On 10 July, the Federal Court ruled that classical pianist Jayson Gillham had failed in his discrimination case against the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Gillham had sued the MSO for cancelling a forthcoming performance (of Mozart and Brahms), after Gillham had premiered Connor D’Netto’s composition Witness at a concert in Sydney. Witness is dedicated to journalists killed in Gaza. The MSO objected not to Witness itself, but to Gillham’s introductory remarks, in which he described the killings as targeted assassinations by the IDF, amounting to war crimes.
Justice Graeme Hill was careful to note the case was not about litigating Gaza or the facts of Gillham’s comments, but about whether the MSO was within its rights to cancel the concert. Ultimately, Justice Hill found that MSO was entitled to protect its business in this way, and that there is a longstanding ‘custom or practice’ that artists and performers be expected not to express their political views onstage.
Gillham Vs the MSO – quick links
Gillham vs the MSO: can art be ‘non-political’?
It’s worth asking whether there really is such a custom, or how far it extends. Spend enough time on social media and you’ll certainly see actors being told to ‘stick to acting’, and musicians being told to ‘stick music’, by people who don’t like their politics. But artists using their visibility and platform to speak – either in the service of power or against it – is as old as art itself.
Even if you don’t agree that ‘everything is political‘, plenty of artworks contain politics that audiences, and even performers, might not recognise. Once you read Shakespeare’s Macbeth as propaganda justifying the then-recent accession of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne, you can’t quite see it the same way ever again. The same thing happens the moment you see Hamilton as a Macbeth for the Obama presidency, reading a multiracial liberal America back into a foundation of slavery and white supremacy.
We might reply that instrumental music is different because it is a non-representational artform. Music (as opposed to lyrics) cannot stand for objects or concepts in the way images and words can.
Of course music can try to capture the feeling of a particular time or place or emotion. Take Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The composer has long been praised for capturing the mood of each season in the four movements of the work. But if you heard The Four Seasons without knowing the title, you wouldn’t hear it and think ‘Ah, this is about autumn’.
Gillham vs the MSO: bearing witness
Likewise, you could listen to Witness, the piece D’Netto wrote for Gillham, without realising that it’s dedicated to the journalists of Gaza. According to D’Netto’s artist statement, the piece is in fact about precisely the issue the whole MSO affair raises:
‘A friend of mine recently said that they were trying to mentally reframe “doomscrolling” as “bearing witness”, and that really resonates with me. At a minimum, it is each of our responsibility to bear witness, and to not forget.’
Witness is a slow, elegiac piece, but punctuated by insistent, dissonant chords that you almost have to fight against to stay with the flow of the music. After a while you start to expect them, but bracing yourself doesn’t make them any less jarring.
It’s not hard to see the idea here: our lives are constantly interrupted by horrors that we try instinctively to shut out. But we can’t – and we mustn’t. As D’Netto puts it, ‘Though our gut reaction might be to look away, to hide from it for the sake of our individual mental health, we cannot afford to.’
The MSO claimed Gillham’s on-stage comments in Sydney were ‘an intrusion of personal political views on what should have been a morning focused on a program of works for solo piano’. But just as Macbeth meant more things to a politically informed Jacobean theatregoer than it might to us now, Witness should be heard in its context; what it is about, and what it is for.
Gillham vs the MSO: custom vs duty
Even if, as the Federal Court found, there is a ‘custom’ of not using performances to speak on political issues, should artists be bound to respect it? Might they even be morally obliged to violate that custom – and if so, when?
Gillham frames his court action in terms of freedom from censorship, and ensuring artists can ‘be themselves on stage’. But many artists might also insist that, morally speaking, they have no choice but to speak out. Martin Luther supposedly declared to the Diet of Worms: ‘Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders (Here I stand, I can do no other).’ Such moral necessity is costly; it can make people lose their careers and even their lives.
That contradicts the marketplace’s emphasis on satisfying preferences. At the heart of the MSO’s argument is an appeal to what its audiences want, which in turn goes to how it protects its business. Gillham and D’Netto might well reply that this is precisely the point: we must not look away from suffering, even when we’d rather just have a nice evening at the concert hall.
Of course, every decision to use a platform to highlight one cause necessarily involves leaving out others. There are always more things that deserve our attention than we have bandwidth for, and no perfectly calibrated scale for triaging our moral concern. That’s a legitimate problem, but it can also be used to fuel bad-faith ‘whataboutism’ too.
Sheet music often includes a tempo or mood instruction at the top. The score for Witness tells the performer to play ‘with weighty commitment’. Gillham has clearly lived up to that demand. Can the MSO, whatever the legal outcome, honestly say the same?
