I began writing about music in 1981, and, call me a slow learner, but it's only this century that I came to understand what the job is really about. Being a judge of quality is not the main point, and nor is being a historian, a musicologist or an analyst. The role of the critic is to discern truth, because the role of the artist is to play, paint or write truth. Rather than defining music as either good or bad, I prefer honest or dishonest. No genres. Music is music.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
So how do we define this elusive trait in music called truth, and why is it so important? Truth is playing the music rather than the instrument. It's the player or singer extracting essences by meaning every note. This eliminates imitation, playing off muscle memory and playing to impress. The work of our finest musicians is too beautiful to be lost, it too important to be forgotten.
Yet cultural amnesia is rife in Australia. It took a German label to re-release several classic Australian albums from the ’60s recently. It seems apathy and cultural amnesia are close to completely taking over this place. The ABC uses 9994, Don Bradman's batting average, as its national PO box. What equivalent celebration of our artists do we find? Precious few. Many of our finest painters are represented in our major galleries, and the occasional one will gatecrash the consciousness of the wider public, although more for misbehaviour, eccentricity or living a long time than for their art.
And of course our actors who become international film stars are exalted, but more for their celebrity than their artistry.
Now we find ourselves in the unholy era of Trump, when a lie is heralded as truth, and truth is maligned as a lie. So how should artists respond? Should they cocoon themselves from the putrid horror of it all, or do they have a role? I believe they do, as any member of the community does. Perhaps just as beauty begets beauty, truth begets truth. If the artist is rigorous and relentless in the pursuit of truths both big and small, perhaps he or she helps the community to inure itself against falsehood.
It seems apathy and cultural amnesia are close to completely taking over this place.
The ultimate battle for any artist is the one where truth wins out and spawns beauty. It's this that decides if the art in question has lasting value as well as short-term appeal.
Truth is not just an imperative for players, it is also an imperative for listeners and for critics. Far from being merely a political movement with affiliated ideologies, populism is part of a broader movement of democratisation spawned by the internet.
In theory this democratisation sounds like a wonderful development. In practice, the ability of search engines to give equal weight to falsehoods as to truth is disastrous.
It is this excessive democratisation that allows someone to say their opinion counts as much as a doctor's when debating vaccination. It allows another to claim their opinion is more valid than a scientist's when discussing climate change. And of course it has changed the face of everything from restaurant and wine reviews to arts criticism, creating issues of quality control and independence. The truth issue is everywhere.
In this cartoonish, post-truth Trumpian world of alternative facts, we are ever more obliged to propagate truth as the best way to slap down this insidiousness. No performer should succumb to propagating those fake emotions so highly prized on Eurovision. In a country that suffers from cultural amnesia and in a world where truth is under grave threat, we must keep alive the legacy of an artist like the late Jackie Orszaczky, who understood all music was one and only knew one way to sing and play: honestly.
John Shand is a writer and musician.
