A freak hail storm caused significant damage to much of the ANU. In our music school we were relatively unscathed, though one of our pianos became inundated with water, and everyone who had parked near to the school had their cars written off. Then we have the Covid 19 virus which has required immediate thought and action. What do we do for our international students when we truly have no idea how this virus will play out? Is your experience a little like ours?
What comes from last Summer is a profound challenge. The challenge is the opportunity to reflect on the role of academic art and its potential to make a significant contribution to our society right now. Is there something we can and should do now? I would say that tragedies cannot be papered over by physical recovery strategies, financial help, tax breaks or any other government policy. There are too many things that do not make sense yet for us to simply move on. Questions need to be answered. How much are these fires a direct result of global warming? How might Indigenous land care and fire management practices help us manage our land into the future? How will we as a nation adjust to longer fire seasons that threaten more of us? The answer is probably quite simple, that for now there is no answer.
Instead we can feel and learn together. To do this we need three processes. The first is to bear witness truthfully and with depth to the experiences we have had, allowing us to sit with the suffering of others without responding intellectually, or reducing their experiences to generalised impressions. The second is rigorous academic engagement with ideas, which is what universities do very well. We can take the time to find the thinkers and doers who can find solutions or at least give us the scientific reasons as to why these fires were so larger in scope than anything else on record. We can study mitigation and ways to move beyond the carbon economy. The third is in artistic response, the chance to make something that contains everything that cannot be resolved in words or ideas. While others can do one or two of these processes I feel that creative academics have the skills and the methodology to play a crucial part in the recovery of our country.
I remember in 2011 working at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, where we were planning a new opera. We decided to make it in response to the recent Queensland Floods. As soon as we had done that, something profoundly changed for us. We could make this opera because we did not need to rush, we could have multiple viewpoints and styles of art and thinking, and to do this we asked four composers to write a self-contained act. We committed our resources to something important to us and our community, and we hoped that we could heal a little as a result.
It is therefore a special time to be at the ANU for myself, and for all of us to be at a University. We at the ANU School of Music are opening dialogues with our Indigenous colleagues, the Fenner School of Environment, climate scientists and health professionals. We have a role to play in the debates that have already started. That role is to combine scholarship with art; to allow people to move beyond the simple binaries that are so seemingly reassuring after a tragedy. We aim to make something profound, something to help us grieve as a community, that inspires us to take the social and environmental actions we so desperately need.
We will do this in two stages. In April the School of Music will produce a benefit concert, that is a little like some of the others we have already seen. Our staff, students and the foremost musicians of Canberra will play to our community to raise money, premiering a number of works by Australian composers that can start our cultural response to the fires. Later in the year we will partner with the larger ANU and a number of other institutions to make a night of mourning for the fires. This will be total art as defined by Wagner, because it will have scientists, philosophers, artists and musicians working together. We, in a purely unrestrained way, can respond to the profound losses we have seen.
It is my hope that all of us can use our unique experiences and skills base to help shape our society at this crucial time.
Kim Cunio, Head of the School of Music at the ANU, is an activist composer interested in old and new musics and the role of intercultural music in making sense of our larger world. A scholar, composer and performer, Cunio embodies the skills of the exegetical artist, showing that writing and making art are part of the same paradigm of deep artistic exploration. The ANU School of Music is entering a new renaissance, again valued by the university and the community of Canberra due to the work of its academic staff and the fearlessness of its students.