Radical Amateurism -

Excerpt from an interview with Warren Burt, by Libby Dempster.

In the 1970s, in California and Victoria, Ron Nagorcka, Chris Mann, Ron Robboy and myself began working with an idea that eventually came to be known as "radical amateurism." Recently, in an extensive interview with Libby Dempster, which appeared in "Writings on Dance" (issue 18/19, Winter 1999), I had occasion to revisit the concept. The full interview can be seen in the current issue of "Writings on Dance", available from PO Box 1172, Collingwood, Vic, 3066, Australia.

Warren Burt: A student of mine, James Hullick, went to German to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen at his summer intensive composition course. Stockhausen is one of the world's great teachers. You do a two-week intensive with him and your life changes. Mine did in 1970. So did James' in 1998. However, Stockhausen has done a lot of music-theatre pieces in the past twenty years, and the criticism of the pieces in general is that the music is really professional, but the theatre is really amateurish. You know, the costumes are homemade, the dance is hokey, etc. etc. I've seen some videotapes of some of these pieces, and I thought that some of them were a little corny, but when James and I were talking on his return, I realized, "ah, it's not corny - it's amateur in the best sense in that it's homemade." Then I had this real flash of insight, which may be totally wrong, but I'm willing to go with it and see how it develops. It's this: musical serialism - all of it, from Schoenberg's first efforts in the 1920s up to the present day - is homemade. It's very amateurish. A lot of psychoacoustic research has been done in the past twenty years that has repudiated the structural bases of serialism - the work says things like, the human ear does not work that way, serialism works against the nature of human hearing, etc. etc. Anyway, my response to all that research is bunco. For me, serialism is interesting precisely BECAUSE it is written AGAINST so-called common-sense ways of hearing. So I think that serialism was a homemade structure, in much the same way that Harry Partch's wonderful homemade instruments were a homemade structure, and I think if we understand Stockhausen as an example of the essential homemade composer, then the amateur theatre fits in perfectly.

I just read an article by my friend James Harley, a Canadian composer living in L.A., about Richard Barrett, an English composer living in Amsterdam. He was talking about Barrett's aesthetic as being on of failure, that the pieces are failures, and he's consciously promoting a sense of failure, deriving from Samuel Beckett more than from purely musical sources, and I thought that made sense. To me, there is in all the avant-garde arts, a sense of amateurism, a sense of homemadeness, a sense of "do-it-yourself", which is very much opposed to the slick production values of the Australian Ballet or Hollywood cinema. One of the best examples I know of this 'radical amateurism', which people always laugh about, but which I take as a very serious thing, was the Portsmouth Sinfonia in England in the '70s, a group of amateurs playing classical music badly. The result was hilarious, but it was also very serious - if you listened carefully there were all sorts of interesting things happening in their music. At the same time, in the early '70s, I was a member of a similar group in California, called Fatty Acid. We were a trio of violin (Ron Robboy), mandolin (David Dunn), and accordion (myself), with an occasional clarinet added. We played the popular classics, but we were more highbrow than the Portsmouth Sinfonia. They played Beethoven, we played Wagner.

Libby Dempster: (laughter) On violin, mandolin, and...

Warren Burt: And accordion, yes. With the "Rite of Spring", by Stravinsky, we added a clarinet (Peter Gordon) and did some multitracking, but basically, violin, mandolin and accordion was ourtrio. What we said at the time, with our tongues firmly in our cheek, but with our critical theory firmly in place, was that we were the contemporary continuation of neo-Classicism, the movement that Stravinsky, Satie, and Ravel had been so much involved in setting up. In the neoclassicism of the 1920s, an object from the past, such as a piece by Bach or Handel, was put through the distorting lens of your own technique, and a new, relevant, contemporary piece was created. Stravinsky's case with "Pulcinella" is the classic example. He composed right on top of photostats of the scores - which were early 18th century scores attributed at that time to Pergolesi, an Italian baroque composer, revising them as if they were an earlier work of his own. And through the distorting lens of his technique the Pergolesi scores emerged as a piece by Stravinsky, a new work. (It's interesting to note that Stravinsky only abandoned his neo-Classicism after 1951. After this time, he began composing with Schoenberg's serial technique. Schoenberg died in 1951, by the way, so at that point he became just another part of history, and it's curious that it was only after Schoenberg was apart of history that Stravinsky felt he could use his ideas.)

We felt we were continuing neo-Classical thinking with our incompetence. Remember, these are three boys in Southern California, just down the road from L.A. where Schoenberg and

Stravinsky had lived in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, and so we were continuing the tradition of taking objects from the past and putting them through the distorting lens of our technique and producing new objects. Our technique happened to be incompetence; Stravinsky's happened to be his studies with Rimsky-Korsakov, but still, the idea of technique as a distorting filter was similar. And it was about this time that Ron Nagorcka, who was also in San Diego then, came up with the statement, "The very essence of electronic media is distortion." No matter how you record the Cleveland Symphony and put it on a record, it's still a recording. You're distorting the social occasion of the concert, you're distorting the music, its sense of spatial reality, etc. and therefore, what we WANT to do with technology is to actually produce those distortions. So much of electronic music of that period, including the whole cassette recorder movement, also shared that sense of the desirability of distortion.

There have been several books written about the international cassette recorder movement of the early 1980s, such as the very wonderful "Cassette Mythos", edited by Robin James, but nearly all of them overlook what went on in Australia during the period of the mid-70s, where the ideas of cassette culture were already developed fully. Ron Nagorcka was one of the key figures in that development. And so that was another example of neo-Classical technique; with crummy little cassette recorders, we took material from the past or the real world and put it through a distorting lens and came up with a unique object. And just like serialism, these were radical amateur activities. I think critics have not understood this. In fact, they've gotten in the way of these ideas being understood. I'll just single one out, with no malice at all - my friend Richard Toop in Sydney has written many valuable articles for reputable musicology journals. Now as valuable as these articles are, perhaps they lend to the work a patina of professionalism that in coming years we will see was not really justified. (Parenthetically, I might mention that one of the logical outcomes of my idea that much of new music is radically amateur would be that it's not really suited for performance by thatmost professional of organizations, the symphony orchestra. I mean, even composers as professional as Xenakis, Cage, and Babbitt may have at the core of their music a radically amateur, 'do-it-yourself' nature that is absolutely opposed to the professionalism of the orchestra. A radically amateur art is not designed to be a commodity; the orchestra as it exists, can ONLY be a commodity, and so there's an essential contradiction in the very act of writing for the orchestra. This doesn't mean, however, that it's not worth trying, just that using the inflexible beast that the orchestra is is fraught with daunting musical, sociological and political contradictions. It may be that it's only at places like Cubitt St. (Theatre of the Ordinary), or at Linden (Gallery, St.Kilda), or at Dancehouse (Melbourne), where that sort of radical amateurism can actually thrive and survive.

Libby Dempster: John Berger writes about this issue in his 1980 essay "The Primitive and the Professional." He makes the point that the 'primitive' artist (your term would perhaps be 'the radical amateur') refuses the conventions of professional practice because she understands that it cannot speak her interests. She recognises that her experience cannot be rendered in the language or terms of the given tradition.

Warren Burt: In Berger's article he mentions Grandma Moses. Where I grew up in the States, she was the local famous artist. A couple of years ago, I saw an article about her - her sketch books had just been published, and they were filled with collages, things cut out from magazines and put together with an almost Picasso-like sense of construction and trying again and again until she got just the right composition with the perspective distorted in just the right naive way, and then she painted from that. And so she's an amateur, but she is amateur like Rousseau, like Erik Satie, or Harry Partch, whom that amateur charge was also thrown at. These are people who know the scene very well and know what they want to do, and know that there was no place for them inside the professional scene. Melbourne had a good example of that in Syd Clayton (1939-1994). Those of us that knew him knew that he was brilliant, but he never tried to promote his work, he just did it at La Mama (Theatre, in Carlton).

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