In December, saxophonist and composer Sandy Evans delivered the 10th annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks address at the Mint in Sydney. As we celebrate Australia Day and look to the new year with a mix of hope and uncertainty, Sandy’s ideas about creativity and our need to nurture it are worth reflecting on.
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It is a great privilege to give the 10th Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address. I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land – Gadigal clan of the Eora nation.
I am grateful that the New Music Network includes musicians from my field in its vision and community. It’s hard to say exactly what my field is, but it encompasses jazz and other improvised music and music with cross-cultural influences. My practise has many synergies with musicians approaching new music from a Western classical music perspective. I’m going to look at ways we can improve things for all of us and for future adventurers in new music. Our support of each other is probably the most important factor in ensuring the survival of the music we believe in and in improving conditions for the future. Fortunately, we are rich in this resource. Where things become difficult is in the area of money, or the lack of it. We might do better in an economy financed by rum! 45,000 gallons of rum seem to have worked well in facilitating the construction of this building!
I’ll return to money later, but first a more positive subject, death.
The word death creates fear in me. Death confronts us with our impermanence. It challenges us to abandon old ways of doing things and to adapt to whatever each moment brings. New music, by its very nature, embodies change and therefore brings about small deaths of old sounds. At the same time it owes its existence to everything that has gone before it. There is simultaneity of past and present, an essential unity and continuity of human creativity. This continuum of life is full of interesting contradictions and unexpected challenges.
In January ‘Respect for artists, and for the life of artists across the wider community, needs to be reinvigorated.’this year, a much loved and very significant Sydney musician, Jackie Orszacky, died after fighting cancer for two years. Jackie’s passing was a great loss, but his memory, musical legacy and spirit live on through the myriads of people he influenced. I would like to read from a letter written to The Sydney Morning Herald by one of his closest friends and musical colleagues, drummer Hamish Stuart, after Jackie’s wake at The Harold Park Hotel.
‘It began at 4pm. About an hour later, the police arrived in two wagons and a sedan. I saw five police on one corner and three on another. There were a number of people outside on the footpath, they were told from the bandstand to come inside. Those, who could fit in, did. The mood, if understandably emotional, was warm and co-operative, and unruly behaviour was improbable. The police left for a while, then returned and stopped the proceedings. … I know the police do a very difficult job, but to not let a wake proceed in a pub on a Sunday afternoon shows no grasp of how the community as a whole functions. I am deeply concerned that Sydney has come to this. I am angry the tribute performances that evening were stopped and with them the city’s cultural spirit.’
This extreme example of the rigid implementation of regulations with little regard for human expression is symptomatic of a deeper crisis of value in our culture. Respect for artists, and for the life of artists across the wider community, needs to be reinvigorated.
Read the full address
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Sandy Evans
