ISBN
9781876044602
Published 2009
186 pgs
$25.95
Don’t Ever Let Them
Get You! book sample
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Variations on a Theme by George
It’s Not My
First Work!
Unlikely Combinations
Surviving
It’s Good To
Have Friends In High Places
Border Crossings or The
Worst News Is...
How Can You Afford To
Miss It!
‘Jenny, Make It Happen’
Jennifer Isaacs
A Resounding Success
Rosemary Richards
Brass Banding Meets George Dreyfus
John Whiteoak
Complete Catalogue of Works
Stage Works
Choral Works
Orchestral Works
Chamber, Vocal and Instrumental Works
Brass Band
Concert Band
Discography
Film and Video
Bibliography
Index
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Kay Dreyfus, Monash University
At the Chapel Off Chapel performance and book launch, 14 March 2010
Some of you might be wondering why George would have invited his
ex-wife to launch his book. I wondered the same thing myself but when I
asked George about it, he just looked enigmatic and said he had his
reasons, leaving me to work out what they might be. But there are
plenty of hints in this book that George likes unexpected - even
discomforting - juxtapositions. Consider the little essay that starts
on page 54, George’s speech of thanks on receiving the
Bundesverdienstkreuz Erste Klasse
from the German government at a ceremony in Parliament House Melbourne,
in 2002. ‘I was ejected in 1939,’ George reminded the German Consul
General on this occasion, ‘and now I am being honoured with the
Bundesverdienstkreuz Erste Klasse.’
Just to reinforce the point in the book, the essay is illustrated with
the picture of George’s childhood passport that decorates the book’s
very expressive cover, replete with its red ‘J’ for ‘
Jude’,
which was the distinction bestowed on him by the German regime in 1939.
At another point in the book, George writes how he enjoys the
juxtaposition of ancient Biblical prophetic texts with his sometimes
raucous Australian music in his piece
Visions.
Or what about the moment in his setting of the Mass where he misread
the text of the Gloria, and inserted a citation of Australia’s
unofficial national anthem? [Jonathan Dreyfus to play opening phrase of
Theme from Rush.] Is George linking the
Theme from Rush to the Godhead?
For
a musician, George is an inveterate story-teller. Add to that the fact
that he doesn’t like to waste anything he ever thinks of, whether
verbal or musical, and you end up with a trilogy of autobiographical
books of which this present one is the third instalment. The essence of
George’s skill as a composer is his ability to create an inspired,
memorable, classically structured, expertly organised, organically
connected, thematically developed and varied piece of music in three
minutes - I refer of course to his one and only
Theme from Rush [Jonathan Dreyfus to play
Theme from Rush].
The essential quality of his prose, however, is perhaps summed up in
one word, and that word is George’s (see page 46): RANDOM. George’s
prose style is one of free association - one thing leads to another,
this reminds him of that, no one is spared, saints and sinners, friends
and foes. His writing crackles with the energy, vitality and infectious
iconoclasm that have been the hallmark of his style as a musician, a
composer, a performer and an entertainer for these many decades.
Actually,
Arnold Zable should be launching this book, but when I put this idea to
George he said no, Arnold had too much personality! Clearly I was not a
problem in the personality department. I heard Arnold Zable speak at a
conference recently and it seemed to me that he has a wonderful
appreciation of the many reasons why story telling is so important to
us as humans and especially why story-telling is important to people
who have experienced a major trauma in their life. I’d like you to
pretend that Arnold Zable is in fact launching the book, as I am going
to make use of some of his ideas to talk about it.
The cover of
this book bears a most eloquent witness to the defining trauma in
George’s life, At the age of ten he was taken from his family and put
on a boat with his brother and 15 other children and sent away to an
orphanage on the other side of the world where no one spoke his
language. There’s a photo of the children on page 37. George gives us a
glimpse of what it was like for the children (pages 38-39):
It
was a desolate time, Matron gave is as much guidance as she could, but
I was often miserable, I missed my parents and family to such a degree
tjhat there was a hole there that nobody could fill.These
are not George’s words as it happens. But Arnold Zable reminded us that
not all story-telling has to take place in words and the piece of music
we have just heard reflects something of George’s feelings about this
time,
Larino Safe Haven.
George says among other things that this piece is an autobiographical
work, a piece about children without parents, a stolen generation
piece. With its haunting scoring for two oboes and cor anglais, it is a
piece about loss. George was fortunate that his parents turned up a few
months later, and he and his brother Richard were able to leave the
children’s home and tackle the larger task of assimilating into
Australian society. Most of the other children were not so fortunate.
But George had lost a lot. Most grievously, he lost his grandparents,
and late last year Jonathan and I went with George to Wuppertal to see
the memorial stone that had been placed in the pavement outside his
grandmother’s house to commemorate her death. George also lost his
German musical heritage. As John Whiteoak writes in his wonderfully
affectionate chapter on George and the brass band movement, ‘George has
always felt most connected to the only partly recovered European high
art cultural milieu that was taken from him as a child’ (pages 99,
126). George’s stories, like his music, are full of references to his
German musical heritage.
Larino Safe Haven, for instance, is an example of
Durchkomponiertevariationentechnik to be compared to Beethoven’s
Septet op. 16, Brahms’s
Variations on a theme by Joseph Haydn Op. 56a and Max Reger’s
Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart Op. 132. I hope you thought of all that while you listened to it.
Larino Safe Haven
is a piece about surviving. In fact, this whole book is about
surviving, as the title suggests, and not just about children surviving
the antisemitism of the Third Reich, but about George surviving in
Australia, as a musician, a performer, an entrepreneur and a free-lance
composer, something that no one before him had done and few have done
since (Whiteoak page 125 ). More than that, though, it’s about what
George calls ‘survival revenge’. George is not a man to take
disappointments quietly. On the contrary, he turns them into
performance opportunities. George writes his very own revenge arias,
joining a noble operatic tradition that stretches back to
Don Giovanni and beyond. So for example on page 26 we find his catalogue aria of opera stoppers: to a backing of music from his first opera
Garni Sands he sings, in alphabetical order, the names of all those he considers responsible for preventing his opera
The Gilt-Edged Kid
being performed by The Australian Opera. [Jonathan Dreyfus/George to
sing.] ‘Transportation to the cultural Hades for the lot of them’,
trumpets George on page 26, ‘that is, for those who are not already
there’. Another echo of
Don Giovanni!
George likes to note those of his cultural enemies who are dead. On
page 5, we find his musical insult tribute to Clive Douglas, another
dead and a long-forgotten Australian composer who, as a second or
third-rate resident conductor for the ABC, made George’s life a misery
in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s and eventually had him
dismissed. [Jonathan Dreyfus/George to sing.] James Murdoch, author and
commentator, was unwise enough to pen a critical quip about George’s
Symphony No. 1
- it was, so Murdoch said, a ‘decided disappointment’. Undeterred,
George set Murdoch’s entire text to music, made the song the
centrepiece of a one-man show he performed all around Australia and in
Germany. [Jonathan Dreyfus/George to sing
Deep Throat.]
There are fourteen more verses of that one, but I think you get the
picture. George enjoys his musical revenges. And so can you if you buy
a copy of this book!
Arnold Zable distinguished three different
aspects of story-telling. First of all, he says, there is expression:
that is when the story-teller, in this case George, tells the
reader/audience things that he considers to be important about himself.
Secondly, there is impression. That’s when the story-teller tells the
audience things he considers important about other things and people.
This book gives the reader quite a rich counterpoint of impressions: we
get George’s impressions of other people, often vengeful, as we have
seen, though not always. Then we get other people’s impressions of
George, also sometimes vengeful, often bemused, frequently quite
affectionate. We get George’s versions of other peoples’ interactions
with him, and then we get other people’s versions of their interactions
with George. There’s a lot going on.
Although George is at
centre stage for most of the book, his is not the only narrative voice
that is heard. In the second part of the book, three invited authors
explore George’s encounters with three different aspects of the
Australian musical scene. The common theme of this part of the book
could be said to be that of ‘cultures in conflict’. In one corner we
have George, embodying his own unique fusion of German musical
imperialism and what John Whiteoak calls his ‘gumnut Australian
nationalism’. I think George would agree that the
Selections from the Sentimental Bloke
that we are about to hear is a delightful example of this fusion. In
the other corner we have lined up variously, the unsuspecting amateur,
the deeply conservative fifth generation brass band enthusiast and the
dignified but profoundly different traditional indigenous musician.
The unsuspecting amateurRosemary Richards tells the story behind George’s composition
The Box Hill Gloria
- you will hear an extract from this piece later this afternoon. This
is one of George’s special occasion cantatas, written to commemorate a
particular event - in this case, the establishment of a settlement at
Box Hill - and, until today, given only one sonically memorable
performance in 1985 as part of the State’s sesquicentennial
celebrations. On that occasion, more than 200 performers outnumbered
the audience, but the sound was spectacular - ‘sublime’ in the
words of one commentator. According to Rosemary, the event was
memorable in other ways. Her essay documents the impact of the
collision between her self-confessed naïve enthusiasm for the creative
idea and the reality of organising every amateur musician in Box Hill -
nine different amateur choirs and instrumental groups. She offers
tragic testimony to her folly in an image of her car, wrecked in a
moment of stress associated with this event, and then rusting in her
driveway with plum trees growing through its roof. She also describes
the impact of George’s musical expectations on the members of the Box
Hill TAFE student choir, most of whom, after one rehearsal with George,
did not turn up for the performance. Not George’s first choral
disaster. He himself tells the story of another walk-out when he
rehearsed the Melbourne Choral Society in his sacred choral work
Visions. But for the details of that, as George himself would say, you will have to buy the book.
The brass band enthusiastJohn
Whiteoak’s essay deals with George’s encounter with the brass band
movement. This is a very different story. George wrote his first score
for an Australian brass band in 1969, when he composed the music for
the Australian pavilion at Expo Japan, in 1970. In 2003, he
composed his ‘Fanfare for the New Dome’ of the State Library of
Victoria, a splendid multi-directional work that was also played at his
Hawthorn Town Hall concert last year. George was commissioned to write
a special piece for the Australian tour of the Grimethorpe Colliery
Band in 1982. Over three and a half decades, a number of his most
successful film and television themes have been arranged for brass band
by some of the most skilled musicians working in the movement. His
music is published by Wright and Round, England’s leading publisher of
music for brass band and a CD of just about the whole lot, performed by
the Kew Band with George conducting, has been issued by Move Records,
including of course... [Jonathan Dreyfus to play
Theme from Rush]. There is nothing ephemeral about all that.
John
scrutinises every aspect of George’s engagement with the brass band,
noting ‘the awesome intensity of George’s will to survive
professionally’ and asking how comfortably such intensity might sit
with the rather different ethos and agenda of amateur community
music-making. The result is a wonderful overview of the history of
banding in Australia. John also critiques George’s engagement with
Australian folk-music, an essential part of George’s self-definition as
an Australian composer, largely derived from the pages of John
Manifold’s Penguin Australian Song-Book. But as George himself says on
page 47 of this book, ‘ignorance is no handicap’. Critical though it
may sometimes be, John’s essay is full of his regard for George’s
achievement. So much so that John even offers to break a 35-year
embargo and attend the National Brass Band Championships should George
ever be invited to write the test piece. Something to aim for, George.
The indigenous musicianThe
last of these invited essays is, perhaps, my favourite. It tells the
story of the events that led to George being commissioned to write what
some people regard as his most original composition, the
Sextet for Didjeridu and Wind Instruments.
George is not really a central character in this story. Instead we have
Dr Herbert Coombs, Chairman of the Australia Council, Governor of the
Reserve Bank and chief patriarch in charge of Aboriginal affairs in the
early 1970s. The narrator is Jenny Isaacs, Dr Coombs’s personal
assistant at the time, and the person, who ‘made it happen’. when Dr
Coombs decided to stage a creative exchange of music making between the
Adelaide Wind Quintet and a selection of Aboriginal musicians in the
remote Aboriginal settlement at Yirrkala, in the Northern Territory.
What follows goes beyond any ideas you might have of cultures in
collision, but the narrative yields some wonderful images and
descriptions. The Quintet arriving at their motel at Gove - a series of
trucks arranged on their sides around a tree, boiling hot, no air
conditioning, dunny out the back, probably full of flies. Enter the
tour manager, a formidable lady named Miss Regina Ridge, wearing
stockings and gloves. The meeting with the head of the Aboriginal
community - no chairs were provided, everyone sat on the ground under
trees, Miss Ridge still in her stockings and gloves. The concert, with
the Aboriginal MC equipped with stop watch and megaphone stopping each
performance after ten minutes, ready or not. The audience members not
clapping but getting up to dance if they enjoyed an item. And yet, in
spite of all this, marvellous music-making and a real sense of
connection between European and indigenous musicians and a marvellous
creative outcome... [Jonathan Dreyfus to play
Theme from Rush]. No, no, not that marvellous creative outcome, the
Didjeridu Sextet.
At this point I should explain that one of my aims in this speech was the mention the
Theme from Rush
[Jonathan Dreyfus to play] more often than George does in his book. But
to find out who won [on top of Jonathan Dreyfus] you will have to buy
the book. That’s enough Jonathan Dreyfus [send Jonathan Dreyfus off].
The
third aspect of story-telling is what Arnold Zable called mirroring.
But what sort of a mirror does George hold up to his Australia? What
sort of place is it, and how does George fit in? Well, to find the
answers to those questions you will just have to buy the book. But
there are some odd juxtapositions. For example, on page 9 George
describes how as a young man of 21, in 1949, he worked on a setting for
soprano and large orchestra of texts in German extracted from Goethe’s
Wahlverwantschaften.
Goodness! What a project for late 1940s Australia! Then there is
George’s hangup with opera - nothing but trouble there. He keeps on
writing them though the Australia Opera refuses to play them, even if
he has had two premiered in Germany. You can find a list of the reviews
of the German performances on pages 27-30 of this book. I am not sure
if George has set these lists to music, but he certainly read them out
during his one-man show. John Whiteoak says that George himself is a
brass band, particularly when in self-promotional mode: exuberant,
loud, not at all in need of amplification. However, like the brass
band, George can be said to have been and to be a meaningful and
functional presence in Australian musical life. As this book shows, he
possesses in large measure a bundle of qualities that have not only
enabled him to survive in his Australian exile but to thrive and make
his mark against all the odds. George has given Australia its
alternative national anthem. [Jonathan Dreyfus offstage plays
Theme from Rush.]
But what has Australia given George? Most importantly of course a safe
haven, but also a mixed bag of opportunities out of which he has
created the colourful narrative of his life, and an impressive list of
compositions that includes music that has given many people a great
deal of pleasure over a long period of time. It only remains for me to
declare this book launched, to encourage you all to buy a copy - George
would not be happy if I didn’t do that! - and wish George a long life.
Mazeltov!
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From Suz’s Space Blog:
George
Dreyfus is more of a musician than an author and his book launch
demonstrated that quite dramatically. Proceedings were interspersed
with music. We started off with Dreyfus playing with his son, Jonathan.
They did a nice rendition of the theme from
Rush which
Dreyfus wrote in 1974. This music has become very iconically Australian
which I find rather strange as Dreyfus was born in Germany in 1928 and
only arrived in Australia in 1939. On the other hand, the bulk of the
population in this country is composed of immigrants and yes, I’m
looking at the past 200 years. Before that the inhabitants had been
here for thousands of years so they don’t count as immigrants.
Getting
back to the book launch. Some of the other music we were entertained by
was: the theme of The Adventures of Sebastian the Fox; Larino, Safe
Haven; and The Sentimental Bloke. The music was wonderful and the jokes
were thick and fast in some areas. I don’t know about you, but most of
the people I know do not enjoy good relationships with their
ex-spouses. There is the odd person that manages that and Dreyfus,
being a rather unique person has managed to have a good enough
relationship with his ex-wife Kaye that he asked her to launch her book.
Kaye had much to say about him. This included phrases such as:
# ignorance is no handicap
# unexpected, even uncomfortable juxtapositions. (I think she meant his music.)
# Random – free association
# George is unique
# Turns disappointments into musical opportunities
# He is a meaningful and functional musical presence in Australia
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Don’t
Ever Let Them Get You!