NACTMUS - National Council of Tertiary Music Schools - Conference 2001

MUSIC GRADUATES IN A GLOBALISED WORLD

by Richard Letts

Our species has pushed out its own borders since time immemorial. We now know that our footsore Australian Aborigines had trade routes that covered the continent. From a Western perspective, exploration, trade and conquest had covered the globe centuries ago.

So when we talk about globalisation now, we are considering only the latest stage in a long and cumulative process.

A year ago, I took a long look at this phenomenon and came up with an article titled "(More than) 100 ways that globalisation affects music".

Music, more than practically any other commodity, has lent itself to globalisation in its current phase. Music can be created digitally, marketed digitally and delivered digitally from, and to, virtually any point on the globe. But while the focus tends to be on the extraordinary consequences of digital technology and communication, we need to remember that we are also involved in the continuing evolution of other, more physical exchanges.

Helen Lancaster has spoken to the potential effects of globalisation on music education.

I will take you on a fast ride through a very few of its effects upon the world into which tertiary music institutions will thrust their graduates. This is a head-spinner and an inundation, so we'll then settle down to explore at some length a current threat to music and culture arising from the negotiations around international trade treaties.

We'll begin with some of the non-digital aspects of the globalisation of music, starting with the effects of the movement of peoples.

With the increasing ease and diminishing cost of transport, the flood of refugees resulting from (mainly) civil wars, and global media exposure of disparate living standards, the movement of peoples has burgeoned. Monocultural societies have become multicultural. Where in the past, white Australia forebade Aborigines their own cultural practices, now we encourage, for instance, the music of indigenous and immigrant peoples. Our whole idea of self and other is changing. For many, this means a greater openness to other cultures, for some a stronger need to assert their own. Some of our professional musicians take up music from other cultures now at home in Australia, becoming exponents of the pure traditions, or creating hybrid forms. We begin to claim all this music as our own. Some of it reaches a mass market through the phenomenon called world music and festivals such as Womadelaide. The stylistic options for music graduates multiply.

The greater ease and diminishing cost of transport also engenders greater tourism. Musicians can benefit from tourist spending. For instance, it may well be that the high attendances and prices for orchestral and opera performances in Sydney, and the relative health of Sydney orchestras and Opera Australia, result partly from tourist patronage of the Sydney Opera House.

Musicians are also people who tour. Australian musicians of high ambition are quick to travel overseas for study or, later, to perform, in the hope of cracking that big market in the sky that brings, maybe, a full-time performing career and, in a blue moon, fame. At the same time, foreign musicians tour Australia, many of them highly selected. The Nugent Report last year found that a proportion of Australian audiences hears foreign companies live on tour in Australia, and/or electronically, draws unflattering comparisons, and stays away from Australian companies. Beginning next year, an entrepreneur will bring three really top-line orchestras a year to perform in Sydney and Melbourne. Globalisation brings continuing pressure on standards. Our musicians and orchestras have to lift their game, but our orchestras must compete for players in an international market that can lure our best players away. (Fortunately, we also can lure fine players, with warm sunshine in lieu of cold cash.)

Let us look briefly at the recording industry. Under the forces of globalisation and aided by the global movement of capital, 80% of the world's trade in music occurs under the auspices of five, or is it now four, giant transnational recording companies, themselves part of wider entertainment complexes. No Australian popular musician can achieve international fame except through these companies. But the companies themselves face enormous uncertainty with the emergence of on-line delivery of music. Napster has become famous for facilitating the free on-line exchange of recorded music, usually single tracks, and tens of millions of people world-wide have taken advantage of it. Sales of CD singles have plummeted, although album sales have increased a little. The major record companies are forcing intellectual property legitimacy on Napster, but other software that does the same job and is beyond any control is here or will emerge. Efforts to find a way of preventing unauthorised &endash; that is to say, unpaid for &endash; downloading of sound recordings have failed. SDMI, the joint project of recording industry companies, after years of work recently produced a software package that was hacked within two weeks. Do the major record companies have a future? This certainly is a question that troubles them. Whether it should trouble the musical world is a matter of some dispute!

Meanwhile, as you know, musicians and composers offer their music directly and globally via the internet. There are unprecedented possibilities for global niche audiences &endash; if only you can find a way to have your website noticed among the hundreds of thousands of others. Niche audiences also could build up around global on-line radio programming. Every musical taste could be satisfied with extraordinary precision. For the moment, however, on-line radio is an excellent way to lose money.

I could go on with a list naming the various effects of globalisation for the rest of the afternoon. But the mention of radio brings me to a topic on which I would like to spend the rest of my time today &endash; and that is international trade liberalisation. You will understand the radio connection shortly.

Trade liberalisation is heaven's gate for some, a filthy word for others. Basically, the idea is to remove all barriers to international trade, all arrangements by which governments favour some countries or corporations over others, whether local or overseas.

Everyone here knows something of this issue, if only because of the riots in Seattle and Melbourne. The riots possibly reveal, probably conceal the rational position against trade liberalisation as now practiced. The question is: Who benefits, and who loses? The opponents say that transnational corporations benefit, countries and citizens lose out. Others, including our main Australian political parties, point to greatly increased trade and GDP outcomes. If you think about it, the two positions are not necessarily contradictory.

To get your full attention, let me give you a few examples of outcomes from the North American Free Trade Agreement's Article 11, a provision that could in due course find its way into other agreements affecting Australia. The provision permits individual firms to sue governments, where they believe their investments have been adversely affected by government policies.

Here are two instances where US companies forced the governments of other countries to dispose of toxic wastes, against their own environmental policies. A US company, Metalclad, successfully sued the Mexican government over the decision of a municipality to refuse the company permission to open a toxic waste dump. It won $30 million damages.

The US-based hazardous waste company, S.D. Meyers, sued Canada over its refusal to permit the export to the US of PCBs, a known toxin. Canada had banned the exports as part of its implementation of the Basel Convention that obliges nations to look after their own waste products. In addition, the US law prohibited the importation of PCBs. Canada has been ordered to pay damages. Bizarre, yes?!

UPS, the world's largest courier company, has sued Canada for $300 million. UPS alleges that Canada Post is taking advantage of its monopoly over the delivery of mail to subsidize unfairly its own partly-owned courier service that competes with UPS. This seems to mean that public services that operate as a hybrid with both public policy and commercial objectives may be vulnerable. An example in Australia might be the public service broadcasters, ABC and SBS, that also act as producers of television and films in competition with private producers.

We have our very own home-grown exemplar in the cultural sector. Who remembers the Blue Sky case of a few years ago? This is a lulu. Australia has a comprehensive free trade treaty with New Zealand. Such treaties require that each country extends to the enterprises of the other, "national treatment" &endash; e.g. Australia should treat New Zealand companies in the same way that it treats its own. Blue Sky is a New Zealand television production company. It brought a case to the Australian High Court claiming that New Zealand television productions should be given national treatement &endash; i.e. regarded as Australian for the purposes of Australian local content requirements on television. So we have the bizarre situation where a foreign company uses a free trade agreement to claim special privileges under a regulation that restricts trade. It won. Who knows why we haven't been swamped with episodes of Daughter of Zena the Wonder Woman? I'll come back to this shortly.

Let's move to music.

In a succession of international music conferences, I, and no doubt you, have heard people from post-colonial countries express resentment that their own musics have been supplanted by the music of their former colonisers. Two weeks ago, a wonderful Philippino woman, Marian Pastor Roces, told a conference in Sydney how she had grown up in the Philippine countryside with her opera-loving grandfather. The house had high ceilings and open windows; birds flew across the room as though it were part of the outdoors, and the sound of Verdi arias floated out, as she said, across the oinking of the pigs. This was the music she knew and loved. Years later, on a visit home, she ran across a research project into the indigenous music of the area &endash; music of whose existence she had been totally unaware in her years with her grandfather.

The musicians from post-colonial countries look with fear upon globalisation as the latest weapon of the cultural imperialists, threatening a death blow to their indigenous musics &endash; just as they were beginning to reclaim them. The analogy is to threatened biological species, and the rallying cry is for the preservation in this case, not of biological diversity, but of cultural diversity.

In a sense, we in Australia don't face quite the same threat. Our dominant allegiances are to Western music, so we don't fear in the same way the potential loss of our own musical styles. And while official policy supports multiculturalism and encourages the music of indigenous communities and immigrant communities, they so far remain marginal to the interests of the music industry and indeed, the general populace.

What is under threat is the economic basis for us to produce our own performances and compositions rather than simply consume imported performances, or recordings, whether in the mainstream Western styles or in others of minority interest.

Some decades ago, the Commonwealth government legislated to require commercial radio stations to devote 10% of their music broadcast time to Australian performers, and 5% to Australian compositions. The law concerning compositions has been disbanded. But for Australian performances there is a new regime, ostensibly self-regulated by the radio stations and feebly overseen by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. The requirements depend upon musical style. At the top end, rock stations must give 25% of music broadcast time between 6am and midnight to Australian performers. The scale descends to a requirement of commercial jazz broadcasters to give 5% of broadcast time to Australian jazz. Australian jazz has 5% of nothing since, so far as I can discover, there are no such broadcasters.

Why do we have these requirements? Presumably, before the first legislation was introduced, requiring, remember, only 10% local content, there was much less. .My inside info is that the radio stations have never taken kindly to the requirements, and still don't. Without the requirement, local content could dive. If we can't get our musicians onto the air, they can't sell their recordings, and they would be known mainly by their live performances which reach only a very small and local audience.

While these particular regulations apply only to the commercial broadcast sector, there is a similar requirement of the community radio stations &endash; which by and large voluntarily support local music beyond the legal obligation.

The ABC is not legally covered by a quantified requirement, but its charter requires it to encourage Australian cultural production. It has not always been exemplary. When I was director of the Australian Music Centre, we discovered that ABC Classic FM was broadcasting only about 1_% Australian compositions, compared to the 5% requirement on commercial broadcasters. We mounted a successful campaign, as a result of which the ABC agreed at least to match the commercial quotas, and it has since then regularly exceeded them. But it is important to recall that piece of history &endash; and so not to repeat it.

I know that changing technologies and on-line broadcasting may make this yesterday's game. But really, no-one can predict what will happen there, and for the near future, free to air broadcasting is still dominant.

If Australia, and other countries such as those in Europe, reserve air time for their own music, it is consequently denied to the musical productions of other countries. The USA is especially sensitive to this issue since, of all sectors of the economy, the audio/visual sector is its largest source of export income.

For the USA, the main game is television. It is against, on principle of course, a situation where an unfair trading advantage is given to our own film and television productions. Australian content requirements for television drama, for instance, mean that for a certain percentage of broadcast time, productions from the US and other countries are excluded. Not satisfied with filling most of commercial television station drama broadcast time, the US wants it all. Let us be clear that without the local content requirement, the US probably would have it all, because it costs 5 or 6 times more to produce a local TV drama as to fill the same time slot with a rented US production.

Since the USA is acting, of course, out of principle, its opposition to local content requirements for television drama would be bound to extend to music. (I note that its principles do not extend to its own protected agricultural sector.)

What other cultural regimes are vulnerable to this free trade philosophy? Well, anything that gives an advantage to local production over production from other countries. Subsidy, for example. If Australia gives subsidy to Australian artists or arts companies which it does not also give to those of its treaty partners, so disadvantaging them in international trade, they could seek either termination of the subsidies or equal access to them.

Trade liberalisation treaties can be organised under the auspices of the World Trade Organisatiom (the WTO), or as regional treaties or bilateral treaties with one other country. Under the WTO, the treaties apply to the many countries that are signatories. It is good for Australia to negotiate these cultural trade issues under the WTO because there are other countries with which we can be allied in taking a position to protect local cultures.

We do not have such protection in a bilateral treaty such as the one the Howard Government is proposing with the USA. This is a negotiation between very unequal partners &endash; and the USA has stated that it would want audio/visual trade put on the negotiating table. For its part, Australia desperately wants the US to lower its barriers to our agricultural exports. There is a great danger that the arts sector here could find itself at war with the agricultural sector as the government weighs whether it is willing to abandon cultural support measures in order to gain agricultural exports. This is truly a gruesome prospect. And imagine if we had a treaty with the US along the lines of that with New Zealand. And a US company won a Blue Sky case, and American music was counted as Australian for the purposes of local content assessment. Ludicrous.

Internationally, there have been some moves for what the French call the "cultural exception": i.e. a principle that culture should simply not be included in the trade liberalisation agenda. Culture, it is said, is not a commodity to be traded like any other. It is fundamental to the lives and spirit of a people. Alas, Australia has refused to endorse the cultural exception.

The Music Council has assisted the UNESCO International Music Council and also the International Network for Cultural Diversity to develop positions in this issue. There are moves to formulate an international declaration to protect cultural diversity. This might act as a guide to nations engaged in trade liberalisation negotiations and create some drag against the US aspirations.

It is difficult to know quite what to expect of the major Australian political parties. After the Blue Sky case, the Coalition stated that it would never never never let such a thing happen again. But when Trade Minister Mark Vaile went off to the US to try to put a bilateral treaty on the agenda, he said that local content could be up for negotiation. Kim Beazley was wishy-washy until somehow the issue heated up. Now Shadow Arts Minister Bob McMullan has said the Labor Party will never never never put culture on the table, and the party has backed him. Aden Ridgeway, God bless him, has said that the Democrats do not believe in a karaoke culture, with us singing other people's tunes. And now the Coalition has found religion again, claiming that the Labor Party stole their policy.

It's all very entertaining. But what will happen if it really does come down to our lamb chops vs their TV Sopranos?

Biographical Note

Dick Letts is Executive Director of the Music Council of Australia, which he founded in 1994. He gained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, and then established a performing arts school based in the nearby ghetto. This ultimately taught classical (including early and new), jazz, folk, rock, Latin-American, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Caribbean and Indonesian musics, some of the equivalent dance forms, theatre, and film, and was home to a number of performing ensembles and companies. He next became director of a large classical music school of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He returned to Australia in 1982 as Director of the Music Board of the Australia Council, and then was Director of the Australian Music Centre 1987-93. He has written a number of books and founded and edited three journals (currently the Music Council's 'Music Forum'). He is President of The Song Company and has been a member of other boards, including the International Music Council (Paris) and the International Network for Cultural Diversity (Ottawa).

2001 NACTMUS Conference