No, I am not an arts administrator, nor was meant to be, but sometimes I think about stuff and the consequences have to be advertised on a website post. This is one of those times.

Everyone knows that the supreme ruler these days is the dollar, and most decisions about everything are made in the interests of those who are already holding most of the dollars and wish to accrue a few more. The university has turned into a fetching, grasping denier of all for which it was instituted; the football league just had to go national to squeeze a bit more wherewithal from the hapless fans. Let’s not talk about the press. Arts rely on the audience, and this is particularly complicated since some audience members are actually smarter (like some readers of the press, some Melbourne Football Club followers) than for what they are given credit. The concert hall is not entirely without new music, but it’s clearly in the minority. Georg Solti, famously at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, directed that should people want to come along to hear Tchaik 4, they were going to have to listen to Lutoslawski 3. I commend this heartily. Because some people still can’t even handle Le Sacre du Printemps. Someone once told me that a friend of his had gone along to a performance, hated it, and declared that ‘at one point, it sounded like the orchestra farted!’ I don’t know what to do with this. Ensemble Gombert, one of the country’s finest vocal ensembles, has blended very, very old music with very new. So has the Astra Chamber Music Society under my friend, the estimable John McCaughey. I’ve written previously about Allan Browne’s capacity to see ancient (joke) jazz styles cohabiting with very recent ones. It’s possible. None of these people is making the buck they deserve, but minds could do with a little changing. People who think everything written in the twentieth century is ‘squeaky gate music’ (Lord knows who came up with this expression but it’s stuck with me) have to be educated. Education is power. Knowledge frees y0u.

So it struck me that someone ought to start paying attention to some of the incredible music written throughout the twentieth century, because even that isn’t the freshest thing on the menu anymore, and put together a concert series featuring some of it. No-one did, so here’s my take. A ten-concert series, that you could hear at our house because all the selections come from my CD collection. Not that I wouldn’t mind having an orchestra step up to the plate and deliver them live. You know.

Each program features two symphonies, and the interval of roughly ten minutes’ duration (longer, if indicated) is given to discussion of the first work heard. Discussion of the second can be conducted once it is concluded, and is indefinite. Let’s listen. Let’s feel. Let’s share.

February 15, 2025
8pm
Vagn Holmboe: Symphony no. 2 (1938-9)
Carl Nielsen: Symphony no. 4 ‘The Inextinguishable’ (1916)

March 15, 2025
8pm
Sergei Prokofiev Symphony no. 2 (1924-5)
Michael Tippett Symphony no. 3 (1970-2)

April 19. 2025
8pm
Hans Werner Henze Symphony no. 7 (1984)
Arnold Bax Symphony no. 3 (1929)

May 17, 2025
8pm
Arthur Honegger Symphony no. 3 ‘Liturgique’ (1945-6)
William Walton Symphony no. 2 (1958-60)

June 14, 2025
8pm
Andrzej Panufnik Symphony no. 9 (1987)
Edmund Rubbra Symphony no. 6 (1954)

July 19, 2025
8pm
Robert Simpson Symphony no. 5 (1972)
Hugo Alfvén Symphony no. 5 (1953)

August 23, 2025
8pm
Bohuslav Martinu Symphony no. 5 (1946)
Ross Edwards Symphony no. 1 ‘Da Pacem Domine’ (1991)

September 20, 2025
8pm
Per Norgard Symphony no. 2 (1970)
Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen Symphony-Antiphony (1977)

October 25, 2025
8pm
Malcolm Arnold Symphony no. 7 (1973)
Karl Aage Rasmussen Symphony in time (1982)

November 22, 2025
8pm
Albéric Magnard Symphony no. 4 (1913)
William Mathias Symphony no. 2 ‘Summer music’ (1983)

In fact it’s only scratching the surface but any start is an effort, a beginning. If all goes well we could have another series in the following year, and there’d be no shortage of material.

21.v.2024

I know it’s a thing we all talk about, and opinions are held passionately. At the same time, I’ve discerned a lack of energy here and there about finding a position to hold, in view of the prevailing modus operandi of capitalism and our being impelled to toe the line. But at this point in time I have decided to withdraw all the music I can from any streaming services, because they are not about music but rather about data collection, and I’m not interested in being part of that, for little to no reward.

A little while ago I took everything off Spotify, which still I consider to be the very worst of all the streaming services; quite apart from anything else the idea of having all the world’s music available wherever you are at any given time seems to me to devalue the work that has been put into making it, the distinction of the original creation, and the value of variety and difference. Back when we went to record shops and bought albums, because we’d saved enough money to do so, and then we went home and listened to them all the way through, the way the musicians had intended their work to be heard, we maintained a very special relationship with the music we were hearing. There was less of it, because buying an album was the exception, and the albums one actually owned were treasured.

We admired the covers. If there were notes, we read them with interest – even the acknowledgements. Almost Famous is a magnificent movie about music lovers in the 1970s and even the artwork on the front of the LPs that one had amassed in one’s collection is given the respect it deserves. Essays have been written about Charlie Watts’s presence on the cover of the Rolling Stones’s Get yer ya-yas out. This is appropriate. Betty Mabry is on the cover of Miles Davis’s Filles de Kilimanjaro. I can’t stand Pink Floyd but everyone can picture the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon.

Anyway now everything is apparently free. It’s no trouble to dial up a name online and have the artist’s catalogue at one’s disposal. You can pay to be part of these services, but you don’t have to, and so little of what you actually contribute goes within a bull’s roar of an actual artist, so the entire exercise is a festival of corruption.

I was previously on Distrokid, which made everything very simple, but I have now left. The thirty dollars I made in the time I spent there – well, who cares. Music will never bring very much money in but I am damned if I’m going to let someone else reap the rewards of my creative efforts.

From now on, if I release an album it will go onto Bandcamp, and that will probably be it. If you want to hear my work, go there. If you like it, pay for it and you’ll receive either a CD posted to you or a download you can access wherever it suits you. I have found that Maria Schneider is fundamentally opposed to streaming, and her marvellous work is only available through ArtistShare. Recently I heard The Necks in a breathtaking performance at Brunswick Ballroom – I have all their studio albums and I find that they don’t stream either. This I respect and I join them in rejecting this awful exploitation of the honest work of creative people. Several of their albums have sold out, meaning you can’t actually get hold of them anymore, unless you’re prepared to pay the prices asked by the second-hand vendors at eBay or Discogs. I love that items I have in my collection are so difficult to access. Some people don’t even have CD players any more. They are missing OUT.

Treasure your collection. Expand it at will. Get more shelves! (We just did, and they were free through the Boroondara Hard Rubbish Rehome.) Look at your complete collection of Haydn symphonies, or your several versions of ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’ or all the Miles Davis bootlegs you’ve amassed, and rejoice in the time you’ll have with them now and in the years to come.

20.v.2024