Our early music world-class

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JG: He was a jazz musician in the 30s in Melbourne. And he always had wanted to do classical music but there wasn't classical to learn, classical guitar, in Melbourne until about the mid-50s.

PH: Well, it's an interesting instrument really because it took a long time for the repertoire of the guitar to be either revived or developed.

JG: Relatively. But there were actually some interesting forerunners. [Points to shelf of records] I've got up there an LP of classical guitar music made in Melbourne in the late 1940s by a guy called Midjian Picatore. He came to Melbourne in the late 1920s and played banjo and guitar in the Tivoli orchestra, then stayed in Melbourne until after World War 2, then took off. So there were little things like that, isolated things that were happening.
Anyway, so I started playing classical guitar. In the process of playing classical guitar, I started to play some arrangements of music adapted for the guitar from lute music and other early sources. I got interested in that, I finished up doing an arts degree at Monash…

PH: Where they have a Department of Musicology…

JG: It was a very progressive school and, so people who studied Western music had to study the history of musical instruments and historical performance practice, and it was through that, and through my guitar stuff, that I decided "Hey, I would like to play this stuff on the original instruments"

PH: And how did you go about finding original instruments? This would have been in the seventies?

JG: Early seventies. I wanted to play the viluela. I was interested in Spanish stuff because of the guitar…

PH: Can you give me a brief description of the vilhuela as compared to the guitar?

JG: [The vilhela] was played in Spain in the 16th century - guitar shaped body - the strings were in pairs, like a modern 12-string guitar. But like all of these instruments, [the strings] are very light, and the tension is very light.
There was a guitar maker in Melbourne called Peter van Ree and I asked would he make me a vilhuela. And so we had to set about, together, researching how to do it, models, plans, designing… He made that, and at Monash, it was a generally musicological course, they had a kind of a subject in my final year that they let me do all this. So I think it was in 1972 that I gave my first vilhuela concert at Monash - it was the first time that the instrument had been played in Australia.

PH: Were you able to get any tuition at that stage or any help apart from slowly researching how to play?

JG: I wrote letters overseas and got some advice…because I didn't know how to string it, so I got in touch with the Lute Society of America, and they were very helpful, and there was a lady there who put me in touch with string dealers, so I got strings of the right gauges.
At about the same time, there were a couple of makers up in the Blue Mountains who started to build lutes and other early plucked instruments, and viols as well. And so things sort of flourished. A little bit later, probably about '74, '75, there was a woman called Jay Parks who came back to Australia. She studied at one of the specialist schools in Basel, Switzerland, and she had some lute lessons and I went over to Adelaide and met her, and she showed me what she'd been taught. Then in 1975 I went to Europe too.

PH: So really, at this stage of things in Australia, this was real pioneering stuff.

JG: Well, there had been other things going on.

PH: It would have been hard to get a teacher, especially for the vilhuela.

JG: Absolutely. There had been, through the fifties and the sixties, a slow build-up of interest in things that. A lot of it was associated with Leonard Fullard, who was the director of music at Christchurch, South Yarra. He ran an annual Bach festival right through the fifties, and sixties and into the seventies, until it was eventually eclipsed by the Melbourne Festival of Organ and Harpsichord. Fullard's Bach festival was where the people who were interested in early music started to gather. People like Fred Morgan for example, who went on to become the greatest recorder maker of the 20th Century…

PH: He lived in Victoria.

JG: Yeah. He had his workshop in Johnson Street, Fitzroy until he decided to move to Daylesford.

PH: I've heard that recorder players from all over the world would actually come to Australia to get him to make a specified instrument for them.

JG: Yep. He had a fifteen year waiting list. He was really…I'm not exaggerating by saying he was the greatest recorder maker since the 18th century. He was tragically killed in a car accident.

PH: So, while you were developing all of this, the Melbourne early music scene was starting to develop as well, from a very low start.

JG: I think that, probably from the time that I was involved, there was probably a fair bit happening that I didn't know about. Then in the early seventies, […] we started a group called Ars Nova. We did performances of Monteverdi's Vespers and Josquin masses and all sorts of things […] we were getting by this time good recordings from overseas […] There were people here who were importing instruments from Britain and Europe. There are isolated examples of these things in the 1930s and the 1940s and so forth, but it really exploded in the early seventies at the time that I started getting involved. I was just sort of swept up in that thing. And that's when Melbourne started to develop things too.

PH: My impression, I suppose, were that in the eighties, when I first started going to early music performances, the performance standard was modest at that time - it was coming off a relatively low base.

JG: Early music in the seventies attracted amateurs. It went along with […] ideas about society and stuff like that.

PH: I suppose the kind of people who were interested in playing those instruments were also interested in the Society for Creative Anachronism, for example.

JG: Yeah, The first big boom in Melbourne was playing Renaissance instruments. Renaissance instruments of course were all grouped in families, and were used to play music where all of the parts are kind of equal so it was egalitarian music for people aspiring to socialist ideals and so forth, where you didn't necessarily have to be terrific. So it attracted amateurs and it attracted a certain sort of people who probably wouldn't have been able to make it out in the "real" classical world.

PH: Just as a little side shift on that, when those instruments were first developed, was society going through a stage then where some moderately wealthy families wanted to play music together, so some of this music would have been developed for domestic use rather than primarily for performance.

JG: Originally? Back in the sixteenth century? Yes.

PH: With the increasing wealth of families, and the emergence of a middle class I suppose…

JG: Plus printing, which took music that up until that time had been exclusively of the Court and Church, the dominant powerful institutions in society. There is a tremendous surge in scholarship.
So in the 1970s there is this same kind of thing, with the social consciousness behind it. It was in the seventies also that the first sort of wave of young Australian musicians, whose appetite had been whetted, went to Europe to study with the leading teachers and brought back a new level of expertise that lifted the game. At the same time, you know, one of the things was that in the seventies, it was really often hard to get the music to sound in tune. That was partly due to that fact that the instruments that we had then were not always very good, and that's important to the music as well.
So things got better. And by the early eighties, there was a sort of a new core of more highly trained people in Melbourne and Sydney who were able to do moderately good performances, and that's continued to build.

PH: When I first came to it in the early eighties, it was modest, but by the time I was going to Melbourne Autumn Music Festival concerts in the early years of this century, the standard was extraordinary.
And also the number and quality of concerts had increased very dramatically in those years, it was like a mushroom growth

JG: What happened was, you got maybe a dozen or fifteen people who were part of that exodus to study in Europe the mid-seventies who came back. For example I started my group La Romanesca in 1978 immediately on coming back from studying in Europe with other people who'd come back and done the same thing. With the mediaeval and Renaissance repertoires that we played, that brought a completely new standard to what was happening in Melbourne.

PH: I have to say, as a disclaimer there, it wasn't La Romanesca that I saw that was of modest quality! It was actually a performance with a number of amateur players which was a large orchestral type of thing which I suppose is exactly the situation in which you will have the highest density of amateurs and the greatest risk of it not being …polished.

JG: But I sometimes listen to recordings of the earliest things I have done and I've matured over time too!

PH: That's every recording musician's experience.

JG: Yes, exactly. So you know, as this happened, there was a lot more importation of good recordings, especially due to people like Peter Mann (the guy that owned Discurio). And so we got to hear stuff, more authentic performances, there were better instruments around that could be acquired with greater ease. And there were teachers! Locally! Who could prepare students. So the next generation who went overseas had already achieved a much higher standard.

PH: How would you compare Melbourne with other cities where early music is of major interest. Is Melbourne relatively speaking a regional backwater in that respect, or it somewhere which has some standing…if it is reasonable to talk about a city in that way.

JG: I think these things fluctuate to a certain degree. I would have said that Melbourne was the leading city in early music during the last quarter of a century in Australian terms.

PH: So, the leading city in Australia.

JG: More professionals, greater number of concerts, higher standards, specialist festivals. That's changed. I think that the creation of the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra in Sydney has been very influential. Sydney now has a very healthy number of early music people, and is at least as good as, if not better than, Melbourne. Other good things are happening in Adelaide, Perth as well, and in Brisbane to a lesser degree. But there are some terrific individuals right around the country.
But when we talk about it in these terms, it makes you realise that the critical mass is still not great enough to create a kind of stability.

PH: We're nowhere near an Amsterdam or a London (though of course London has a huge advantage in terms of population)….

JG: At the moment for example…well, maybe five years ago, the best, the most active violinist we had in Melbourne left town. So it fluctuates.

PH: And its something that can be quite influenced by a small number of musicians changing locations.

JG: Exactly. A new person comes to town…and things are changing too - the Organ festival [Melbourne Autumn Music Festival] has just ceased to exist…

PH: With a whimper rather than a bang…

JG: But on the other hand it had a good run. And it achieved in a sense what it set out to do, because now, at the Melbourne International Festival, you get to hear the best early music from overseas. All of this has been mainstreamed…

PH: So it has put early music on the map.

JG: Exactly. And in fact, as a low budget festival, it was just not able to compete. There are lots of sub-arguments in that. You could argue that it has just been swallowed by the gargantuan advertising budget of other festivals, and it's a symptom of the sharing up of the funding cake. And the fact that contemporary culture goes to big spectacles. You know, we want everything to be a Grand Final. It's got to be the Three Tenors, opera, has to be grand performances. And this is not just a criticism or an observation of local behaviour, it's international. The solo classical recital, whether it be piano, violin - [it's] done for.

PH: Apart from Musica Viva…

JG: But they bring ensembles. The ABC no longer has a recital series. They used to have a series where they brought recitalists every year who would do solo recitals around the country, and then they'd play a concerto with the orchestras. They are only interested in the concertos and the big things because of the economics of it - you've got to have 2000 people in a hall, and who wants to go and hear a piano recital in a hall of 2000 people?
With CDs, you can listen to fantastic things. Such convenience. Even on the tram. The whole sociology is different now.

PH: You've done numerous recordings for Move and other labels. You've already talked about La Romanesca to some extent. I'm just wondering if there are any of those recordings which for you are really stand-out experiences, where you still feel like you achieved what you wanted to?

JG: Yeah. Well there's one recording that we did that was published in 1982 that includes the earliest known song cycle by a Spanish or Portugese composer of the 13th century called Martine Kovax. I think that the performance on that recording has really stood the test of time compared with any other recording that has been produced in any other part of the world in the last twenty years. That's a recording that in its time was bought en masse by the Portugese Ministry of Culture and used as teaching material in schools throughout Portugal. Just in the last couple of weeks we've recorded a new swag of mediaeval music that's going to come out on a new CD together with a reissue of that same 1982 recording. That's one that has been really good.
The other series of recordings were the ones that I was involved with as a co-director of a project with John Stinson.

PH: The chant man.

JG: And these were called The music of the 14th century for which we did five CDs, all of music from the 14th century. We originally chose the pieces because they had never been recorded before. Particularly the ones of Italian music…I've met scholars at conferences who said, "I've found the most fantastic recording! I found it on the web somewhere and I ordered it. These are best recordings ever of 14th century Italian music!" And they're our recordings.

PH: They set a world standard.

JG: Yes. La Romanesca was the nucleus of that project. Before this, we still played together…

PH: Who are the founding members?

JG: Hartley Newnham and Ros Bandt.

PH: She's also a modern composer and sound sculptor. It seems to be a common thread that people who are involved with early music are also involved in contemporary art music. I have a lot of sympathy for that personally.

JG: Well, a lot of people do… So La Romanesca don't actively go out looking for gigs. We do concerts together, or a project we'd like to do. Now we've just done these new recordings and we've got some concerts in July.

PH: So it still certainly exists as a recording group.

JG: As an occasional group. It saves us having to do reunions! We just sort of get together…

PH: And I suppose you have the kind of working relationship where it's like an old shoe, if you've been working together for a quarter of a century or more…?

JG: Exactly. You just know there are certain things you can do that will be absolutely magical just because of what happens when a group has been together for a certain length of time. But you also need to go out and do your own thing. We were very active for the first ten years we were working. That's when we did all our international touring and stuff like that. Then you have families, so travel becomes more difficult, jobs…and you need to develop the bits of your musical life that you had to sacrifice. For example, when I was playing all the time with La Romanesca, I did very little solo stuff. I didn't release my first solo CD until 1995.

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Frogs bite Apple

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A tale of two Apples

Once upon a time Steve Jobs set up a computer company and named it Apple in homage to the Beatles record label. Beatle lawyers screamed: “trademark infringement!”

In 1991, after much wrangling, Steve’s lawyers did a deal with the Beatle lawyers that said he could use the Apple name and his own apple shaped logo, as long as he wasn’t selling music under the banner. Steve continued to build the apple computer empire. One day Steve invented Apple iTunes where people could download music for a fee, the Beatles lawyers were not happy! All the lawyers went back into court and started arguing.

The case continues with arguments raging over, among other things, whether or not the appearance of Steve’s logo implies that Apple (computer not Beatle) owns the music and is selling it. Another example of the big boys in the music industry protecting their intellectual property. Wouldn’t it be nice if they viewed muso’s IP as similarly important when devising their contracts? And meanwhile, (as if we care) who will end up with apple on their face?

There were three in the bed, and the little one said...

The Bertelsmann company who own the BMG half of SonyBMG may sell their music interests. This is due to the fact that a Belgian holding company named GBL, who own 25% of Bertelsmann, want to sell their share and Bertelsmann itself want to buy it. The big B can only fund this by selling their share of SonyBMG (if anyone wants to buy it!). Confused?... you’re not alone. One thing is sure, this is a clear indication that the number of big players in the ailing record biz continues to drop.

I’m Sorry, I’ll Count That Again!

Up until now US record company body RIAA, like Oz’s ARIA has based its figures on units shipped to retailers rather than those actually sold (ever wondered how a record can be released and go platinum on the same day?). With falling sales they are now keen to include legal downloads (which are, of course, actual sales) in their figures. This has meant a complete rejig of their approach. The figures may now approach something like a true picture. But… some things don’t change, RIAA still notes a drop in sales of about US$7 Million and claim that this will affect their “…ability to invest in the next generation of music…” Really, what was stopping them from this kind of investment in the past?

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