Dealing with the shock of the new

IN 1992, early one bright Sunday morning, I caught a taxi from North Fitzroy to Monash University with composer Richard Barrett. It was a classic Melbourne autumn morning: the skies were blue; the world was bright, fresh and new.

The driver asked what we were going to do there and we responded, coyly that we were going to record music at Robert Blackwood Hall.

The driver asked what kind of music and we, even more reluctantly, answered: Contemporary. The driver turned around and screamed, Those f---ing c---s at Darmstadt. Richard shrank back into the corner of the cab in surprise.

We were treated to an hour-long lecture on how music had gone terribly wrong since Brahms. Ten years later, I was watching television in the early hours. Flicking channels, I came across one of the many American evangelical programs.

The evangelist was about to cross over and talk to some nuns in Darmstadt, Germany. The discussion was about September 11. A nun, asked about that significant date, quietly replied that her convent remembered it well: in 1944, American planes had flown overhead on a bombing raid: their convent was blown apart, as was much of the city, and 25,000 people died.

Her reply came as a shock.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, Australian composers debated modernism in music, complexity, and the undesirable musical influences coming from continental Europe. The new music festival in the city of Darmstadt seemed to be the epicentre of these influences.

What intrigues me most is the amount of fear and insecurity that drove this debate about distant musical thought not even present in Australia at the time.
Many commentators since have blamed the small audiences for new music on the influence on composers of schools of thought surrounding Darmstadt's festival.
Yet tolerance for artistic diversity and pluralism demands civility, though it shouldn't deny passion, even fierce opposition.

These are the artistic impacts and stresses that create new possibilities. Not one of us can predict or seek to control where artistic practice might go. Nor should we.

Artistic experimentation is about play: about ideas that suggest new constellations of thought and feelings, or even just a simple thing that can take on a totally different appearance or meaning. It is an area of ambiguity, where uncertainty and lack of clarity can allow an artistic grey zone.
It can be accessed time and again by different audiences in different times and places.

This is one of the great strengths of the canonic works: why Shakespeare, in our time, can be absorbed and reabsorbed into our culture in dynamically various ways, by film-makers, for example, as different as Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino and Baz Luhrmann.
The three key factors that allow experimentation so vital to culture are time, friction and reinvention.
Time to spend on creating, on realising a work and on connecting to to a wider public is crucial to contemporary arts.

Tolerance and understanding, too, require time. New practices and innovation are not limited to the initial Eureka! nano-moment of conception.

Artistic development requires exploration, consolidation, re-expression, argument and debate, and then all of the above all over again.
People too often work part-time in new music. It typically depends on voluntary efforts and the energy of one person, and when that individual moves on, the endeavour can collapse.

If contemporary practice is funded as a marginal activity, then the results, and engagement with the public, will be spasmodic.
Development of new technologies and exploration of their implications require a lifetime. Too often we forget that a violin is a technological object, that it has had more than 400 years of investigation into its potential and that that potential is still immense.

During the 20th century, composers such as John Cage, Helmut Lachenmann and others spent decades arriving at points of breakthrough. Further decades were spent articulating and consolidating concepts to the point that a student can, after a year's study, create in the style of Cage.
Time, of course, requires money.

In the 1999 report Securing the Future, by Helen Nugent and others, it was noted: The major performing arts companies of Australia make a significant contribution to Australia's cultural life. They help to define what it means to be an Australian and they send a message to the rest of the world that Australia is a vibrant and innovative society. It also noted economic benefits but added that these companies were under severe pressure.

The same arguments can be applied to the small-to-medium sector, in which new arts reside.
The Howard Government has, since 1996, arguably invested more resources in the arts than any other since Whitlam's. This investment and stabilisation has been driven by successive sector-based reviews and reports: Nugent, Myer, Strong.

In completing this process, the one area that remains is the small-to-medium sector. This is the next, crucial step.
Friction also pushes experimentation.

Richard Tognetti spoke wistfully some years ago of ratbags in the culture. I think of them as the inconvenient: that part of creativity that challenges us, rubs up against us and makes us uncomfortable, and annoys the hell out of our preconceptions. The ratbag is infuriating and will not go away.

They are not very good for the bottom line of budgets; they wreak havoc with an organisation's key performance indicators, turn the hair of administrators grey and are often only timely in their untimeliness. They can also be destructive and distracting.
The degree of friction can sometimes even be a measure of relevance, but not always.

The other factor that encourages experimentation is reinvention.
Each generation must discover cultural territory by making it their own, reinventing the wheel to the eternal despair of the older generation. Cultural knowledge is never relearned or translated exactly.

Understanding changes with succeeding generations. In the transmission of knowledge, errors and creative errors are made. Discontinuities and leaps appear, artists are forgotten, then re-evaluated, and rise and fall in importance.

Common technologies such as the laptop and mobile phones have brought profound changes in learning, communication and artistic possibility. They have disrupted traditional linkages, while enabling new practices to emerge.
It is important for artists who use these new technologies to come to terms with their own histories and the underpinnings of the tools with which they work.

Queensland art theorist Rex Butler recently criticised new-media art in The Australian. What if we argue that these new technologies fundamentally change nothing? he asked.

That for all of their promise or threat of a revolution in our lives, the truly fantastic thing is that absolutely nothing has changed?
Indeed. But one thing they have changed is the dichotomy between high and low cultures.

Australian Idol and other reality-TV shows depend on mobile phones. I view these shows as the new opera. Like Rigoletto and La Boheme, they contain all the elements of human drama: friendship, weakness, vice, betrayal, the testing of loyalties and the emblematic rise of underdogs to exceed their limitations.

What could possibly be more exciting? And the audience can vote - the most basic right in a democratic society - to determine the outcome. Why do we need an Australian opera when Australian Idol supplies drama of operatic intensity on evening TV?

Daryl Buckley is artistic director of the Brisbane-based Elision Ensemble. This is an edited extract from the annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks lecture, which he delivered last Thursday.