Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

This is an essay that was originally composed for Electronic Music History (MUSC 246), written shortly after my previous post about John Cousins, which fed into the essay. The task was to critically assess an aspect of ‘electroacoustic’ music of demonstrable significance to the development of the art-form in Australasia. It was probably evident from the previous post that Cousins is somebody who really inspired me with his speaking – not directly through his music, or even his thinking about music, but through his philosophy of artistry. It is nevertheless the case that his music has profoundly affected the thinking of many New Zealand sonic art composers through his championing of ‘anecdotal’ music. A composers’ workshop earlier in the year featured a work by Chris Cree-Brown that followed Cousins’ methodology – aside from the surround sound environment – to the letter, albeit with unspectacular results. At the CMPO 311 concert one work was essentially a facsimile of Sleep Exposure – it had the stylised voiceover (in this case pretty difficult to make out), the focus on the composer’s grandfather and the inclusion of aging recordings. As much as I am loathe to make a guess at how Cousins would react, I imagine that he would be flattered by the attention, but a little disturbed at the manner in which such a personal style could be usurped.

New Zealand composer John Cousins has occupied a number of roles during his lifetime. While he began his career composing instrumental music that was unchallenging by the standards of the day, he rapidly abandoned this, changing his artistic focus to sonic art and provocative performance work. Cousins’ works are significant not only for their technical achievement, but also the depth of narrative and emotion they possess and the overriding theme of human mortality. His career is also something of a microcosm of the struggles of art music composition – Cousins has had to cope not just with critical misunderstanding and public disinterest but actual revulsion at the nature of some of his music. Despite this, his thirty-five years of composing and teaching at the University of Canterbury have earned him both a strong reputation and a certain amount of influence within the New Zealand electronic music community, amongst whom he is now something of an elder statesman.

Any serious composer of art music must come to terms with the strong possibility that their output will be rejected or ignored by the public. Few composers earn enough money to devote themselves full-time to their work, so what music is completed is not crass commercial fodder, but rather the sum of the energy, emotion and thought poured into each project, and to see this passed over must be heart-breaking at times. Cousins is certainly no exception to this rule, for although he may be a well-known and influential figure within academic circles, he has often been invisible to the general public. To a certain extent this is self-inflicted, for Cousins does not regularly issue recordings of his music, nor does he often allow performances; he does not wish to sacrifice the fidelity of his eight-channel works by mixing them in stereo, nor does he want listeners to experience his music in anywhere but the ideal position. His long academic career – he joined the staff of the University of Canterbury immediately after finishing his studies – allowed him the freedom to experiment with new methods of sound creation without substantial financial restrictions, including starting up the university’s first electronic music studio, essentially for his own edification[1].

That Cousins’ career began at a university illustrates the need for composers to have some form of patronage to assist them in the creation of their work. Although this may not be so applicable today, particularly in electronic music, given the ready supply of inexpensive digital equipment, many of the most important historical developments in electronic music occurred only with substantial financial assistance. Just as Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales developed and exploited the techniques of musique concréte in the post-war period with the financial backing, so Douglas Lilburn and John Cousins worked with the backing of universities.

In abandoning performance and the regular distribution of recordings, Cousins has developed a radical new method of music distribution, inviting anybody interested in hearing his music to come to his studio to listen. This has the distinct advantage of involving only listeners who are either already familiar with Cousins’ work or open-minded enough to desire to listen to unknown and potentially challenging music, and these listeners are able to experience the music exactly as Cousins envisioned it, with the only barrier between them and full comprehension being their different life experiences. Cousins’ choice of this method of distribution marks his acceptance that his music is neither universally accessible nor commercially viable, yet it is also to an extent an abandonment of its radical transforming potential. By artificially reducing the potential audience for his music, Cousins also reduces the number of people – musicians and non-musicians – that it can affect. If the audience going into the studio is reduced to electronic music aficionados and thrill-seekers, then the music will never shock an unsuspecting person into considering different ways of thinking about music.

This issue of confrontation is one that Cousins addressed with his performance installations, amongst them the controversial seven-hour work Membrane, which Cousins considers this to be “one of the best works [he] ever made”[2]. This work, combining aural – breath and drum sounds – with visual – a naked Cousins urinating – elements, is in sharp contrast to the acousmatic practice that dominated electroacoustic music of the time. The stormy reaction that the piece received in Edinburgh begs the question of whether pure experimental music still has the shock potential that it once did. Both curiosity and disgust at Membrane were related not to the sounds it involved but rather to their means of production, which might have been unidentifiable in an acousmatic production, but are revealed in the performance installation by that medium’s visual dimension. Many of Cousins’ pieces both before and after Membrane involve visual elements, although these are often confined to the realm of film. Cousins’ touting of Membrane may be a result of the perfect synthesis of the visual and aural mediums it produced in a brutally abstract work, connecting sight and sound through bodily functions – a organicity almost impossible to achieve in the aural realm alone, particularly when taking into account the added barrier of electronics.

It is perhaps a result of this loss of natural presence in electroacoustic music that many of Cousins’ works uses the human voice – often his own. The voice possesses an aura like no other sound. It is fitting that Cousins should use the voice, intrinsically linked as it is to the development of human civilisation, culture and thought, as a means to articulate his emotional experiences and worldviews. In Sleep Exposure, two voices – Cousins’ and Bing Crosby’s – are used to anchor the abstract, technical elements of the electroacoustic medium to the human experience, yet the two voices are used in radically different ways. Whereas Cousins’ voice supplies the narrative direction of the composition, he uses the recording of Crosby’s voice as a signifier; the way time has ravaged the recording apparently acting as a metaphor for its effects on individuals and society [3].

During his career, much of the mainstream attention Cousins has received has only served to heighten his fears for the integrity of his work. The 1986 work Tense Test, wherein the composer conducts an interview with himself, is a response to a radio incident in which Cousins felt that he and his music were misrepresented by an interviewer. The schizophrenic nature of Cousins’ voice coming from all directions gives the listener a strong impression of the difficulty that he faces in trying to explain himself, particularly as the interview dissolves into a frenzied argument [4]. Considering the uncertainty of the composer himself, the idea that anybody else could gain any real insight into the music seems laughable. Indeed, the particular segment of the original interview around which Tense Test revolves is one in which the interviewer tries to label his motives as being peculiarly masculine. Such an attitude is offensive in both denying the relevance of Cousins’ work to all humanity by implying he is only capable of relating to men and simultaneously denying the individuality of the music. Ian Dando quotes Cousins as stating that there is “no way” that his audiovisual work Eddie’s Wall could be reproduced by another composer.[5] Eddie’s Wall is effectively a retrospective of Cousins’ music, pulling together music from across his career in electroacoustic composition, and in the process illuminating common themes and motifs, particularly of mortality and family. Nobody else could create this work, because nobody else has lived John Cousin’s life.

Part of the difficulty Cousins seems to experience with explaining the forces behind his art is that he is constantly reconsidering these himself, revisiting old material to explore how his opinions of the work have changed. This obsession with his own music is often portrayed as being somehow narcissistic, as if Cousins is completely enamoured by his own brilliance, a portrayal that the man himself can at least partially understand. What separates Cousins from true narcissism is that this obsession is not vacuous self-adoration but rather self-criticism. Furthermore, he talks almost inerrantly humbly about his place in world, accepting that his music will never be universally accepted, and that he will not be remembered long after his death like the classical masters he admires. This is not to imply that Cousins is dismissive of his own work, but rather that he takes the concept of mortality, to which he often makes recourse in his works, particularly seriously. Humans are so closely connected with art that art may take on human characteristics; like humans, works of art or pieces of music tend to have finite life-spans, only powerful within their time and context; only the greatest, revolutionary masterpieces are able to transcend their time. Like Sleep Exposure’s Bing Crosby recording, lesser works of art are savaged by the advancement of civilisation, surviving as mere curiosities, if at all. For every Mozartean figure, there are dozens of Salieris.

While Cousins’ vehement insistence on the veracity of his work and its close relationship with his personality and life story may indeed limit the permanence of his music and message, and while his technical achievements and musical sense may only be influential within a miniscule subset of the world’s musicians and music appreciators, he is nevertheless a vital part of New Zealand electronic music. During Cousins’ thirty five years of teaching at the University of Canterbury, a large number of aspiring composers have come under his wing; the fawning Ian Dando remembers Cousins as both an inspirational teacher and an innovative composer, undeterred by public disinterest [6]. New Zealand expatriate composer John Young, whom Cousins taught and worked on projects with, certainly felt his enthusiasm, learning from his mentor’s inquisitive approach to sound[7]. Young describes Cousins as possessing a “follow your own nose” attitude, perhaps arising from the stereotypical New Zealand “No. 8 wire” mentality.

While he might not be a tree-felling, fence-building, sheep-shearing type of pioneer,, John Cousins is undoubtedly hugely important in the development of New Zealand electronic music. Despite public disinterest and misunderstanding, he has consistently created valuable music, beginning as an academic, and continuing into what for other people might be retirement. Through the years his music has touched and influenced many people within the art music community, even if they rarely get the chance to hear it.

[1] John Cousins, Upbeat (Radio New Zealand Concert), 2 October 2007

[2] Ibid

[3] Dugal McKinnon, ‘Spectral Memories: Radio, Records and John Cousins’ Sleep Exposure’, Canzona, Vol. 25 Issue 46, 2004, pp. 30-35.

[4] John Cousins, ‘Tense Test’ on Sleep Exposure, CD MANU 1436, 1993.

[5] Ian Dando, ‘Eddie’s Wall’, Canzona, Volume 23 Issue 44, 2002, pp. 20-23.

[6] Ian Dando, ‘Inner Lives – John Cousins’, Canzona, Volume 26 Issue 27, 2005, pp. 28-29.

[7] Dugal McKinnon. ‘Sourcing the Subjective: An Interview with John Young’. Canzona. 1994. Vol. 16 Issue 37.