Latest / WHAT I'VE LEARNT / What I've Learnt - Paul Grabowsky

Transcript

What I've Learnt - Paul Grabowsky · WHAT I'VE LEARNT

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Grobowski is a pianist, composer, arranger, conductor, and one of Australia's most distinguished artists.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: His recent collaboration with the likes of Paul Kelly and Archie Roach showcased Paul's versatility, and both the albums brim with musical gems about love, heartbreak, and tenderness.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: A must-listen for all of you.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I sure got some agrees.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: During which time he performed with many jazz luminaries, including the wonderful Chet Baker.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: He returned to Australia and established a reputation as one of Australia's leading jazz musicians and was the musical director for jazz singer Vince Jones.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: He was also musical director of Tonight Live with Steve Visard, a nationally televised variety show, and was also commissioning editor for arts and entertainment for the ABC Television.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Paul has written over 20 feature film scores in Australia, the UK, and the US, including for films, major directors like Paul Cox and Words and Pictures, as we know, directed by Fred Skepsey.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: His works for the theatre include four operas and various multimedia works.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: His most recent opera, created for soprano Emma Matthews, The Space Between, with libretto by Steve Visard, premiered at the Arts Centre in Melbourne.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Paul has won eight ARIA Awards, most recently in 2020 for his recording, Please Leave Your Light On, with singer Paul Kelly.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's won two Helpman Awards, several APRA, and was the Sydney Mime Performing Artist of the Year in 2000.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Paul was also an artistic director of the Queensland Musical Festival from 2005 and was artistic director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts for 2010 and 2012.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: He's now a professor at Monash University and is currently director of the Monash University Academy of Performing Arts and the Monash Art Ensemble.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: He oversaw the development of the Ian Potter Centre for Performing Arts, which opened in May 2019 and launched MLive, a year-round series of curated performances.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, there's so many things we could go on about.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: You've done so much in your extraordinary career.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're obviously endlessly creative.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: You've delved into such a broad range of genres.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: I've been listening to that beautiful album you made with Paul Kelly.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me, what was it like working with Paul Kelly?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: How was it creating that wonderful album?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, thank you very much, Deb, and um and thanks for the opportunity to talk to you.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um well, I've known Paul for quite a long time.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_03: The first time we worked together actually was on the Tonight Live Show with Steve.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that would have been back probably in 1990 or 91, where we played his song Wintercoat, which when we were coming to make the album Please Leave Your Light on, uh, we thought that Wintercoat should definitely be there as it was the first song that we'd ever performed together.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and then we touched base again um on a uh a larger project.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'd sort of stayed in contact with him, um, and I interviewed him for a program that I made for the ABC in the mid-90s called Access All Areas, where I went around the place talking to musicians about various different aspects of music making.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: And um we did a show with a sort of large ensemble with the actually with the Australian Art Orchestra and Vicar and Linda and a small gospel choir of arrangements of his songs that I did.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: All of the songs were based on ideas taken from the Bible, and it was called Meet Me in the Middle of the Air.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: And that was great fun.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_03: We toured that nationally, and then uh I was given the opportunity to curate a series of shows at a really beautiful venue in the Adelaide Hills called Eucaria, which was actually purpose-built for the performance of chamber music and funded by uh Ulrika Klein, who was the founder of the Jurlique Cosmetics Company.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, she sold that company uh a long time ago.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and from the you know, her wealth, she yeah, she she realized uh a long-standing dream.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, she actually wanted to be a cellist originally, but she became you know a very successful business person.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but this was her way of vicariously realizing her musical dreams to have a an extraordinary, actually, it's quite exquisite venue, which is completely sort of handmade.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: And um so anyway, I got the opportunity to curate things in that place which weren't classical music.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: So I I worked with a bunch of different vocalists over um two or three years, and just piano and voice.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, a wide range of people from Leo to Megan Washington to Ebrah Conway, Vince Jones, you know, largely people, Archie Roach, people that I'd had associations with various times over the years, and I asked Paul to be one of them, and he graciously agreed.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: And really, while we were rehearsing uh right at the outset of it, it you know, it was feeling really good, and we were finding things in the songs which brought up a new quality in them because if you strip away the band and just have piano, and and uh my attitude to his music was treat it as you would treat you know a song by Schubert or something like that.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's really these are really extraordinary songs, and and to be able to kind of use a piano to accompany in in a more kind of colouristic way, very pianistic way, turned out to be great, and he really loved it.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: And he said, let's record this.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: So um we recorded the live shows that we did uh at Eucaria and had listened back to those, and you know, we could see what was working, what what you know maybe wasn't working so well, and we finally went into the new center that I've um been running in Monash, which has got a really fantastic room in it for recording.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: And um, yeah, we were there for three days, it was all very relaxed.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's really interesting you say that because I read you have this quote: the piano never lies when it comes to jazz and composition.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And what you just referred to, I just love the way you treated those more contemporary songs as if they were a Schubert piece.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: When I listened to that album, there's a tenderness and a stripped back aspect, and it's just so poignant.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Assuming that's what you're saying when you talk about treating it as a Schubert piece.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: He he would say that we uh were very influenced, and and I'm not just saying he would say it, I would agree with this, but Paul has been um when he talks about the album.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, for him, it was influenced by Frank Sinatra's capital recordings um of the 50s, particularly two of them which focus exclusively on ballads.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: One of them is called In the We Small Hours, and the other one is called Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: And they're both arranged by Nelson Riddle, and they are really amazing records.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I don't think Frank Sinatra ever sounded better than on those two recordings.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think most of the time he sounds pretty good, but um, you know, they're they're torch songs and they they speak, I guess, from a male perspective, about unrequited love and and and pain, you know, which are very often the subject matter given to female vocalists to sing about, because you know, in both opera and in many instances of you know, the American songbook, um, women are singing songs about being treated badly by their partner or by their by their love object.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_03: Or, you know, it's a classic case of um women being given the short straw in a relationship, you know.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: So there's been a whole literature kind of built around this idea.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_03: The Frank Sinatra one kind of inverts the paradigm to a degree, although you know, even then, I think you could subject that to a uh a feminist viewpoint which would not quite see it that way.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: So Paul wanted to kind of get that sense of um of that feeling in the music.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, if Paul's catalogue is vast, you know, hundreds of songs, and so he cherry-picked what he thought would be the most appropriate songs to be able to be held up to that kind of treatment.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_03: I was drawn to them because, you know, I have a tilt towards melancholia as well.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of your beauty, Paul.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: I can really hear such a beautiful vulnerability and tenderness that's very much a resonance throughout many of these albums I've listened to.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting you say that because I was listening to that album, and we'll get to the album with Archie Roach, but what you're referring to is so interesting.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you fall a bit in love with the people that are on the album with Paul Kelly.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's something really entrancing about two very creative, powerful men talking about their vulnerability through the lyrics and through the sound.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's just such a sympatico.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, you know, look, it's a part of life, and there's no shying away from it.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think love necessarily has an element of sadness about it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and you know, if if you've ever been in love, then you know what that feels like.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: So uh a lot of the best music ever written comes out of that feeling, a lot of the best art ever made comes out of that feeling.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and um, or or an attempt to at least describe it or question the existence of it, why why it is like that.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: So, yeah.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think there's more scope?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And while you talk about the Sinatra history of men expressing their thoughts and feelings about love, do you think this is becoming a little bit more acceptable or perhaps being brought into the foreground more than it used to be?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, I suppose so.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, the idea of men opening up and sharing their feelings is certainly something which has been gaining currency in recent years.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, advocates for um you know people who are dealing with domestic violence would know that one of many, many reasons why those situations arise is because men uh, for whatever reason are completely hopeless at expressing themselves, and therefore that ends up going down a very dark pathway.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know, we're lucky to be artists because we're in the business of expressing our feelings.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and you know, Paul, one of the great qualities of Paul as a songwriter is that um, and I think this is true of any truly great songwriter, is that he bears himself, you know, he talks very candidly about the way he feels.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: He's not using, he's not trying to externalize or objectify, he's not creating other characters on his behalf.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: I think that you know, he's you know, in many instances in his songs, he's talking about himself.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's what touches people because they see their own vulnerability or they can relate various aspects of their own lives to what this person is saying.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: And again, I think that's the role of the artist.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: The role of the artist is to help people to uh give voice to feelings that are very difficult for them to verbalise.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say, you and Paul have done a wonderful job doing that album.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's Tell Me Why with Archie Roach.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's another magnificent reflection of your work.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very different story, but what did you learn through that project?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's some similar themes, but I can see obviously a very different story.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's a different story, but it's the same in the sense that Archie is utterly true, you know, I mean, and talking very personally about his own life, uh, pretty much in every song that he writes.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_03: He writes very specifically about people, places, events.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: His heartbreak, family.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's quite an extraordinary odyssey in that book.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the brief was always to provide a musical companion to the book.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so you know, I went away with Archie for several days.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, we went to Eucaria, a residence, which they offer to artists, and um they gave it to us for a few days for us to basically workshop the album, which consisted of he and I sitting around the kitchen table just talking for days.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_03: And every now and again I'd go hold that thought and I'd you know rush up to where there was a piano and I'd bang out a tune, which uh you know suddenly came to me as a as he was talking, and then I'd bring it back and play it for him.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, it was very organic like that, but also a lot of the album, as you know, uh is re-workings of his back catalogue.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_03: So there's sort of three layers to it.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: There is um, you know, Archie Roach kind of standards like Took the Children Away, and um, you know, actually Ruby Hunter's song down city streets, which was also on the Chaco Lane album.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh there's a song that he co-wrote with Paul Kelly called um Rally Around the Drum, which Paul also guest song.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: So these are back catalogue songs, F-Troop's another one.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: F-Troop's great.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Once again, I hear your presence and resonance on that album.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: I can't help but notice how beautifully you sit under the vocalist, like a platform that actually enables them to rise.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful skill you have, Paul.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you for that.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's very kind.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I think that um, you know, the job of an accompanist is to accompany.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's not to, you know, kind of elbow the singer out of the way and say, What about me?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's uh, you know, you really want to support the singer and to be able to help them to bring out the type of meaning uh in the lyric that is essentially what the song is all about.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: And the other two kind of aspects, this is you know relevant to the other two aspects of the Archie project, which were on the one hand, uh looking at the early influences on him.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: So there are a couple of songs on the album, uh, one being I'm so lonesome I could cry, which is a Hank Williams album, and another one is uh Just a Closer Walk with Thee, which is a hymn, which um Emma Donovan is the guest vocalist on.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um they both look back at you know two of the big influences on him when he was a younger man, country music and and church music.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: And then there are three tracks which we co-wrote, which are very specific to uh themes in the book.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_03: One of them is based around each of his foster parents.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_03: So his mother Dulcie, his foster mother Dulcie Cox, um is represented in the song One for Each Person and One for the Pot.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: And his foster father uh is represented by the song called the Jetty Song.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um what's his name again?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: Mr.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: Cox.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: Alexander.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: So um, yeah, and then the third one is called Place of Fire, which is a kind of song, which is really a philosophical statement by Archie, which you know, Archie told me when we were up in the UK those days, that he thinks that you know, if we look at the fact that the whole human race, if you trace it back far enough, started in Africa and then wandered out into the rest of the world over the span of you know however million years it was, that a way you could look at that, particularly from um an Australian First Nations perspective, is that that's one song.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's there's a song that started, and it this that one song then spawned every other song which came into existence.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty extraordinary notion, really.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, so many songs are just different chord configurations that are played for years and years and years.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think there's some truth to what Archie put forward there?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's certainly a truth to it in a kind of conceptual sense.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: I I also work a lot with uh some traditional uh uh First Nations performers of ceremonial music from these are these are men who live in a remote community in Southeast Arnhem Land.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, in a just a few weeks' time, we're performing with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, a huge piece that I've written for the orchestra with those guys.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, where will you be doing that and what's it called?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_03: Hammer Hall on the 20th of February.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's called Wata, W-A-T-A, which is a word in their language.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: Their language is called um Wagalak, which is part of the Yolnu language family.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_03: And it just that's that word means wind, but it also, I mean, their words mean many things, but it means wind, it it means smoke, purifying smoke.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so yeah, it's really about purification and renewal.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: How excited are you to be performing again at Hamer Hall after such a strange year?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm very excited to be performing at Hamer Hall, but particularly excited to be doing that.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, what an extraordinary collaboration.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Was it something that took a long time to come into fruition?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: The MSO commissioned it, actually.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_03: I'm their composer in residence this year.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: And this is the first of four pieces that I'll be writing for them.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_03: But just to get back to your earlier question about do I think what Archie said, uh, how do I feel about that?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: What these um traditional men have taught me is a lot about how everything that we know about life is interconnected.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and they've known that better than most people because having lived in harmony with the Australian ecology in their particular part of Australia for who knows how many tens of thousands of years, um you know, and until colonization, they were presumably living fairly much in a you know, in a ceremony, well, in a traditional cultural way, which you know it is a dynamic thing.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't like they'd arrived at one particular thing and it just kind of ceased to develop.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, Aboriginal culture has developed in all kinds of ways all over the continent.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, because they believe that everything is interconnected, then the notion of there having been one song, which becomes every song, is a beautiful way of looking at evolution, the whole evolutionary process.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite a beautiful notion, the idea that we all come from a similar place.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite healing.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see the power of music as a tool for healing?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Have you found it's kind of a solace, whether it be for you or for the people you work with?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: Music certainly um does take us to a place which, again, words um are inadequate to be able to really fulfill.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: Words are incredibly useful, incredibly important, and in the hands of great words, really beautiful and moving and uh investigative and uh revealing uh all of those things.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: But also words can can deceive and lie and lead people to believe things that are not true.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: And we're living in an age where that was never more being you know presented to us in all kinds of bizarre and uncomfortable.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Ways than is happening right now, particularly by people who should know better.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_03: But uh clearly they don't.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's all a little dystopian at the moment.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Words can be used for evil.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so music, you know, um, I mean, let's let's not for think for a moment that music isn't uh a willing little helper to people who potent who are bad.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um music has often been you know press-ganged into the service of all kinds of horrible uh regimes and and individuals.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_03: But I do know uh from the point of view of being a musician, that you know, music is um in itself completely dispassionate, it's sufficiently abstract as an idea that it's dependent 100% on your input in order for it to be able to do whatever it's going to do.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so if you put into it, whatever you're putting into it, it puts out, and that part of it is true.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if the if what it you're putting out into the musical form is some kind of falsehood, then it's true that it is a falsehood.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: But if what you're putting out is true to you, it's it's um you know meant uh it's full of good intention, you know, or it's full of no intention, neither good nor bad, all of those things will you know present at the end of the day as just what they are.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Music is a tool.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: In light of what you've just said, you've written over 30 music scores.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: In a way, your role in that sphere is to take musical abilities, skills, technicalities, and resources and use it to create a mood or a feeling.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: You take it and create the dramatic moments or the sad moments.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's something you can really wield that.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a skill.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you can.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, music is often used in films as a kind of you know steroid, which I don't really like.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's like you know, somebody who is a bodybuilder wants to puff up their muscles with steroids.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's what music does in a kind of action movie, which has got a very loud soundtrack and lots of very bombastic music, which you know is kind of bashing you around the head.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_03: Not my idea of a good time.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: And funnily enough, also as a film composer, it's very, very different qualitatively from the other things that I do because in film you are very much at the service.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're really in service to the script.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the director, essentially.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: No, the director is the person who has the final call, and irrespective of what you might think at the end of the day, the director is the person who places the music, uses the music, decides where and how it's going to affect the picture.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: So, um, in a sense, as a composer, you have to be prepared to relinquish control, really kiss it by, and be at peace with that.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I know that that doesn't sort of suit every composer's reasons for being a composer.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: And um, I've had a kind of slightly ambiguous relationship to it over the years.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: Or, you know, in the mid-80s, when I started to write music for film, there was nothing I could think of as a more desirable outcome and exciting prospect than being a film composer.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: But the more that I did it, the more that I began to understand that it's not everything that I'm seeking out of music.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: And it boiled down in my particular case to relationships with just a few directors who you know remained interested in me as being part of their creative team, and I remained interested in what they were doing, and particularly Fred Skepsey and Paul Cox, who you know I had very long-standing relationships with, um, and learned a lot from both of them, you know, about film music.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: And they're both very um super aware of how they use music.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_03: And with well, unfortunately, with Paul Cox, we're talking in the past instantly.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, very, very unusual.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the way Paul used music in in picture was, I mean, he'd never used a composer at all before me.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: And he'd in some of his famous early pictures, like Man of Flowers, and Innocence.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Innocence was one of the ones that I was involved with.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_03: He used classical music.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: You know, he would find a music opera mainly and use it.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: And when I came along, uh, you know, he'd asked me to write some music, but I had no idea how he would end up using the music in most cases.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um does that scare you, creating your piece of art and not knowing how someone is going to adapt and use it?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, at first I was a bit thrown by it.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, after a while you realize that the relationship that you have with with a with a director, and let's face it, this is similar to any relationship you have, but you know, and we're talking specifically about music here.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's based on trust.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: And once I I learned how to trust Paul's instincts about what he was going to do with music, I ceased to worry about it.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: I just sort of said, you know, here it is, go for your life.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: With Fred, it was a far more traditional kind of here's the scene, here's where the music starts, and the music finishes here, write the music.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, I would write various drafts of the score, and then he would critique it.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: And he would check it out in the cutting room and say, you know, don't do this, do that.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: You don't need the music to do that because we're already doing that.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: The music should should do something different from that.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um you can't really have an ego or allow your ego to take over.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: The very nature of a musician, you have to believe and trust your own journey where you need a bit more of that ego, but you seem to have struck that balance where when you need to, you let the ego sit a little lower, particularly when working with directors who are known to be quite, shall we say, headstrong?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they are.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: They are, they're very uh, you know, they're charismatic people.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and yes, I mean, they're sometimes uh very militant about what they require.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, look, with most of them, I've always found that having a sense of humor is really important because they usually do.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: And whilst they might seem ferocious on set, both of those men that we're talking about um are very, very generous people and and also very funny people.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, they're just big, they're big people.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, Fred is a is a big personality, and um, you know, there's there's many sides to him.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like Steve Wisard as well, Gillian Armstrong, you've worked with so many.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know, she's very um clear about what she wants, very um, you know, um, yeah, it's it's it's kind of easy to work with a person like that because after you've gone through the initial dance around, you know, well, who are you, and uh what's going to be the sort of language that we employ and what's the modus operandi, and figure out, okay, well, you know, when she says A, she means this, and when she says B, she means that.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: That's another thing about being a composer.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: Music, of course, is that is a language, or music has a language of terminology, which is very specific to music.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, when we talk about a particular thing in music, we know what we're talking about, you know, a crescendo or bars, or you know, um, I don't know, uh registration of an instrument, uh, transposition, key, time signature, all of these things.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: They're very specific things.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: And in many instances, film directors really don't know what they are.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: Their editor in many cases to lay out other film music and what they call a temp score.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, every composer looks at those things in horror.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: So tell me, clearly, you're more than capable of morphing from genre to genre.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: You seem to effortlessly adapt quite easily, or at least appear to be able to effortlessly morph, whether it's a film composer or working with an orchestra, it's such a skill you've mastered.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is this a skill you've developed or learned over the years, or was it intrinsic?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: What do you see as the key to your ability to do that?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, well, I'm curious, and I think I come from a long line of curious people in the Grobowski family.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_03: Uh some quite powerful characters and um people who went out and did things which were high risk and uh very unusual.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_03: So whilst I I can't lay claim to being nearly as unusual as some of my forebears, I think that I have often traveled uh down some very rocky paths as a composer and as a as a musician.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I've done it quite willingly.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_03: I've been very interested to test various propositions or hypotheses about music.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: So for example, jazz.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, jazz, you know, we think of as being essentially uh an American art form, more specifically, an African-American art form, based around certain key ingredients.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know, people find jazz difficult to describe, but they know it when they hear it.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not sure that, you know, for me the word maybe means different things than it does for other people.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: So an American may have a different kind of sense of what the word jazz means than an Australian because we don't have the same kind of cultural uh history, sociology, and everything which gave birth to jazz in the first place.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I was always interested in seeing how the idea of being an improviser, which was more interesting to me than the word jazz per se, how you could take that into other meetings with people from other cultural traditions entirely.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: Uh whether they'd be people who were classical musicians, people in my instance working with you know with um Balinese musicians or Indian, you know, Carnatic musicians, or um, you know, First Nations musicians, um, other improvisers who are coming from non-jazz backgrounds, all of these kinds of things, all driven by curiosity more than anything else.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: And in most cases, uh what has emerged from these experiments really has been uh a very strong view that music, you know, if you go into a situation and apply certain principles of you know, trust being one of them, but also being confident about your own ability and the ability to listen.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: And listening is a word which you know we use very frequently, but I'm not sure that everybody really understands what it means to listen.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: Listening does actually involve suppression of the ego, um, because you've got to get out of the way in order to listen to someone.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really great point.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I referred to that and the notion of the ego, because it's clear you've learnt that to get the most out of the work, you need to listen to the other and not allow your ego to dominate the experience.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: I feel it just comes through in your work, whether it's the way you produced the Paul Kelly album or your work with Archie Roach, the vocalist is so forward and you've got this beautiful, subtle music behind it.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: And clearly that resonates with your outlook as a producer and a composer.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, do you have a hope for the future of the arts with everything that's been going on from the slashing of university funding to the arts and the impact of COVID?
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Do you feel positive?
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, look, the sector has taken a hit, um, which is unlike anything that it's ever experienced before.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, what's been hit is the economics of the sector, not its expressivity.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_03: No one's taken away the rights of artists to speak.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and in fact, that's that's never really been held up to any danger in uh what what I would describe as a relatively free and open society like our own.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_03: But the is the you know, the socioeconomic realities of uh making a living as an artist.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_03: So it's the infrastructure which has taken a hit, the venues, the people who you know, the administrators of venues, um the galleries, the university sector sure has taken a massive hit because of our reliance on overseas students.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: Do I think this is forever?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_03: No, I don't.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, my my deep interest in history shows me that all sorts of cataclysmic events have taken place, which, if you were living through, then you would think, how the hell are we ever going to get out of this one?
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_03: And yet we sort of do.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_03: As the great uh late photographer Rennie Ellis used to say, we blunder on.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: In a funny way, it is the arts.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Katie Noonan and I were talking about this the other day.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: We always come back to the arts, particularly in times of trouble.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: We turn to the arts for solace, for comfort and inspiration.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: We all turn to films, music, books.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's our humanity.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I think it's sad the cutting of university funding for arts degrees and the devaluing of the humanities.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: I agree with you.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're still tuning in, as you say, but we need to protect our artists and particularly young up-and-coming artists.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we do, but you know, we we are unfortunately governed by uh liberal economic, I mean small economic uh propositions about you know elitist meritocracies and um you know money not being spent on the right things, um, which I fear will continue to dominate the discussion around nation building, which will be the primary conversation which we're having coming out of this.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's been interesting to note that during the COVID crisis, I think the most visionary um kind of blueprints, it seems to me anyway, have been laid out by state governments.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they've really looked after their own.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm very, this is you know, sort of sliding slightly into politics here for a minute, but I am very proud as a Victorian that we've managed to show that we are a society that can fairly much swing together under this kind of pressure, and that when you compare our willingness to, I think, be sensible about what's necessary, compare it to what's happening in other parts of the world.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's kind of amazing, really.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I was talking to a friend yesterday in in Germany, really good friend of mine, um who lives in Munich, where I also lived for many years during the 80s, and and he said, you know, that they're just not playing ball.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_03: People are still congregating in large numbers, they're not wearing masks, they're not doing the right thing.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, one could say they're not listening.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_03: Listening is is key to moving forward because only by listening can we really learn to trust.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And on that note, I'd just like to thank you so much, Paul, for joining me on the What I've Learned podcast.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's been an absolute pleasure, and I look forward to seeing all the wonderful work you're doing this year.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: Best of luck for Hamer Hall.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_03: I've enjoyed it.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm blessed to have so many wonderful guests coming on the show.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, check out my What I've Learned Instagram for updates.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, stay tuned, kind, and curious.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: Love dead.