A classic cult of virtuosity: the Sydney International Piano competition exemplifies a decline in Australia's musical culture.

The classical pianist is a remote figure yet one which resonates strongly within the popular imagination. Often the figure of the pianist comes to stand for something more than simply the music. There are figures of erratic or eccentric genius, such as David Helfgott and Glenn Gould, as well as lone figures defending culture in the face of barbarism, such as Adrien Brody in Roman Polanski's The Pianist. Certain names conjure up images of the player--the brilliant but reserved Horowitz, or the quietly intense Stanislaw Richter illuminated on stage by only a single lamp--as much as they do the style of playing. The classical canon--arguably more constrictive than other artistic canons--invites an especially agonistic relation between performers. Having relatively few works to perform, pianists are judged in the light of previous interpretations. Perhaps the most devastating portrait of this hyper-competitive world is Thomas Bernhard's novel The Loser, where the talented pianist Wertheimer is crushed upon hearing Gould's version of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The novel ends with Wertheimer, torturing himself and others by playing Bach nonstop for days on a cheap and deliberately out-of-tune piano until his eventual collapse and suicide. As the narrator observes 'for a decade we study the instrument we have chosen for ourselves and then ... we hear a genius play a few bars and are washed up'.

Against such a rich background of individual heroism and tragedy, piano competitions have been a remarkable success--their numbers increasing steadily in the last three decades. The recent Sydney International Piano Competition was by no means atypical. Simulcast on ABC Classic FM, the competition gave the chance for many people to be exposed to performances of music that they were otherwise unable to hear. The range of devoted listeners clearly belied any notion of classical music simply being an 'elite' pastime. The chance to compare different interpretations of the same piece also provides a rare opportunity for many listeners unable to purchase multiple versions of the same work. In one sense the competition allows one to encounter the richness of the musical canon--where pianists face the challenge of, say, revealing the emotion in Chopin without falling into cliche, or articulating the voices within a Bach fugue without becoming overly stilted and thereby obscuring the affective content that lies beyond the score.

Are piano competitions healthy for the culture of 'art' music then? Such competitions are by nature conservative. The last winner of a major competition to go on to be an international performer of distinction was Murray Perahia (back in the 1960s), while other performers of note, such as Andras Schiff or Mitzuko Uchida, often failed to reach even the final rounds of major competitions. In many ways this is inevitable. The winners are the 'committee' choice, meaning that their collective judgement is unlikely to favour the radically new. Similarly, performers are more likely to choose relatively 'safe' pieces so as not to alienate anyone on the judging committee. While virtuosic complexity is prized, the more difficult compositions of 20th century modernists are rarely performed. With a few exceptions the Sydney competition fell into a familiar pattern.

Given the tenuous state of classical music generally, it is rare to hear anyone within the performance culture criticise the actual institution of competitions. Michael Kieran Harvey's comments stand out in this respect. Harvey, an accomplished performer in his own right and winner of one of the world's most prestigious competitions, provoked controversy at the previous Sydney competition for his forthright opinions of some of the performances. This year he went further, arguing on Radio National that the rise of the piano competition was a symptom of the decline of musical culture rather than a sign of its health. For Harvey, competition 'squeezes the value' out of a whole art form; the fundamentals of music are being ignored for the sake of technique. The emphasis on virtuosity precludes any real engagement with musical tradition, he argues, and while competitions provide one of the few ways performers could make a living, they are hardly environments where a genuinely thinking artist might be produced. Harvey's broadly-aimed criticisms fell upon musical institutions generally, where the decline in actual music courses and the rise of fee-paying tuition is producing technically impressive but limited performers.

No doubt those who can see beyond mere aesthetics would concur with Harvey's observations, especially as they pertain to the institutions of musical culture and those that oversee them. At a recent international musicology conference in Melbourne, the Federal Minister responsible for the Arts reaffirmed his commitment to classic music in a way that could only entrench despair rather than alleviate it. Minister Kemp noted that, following a recent review of Australian orchestras, the Federal Government remained committed to the 'efficient and effective delivery of orchestral services'. For those of us who already feel an uneasy parallel between piano competitions and pop-culture spectacles such as Australian Idol, the notion that national orchestras might be judged on the same terms as a transport network is hardly reassuring.

Yet, if the institutions that govern classical music threaten to undermine its conditions of possibility, other factors also contribute to a particular skewing of music's place within society. The very nature of contemporary 'performance' is a highly unusual and specific phenomenon. What is best about the act of performance--the unresolved and antagonistic relationship between the individual performance and the score--tends to become reduced in an age of heightened aesthetic specialisation. In 'Performance as an Extreme Occasion', Edward Said writes that the contemporary concert is an extraordinary event, highly specialised and totally removed from ordinary life. The unprecedented virtuosity of performers represents a talent in and of itself (performers don't have to do anything other than play well) and represents a new division of labour between performers, listeners and composers. Before the mid-20th century such a division was rare; performers were more than likely to also be composers, while listeners were also often accomplished amateur players. Nowadays both the composer and to a certain extent the listener are marginalised under the conditions of contemporary performance. The specialised performer creates a particular kind of 'ownership' of the work. The concert is both a display of extreme ability and an 'alienating social ritual', where the 'regression of hearing' (to take Adorno's phrase) expresses itself in 'the listener's poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sado-masochistic experience'. The heightened public experience of musical performance also indicates a particular kind of private alienation on the part of the listener.

Of course the very existence of a tradition of classical music has only been made possible by the possibility of its recording. Ironically, it is the move from one mode of storage (notation) to another (electronic recording of the performance) that contributes to the problem music now faces. The recording of music in the score allowed the re-creation of music in semi-private settings, generating whole sub-cultures of amateur musicians, and also created a different relation to public performances, where there were always significant numbers of amateur musicians who had direct experience of playing the score. Charles Rosen observes that, 'when recordings replaced concerts as the dominant mode of hearing music, our conception of the nature of performance and of music itself was altered'. The audience, less familiar with the score, became more passive listeners; the amateur musician--an important mediating figure between professional musicians and the general public--began to decline in number. The relation between the score and the expression of the work was inverted. The recording, once fragile and ephemeral, now became permanent, while the score faded in significance. The result is more widespread access to classical music but perhaps a thinner relationship to the music itself. Under such conditions, the cult of virtuosity, with its ambivalent relation to the public, is able to manifest itself.

The Sydney competition did contain exceptions to the general conservativism that marks such events. Some pianists played Ligeti and it was interesting to hear various pieces from Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus--a complex and monumental 20th century work that manages to be both a sublime work and depart from the discursive traditions that frame both classical music and musical performance itself. Much of the classical tradition has been determined by a specific relation to time--the focus on musical development within the form (drive, resolution, recapitulation). Messiaen's music, with its emphasis on non-narrative form, as well as its heterophonic elements, represents a subtle subversion of more dominant traditions. Yet one can't help feeling that his emphasis on heteronomy and stasis, while deviating from mainstream musical convention, is actually suited for our own time, a postmodernity marked by an intensive sense of the here and now rather than a historically produced form of being.

Equally significant, however, was the absence of the second Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, as well as their descendents), a school that interrogated the assumptions behind the Western musical tradition. Given that other spheres of artistic modernism (visual, written) have become, to a degree, acceptable to audiences, the fate of musical modernism remains an anomaly. Surely one reason lies in the decline of the structures and institutions that help reproduce the musical tradition. After all, high modernism's radical engagement with tradition can only work if the tradition itself is alive.

Anyone who watched the recent Stanley Kubrick retrospective on SBS could not help but notice how essential the classical tradition was to the heightened feeling of affect created by the filmmaker--whether it be the use of Strauss (both Johann and Richard) and Ligetti in 2001 or the sublime use of Schubert's 'Trio in E Flat' in Barry Lyndon. On the other hand, the recent appalling choice of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (a music tainted with all manner of totalitarian sentiments) to mark the reconstruction of the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia-Herzegovina reveals that we need always to be aware of the connections between music and power. If the contemporary concert (or competition) at its worst functions like a museum exhibit--decontextualised from power, history etc.--this isn't an inevitable conclusion. A richer connection to the musical tradition could occur through a more egalitarian approach--strengthening musical culture in schools and universities, funding community concerts and the like--instead of cutting back music programs and assessing the success of contemporary music culture according to the formula of service delivery.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications editor.