All I want for Christmas
December 2013
…is more pollies who value good music.
It is hard not to watch the Kerry O’Brien interviews with former Prime Minister Paul Keating on ABC1 without a little wistfulness. Regardless of one’s political affiliation, or one’s thoughts about the man himself, the ambition he had not just for himself but for the political process itself is as attractive today as it is lacking.
Keating’s ambition took on, the interviews revealed, as many manifestations as it had origins, but one of the most intriguing (if not initially perplexing) is his professed indebtedness to classical music. Indeed Paul Keating once declared that he had ‘reformed the Australian Economy on Mahler and Bruckner.’ What on earth did he mean?
Music psychologist Emery Schubert was recently quoted in The Australian arguing that Keating’s taste for nineteenth-century musical romanticism may have been triggered by a pleasurable associative childhood memory. In this respect what Keating associates with Mahler is no different to what Wayne Swan associated with Bruce Springsteen – happy thoughts of childhood.
Without disparaging Wayne Swan, Bruce Springsteen, or indeed Emery Schubert, however, surely Keating’s passion for such music is not just a matter of taste and personal biography but also of function and meaning. As Keating acknowledges in the O’Brien interviews (as he has several times before) he has long been fascinated by the effect that great art can have on our imaginative capacity per se – the ability it has to make us more predisposed to be creative and free-thinking when faced with problems of all kinds (including the political).
Such a mind so inspired, he seems to be suggesting, is potentially more likely to be the kind that sets out to change the world, for it is the creative imagination which allows us to contemplate not only what we think is real, but what is possible; not just what is, but what might be.
This is not a new idea. The German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller nailed it back in 1803 when he wrote that great art ‘does not aim merely at transitory entertainment, it has a serious purpose, not to translate life into a momentary dream of freedom, but to make us really and truly free.’ Of all the art forms, romantic era artists recognised in music the greatest capacity to release the imagination from the confines of the sensual world because it was unable, beyond the vaguest of illusions, actually to depict or signify objects or ideas drawn from everyday reality. Precisely for this reason music was best placed to help us gain control of our destiny through the power ideas.
Lest we get carried away, an appreciation of music is of course no guarantor of political virtue; good musical taste does not guarantee good conscience, nor humility; nor does it serve as a safeguard against unjust thoughts or actions. Music may help free the mind from the restrictions of the material world, but the making and performing of it itself does not exist outside of a material context. Surely part of the power of Bruce Springsteen’s music, for instance, is that he gives voice to the life stories and aspirations of working-class America.
In any case, didn’t Keating eventually lose to John Howard in part precisely because a good deal of us hated the fact that he seemed to conflate his vision of Australian politics with a penchant for Italian suits, Napoleonic era clocks, and loud German symphonic music? It might have impressed a few of us, but it didn’t win him votes because, barely hidden beneath our distrust of such refined tastes lies the politically deadly charge of elitism.
All the same, does not this charge, which we so readily wield now against any politician who might suggest that there could be a distinction between what is commonly accepted wisdom and what is good, ultimately undermine the very aspirational spirit that is enshrined in democracy itself? Do we not run the risk that in suppressing any public ownership of aspirational culture, we risk promoting a civil society unable to imagine the world to be different from the way it is? After all, a collapse of an inclusive political culture does not require the rise of a totalitarian state, just a just a radical collapse of vision.
Keating is therefore right, I think, to remind us of the value of appreciating romantic-era music, and its ability to inspire an empowered sense of ourselves and our imaginative capacity. In a political landscape that has lost the will, or perhaps even the ability, to talk of soul, of passion, of inspiration, of greatness, music proffers at least one vision of human potential that, frankly, we need more than ever in an age where such visions seem perilously few.
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