John Cousins – Some reflections
Q. How do you think you would react if your music suddenly became wildly popular?
A. … I guess I’d think it was shit …
John Cousins is probably one of New Zealand’s greatest exemplars of putting art before personal engagement. The sonic artist, formerly of the University of Canterbury music faculty, is so protective of his art that he rarely allows it to be played outside of his studio – a studio he has apparently remortgaged his house four times to develop. He is known throughout the New Zealand art music scene particularly for his 1979 work Sleep Exposure, but to actually experience most of his subsequent work one must travel to Christchurch to listen on his 16-speaker system. Cousins originally intended for this open-studio environment to provide a means for people to cheaply experience the full impact of his sound-work, but interest has been, perhaps unsurprisingly, a little muted. Two hundred and fifty people have arrived to listen in the past three years. Cousins is, understandably, a little miffed about this reaction. He isn’t trying to make a quick buck from this operation; he simply feels that his work contains something a bit special, that contributes something to music.
The contradiction of Cousins’ music is that he is attempting to create sonic art that is at once accessible and challenging, able to say something about human experience and deeply rooted in Cousins’ own memories and dreams. There is certainly a great deal that somebody else can take from listening to Cousins’ work, but in order for this to happen the listener really does need some insight into the man himself – into Cousins’ desire to be recognised and understood as an artist. Without this a work like Tense Test is really just 25 minutes of some guy whining.
Cousins suspicions that he would be disappointed were his music to become popular are probably due in part to the long period of non-acknowledgement breeding disgust at popular musicians whose work, he feels, is inferior. There is more to it than this, however. If Cousins’ music were suddenly accessible enough to be popular, it could only be because it had lost some of its character. For his music to actually be worth something, it must say something new about the human condition; if everybody could understand it, they wouldn’t have to think about the meaning of the music at all – he would be telling them something they already know. At the end of the day, Cousins doesn’t want anybody (possible apart from himself) to fully understand his music – which is why, in Tense Test, he rails against the reporter trying to put words, which may or may not be true, in his mouth - he simply wants people to listen to it, or at the very least acknowledge its existence.