BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
There’s gonna be a whole lotta music going on this month in the tiny town of Tarraleah.
From today until September 16, the Australian Art Orchestra will occupy the former hydro-electric town in Tasmania for a Creative Music Intensive. This project brings together traditional Indigenous Australian, Korean, and jazz musicians for a residency filled with improvisation and new music-making. AAO artistic director Peter Knight sheds light on why it’s important for us to embrace the music of all cultures.
Tell us about the mission of the Australian Art Orchestra, and why you have a strong interest in bringing Australian and Asian cultures together for music-making.
The Art Orchestra has a long history of trying to engage with the idea of the music of now. In Australia, we’re geographically a part of Asia. Our place in the world, changing relationship with our Europeanness, and increasing engagement with the idea of Australia as a place that is culturally much closer to Asia, drive what we do in the Art Orchestra.
On the outset it seems Korean and Indigenous Australian musical cultures are wildly different. But if you consider Australia an Asian country, do you feel there are many similarities?
The sounds of these different music traditions are wildly different, and at the AAO we come out of a contemporary jazz context that sounds different from Korean or Indigenous music, too. But as soon as you get people in a space together, working together, you find the common ground. The musical traditions sound different but there are similar things driving them because they are human impulses that lead to musical expression in the end.
What are some of those similarities on a practical level that we may be able to hear, or that make it easy for different musicians to work together?
The strength of the Art Orchestra is that we all come from improvisational backgrounds. A lot of the Art Orchestra musicians are jazz musicians, and they’re used to working with open-ended musical ideas and forms; used to improvising and spontaneously making music. Those approaches have a lot in common with the way Korean music is approached, and the way that Indigenous music from Arnhem Land is approached. The musicians are responding to what’s around them and the people they meet, and it’s the same with Korean music – there’s a lot of space for interpretation and improvisation. It’s different from European classical music, where you’re trying to perform the works from composers who are a little bit more fixed in the form or the way that they’re expressed. I think improvisation is the key here.
You’re bringing jazz, improvisation, and modern ideas into the mix while still working with very old types of music. Are you also looking at the modern aspects or Korean and Indigenous music as well? Or is it that, by using improvisation, you’re going back to tradition anyway when all music was once improvised?
It’s a really good question and it goes to the heart of what we’re trying to do in this workshop and intensive. What we’re trying to do is create a new space for things to emerge. We’re not trying to learn the traditions of Young Wagilak and we’re not trying to learn how to be Korean opera singers. What we’re trying to do is to think about what ideas underpin these two musical positions and how we can take ideas into the space of creating new music. It’s the same with Western approaches as well. When we work with jazz or classical, we’re trying to think about what those forms teach us in the creation of new music. What we share with the artists who we’re bringing over to Tasmania from Arnhem Land and Korea is that they’re also very interested in that. They’re not musicians who are stuck in their ways and only want to be involved in traditional music – they’re musicians who are, within their cultural contexts, trying to create the new.
When you are using the traditional sounds and instruments, are there any challenges or strategies regarding how to record these, and bring electronics into a sound that obviously existed long before electronics did?
It is a challenge and you want to be able to create a situation where people can express themselves and don’t feel inhibited by things like electronics or unfamiliar instruments, and that goes both ways – where you can create a space where people feel comfortable with others. Electronics help to open up those spaces because you can use sampling or live processing techniques, and with electronics you can work with what exists and immediately change the space.
It comes down at the end to creating friendships and relationships and negotiating these sorts of things. This is why the Creative Music Intensive is so important: because you’re going to Tarraleah for 10 days and at the end you have had experiences together you’ll never forget. You’ve seen things together for the first time and those kinds of experiences are just as important as what happens in the rehearsal room.
The Australian Art Orchestra intensive will culminate in a performance at The Void, MONA, from 1-4pm, September 11. Expect music influenced by the cultural traditions of Arnhem Land, and Korean p’ansori.
Image supplied. Credit: Tobias Titz.
