Words by Philip Lambert,
ANAM Music Librarian, 2004-2023
Good old Sydney-Melbourne rivalry.
Sometimes it actually produces good things. A national music academy, for example.
Because when Paul Keating, our Mahler-loving, Sydney-centric Prime Minister delivered his ambitious Creative Nation statement in October 1994, promising an extra $7.5 million for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, political optics demanded that something of similar value be given to Melbourne. But what?
The solution came from John Painter, Director of the Canberra School of Music. For some time Painter had been lobbying Keating to establish a new classical music performance academy that would match Juilliard and the Curtis Institute in quality, giving young Australian musicians the same level of ‘world-class’ (sigh) training. Painter had already done his homework and prepared a blueprint, naturally assuming that his new academy would be based in Canberra. So he must have been blindsided and a little put out when Keating – with an eye to settling the Melbourne horses following his nod to Sydney – announced “The Academy will be situated in Melbourne”.
So from its birth the institution was something of a political construct, the solution to a larger political headache, a settling of the ledger. This lack of a clear strategic raison d’être at start-up plagued the Academy for its first fifteen years of life, making for a tortuous adolescence (albeit a racy case study).
Of course, issuing a fiat is the easy bit. Making it a reality proved infinitely harder. Keating’s statement offered no clues as to how the National Academy of Music, as it was first called, would operate, how many students it would take, how long they would stay, nor a tangible role for the institution in the country’s music-training eco-system. Despite Painter’s preparatory work, the whole project ended up being handballed to Professor Barry Sheehan, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne. Sheehan emerges as one of the heroes of the Academy’s first baby steps, for it was he who assembled the first Board of Directors, wrangled the politicians and the bureaucrats, and put out dozens of bushfires along the way, all from his small office in Parkville. He correctly identified that the NAM needed three things urgently: a home, an artistic director and a teaching model.
A Home
As for the first of these, Keating’s offer to locate the thing in Victoria had been conditional on the Victorian Government, ensuring that the NAM would have an appropriate and permanent dwelling whilst based in Victoria. “The Commonwealth will provide operational funding, whilst the State must ensure its ongoing security of accommodation,” the MoU stated. Jeff Kennett, then Premier, had recently forced the amalgamation of 210 local councils down to 78, and thus had a few spare town halls lying around; would one of those do? After several disused government buildings were inspected and rejected, the South Melbourne Town Hall emerged as the best candidate. It was close to the arts precinct, which the Victorian Government was promoting, had good access to public transport, comprised lots of rooms that could be refitted as studios, and, with the new Council’s operations being centralised in the St Kilda Town Hall, was sitting empty.
There was only one problem. Kennett’s sacking of the South Melbourne Council had so enraged the local community that his ‘gifting’ of their town hall was felt as yet another slap in the face, and this hot on the heels of him seizing the same community’s Albert Park to stage a car race! They were not going to take it lying down. They had a legitimate grievance: the South Melbourne Town Hall was the only town hall in Victoria to sit not on Crown Land, but on land bought by the earliest ratepayers, meaning that Kennett had no moral right to give it away.
Julie Johnson, a former South Melbourne Councillor, rallied the anti-Academy troops in an angry letter to The Age, fuming that the Academy’s occupation of the Town Hall amounted to a “theft from the local community”. Of course, no one seemed particularly interested in talking about a much earlier theft: it could be suggested that the Town Hall sat not on the land ‘bought’ by the earliest ratepayers, but on the lands of the Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the East Kulin nation.
Neither were the troops much interested in talking about how the now empty building might be maintained or what possible use it might serve. A ‘museum for local government’ was the inspired idea doing the rounds: one can just picture the crowds of primary school kids, lined up outside, waiting to enter the grand colonial pile to view the mayoral robes of yesteryear and nineteenth century ledgers of parking infringements and dog registrations (no-one could be blamed for skiving off down South Melbourne beach on the day of that particular school excursion). The Academy was finally granted a twenty-year lease by the new City of Port Phillip transitional Administrator, but the protestors – and the elected members of the dually convened Port Phillip Council – proved very good at maintaining the rage, and the whole messy business would continue to give the Board grief for at least the next twenty years.
By May 1995 Barry Sheehan was able to call the NAM’s first Board meeting. Members included leading Australian musicians, academics and administrators, including John Painter, who graciously gave his time and talents to the new Board despite having lost out to Melbourne. Sir Zelman Cowan, the former Governor General, accepted the role of Chair. One of the biggest questions the Board had to settle over the ensuing months was what sort of teaching model the NAM would adopt. By December they had narrowed the options down to two, the choice neatly capturing the tension between the national remit implied by the ‘N’ of the NAM’s title and the political imperative to ‘throw some scraps Melbourne’s way’:
(1) a national schedule of intensive short-term courses held across the country, involving teachers from all Australia’s institutions, with all Melbourne activities to take place in South Melbourne Town Hall, and without the awarding of diplomas or certificates;
(2) 40 full-time ‘elite’ students – that pesky ‘e’ word would exercise the minds of many in the coming decade – based in South Melbourne, with faculty drawn mostly from the University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts and visiting international artists, offering a Graduate Diploma in Performance.
At this early stage the Board overwhelmingly supported the short courses of option (1). It’s not hard to see why. Warren Bebbington, who was also Dean of the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, ominously warned that a full-time program would be “directly competing with us” (i.e. the established music schools) and would probably force the resignation of some Board members. He would be proven right about that: before too long the Board would face walkouts from John Painter, William Hennessy and Bebbington himself. But for the time being, the Board wanted short, non-award courses (meaning no diplomas or degrees), and performance excellence to remain the primary goal and measure of success. The NAM was tentatively finding its feet but, as Sheehan noted, it was hard to finalise any further plans without an Artistic Director.
In July 1995 there was another important development: the NAM became the ANAM – the Australian National Academy of Music. (Was it Aussie pride that served up this tautology, or did someone finally twig that ‘nam’ had unwelcome connotations?)
On the road
The tireless arts administrator Fiona Allan had been appointed Manager in late 1995, tasked with pulling the touring production together and getting the show on the road. In 1996 the curtain was ready to go up on the new ANAM. In March, the first auditions were held, identifying over 100 gifted instrumentalists and singers between the ages of 11 and 30 to participate in one of eight intensive courses held in state capitals. One of these was a piano course, held over two weeks at the University of Melbourne and tutored by Ronald Farren-Price, Michael Kieran Harvey, Piers Lane and John Lill - not a bad line-up - and the young secondary school aged pianists included future stars such as Andrea Lam. The Herald Sun, not usually noted for its arts coverage, raved about the culminating performances.
Next, a program in Sydney for 30 young wind players was hosted by Gary Schocker, a flute Professor from Juilliard, who was pleased to find a level of talent and enthusiasm superior to back home. Then string players had a turn when five members of the Berlin Philharmonic, including that orchestra’s only Australian member violist Brett Dean, arrived to impart their skills. Dame Joan Sutherland led a voice program. Our finest young musicians finally had the world coming to them, rather than the other way around, and ANAM was offering tuition of an international standard, albeit in short doses. Crowning the year was the appointment, in November, of Trevor Green as ANAM’s first official Artistic Director.
Green came to Melbourne from Manchester, where he had been running the BBC’s music program in Northern England. He must have really wanted the job, as his three-year contract only provided for two economy-class tickets from the UK. But his initial enthusiasm didn’t last, and after only two years Green was poached from ANAM to run the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (it is said that Sir Zelman’s fury at both Green and the MSO took some time to subside). Valiant Ron Farren-Price stepped into the breech while the Board scrambled to find Green’s successor, but Green’s early departure proved to be a recurring problem. The next Director, pianist Frank Wibaut, also departed before the conclusion of his contracted term, without having laid any clear path for ANAM's future.
In 1999 the Board made a radical change of direction, dropping the nation-wide short courses in favour of a full-time program at the Town Hall. The short courses, though successful, had consumed huge resources, requiring hundreds of airfares and extensive accommodation costs, not just for the musicians but also, in the case of younger participants, their chaperones. The new Advanced Performance Program took place entirely in the Town Hall and offered 36 weeks of intense tuition, masterclasses and concerts split into four terms across the year (resembling the structure of ANAM’s current program). But this move came at a cost. It undoubtedly weakened ANAM’s national exposure and raised the eyebrows – and ire - of conservatory schools across the country, as Warren Bebbington’s warning had foretold.
In the early 2000’s there was also a growing perception in some quarters – including, ominously, in Canberra – that ANAM was too costly for what it was producing, and its musicians too privileged: focusing on producing ‘international soloists’ was perhaps not something that the country could afford. Even long-suffering John Painter began to lose faith. Something clearly had gone wrong, although it seems that the disquiet from the capital wasn’t registering in the ANAM board room.
ANAM's next Director, violinist John Harding, only stayed a year (2004), in which time he opened the Academy to wind and horn players. Thanks to Harding, ANAM was no longer just a finishing school for string players and pianists, but could now put together a small orchestra. Harding’s early departure left ANAM once again director-less, and while administrator David Barmby put together a program for the 2005 cohort, it had become obvious that the Academy needed a leader with vision who would stick around, and whose priority was ANAM’s young musicians.
Violist/Composer/Conductor
The Board must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when composer and violist Brett Dean accepted the role. His credentials were unassailable: fourteen years with the Berlin Philharmonic, a solo career, and a growing reputation as one of the world’s most admired composers. He was a Brisbane boy who had made good on the world stage and was an ideal role model for aspiring young Australian musicians.
As he settled in, Dean began to feel that ANAM was too concerned with what to him was an outmoded culture of grooming future soloists rather than producing well-rounded musicians. “As an institution,” he says, “it didn’t seem to burn with curiosity or to be stretching its collective sense of imagination. It tended to follow well-trodden, rather Euro-centric paths. It wasn’t imparting the sense of ‘what-if’ about futures in music in the way that I felt it could and should.” The remedy, he decided, was more chamber and orchestral playing, and a widening of the historical parameters to program more works outside the Classical-Romantic domain. “No one’s here for a haircut,” he was often heard to say, programming more ensemble and contemporary works.
At times Dean felt like he was pushing ‘stuff’ up hill, as his ideas irritated some faculty members and musicians who regarded chamber music as interfering with their preparation for competitions, and he battled inertia and obstruction from some administration staff. But Dean stuck to his vision and struggled on, holding that even gifted soloists needed “more exposure to the act of making music with others.” Under Dean’s leadership, the musicians gained a much wider variety of experience, and ANAM became one of Australia’s leading venues for hearing performances of chamber and contemporary music at the highest level.
2007 and 2008 were good years for ANAM. Dean’s energy and his superlative musicianship, generously shared in performances with his ‘colleagues’ as he described his young charges, inspired them to work as they’d never worked before. Crowds began to grow. Nick Bailey, the new Artistic Administrator, fresh from programming one of Australia’s symphony orchestras and bringing the operational and organisational experience of driving one of those artistic ocean liners, was totally supportive of Dean’s aspirations, and the pair proved a dynamic duo. Bailey had arrived in August 2007 to find only a sketchy program of ‘Repertoire and Artists tba’ planned for release the following year. His technical facility in program-making put a bomb under the place, and he set about putting the structure in place to deliver Dean’s vision: in February 2008, for the first time, a Season Brochure listing the year’s more than 90 public events was released, and a full year’s schedule of rehearsals, classes and activities distributed internally.
Bailey also curated events which were visually as well as aurally memorable, including the Messiaen in the Cathedral festival, which included ANAM’s pianists choregraphed to perform the composer’s Vingt regards on eight Steinways dispersed throughout St Patrick’s Cathedral at midnight, spectacularly lit via Vingt illuminated helium-filled weather balloons. In addition to the extra concerts, Dean instituted Fridays@3, a weekly public lecture series following the Friday lunchtime recital, where visiting guests – from Don Watson to Vladimir Ashkenazy - talked on a wide range of topics. The Town Hall was buzzing. It felt like the organisation had the wind in its sails for the first time.
When Kevin “07” Rudd won the federal election for the ALP, ANAM’s future looked rosy. Because Labor governments are always supportive of the arts, aren’t they?
Fax Day
Politics, like the bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty, had been present at ANAM’s birth and in August 2008 politics returned to spoil the show. Despite ANAM’s burgeoning organisational momentum, replete with new initiatives, personalities and activities, the misgivings from the early 2000’s had taken hold amongst the Canberra bureaucracy. The bureaucrats, the holders of corporate memory, had failed to keep up with the rapidly moving ANAM pageant down in Melbourne, clearly a profound failure of ANAM’s reporting processes and government relations, and the bureaucrats had the ear of the new inexperienced Minister. A letter arrived for John Haddad, ANAM’s then Chairman, from Peter Garrett, the new Minister for the Arts, outlining nine conditions which had to be met. Garrett wanted an amended bursary policy, a review of ANAM’s constitution, a plan for course certification, more income from sponsorship and less from government, and so on. His demands were not unreasonable – these were taxpayers’ funds, after all – but the timeframe was: ten weeks for ANAM’s Board to meet all nine conditions. No Board, with the best will in the world could address so many issues in so little time. ANAM was clearly being set up to fail.
On 3 October, Haddad replied to the Minister that the Board had formed a plan to address the Government’s concerns but would need more time to deliver. Garrett’s response delivered nineteen days later by fax – 22 October, to be known thereafter as ‘Fax Day’ - was brutal: the Board had failed to meet his requirements; funding would cease at the end of the year.
The news was received as a death blow. A careers counsellor, oozing professional empathy, was called in to advise staff on life post-ANAM. There was schadenfreude from ANAM’s old foes, including the South Melbourne protestors and members of Port Phillip Council (“Turn off the lights and leave the key under the mat as you leave; we’ll swing by in the morning”). A librarian from Melbourne University, quick off the mark, rang to ask what was happening to ANAM’s CD collection. The Board set about pricing the organisation’s pianos and other assets in preparation for winding up. The musicians were even worse off, as it was now too late in the year for them to find places in other institutions.
But Dean felt in his heart that there was a kernel of something unique and very special taking shape in South Melbourne, something too precious to abandon. In recent years things had been shifting: fine performers were emerging – that year, all three finalists in the Young Performers Award were from ANAM – and great, often rarely heard, music was being eagerly devoured by a growing audience. A crucial moment had been reached. Australians needed to decide if their country’s musicians warranted a similar level of investment in their training as its sportspeople received. Dean, nailing his colours to the mast, set aside work on his first opera Bliss, enlisted Bailey, and embarked on the campaign to save ANAM.
The War Cabinet
Of course, fights aren’t waged by lone individuals. If Dean made for a charismatic general, he had a brilliant lieutenant in Nick Bailey who now proved an adroit strategist, writing media releases, backgrounding the media and politicians (there were plenty in Canberra – including in his own party – who were only too happy to see the new rockstar Minister take a public hit), collecting signatures – a skill that would prove useful a decade later – and marshalling the musicians to fight. It constituted a valuable lesson for any young artist: Dean said to them “you can’t take what we are building here for granted; if you believe in it you have to be prepared to fight for it”. He told the musicians that the best way to save their academy was to make even more music, give even more concerts, don’t let up, play louder, let the public hear what they will be losing. “If things like this are allowed to slip away because we sit idly by, they don’t come back”, he said. The temperature was clearly rising.
Bailey and Dean met every morning, a sort of ‘war cabinet’, to plan the day’s strategy and tactics. As they carefully nurtured the media, most coverage was unfavourable to the Minister, ANAM’s phones rang hot with outraged supporters who were politely asked to redirect their feelings to their local MP. Garrett’s decision was not proving popular. Cultural luminaries expressed dismay in a petition of protest coordinated by Bailey: the more than 700 signatories represented a Who’s Who of the arts, including Dame Joan Sutherland, Paul Kelly, Elliott Carter, Dorothy Porter, Tim Rogers, David Williamson, Sir Simon Rattle, J.M. Coetzee and all the Chief Conductors and all the members of all the country’s symphony orchestras. Richard Tognetti, Director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and an old friend of Dean’s, took up the cause. Night after night as the ACO toured the country he raged against the vandalism being unleashed on Australia’s cultural life, urging audiences from the stage to “write to Canberra”. He flew to Melbourne to direct the ANAM Orchestra in a blistering protest performance, raising a Beethovenian middle-finger to the Minister.
Garrett, initially combative, began to look shaky. On 19 November he announced that all ANAM’s funding – and musicians – would shift to a new school, the Australian Institute of Music Performance, operated within the University of Melbourne. This new institution would be “committed to supporting our most talented classical musicians, to bridge the gap between their tertiary studies and professional performance.” ANAM was being closed to be replaced with… ANAM. Dean was furious and publicly proclaimed “Enough is enough” and refused to meet with the Government or University “until they have something sensible to say”, whilst Bailey scurried around in the background, quietly meeting with representatives from these bodies trying to thrash something out.
A Couple of Days in December
It all came to a head in the first days of December.
On 1 December it was announced in London and New York that Dean was the winner of the annual Grawemeyer Award, the ‘Booker Prize’ of music, for his violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing. It was Dean’s achievement, not ANAM’s, and yet it exposed even further the widening gulf between the arts community and the Arts Minister. For Dean had tied his own reputation to ANAM’s, the first flourishings of which had been under his leadership. This prestigious international endorsement only confirmed his stature as an artist, an artist who believed saving ANAM was crucial for Australian culture.
The war cabinet had been sitting on this news and date of its public release for six weeks, developing a strategy to exploit its impact on the day scheduled for its announcement. It took the form of a delegation of musicians, faculty and staff flying to Parliament House in Canberra as news of Dean’s win broke around Australia, including on page 3 of The Age and leading ABC morning radio. As guests of the Greens they disrupted the busy building’s foot traffic, giving impromptu recitals in the corridors and courtyards for parliamentarians and the unusually attentive media. What was music to their ears was probably not so to the Minister’s. In a meeting that afternoon with senior Canberra officials behind closed doors, Dean and Bailey were quietly advised that the Government was revisiting its decision, an agreeable solution would be found, and “might you both possibly be available to get together next Saturday morning in Melbourne to sort it all out?” Leaving this meeting the two of them would have made quite a sight, dancing down the tree-line Canberra boulevard, Tognetti on speakerphone, yelling “we’ve done it!”.
At 11am the following Saturday, 6 December, in University House Parkville, the gathering of senior University of Melbourne, Commonwealth and State government folks with Dean and Bailey made it official: ANAM would have a year to ‘sort itself out’. Dean was invited to continue as Artistic Director and Bailey to assume the role of General Manager. Toward the end of the meeting one of those present quickly left the room as their phone rang and on returning said “that was the Prime Minister, just wanting to make sure that everyone is happy”. The crafting of the public message with the Minister’s media advisor following the meeting was a thing to behold (there were many faces to be saved). A sense of “no hard feelings?” lingered in the air. A beautiful sunny summer’s day, Dean and Bailey adjourned to a sidewalk café in Lygon St for a long lunch and to start work on their memoirs.
Garrett later wrote in his memoir, “I felt the Department and the Chief of Staff had let me down”, which is probably as much as we’ll ever learn regarding any Sir Humphrey/Minister-type exchanges that took place in the Ministerial office. Still, his original conditions remained, only this time the new Board would have a year to address them. Fair enough. But was all the turmoil really necessary?
Bailey reckons that it was the making of the place. “A near-death experience is not such a bad thing for an institution struggling to find purpose,” he now says. “And for those musicians – just as for an institution engaging with notions of what it means to be an artist in the 21st century – an invaluable lesson in the importance of not burying their heads in the musical sands, of the need to lift up, look outward and engage, take note of what is going on in the world around and the role of their music-making in it, and be prepared to fight for it”.
One might observe that ANAM, in its second fifteen years, has been shaped by this experience at every turn.
Barry Sheehan and John Painter passed away in the last couple of years, both, at the end of their lives, delighted and proud of how their ANAM had turned out. Barry, present in the first meeting in 1995 was also present for the December 2018 meeting – there’s a stayer for you – and some years later spoke of his relief at the outcome: “It was a close thing that ANAM, which after all these years was finally starting to work, survived. The country is so lucky to have it.”
In the next edition of Music Makers we will see how ANAM met Canberra’s demands and faced another, non-political but perhaps more existential, threat to its existence. The glorious heritage architecture of the South Melbourne Town Hall was, in fact, a ticking timebomb just waiting to go off.
(To be continued)