Fighting for our musical honour

By HEATH LEES

A concert performed by the Auckland Philharmonia raised hackles this month with a piece of music called Chain 2 by Lutoslawski, a Polish composer who died half a dozen years ago. First performed in 1986, the piece is still pretty avant-garde. It demands concentrated listening and a good idea of its aims and construction.

Justine Cormack, the violin soloist, prepared for the fray by telling the audience how exciting and challenging it was. The conductor Werner Andreas Albert added that he had met Lutoslawski, who was an extremely nice person, and highly rated as a composer.

In a roundabout way they were both saying that this music ought to be liked by decent and generous-spirited people.

With hard hats firmly in place, we sallied into it. At the end, the applause was cool, but well-meaning, so we were rewarded with an encore.

You could see the audience bracing itself, in case it was to be repeated. When familiar Romantic sounds stole across the air, there was an audible sigh of relief. During the interval, much heated discussion issued from people who seemed annoyed by the experience.

It's tempting to say that this has all happened before many times, that all composers have been ahead of their own public.

But if you look closer, you discover that it's a different problem nowadays. What changed is that by the early 1970s - say by the death of Stravinsky - the "grand tradition" of more than two centuries of Western European symphonic music had played itself out. Over the past 30 years or so we've gone global and brought in symphonic music that comes from America, Argentina, even Africa.

In principle, Lutoslawski's music is neither better nor worse than anyone else's. In its heyday, it was important - a symbol of resistance to communist cultural repression. Now it's just another strand in the global contemporary music that orchestras choose from when they want something new and different.

But today's audiences don't share the desire for "something new and different". Paying relatively higher ticket prices than before, they call the tune by expecting the familiar music they enjoy. Orchestral marketing often panders to that expectation ("Thrill to those glorious melodies ... Hear Mozart's film music in its original orchestral setting ... " ).

If orchestras increasingly favour old music, it doesn't mean that new composers are forever silenced. Many modern composers bypass the orchestra in favour of smaller, more flexible groups. With grants and cheap CD production, composers often get their music into the community without the benefit of an orchestra or even a live performance.

Does this mean that we shouldn't listen to new music at orchestral concerts? Not at all. But the amount we can play is limited, so we should use it wisely. We must find and play the best music from our own composers in this country and region - New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific.

Let's play contemporary Polish music at festivals and trade fairs. For the rest of the time, we should showcase living composers from our own part of the world whenever we programme contemporary music.

Let's not forget that today it's perfectly possible to be "new" with "old" music. The Early Music movement, with its authentic instruments and rediscovered interpretations, has been making new performances out of old music for decades, but none of this country's orchestras seems willing or able to try this.

There's a simple recipe: if the music is to be new, let it come from New Zealand, or nearby. If it's old, then make it new again by reviving its original context; in every case play it so well that it sounds fresher than ever. Then audiences will grow and musical honour will be satisfied.

* Do you agree with Heath Lees? Arts on Monday would like to hear through e-mail or letter your opinions. Are new New Zealand compositions what you want to hear?