The Lyre’s Island: Some Australian Music, Sound Art and Design

T he lyre bird was named for the shape of its tail and its Orphic propensity to launch into captivating song, but it is known for being one of the world's most remarkable improvisors and vocal mimics, taking from and transforming any and all auditive sources as though it were a sampler made of meat, bones and feathers. Stories abound about some kid's squeaky clarinet rehearsals incorporated into a bird's permanent repertoire or a bird's variations on the chain saw destruction of a nearby habitat. The lyre bird's natural ability to replay human sounds is no less than downright unnatural; its name could easily be misheard as liar bird. It is also known for passing its songs down from one generation to the next. Ornithologists have heard in its call the calls of birds long since moved out of the area; from this they speculate that within this generational transmission there survive direct passages from and faint echoes of the songs of birds long extinct. So intensely beautiful and uncanny are the vocal talents of the lyre bird that the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio once set up microphones to broadcast the singing of a group of birds live to a national audience-quite an achievement for so shy a bird. How could anyone working within contemporary music and sound arts imagine a better animal? In the past, many composers have been humbled by the melodic stylings of this or that bird, their humility bolstered no doubt by lofty figures of transcendence in the sky, just far enough above society to remain reassuringly in sight. But how could contemporary composers and sound artists really condone-let alone celebrate-these art-song and crypto-religious critters? Is not global destruction aided by imaginations of rising above the earth? The lyre bird, however, is not known for its flight, but for the dipping softfooted dance it does, hugging the ground as it sings. Old composers' birds signalled an unsullied Nature standing for Western art music's elevated cultural goods, but the lyre bird would only throw a monkey wrench into the works-or the sound of monkey wrench. Old composers' birds sang the primacy of the original utterance, a unique voice appropriated to advertise the composers' God-given individuality (even though they stole it from a bird). The lyre bird is, instead, custom-made for cultures of appropriation, recording and transmission, where listening includes an untangling of historical and contemporary allusions from all auditive sources, as well as pleasures to be had in innocent ignorance. The lyre bird patches together, makes do: it is a bricolage bird whose art of segues has prevented it from becoming a victim of 1980s postmodern pastiche. Unpresumptuous, multitalented, worldly to the limits of its world, broadcast nationally on ABC Radio: not only is this bird the bird for contemporary auditive arts, it does its civic duty by providing an emblem for this compact disc. The lyre bird makes its home in Australia, who knows since when. It provides a natural emblem (of which there are many) for the Australian nation for two reasons alone: because the peculiar political-economic entity called "a nation" exists in the first place, and because the lyre bird does not belong to the species of contemporary artist in the habit and habitat of intercontinental flight. By contrast, many Australian artists are born to travel; they often find themselves working and living overseas. Many were born elsewhere and came to Australia to live and to travel. Many more are borne along the cosmopolitanism pervading the many artistic and intellectual cultures in Australia. To try to divine a particularly Australian national sensibility from this migratory scene would freeze-frame the vitality and trivialize the diversity that truly characterizes the place-wherever that place may be. Australian auditive arts fare exceptionally well, considering he size of the country and its geographical distance from Euro-American dens of activity. Its artists and theorists not only sport a consistent presence on the world stage, but they do so with a great deal of sophistication and adaptability to jet lag, climate change and conflicting institutional seasons. Questions of national identity remaining elusive or irrelevant, it may nevertheless be possible to propose a few reasons for how this strength has been fostered and maintained (keeping in mind my own relatively brief residence here). First of all, although the governmental support for the arts in Australia may pale when compared with that provided in certain European nations, artists here nevertheless enjoy a level of government sponsorship that would be welcomed in any other nations. Moreover, there has been a readiness to promote artistic works that, in other places, could easily vanish between the funding guidelines of conventional categori s. This funding nevertheless occurs in a society in which things are relatively expensive, a society that lacks the type of material excess of, say, the United States. Artists in other nations often set up camp in zones of surplus, whereas, in Australia, a more measured use of materials exists, throwing the balance toward a greater reliance upon ideas. When it comes to ideas within new music and the auditive