive discussion on the selection process, see Ferris (1979). 13 golden record are in fact a statement about terrestrial diversity, directed more at the population of our own planet than any other (Squeri 2004, 484). In this earnest attempt to condense the entire history of recorded music into one hour-and-a- half long sampler, the enigmatic concept of audience looms large. Is it an unknown, in this case otherworldly, population? Is it each and every one of us as individuals? As a homogeneous mass? As a collection of communities or subcultures? Or, perhaps more tellingly, are the members of the Voyager committee themselves the real audience here, acting out the music lover’s ultimate fantasy by anthologising their own listening preferences in an act of consecration likely to outlive humanity itself? In a 1998 article published in the journal Popular Music & Society, musicologist Sammie Ann Wicks makes the following declaration: The failure of both ethnomusicology and musicology to answer the most fundamental questions about the nature of music and its important relationship to human cognitive functioning means that our understanding of ourselves as a species … is woefully incomplete. And whether or not any of this seems important to those working in areas that appear to be more crucial to our sheer physical survival, it must be admitted that we simply do not know yet – because we have not asked – whether a deeper understanding of expressions like music might significantly contribute to the amelioration of our current intractable social predicaments. (57) Wicks’ chief concern is to critique the perpetuation of a rigid, inequitable and increasingly remote Western canon in the American educational system, to the exclusion of the countless other musical cultures, genres and activities currently in operation. Yet with these words she articulates an even weightier philosophical conundrum, one that few have been prepared to approach. It can be argued that music mirrors greater society in so many ways: people defend their own tastes with a near religious fervour; the borders between genres are permeable in some ways but impregnable in others; a dominant mainstream all but conceals a disparate array of marginalised tributaries. Might it be that the rationale behind our musical categorisations, predilections and prejudices say more about us than many are prepared to admit? This is an issue which will remain under consideration throughout much of the discussion to follow. 14 My reference here to a dominant mainstream is important in so far as establishing a general position out of which the forthcoming arguments will emerge. I take it as given that in contemporary music, as with contemporary culture generally, there is an ascendant mainstream toward the centre of which the great majority of attention and thinking to date has been focused. It is a mainstream that may well be a fragmented or contradictory one, but a fragmented or contradictory mainstream is still a mainstream. In fact, if there is a mythical aspect to the standard mainstream/alternative dichotomy then it seems more likely, as Tom Frank (2001) suggests, to be associated with the latter term. The great thinker Theodor Adorno (whose work influences the pages to come perhaps more than any other) long ago recognised the reach of commodity capitalism to be essentially absolute, gathering up both highbrow and popular culture (as people commonly conceive of them) in its considerable grasp. Any attempt to think around mainstream narratives in contemporary music requires first and foremost an awareness of how crowded the mainstream actually is.2 In this dissertation I also take the position that, similar to how individuals are comprised of a broad combination of personal insights and social interactions, discussions on music need not be limited – as some of the scholarly literature would have us believe – to a focus upon specific musical texts or genres. How different texts and genres intersect and relate to each other, and how music itself intersects and relates with other art forms such as literature and film, indeed with all aspects of life, are just as important. In this manner, the narrative drifts to a certain extent from one encounter to another, at various moments intermingling music of all kinds with the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, Seinfeld, Virginia Woolf, Wassily Kandinsky, Raymond Williams, Charles Baudelaire, film studies, literary theory and much more besides. As Edward Said, referring to how critics should go about their work, terms it: “to be interested in as many things as possible: I think that’s what we are best at doing” (in Salusinszky 1987, 145). 2 Thus when David Hesmondhalgh (discussing the concept of art as “symbolic creativity”) reminds us that though this “can enrich people’s lives … it often doesn’t” (2007b, 5) [original italics], or when Andy Hamilton (giving examples of “current extremes of commodification”) says that not even in Adorno’s “worst nightmares [could he] have envisaged such paeans to inanity and imbecility as reality TV’s Big Brother and the manufactured democracy of Pop Idol” (2007, 174), my position would be that these comments if anything underplay how limited in scope the vast majority of what passes for culture in the 21st century really is. 15 A third important establishing point to make here is that this dissertation represents a somewhat peculiar take on the issue of contemporary music and its audiences, in that it is written from the point of view of an audience member not affiliated with any specific disciplinary or industry perspective. The non-professional audience can be regarded as the silent majority in modern music, and what follows is some attempt to give that silent majority more of an input than has previously been the case. On that note, any sense of isolation my position engenders no doubt sits well with the fact that the discussion emanates from an Australian setting, one Philip Hayward has referred to as “beyond the axis” so far as most dialogues on music are concerned (1998, 1-2).3 In February of 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, weighed down with its cache of musical greatness, was almost six billion kilometres from home when NASA turned its cameras back toward the earth one last time. The picture that resulted presents our world as an unidentifiable speck of light – in Sagan’s words “a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam” – and he exhorts us to consider this fact in terms of certain aspects of the planet’s not-so-proud history: Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. (1995, 8-9) 3 The axis Hayward refers to is essentially a UK-US one. That the music of the Oceanic region is almost completely ignored in international discourses is exemplified by the recent slew of (purportedly comprehensive) canonical texts and reference books on all types of music. Inevitably absent from these nonetheless Westernised histories is pretty well every important and influential musician or group Australia and New Zealand have produced, of which Warren Burt, the Laughing Clowns, Chris Abrahams, Essendon Airport, Warumpi Band, Dirty Three, Bernie McGann, the Verlaines, the Dead C, Robert Scott, Roy Montgomery and Birchville Cat Motel are but some of the more obvious.