Hard News: "Creative" and "Flexible"
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Sadly, I can't see how any opera company in New Zealand is going to make the budget work on a fully-staged contemporary opera (see below), let alone commission one that is quote unquote "relevant":
This is what the NZFotA should be doing, and did a pretty good job of last time around with Matthew Suttor's The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (which saw Deborah Wai Kapohe in pretty stunning form). And that got pretty substantial audiences.
NZ Opera could perhaps afford to test the waters in a couple of years with a Wozzeck or an imported Adams production. There's no reason why a contemporary opera necessarily has to be a wildly expensive affair to produce in any case - it doesn't carry all the same expectations as historical opera.
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I think that in a small, poor country like ours
Um.
the government should direct it's money and energy
You mean its, which is to say, our.
into areas like education, welfare and healthcare
Because those sectors never, in any case, ever overlap with music or art, ever.
not paying ballet dancers to stage productions nobody watches or composers to write symphonies nobody listens to.
Golly, sounds like you have some specific cases in mind? Because "nobody" is a pretty definitive number.
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"If we lose the Concert programme, where are we going hear our lovely Kiri?".
Because 'left-wing intellectuals' think she's a bit of a prat?
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Danyl, if Prime Minister Peter and his wife Janet Fraser et al were still alive they would argue strongly for ongoing government support of the arts. The NZSO, the RNZ Ballet, public art galleries and public radio and such like were started (or nationalised) by the first Labour government, so that they would be accessible to everyone, not just the elite. They also knew the government support of an arts industry would be economically sensible in providing training and employment for New Zealanders. I would suggest that our creative industries today would not exist without this history.
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And I guess there's a case to be made for pop-culture productions like Outrageous Fortune
Ah! Here you must be referring to Gillian Whitehead's opera about the Otago gold rush, right? I don't think that was central government funded though.
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re NZ Hip Hop
What say we actually enjoy what they do?
My old Upper Hutt Posse tape still gets a lot of plays.... don't hear it on any radio stations these days - but then I mostly listen to National so not a wide sample :- )
...also on disc LOOP did great work to provide a mix of music / culture on their early productions, which were staples in my aural soundscape until they were stolen from a friend's car...world première of Moby-Dick
is this the one subtitled "We are Wailing"?
or the the one with Vera Lynn's "Whale meat again"?Certainly people who already know about music and have money can go to record shops or find music online, but people who don't have those advantages need places where they can learn.
No worries in Chch, our enlightened council is bringing Classical music traditions to the great unwashed with a central city (?) - well Arts Centre based - Classical work camp, with duped fee-paying music students forced to "revitalise" the inner city with their joyous vibrations (thereby adding "vibrancy") - all while paying twice for parking (in town and at Ilam), extra travel costs and time-stress, exclusion from day-to-day campus life...
sadly it is all just to satisfy the vanity project of a gameshow host, a parochial architect, a corporate style property manager, and an almost blind bean counter - The Uni already holds concerts in the Arts Centre's perfectly grand Great Hall that not many people attend - what will change? -
Outrageous Fortune had the smarts to name their show and each episode after Shakespeares lines.
The deliberate and staged wink and nod that means, this is pop-culture but we know what we're doing, and they did.Jonathan Lemalu would be flavour of the moment wouldn't he?
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Just reading some older posts...
It smacks of a fishing expedition, to see just how quickly we can be persuaded to throw somebody overboard from the life-raft they keep telling us we're perilously clinging to. And we're obediently debating it, as always: Toss the grannies! No, the unemployed! Ooh, I know, the harpsichordist... and the group rounds on the hapless musician, gibbering in the corner...
Meanwhile, the life-raft is still firmly attached to the deck of the cruise-ship, and there's carpetbag steak for dinner in the first class lounge tonight, with drinks on the Captain.Priceless.
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I think that in a small, poor country like ours the government should direct it's money and energy into areas like education, welfare and healthcare, not paying ballet dancers to stage productions nobody watches or composers to write symphonies nobody listens to.
And here we get to what I think is really underlying lots of this discussion of the Concert Programme (notice there hasn't been much discussion on Nat Rad, or Radio NZ International...) the strong perception by lots and lots of people that "classical" music and its ilk are for pointy-headed wankers.
I'll give you that the pointy-headed wankers often don't do themselves any favours, but I wonder if this is also a symptom of an education system that for a long time has not really taken the arts seriously, which means that most people grow up not knowing how great Benjamin Britten can be, (thanks for the reminder Craig) or how Radiohead follow in his path, not necessarily musically but in their themes.
(For anyone who'd like to see a pretty amazing example of why the arts should be funded, even in poor countries, I recommend going to see El Sistema at the Documentary Film Festival in a few weeks - about the free music programme in Venezuela that the Inter-American Development Bank has calculated provides $1.68 in social dividends for every $1 of funding the Government provides).
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Arcade Fire is a contemporary rock band that produces music better than many a contemporary classic, or otherwise “concert”, musical artist
Steve: you are my New Best Friend! Arcade Fire revived my faith in the possibilities of music, at a time it was flagging. Several members of AF are classically trained but I wouldn't expect to ever hear them on Concert FM.
Talking of culture, the Script To Screen panel, "Bombing at the Box Office" at The Classic last night ,was quite illuminating. If StS don't write it up, I will do something with the notes I took.
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From Rudman's piece on the granny today, data that might be of interest to our resident fund-cutters:
How much does the Government think a public broadcasting network should cost? New Zealand already spends less on this per capita than most of the other First World countries we like to compare ourselves with.
A research paper prepared for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage by Unitec School of Communications dated December 2005, shows that of the 30 OECD countries, New Zealand's spending per capita on public broadcasting was at $45.2, well below the mean of $66. The Australians paid $83.2 each, the British, $143.6, the Swiss and Norwegians, $163.6 and Icelanders, $216.3.
At the bottom was Mexico with no public broadcasting, the USA, on $1.85 per capita and Turkey on $5.26.
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My old Upper Hutt Posse tape still gets a lot of plays.... don't hear it on any radio stations these days
theres a reason for that...it sux ballz ! Were you ever into 'darktower' ?
if you like real kiwi sounding hiphop check out a crew called "homebrew" ? They're easily the best thing since the last best thing.
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Several members of AF are classically trained but I wouldn't expect to ever hear them on Concert FM.
Ah, but I would. And once upon a time, I think you would have heard them, or something like them, on Concert FM.
But more importantly, wouldn't one expect those classically trained members of Arcade Fire, or something like AF, to have listened to Concert FM? (I mean, apart from the fact that they personally didn't grow up in NZ). It's not just about what's played, but who's listening.
For example, not the best-selling NZ film ever, but we wouldn't have Harry Sinclair's The Price of Milk without Concert FM:
"I was out looking for places to set a sequel to Topless, and there was this amazing piece of music on the car radio," says Sinclair. "It was incredibly romantic and magical and the extraordinary combination of that landscape and that music really sparked something in me."
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Anybody who's heard Nina Simone talk (oh so movingly) about her classical influences would surely cease at once to crap on about the indigenous folk and the hip hop as if they existed in a sealed off world that doesn't need any other musical tradition in order to thrive?
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Last time i checked, Nina simone wasn't hiphop ?
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Arcade Fire were reviewed by William Dart on his New Horizons programme, on 6 May 2007 and 22 March 2009.
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Danyl, I'll have to stand corrected now that I've heard it from the horse's ... mouth.
I actually don't think we're so poor we can't fund the arts. Indeed, on your apparent rationale it wouldn't matter how rich we were, any art that got support is less money for health, education, welfare etc. That boils down to a difference in priorities. From what I can see the only dance industry we'd have without funding would be lap, and whatever rich patrons like (I'm willing to bet that ballet would survive).
OTOH, if NZers just won't pay to keep dance afloat in the box office, maybe it should die, or piss off overseas where it's appreciated. Certainly we would be spared the agonizing decisions about which starving artists should subsist. Agonizing because art is always a judgment call, an exposure of prejudice about what is art and what is not. We could happily leave that in the hands of the wealthy elites, who would most likely continue to fund the existing classical forms, with the difference being that what survived would be entirely to their taste. They wouldn't have agonizing public debates about what middle class prejudices are exposed by their choices, they'd just go ahead and indulge their upper class prejudices.
Or we could outsource the agony of allocating our actually already extremely meager budget for the arts to little known officials, and then gripe about their choices after the fact. That's the course we have actually chosen. A very small pool of money for a bunch of people who would otherwise probably collect the dole, which is given to them on the basis of actually producing something.
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Robbie, any links to a band I saw briefly on TV "No artificial flavours"?
The lyrics were really touching and a heart felt plea about poverty, but I blinked and missed it. -
I've definitely heard one of the Godspeed You! follow-ups on Concert.
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Last time i checked, Nina simone wasn't hiphop ?
No. She was however an exponent of an indigenous musical form (several, actually) so according to the dominant theme in this here thread ought to have found classical music utterly useless and redundant. But you knew that, so why am I even bothering to tell you?
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Arcade Fire were reviewed by William Dart on his New Horizons programme, on 6 May 2007 and 22 March 2009.
Thanks, Paul. William is a real treasure (he is in the Music Dept at Waikato) and often is a breathe of fresh air in a programme lineup that often sound like it could be coming out of Sussex in 1963.
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From Rudman's piece on the granny today, data that might be of interest to our resident fund-cutters:
And yet again, I find The Herald's editorial crusade on behalf of RNZ ever so slightly ironic given the way their own operations have been FUBAR -- how is the outsourced sub-editing working out folks? Are we going to see any reporting of APN's profit slump -- and it's possible effects -- more substantial that re-heated and heavily spun press releases?
Still, I've got to give Rudman mad-props for the irony-deficiency of the day:
For that small outlay we provide ourselves the only venue to hear extended and serious discussions on politics, the arts, medicine, lifestyle - you name it. We also provide for ourselves a newsroom with valuable competition for the two or three big metropolitan papers.
Yeah, Brian, because the Herald stable is more focused on the big stories like Ratshit Glaucoma stalking Alison Mau and her alleged harem of "lady loves".
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Robbie, any links to a band I saw briefly on TV "No artificial flavours"?
thats dat hori taaz. Sth auckland b-boy and allround hiphop head.
its not that classical music is useless and redundant Gio, just irrelevent to most. It's had it's day and so time to move on. Which is how i feel about the concert program and radio in general.
Musically, it's all about dubstep and UKfunky now, which if most of them dead white euro composers from eons ago were alive now, they'd me making instead.
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And yet again, I find The Herald's editorial crusade on behalf of RNZ ever so slightly ironic given the way their own operations have been FUBAR -- how is the outsourced sub-editing working out folks? ... Yeah, Brian, because the Herald stable is more focused on the big stories like Ratshit Glaucoma stalking Alison Mau and her alleged harem of "lady loves"
That's a truly breathtaking work of diversion Craig, but it might be more useful to deal with what Rudman actually says in his column.
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Musically, it's all about dubstep and UKfunky now
Terrific, and of course whenever there's a new kind of music on the scene the thing you've got to do is forget about everything that came before it. What a fucking depressing idea of culture.
Meanwhile, and so long as you don't mind, I'll keep listening to Nina and Wolfgang some of the time. It's nice to know that for the grand price of 1 dollar per New Zealander per year there's a place where I can do that.
That's a truly breathtaking work of diversion Craig
Yes, I thought it was pretty impressive even by Craig's high high standards.
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