April 29, 2002

Such divine intervention needed to sell overseas

At least one man is helping Australian musicians gain recognition abroad.

Few things are harder to bring off for performers and composers of concert music or opera who live in this country than to have the recordings they make here fully distributed and available in Europe, North America or Asia.

It's a serious limitation, because recordings act as effective visiting cards for touring groups and individuals and can add greatly, through direct sale or radio broadcasts, to the admiring and expectant audiences these musicians hope to cultivate overseas.

A huge resource is available in the catalogues of ABC Classics, Melbourne's Move Records (our oldest surviving record company) and Tall Poppies, to mention three especially enterprising labels, and in the lists of smaller or newer concerns such as Andrew McKeich's Artworks or the Australian Music Centre's VAST series. Then there are the local issues, usually restricted to local distribution, produced by major international companies such as Universal and Sony.

The thing they have in common is that an invisible but powerful barrier stands in the way of encountering nearly all this output anywhere but in Australia. Look at retail record shelves or boxes in London or New York, Paris or Berlin, and it's almost certain that you won't find any of the discs belonging to this category.

If you lived in Europe or North America and were utterly determined to find them you might have some success. The foreign agents for these Australian issues are sometimes listed in fine print at the back of specialised record magazines. Add a bit of determination and a dash of patience to some original curiosity or interest and it's possible that the disc will come your way. Or, if you wrote to an Australian record shop of the right kind, you could take advantage of the exchange rate to import these discs for a modest local price.

Mind you, as a foreigner you would have to be a keen Internet scanner or have some special source of information to know that they are there at all. Without effective distribution there is no point in newspapers or journals reviewing them.

Most of our leading labels, such as ABC Classics, have done deals for particular issues and had a degree of short–lived success in penetrating the difficult and over–supplied markets of the northern hemisphere.

I remember when Belinda Webster, founder of the Tall Poppies label, was awarded some travelling funds, took her discs to London, and found personal contact and direct sampling a potent means of interesting retailers and reviewers in her wares. For a time you could find her discs at the big Tower Records' shops. The reviews were numerous and appreciative, and and the Australia Ensemble's Tall Poppies disc of Mozart flute and oboe quartets became the preferred issue listed in London's Good Record Guide. Webster's lack of resources or time to follow up her tiny commercial toehold meant that interest faded.

What is the solution? An Australian agent, superlatively familiar with repertory and persuasive in musical as well as commercial terms, operating in Europe, with another one in North America and another to cultivate the important Japanese market? An overseas distributor paid to be diligent in promoting Australian–produced recordings? Perhaps, but experience suggests that it may be better to find someone from one of those markets, an independent spirit who wants really wants, out of personal taste and enthusiasm to make recordings here and sell them here and abroad.

Which brings me to the unusual history of Eckart Rahn, the president of an international label, Celestial Harmonies, who has a genuine and persistent liking, expressed in more than 40 discs, for recording those Australian or Australian–resident composers and performers (or, more often, composer–performers) who appeal to him.

Among them are the composer–percussionist Michael Askill and the renowned percussion group, Synergy, that he helped bring into being; Roland Peelman's brilliant Song Company in a recording of Heinrich Schütz's Swansong collection from the later 17th century; Riley Lee and the versatile performer–composer James Ashley Franklin playing shakuhachi, the Japanese end–blown flute, in traditional and original music; the multi–instrumentalist–cum-composer Michael Atherton; Winsome Evans's Renaissance Players in a set of copiously documented discs devoted to the lively music of Sephardic Jewish communities; the didgeridoo players and composers Alan Dargin, Matthew Doyle and David Hudson. Rahn admires the local sound technicians who capture their music within his label's trademark technique of simple, direct and truthful microphone placement.

No wonder the Premier, Bob Carr, was happy to provide a welcoming note to go with a Celestial Harmonies disc of excerpts from its Australian recordings released to coincide with the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. Most of the performers, composers (including Ross Edwards and Ian Cleworth) and recording engineers represented belong to or work in New South Wales.

Their recordings go overseas and are central to Rahn's catalogue, along with the improvisations of a Munich organ virtuoso, Franz Lehrndorfer, the piano music of the Lithuanian composer Mikalojus Ciurlionis, works by Schubert and other standard composers, and issue after issue of what used to be called ethnomusicological field recordings and later "world music" the traditional idioms of Cambodia, Vietnam and Armenia, for example, in multi–disc boxes. A 17–disc issue entitled Music of Islam helps disclose how richly various the cultures are that embrace that religion.

German and New York radio stations regularly play the Celestial Harmonies recordings of Australian musicians. A New York radio producer has prepared a disc of selections from Evans's recordings of Sephardic music. Further, these discs remain in the catalogue and are not subject to the deletions practised by many large recording companies. Rahn is understandably proud that all his recordings have stayed in print.

Born in Germany in 1944 and gifted with an insatiable curiosity about the world's musics rather than by his own reckoning any pronounced musical aptitude, he is a European with a liking for places where the sunlight seems to burn away some of the assumptions and hang–ups of the continent where he was born. His headquarters are now in Tucson, Arizona, and he has an apartment on the Gold Coast he regularly uses as the base of his Australian operations. This week sees him at the end of one of his Gold Coast stays and forming plans for new Australian recordings.

It's probably no use showering him with discs and tapes, however, in the hope of exciting him about your special project. He has been happy to produce special discs to go with exhibitions of Indian and Buddhist art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales because these were extensions of his interests. His independence is complete. He listens to the radio, hears what he wants to, develops his own tastes, makes his own choices.

He is not the man to answer a need for a concerted plan to represent overseas Australian players and composers on disc, but he is one of the best and truest friends our performing and creative musicians have.

• Roger Covell
  

March 29, 2002

13192 ABUNDANCE - MICHAEL ATHERTON AND JAMES ASHLEY FRANKLIN (.pdf)

Blurring Japanese

Intercultural music is the term favoured by Michael Atherton and James Ashley Franklin for the kind of creative interaction they engage in on this record. The blending or blurring of traditions is deliberately limited. Franklin plays the shakuhachi (the Japanese bamboo flute) for each of its eight tracks and twice dubs in his playing of the koto (the Japanese long zither). Atherton adds instrumental sounds from several different traditions, including Egyptian harp, vibraphone, guitar and didgeridoo.

Their contributions do, however, mostly complement the typically free–flowing and hauntingly meditative character of the shakuhachi. Just occasionally the collaboration goes further than techniques of transformed echo, simple punctuation or interrupted refrain. The guitar, for example, in Rejoicing World, adds harmonic and metrical dimensions absent from most of the other tracks.

The didgeridoo in Desert Horizon adds drone sounds and rhythmic pulsations to a texture that also contains the sounds of the shakuhachi, koto and the Korean drum, called changgo. Atherton occasionally makes the didgeridoo pulsations surge dynamically in a way that takes traditional 'flares' a step further.

On all but one track, both players engage in structured improvisation in which they respond to small nudges to each other to extend or vary traditional styles belonging to a given instrument. The exceptional track is a composition by Franklin, Salz/Salt of the Earth, commissioned, rather surprisingly, for the 1999 German Lutheran Church Convention. Perhaps out of consideration for Lutheran sensibilities, Franklin adjusted a traditional shakuhachi genre to take it closer to European modal character.

Mountain Grandeur lives up to its name by piling up six ridges or layers of shakuhachi with throbs and rattles from metal percussion. Franklin, a Western-trained composer, began his shakuhachi studies with Riley Lee and attained his rank as a master player in Japan. He makes an eloquent case for the instrument's ability to take on new challenges without losing sight of its stylistic origins. Atherton demonstrates again his instinctive quickness and sensitivity in making music with a diverse group of instruments.

• Roger Covell

Saturday December 15, 2001

114215 BUDDHA: RADIANT AWAKENING - VARIOUS ARTISTS (AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY IN AUSTRALIA FROM THE BOOK SHOP AT THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES IN AUSTRALIA)

Calm as you are

BUDDHA: RADIANT AWAKENING
Field recordings and new works (Celestial Harmonies)

Roger Covell gets a lesson in world championship chanting.

Produced in association with the current exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, this wide–ranging recording of musical sounds taken from or inspired by Buddhist ceremonies brings into play an unusual conjunction of enterprise and talent.

The first disc of this release is devoted to traditional Buddhist chants and rituals, recorded at ceremonies by David Parsons, a New Zealand composer and general musical explorer.

The first track may well strike listeners as austere, consisting as it does of chanting to a single pitch by a solitary Japanese nun in a Japanese shrine near the holiest of Buddhist sites in India, the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya. The only sounds punctuating her rhythmic monotone are gong strokes and the occasional shrieks of children playing nearby. This provides a means of tuning in to Buddhist calm persistence.

Another track records the evening prayer chanted by Indian monks at the Mahabodhi Temple itself.

Their parallel singing sounds like a surprisingly close equivalent of the organum practised in Western European Christian churches in the medieval period.

Daily chanting at the Tibetan temple in the same area prompts some instrumental liveliness from Tibetan oboes, horns and trumpets and conch–shell trumpets.

An extended track (nearly 19 minutes) of chanted prayers at a Thai temple takes advantage of its resonant acoustics; this source also yields a melodically varied solo chant from a singer identified as Dr Phramahachalong Candisiri, who seems unperturbed by brief descants of traffic noises.

The second disc begins with Dawn, James Ashley Franklin's reflection of a species of classic Zen pieces, played by Franklin on the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi, in the Japanese Garden at Cowra.

Lee's eloquent shakuhachi is part of the composer–percussionist Michael Askill's Invisible Forces, the final section of his evocative, Buddhist–influenced music for Graeme Murphy's 1999 dance piece, Air and Other Invisible Forces.

Music originally intended for funerals from the Northern Thai String Ensemble and Chiang Yuen Ensemble is particularly attractive in its airy texture. Buddhist music from Laos includes the piquant sound of a Laotian oboe with xylophones, drums, gongs and a plastic end-blown flute and, from Myanmar (Burma), auspicious instrumental music for conch–shell trumpet, brass plaque and gong as a prelude to a parallel chant.

Conch–shell sounds also introduce a series of Japanese Buddhist chants, many of them with characteristic chesty glides in their trajectories. The final track, David Parsons's Maitreya (the future Buddha) brings together samples of music from four monasteries and temples in India and from the Theravada monastery in Stokes Valley, New Zealand.

Its combination of deep–voiced intonations, monotonal and parallel chants and layered instrumental sounds is an engaging and uncomplicated musical image of Buddhism in the 21st century.

Anyone wanting to pursue unhurried thoughts, free of short-breathed priorities, might use Parsons's synthesis as a point of entry into the sounds of this beautifully presented recorded compilation as a whole.

• Roger Covell

Saturday May 6, 2000

15030 RHYTHM IN THE ABSTRACT: SELECTED PIECES 1987-1999- MICHAEL ASKILL

Michael Askill is the composer and percussionist whose collaborations with Graeme Murphy in the integration of music into dance and dance into music probably reached their peak in Salome.

Askill presents here a selection of the music with which he has been associated over a period of more than a dozen years. Many of the pieces are by Askill himself, though he is the first to acknowledge the creative contributions of such musicians as Riley Lee (shakuhachi), Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Michael Atherton, David Hudson and others. There are excerpts from Salome and other scores.

The disc also includes piece wholly by other composers—two of Ross Edward's engaging marimba dances and Nigel Westlake's brilliant Omphalo Centric Lecture—but performed by Askill.

The cover notes make it clear just how important Askill has been as a means of introducing the work of many Australian-based musicians to the Black Sun label in the United States and to collectors of its recordings. His music wears easily the notion of a Pacific rim idiom in which different influences are blended without stiffness or self–consciousness. Many people have used this idea as a manifesto or slogan; Askill makes it work.

Listeners who accept a new sound as a part of life's aural development will enjoy this disc from a perpetually tactile explorer.

• Roger Covell * * * *
  

Saturday May 6, 2000

From folk song to raga, from Morocco to Aceh, this is a remarkable 15-volume tapestry of music created from the diverse cultures of Islamic culture

19907 THE MUSIC OF ISLAM (17 CD BOXED SET) - VARIOUS ARTISTS

Is seems we must find a pigeon–hole for everything. Even if differences are mica–thin, and only appreciated by obsessive aficionados, there is still a need to find a new term for a new genre. Never mind the idea that the greatest art often defies categorisation.

This genre problem was creatively solved by the German equivalent of the Grammy's when, deciding that this outstanding collection had to be acknowledged but not knowing how to categorise it, they created a section called "other." The Music of Islam was awarded the Pris Der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, a special award in honour of a major recording achievement.

The whole enterprise is unwieldy, but the result is a superb overview of music inspired by one of the world's great religions. Here are the musical styles of the Islamic communities in Egypt (both classical and folk from the Sinai Bedouins and the Nubians), Qatar, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia.

There are moments when the music reaches beyond these countries: volume six features the music of the Moroccan descendants of West African slaves from Mali and Senegal; volume seven is Andalusian music in Morocco; and volume 10 is nearly 66 minutes of non–stop Koran recitation by Turkish experts, including the professor of Koran recitation from Marmara University in Turkey.

It is hard to work out what "comprehensive" means in terms of the totality of Islam. Certainly this collection is wide–ranging, both geographically and stylistically, and the range of instruments and musical approaches is diverse.

However, even the most willing pair of Western ears will find problematic some of the music in the collection.

The extensive notes and their detailed explanations are illuminating. It is possible to buy the individual CDs and a sampler is also available. If, however, you want to appreciate one of the world's most complex musical cultures then this boxed set is rewarding.

• Bruce Elder * * * *

August 6 - 15, 1999 (The Guide)

Winsome Evans's fascinating exploration of the musical world of dispersed Sephardic Jewry takes her into realms of music (and life in general) which are both related to her exploration of surviving medieval repertoire and go well beyond it into regions of timeless practice.

Volume 4, issued under the Celestial Harmonies label, is subtitled Eggplants for the very good reason that its opening piece is a transcription and reworking of a traditional song from Rhodes which deals, among other things, with the cooking of the eggplant, a much–prized element of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking. It stands in this anthology for one of the richly flavoured elements of culture and memory that helped to link Sephardic Jews, who had been driven out of the Spanish peninsula after 1492 by the edicts of Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors.

Naturally, Evans's vast experience in organising, rhythmicising and ornamenting medieval melody is vital in her warmly sympathetic approach to the songs and dances she has found in printed notation or in the memories of friends and colleagues. She is able to extend her effective use of plangent woodwind timbres and her imaginative deployment of melodic variation and rhythmic patterning, drawing where possible on known formulas of improvisation and extension.

Her printed notes on the background of the piece and the societies that produced them are fascinating. The whole project, by which Professor Evans and her ensemble are paying tribute to traditions in imminent danger of disappearing, is one of the most encouraging instances of creative and re–creative passion in Australian musical enterprise.

• Roger Covell * * * *

Monday December 14, 1998 (Arts)

Record Rahn Loves the Sound of Silence

Play a note on a flute in the Taj Mahal and it will reverberate for 18 seconds, Eckart Rahn explains. The president of the Celestial Harmonies recording label is full of such arcane detail. This self–confessed child of the '60 s can expound at length on subjects as disparate as the finer points of Islam, what made Jimi Hendrix unique, how composers and conductors are the Johnny-come-latelys of classical music, or philosophise about the value of silence.

His point about the Taj is that a recording studio is no place for a great musician. "The recording studio is the worst of places to record music because it is only there for the convenience of engineers," he said. "No great composer has written a piece for the recording studio."

It was this belief that informed the CD The Sound Inside: Music and Architecture, exploring the connection between fine music and fine buildings. The result is recordings in such icons as the Taj Mahal, Istanbul's Great Suleymaniye Mosque and Egypt's Great Pyramid. In Sydney, he has recorded The Song Company performing in the Opera House and Saint Scolastica's Convent Chapel.

"Throughout the world, all the great pieces were written for particular spaces—mostly for churches, temples, courts, opera houses, concert halls—places that were built with good sound in mind," he said. Hearing sound in such a space adds a sense of awe and mystery to the experience. "The music has a quality that something produced in an artificial space only rarely has."

Australia has been a regular stop for German–born Rahn as he has traveled the globe for 30 years in search of the eclectic sounds that form his 400–plus catalogue. He was in Sydney earlier this month for the release of composer and percussionist Michael Askill's CD Salome.

Askill composed the music for the Sydney Dance Company's version of the Biblical tale earlier this year. The album saw Askill team up with Turkish musician and singer Omar Faruk Tekbilek to create a sound that draws on Middle Eastern musical traditions. It is the latest in a number of projects Askill and Rahn have worked on since Rahn, having heard of Askill's work with the percussion ensemble Synergy, looked up his name in the phone book and called him about five years ago. "We got together about 20 minutes later," Rahn said.

The bloody tale of Salome, who asked for the head of John the Baptist in return for dancing for King Herod, came at a time when written music was unknown. "He [Askill] brings back the spirit of that music," said Rahn.

Salome is Rahn's springboard into his argument that composers and conductors are the johnny–come–latelys of music. "The written music, where the composer is the main man, has only existed for 300 or 400 years and for maybe five per cent of the world's population, from Portugal to Russia," he said.

"[In Asia] pieces are handed down. But there's a strict repertoire of rules depending on whether it's written for the temple, a particular time of day...it's not free jazz, neither is it composed because the musician has a lot of freedom."

The peripatetic Rahn, who is based in Arizona, returned to his former home city Bonn in October to accept the prestigious German Music Critics award for his mammoth 17–CD set, The Music of Islam.

After producing a number of CDs of Asian music—from Cambodian gamelan to Tibetan Buddhist chants, Rahn decided Islam was one of the last musical frontiers. So little is known or understood in the West about the diversity of Islam and its music.

"Most people think of Islamic music as being Arabic music and that is vastly misleading...it reduces its variety and cultural wealth." The epic project, which he cheerfully admits went way over budget, meant recording musicians everywhere from Morocco to Indonesia.

His approach to recording music is, he argues, in keeping with the spirit of the '60s, with which he still identifies. He's not interested in doing 50 takes in a recording studio to get a track down.

"In the '60s, it was not important how good it sounded, it was important how much it meant. Some of the greatest recordings from the '60 s, from Jimi Hendrix to the Grateful Dead, are not terribly good sounding records, but they have a spur–of–the–moment intensity...in a strange sense we are reverting to that. In projects like this [The Music of Islam] you are dealing with master musicians who get it right in a take or two," he said.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his long involvement with recorded music, Rahn's favorite sound is silence. With music almost ever–present—from elevators to railway stations—we have devalued its currency and taken away its context.

"In Bach's day, people would only hear music on Sundays in church, so when the music came it was special. We have reversed that, so by having the radio on in the taxi and having music in the hotel lounge it is difficult to get away from music."

Recording and broadcasting might have enabled people to listen to all the music of the world, but they have taken the relevance out of listening to music, he said. "The only way to cleanse you system is silence, so that when you listen again you have the power of concentration and you are not overloading yourself because you are doing too much of it."

Listen wisely.

• Joyce Morgan
  

April 21, 1997

South–East Asia has missed out on the world music bandwagon. Peformers from China (the Guo Brothers), Tibet (Yungchen Lhamo), Pakistan (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), Tuva (Shu–De) and India have all found international record deals and enjoyed considerable success on the world music circuit. But there has been a notable absence of musicians from Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malayisa and Indonesia. In part some of the countries are suffering from pop cultural confusion (Thailand has its own version of the Spice Girls) and in part the region's angular gamelan–style of percussive classical music and tonal singing have just been too far removed from western sensibilities.

It was herefore with surprise that I found that Tembang Sunda, a collection of classical music from West Java produced by a New Zealand ambient composer, David Parsons, was not only very accessible but also extraordinarily delicate and beautiful. The complex rhythms of Indonesian gamelan give way to gentle, lyrical, slightly Middle Eastern vocals from Ida Widawati, and the musical backing from the group Lingkung Seni Malati, is an exotic mixture of zithers (kacapi indung and kacapi rincik), lutes (rebab) and bamboo flutes (suling).

The result is a collection of pieces with names like Mupu Kembang (Picking Flowers), Ligar (Flower in Full Blossom) and Angin Peuting (Evening Breeze).

The titles indicate quite precisely the delicate beauty of the music. The interplay between Widawati's vocals, the suling and zithers is a pure delight.

• Bruce Elder * * * **

January 12, 1997 (The Guide)

Does anyone apart from Eng. Lit. academics and linguistic trainspotters read Finnegans Wake these days? Back in 1960 is was quite de rigeur to carry a copy around and, when trying to impress, to read a section and claim you understood it. Yes, it is a richly rewarding exercise. But, equally, it is like Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books—better as a theory than as a reality. Too rich and dense for consumption by normal means.

This recording by Patrick Ball is an astute compromise and goes quite a way to making the work accessible. Ball, an Irishman and celtic harpist now living in the United States, has composed a series of pieces (all are deeply rooted in Irish traditional music) inspired by sections of Finnegans Wake. Not surprisingly, there is riverrun (23 minutes of music and reading from the opening pages), Shem (16 minutes from the Shem and Shaun section) and, for more than half an hour, the glorious Anna Livia Plurabelle. It works because Finnegans Wake makes sense only when read aloud, because Ball is a good reader with a soft Irish lilt to his voice, and because a Celtic harp is ideal accompaniment (it is clean and simple, the text is complex and rich) for this strange and wonderful novel.

You've got to be a committed Joycean to enjoy this. If you are, you'll love it.

• Bruce Elder * * * *1/2

The product of six glorious days at Arthur Boyd's rustic artistic retreat, Bundanon, on the Shoalhaven River near Nowra, this is another fascinating synthesis from three of Australia's most interesting and talented experimental musicians. From the opening, breathy sounds of Riley Lee's shakuhachi through to the wonderfully subtle guitar, oud, bouzouki and didgeridoo playing of Michael Atherton and Michael Askill's always tasteful percussion fills, this is one of those recording which demonstrates that "atmospheric" and "ambient" music can be both passionate and intellectually rigorous.

The musicians have responded to their environment—not only to the Shoalhaven valley but also to the Boyd crucifixion paintings on the walls of the music room—and created music that shimmers with rural beauty. This is music which evokes the tranquility of Bundanon (the interplay between Lee's shakuhachi, Askill's shaker and Atherton's guitar on the title track is superb) and which expresses a deep love of Australia.

I was lucky enough to see most of this remarkably beautiful recording performed live on the front verandah of Bundanon. Amid the lush lawns and under a huge magnolia tree, the music seemed so right, so perfectly in harmony with the surroundings.

The result is a special piece of Australian musical and cultural history . It is said that when the trio asked Arthur Boyd if he would paint the cover for the CD he asked: "Do you think I could do it?" The result is a painting of Boyd's beloved Shoalhaven which perfectly complements the music.

• Bruce Elder * * * *

Tuesday, November 19, 1996 (Arts)

13139 HEINRICH SCHÜTZ DER SCHWANENGESANG (THE SWAN-SONG) - THE SONG COMPANY, ROLAND PEELMAN - DIRECTOR

A moving swansong

The Song Company, Schütz's Schwanengesang, St. James, November 16

Posterity seems to get it right much of the time, with many works falling into obscurity for good reason. Not so, however, the Schwanengesang (Swansong) of Heinrich Schütz, who laid the foundations for baroque music in German–speaking Europe a century before Bach. The Australian premiere of this work, given by the Song Company, showed it to be a masterpiece of sorts, a kind of Heilige Deutsche Monteverdi.

It isn't your Classic Drive fare, however. Schütz wrote the piece as a musical and religious testimony at the end of a very long life, and thus chose Psalm 119 (the longest) as his text, out of which he fashioned 11 motets. I infer from Roland Peelman's annotations that the motets can be used separately for liturgic purposes, given that each begins with a chanted intonation—appropriately sacerdotal singing from David McKenzie—and concludes with the doxology. But as Schütz wrote the pieces as a set, it was interesting to hear them as such.

Given that any kind of liturgy is foreign to most people's experience these days, it should be said that to appreciate this music required meditative patience (and maybe a cushion). It is a work with a stately time–span and is accordingly a Very Big Sing, for all eight voices. To their great credit, the singers maintained an impressive level of stamina throughout the evening with due Protestant decorum—Schütz avoids any kind of vulgar display. Solo writing for the voices is minimal, though Ruth Kilpatricks's soprano was allowed moments of great clarity and David V. Russell's alto was pleasingly prominent in the sixth motet. On the whole, the music concentrates more on the contrasts of the antiphonally arranged quartets, and the range of smaller ensembles that this provides. While the harmonic cross relations occassionally got downright angry, the blend and the tuning was very good, particularly in the high, close harmony which was required of the men at times.

Schütz's recurring structural prinicple is to create chordal pillars which support lintels of polyphonic tracery, in which various devices of canon and hocket prevail. Every so often the pithy Monteverdian phrase sounds in Schütz merely short–winded, but on the other hand the exultant homophony of the end of the fourth motet is truly sublime.

David Drury discreetly accompanied the work on a portative organ that looks like a medieval cigarette machine, but in his hands can sound like a flock of low–flying angels. In addition to his careful support of the singers, Drury played two short solos—one anonymous and one by Sweelinck—which demonstrate his sure technique and familiarity with the style.

Schütz's is a very moving summation of a life's work and conviction. Michael Jackson's I Love You echoed down my street as I got home, but it didn't ring anywhere as true.

• Gordon Kerry

August 5, 1996

15023 LYREBIRD - MATTHEW DOYLE AND MICHAEL ATHERTON

Matthew Doyle is one of this country's most imaginative and innovative didgeridoo performers. Like David Hudson (from the Tjapukai Dance Theatre), Alan Dargin and Mark Atkins, he has taken this sacred instrument and found a way to make its strangely compelling sounds work on record.

Working with the percussionist/academic Michael Atherton, Doyle has created a series of soundscapes which range from New Beginning—an extended piece which seems to evoke the vastness of inland Australia—though the experimental, minimal sounds of Hand Stencils (with Doyle getting flute–like sounds out of the didgeridoo) to Cave Drawings and Mungari.

Doyle, who is also a performer with the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre, brings a sense of living ritual and celebration to the performances of Mouth Music, Tongue Talk and the beautiful Wiridjiribin: The First Lyrebird, where his own staccato chants serve as a sharp counterpoint to the droning sound of the didgeridoo.

This is one of the most successful of all the Aboriginal–Western musical cross–fertilisations. It works as an authentic expression of Aboriginal culture and a series of evocative soundscapes.

• Bruce Elder * * * *

February 10, 1995

World music warrior

When a producer with the record company Celestial Harmonies suggested to Vietnamese musicians and government officials that he record their music in the old imperial palace in Hue, a frisson went through the assembled group.

"We had been kind enough—the Australians and the Americans—to bomb that place to smithereens," recalls Eckart Rahn, Tucson (Arizona)–based owner of the record label, the cringe factor still evident in his voice. "We know so goddam little about Vietnam, even after our involvement in the war."

On Gareth Evans's suggestion, the company also went into Cambodia to record traditional music, during a "window of opportunity" between the arrival of United Nations peace keepers and the resumption of Khmer Rouge activity.

Celestial Harmonies is now recording the music of Islam on 12 compact discs. Work has been done in Morocco, Indonesia, Egypt, Nubia and Tunisia. Remaining on the schedule are "all the places you don't want to visit," as Rahn puts it—places such as Iran, Iraq and Sinai, which most Westerners would approach with trepidation.

Rahn is a sort of Indiana Jones of music recording. His label covers music from every continent of the world, music which he and a handful of specialist producers record in situ wherever music is to be found—regardless of the amenities or the risk.

"You don't even read the alphabet, you're constantly at the mercy of ethnomusicologists, translators, embassy people," he says, with apposite enthusiasm. "It's a struggle...But don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. It's what I do. And the nice thing is, in three years I haven't done anything I know anything about."

At 50, Rahn is tall, big-built, and has a restless energy which spills into his conversation. He admits he loves to talk. A late–riser, he apparently works equally late into the night, tinkering with ideas, designing graphics for disc covers, doing detailed research for the liner notes which he writes.

Other recording executives may talk about units sold and air–time won. Rahn gets stirred–up evaluating Bill Clinton's non–participation in the Vietnam war. "Clinton should have been proud to have dodged the war," he thunders. "The idea of joining the military is unthinkable for a European intellectual, then and now."

Rahn was born in Germany to a family oblivious to music. His grandfather, he says, worked for the railway and only listened to the radio for the news. His mother was a convert to Catholicism and Eckart was dragged unwillingly to Church. "It has taken me till I was 50 to make an organ recording with compassion," he says.

He discovered music when he was 15. "I walked past a record store and be–bop wafted out. I was a different person after that."

Coming to maturity in the radical '60s, Rahn produced political rock in Berlin and Hamburg and eventually founded his own independent record label. He was attracted to the energy of the anti–war protest in the United States and moved there in 1972.

He coined the English title for his now–American company in 1976 and started manufacturing in 1980. "We had these quiet recordings in an age of mega–rock. You could only be talked to in the record business after you had done 30 million units," he recalls. "That changed rapidly in the early '80s. You could make more money out of CDs then and that led to the incredible growth of independent record companies."

He remains idealistic and is confident no–one could accuse him of selling out. Although he has made money in the "last dozen years", he says, he has only changed his lifestyle to book into better hotels when he travels on business.

Rahn is evangelical about the importance of cultural exchange. "What we recorded in Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat is mostly unknown to outsiders and to Cambodians. In the absence of media infrastructure as we know it in the West, if you didn't live there and hear it performed, you would not hear it at all," he says. "Now you can get a boxed set in Sydney."

Challenged about the appropriateness of Westerners recording the traditional music of other peoples for sale in the West, Rahn remains unphased.

"I'm not going to Cambodia to colonise them culturally," he says. "No–one is forcing them to play and the musicians are paid fairly. When the New York Philharmonic plays in Asia, are the Chinese ripping off Beethoven?

To be a true liberal, you have to be in favor of the exchange of culture in both directions. Sometimes we have a missionary zeal to bring it to the heathen, but to take from the heathen is considered not so good."

His criterion for appropriateness, he says, is respect.

"Firstly, we're bringing the same quality of sound recording to Angkor Wat as we would to Berlin," he says. "And then there's the extent and quality of annotation. We [produce] booklets of as much as 44 pages and we go to enormous lengths to verify spelling, the proper transliteration of alphabets, and proofreading. Everything we do is subject to the scrutiny of ethnomusicologists , embassies, cultural ministries, the United Nations. Often getting the booklets done [takes] more time than the recording."

He points out that the term "ethnomusicology" is inherently derogatory and paints a multicultural fantasy of a musicologist dealing with Islamic music while an ethnomusicologist "sits in India looking into the weird psychological aspects of late 19th century Austrian music through the work of Mahler." He also believes that technology will soon allow Third World intellectuals and enthusiasts easy access to music.

Rahn is also evangelical about the environment. His awakening came when he re-recorded Paul Horn playing flute at the Taj Mahal in 1989, 23 years after an original recording. "The whole place was falling apart, all blackened from industrial fumes, and there were too many tourists," he says.

In 1992, the notion simply struck him that trees shouldn't be cut down to make CD booklets, and he began using recycled paper. "Then in the Gulf War, I thought it was downright stupid to go to war to preserve the oil supply which [we] should try to learn to live without. So making these somewhat ridiculous CD containers didn't make sense."

New Celestial Harmonies CDs are packaged in recyclable plastic. A new design, in which the tray is removed and the covers modified, allows two CDs to be packaged in a single slim–line box. All printing is done with non–toxic vegetable inks.

Rahn has had increasing contact with Australia since 1989, and now spends three to four months here every year. He has signed up the Australian percussion group Synergy, the acoustic trio Coolangubra and the didgeridoo player David Hudson.

He has also been embroiled for the past two years in a running battle to wrest 150 minutes of traditional Aboriginal music from the vaults of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AITSIS) in Canberra. The original plan was to release the music on a non–exclusive license, with a large booklet containing descriptive text, accompanied by 30 or 40 images of Aboriginal art housed in the National Gallery of Australia.

He had fruitful discussions with the gallery's Aboriginal art curator. Rahn says he offered to pay for the music, pay copyright royalties where appropriate, pay for a researcher to work with AITSIS for six months, and to keep away from sacred music. The material, now recorded on analogue media, would be converted to long–lasting digitally recorded disc. Furthermore, he says, his record on cultural and religious sensitivity speaks for itself.

According to Rahn's notes, the AITSIS argument revolves around the sacred nature of much of the music and the physical integrity of the tapes they hold.

Rahn, as one could imagine, has not given up yet.

• Miriam Cosic