Wayne Kramer and I share two points of common interest. Firstly, neither of us knows who each other
is (I found his name on a blind internet search) and secondly, Kramer is on the
internet as having said; “I hate that expression, 'fusion'. What it means to me
is this movement where nothing ever really fused”. And with that sentiment I wholeheartedly
concur.
I suspect we are actually talking about different
things when we decry “fusion” music, and if you really get down to it, all
music is fusion. A fusion of the old and
the new, of different styles, of different identities, of different functions
and of different cultures. My dislike is
of what you might call “manufactured fusion” – where you deliberately set out
to take two very different things and force them to co-exist. We find that in food; and while some fusion
food is interesting, it is never quite as good as 100% of the one or 100% of
the other. I love Japanese food, I love
Italian food, but when I had a Wasabi Pizza, I fervently disliked both; fusing
the two diminished each of them equally.
So with music.
Working in south-east Asia one is constantly aware of
the pressure to create a fusion music.
Those with a fundamental misunderstanding (or, more likely, no real knowledge
at all) of the history of what we call “western music”, claim that it is an
alien import and that we should exert our own cultural muscle and fuse the
Western with the Asian. Such people, blissfully
unaware of the province of most musical instruments (very few of which can be
said to have originated in “the west” – wherever that might be), and of the
enormous influences on the works of the accepted European masters of music from
“the east” (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and their admittedly ersatz “Turkish”
music, Debussy, Ravel and Britten and their less ersatz Javanese, Messiaen and
Harvey and their sincere Indian), go with the mindless flow of popular
political correctness and say that for music to be representative of the
region, it must have obvious Asian characteristics. Picture postcard images rather than
subliminal messages, if you like.
The problem is particularly acute in Singapore which
has no indigenous culture and is made up of a mind-boggling array of cultures
each with their own musical traditions, none of which is in any way Singaporean. What links these various cultures present in
Singapore society is the fact that they are not “western”. During the SG50 – the year when Singapore
celebrated 50 years of independence from Malaysia (no such big celebrations
marked 2007, the 50th year of independence from Britain – which may
or may not be a significant point to make) – calls for a “Singapore Sound” in
music resonated loud and clamorous. As
reported in this blog, the ever-enterprising Adrian Chiang even created an
orchestra and a concert specifically to fuse western and Asian musical
elements. Like so much fusion stuff, it
was interesting but ultimately a failure – the experiment has not been repeated
with such a high profile.
But that has not stopped people from calling for such
Asianized Western music. One amazingly
gormless Singaporean pianist is on record as saying “I find it ironic that
though we are born in this part of the world, we mostly play composers in the
western tradition”. The piano is one of
those instruments unequivocally rooted in European soil and its repertory,
inevitably, is skewed towards “the west”; if this pianist is so opposed to the “western
tradition”, why on earth does he attempt to make a living out of playing the
piano?
But such an attitude – and you hear it almost daily - is
not hypocrisy, but simple ignorance. A
failure to recognise that all music we describe as “western” is in fact such a
successful fusion of cultures that we no longer identify its constituent parts but
regard it as a conglomerate whole.
Nevertheless, in a society where glib cliché is regarded as superior to
deep understanding, calls to have a Singaporean identify in Western music
continue to resound, and last Saturday I attended another concert put together
by Chiang which took a rather more realistic approach to the issue of
Asian/Western fusion than the SG50 debacle.
(I reviewed it for Straits Times, and my review can be read here - http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/fusion-work-and-beautiful-sounds-let-down-by-technical-issues).
The idea of using just ethnic flutes against a Western
orchestra was certainly based on sound common sense, but it failed in practice on
three counts.
Firstly, Asian flutes, with their difference in
materials, psychology and playing styles will inevitably be overwhelmed by the
western orchestral instruments. We live
in an age where amplification can help address such balances. But once amplification is involved, the
musicians lose control of the result and are totally dependent on the sound
engineers. On Saturday those sound
engineers were dreadfully incompetent, and ruined the experience for both
audience and performers.
Secondly, the idea of fusing ethnic flutes with a western
orchestra was never practicable before the advent of effective amplification,
so there simply is not the repertory to make up an entire concert. As a result new works were brought in from
composers who lacked experience and full understanding. Sterling though their efforts were, musically
the programme was very shallow indeed.
There were plenty of nice sounds, but nobody had worked to evolve something
that went beyond nice sounds.
Thirdly, the beauty of Asian flutes lies in the subtlety
of their sounds but, more especially, in the cultural traditions which lie
behind the music they play.
Amplification can obscure subtlety, but fusing Asian with Western
instruments utterly destroys any cultural tradition within the Asian
flute. At one point the players were
reduced to appearing in national costume so that we could tell, visually, where
they were from – the sound had lost its cultural, ethnic or even geographical
identify.
Had Wayne Kramer been there, I am sure he, like me,
would have found some of the sounds fascinating and recognised a potential for something
worthwhile to evolve. But I imagine he,
like me, would ultimately have felt it had all been a pointless
experience. I came away with the strong feeling
that nothing ever really fused.
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