Culshaw at Large
The Opera House against the skyline of Sydney Australia: An Embarrassment of Cultural Energy
by John Culshaw
ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA--I have to admit at once that, after two long visits. I have fallen hopelessly in love with Australia. All that is wrong with it, from my point of view, is that it is too big and too far away. (It is virtually the size of the U.S. minus Alaska, yet its total population is only 13.5 mil lion.) The society that has developed from the early settlers and the 160.000 convicts who were transported there by the British in the nineteenth century is interestingly ambiguous. On the one hand. Australians are proud of their country; on the other, they mock themselves remorselessly. On my last trip I was given a book called The Ugly Australian, which is an anthology containing such gems as the remark of Henry Lawson in 1896, "It's the best country to get out of that I was ever in," and that of a Brisbane psychiatrist in 1970, "Australian men don't like the dentist because of a deep-seated fear of castration." The built-in self-doubt is even more explicit when we turn to cultural affairs.
My visits were instigated by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which is a noncommercial network roughly equivalent to the BBC. and my brief was to advise on matters of sound production for both radio and television. The exercise culminated last year in the very first "simulcast" (FM stereo with live television) of a concert of Russian music from the studio in Adelaide. Now such a happening is nothing new in the U.S. or in Europe, but to be in charge of the first one in such an isolated country is, to put it mildly, frightening; and that it came about at all in view of what else was going on is a measure of Australian tenacity.
What else was going on concerned the fact that the ABC happens. logically enough, to run the permanent orchestras in Australia. (There are six of them--Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, and Perth--plus a training orchestra.) All of a sudden the government in Canberra (which city has no orchestra) decided that national economies were necessary and that a reduction in the number of orchestras might make a start. You can imagine the flurry created within the orchestras, since at least three were already seriously undermanned.
Petitions went flying about, and certain politicians made quite incredible speeches. What some of them said was roughly equivalent to what I might say on the subject of shearing sheep, about which I know nothing at all. One gentleman suggested that a single orchestra permanently on tour would solve all the problems at a stroke. (It took me approximately two minutes, with the aid of my pocket calculator, to work out that such a venture would actually cost more than maintaining the present orchestras in their proper locations; indeed, the surplus was sufficient to bring the existing orchestras up to their necessary strength.) Then another sheep shearing gentleman proposed that all the orchestral parts of opera should be tape-recorded once and for all and used in perpetuity.
Thus we face the paradox: Australia is a country that is positively embarrassed by its cultural energy so embarrassed that it has erected a symbol in the form of the Sydney Op era House. You can argue that it was a daft project from the start, or that it is not being used for the purpose for which it was designed, or that it is difficult to reach and has too many steps and no car park. Yet when all the shouting has stopped, the fact remains that it is a building of astounding beauty that could not possibly stand anywhere else in the world except where it does. Having put it up, the Australians still don't know what to do with the wonder they commissioned. My prediction is that they will not have to worry much longer. The problem has been that of time and distance related to artists' availability, but at the moment of writing Concorde is about to fly from London to Melbourne in 14 1/2 hours, and since last December a modified 747 has been flying from San Francisco to Sydney nonstop. Australia is getting nearer to us in more ways than one.
Which brings me back to that simulcast from Adelaide. All sorts of things went wrong before the event. It was meant to be carried on the network but, for scheduling reasons, was not, so it was restricted-restricted!-to South Australia. Studio lights blew up in the final rehearsal and showered the violas with glass, microphones failed, and until fairly late in the day television and radio personnel were neither eye to eye nor ear to ear. In other words, it was not much different from what goes on during similar events throughout the world, except that this was a first. But when it came to the moment of truth, which is the moment of transmission, everything went calmly and professionally.
It is no longer feasible to think of our friends from Down Under as immature, either artistically or technically. The advice given by Dame Nel lie Melba to Dame Clara Butt many years ago (and of course quoted in The Ugly Australian) is simply no longer valid: "Just sing 'em muck!"
(High Fidelity, May. 1977)
Also see: