KEY POINTS:
This week, Aucklanders can experience three evenings of the Australian Art Orchestra, a group for whom musical boundaries were made to be demolished. "We don't do things in a small way," says music director, Paul Grabowsky. "We move mountains, musically speaking."
These 19 improvising musicians have collaborated with their counterparts in South India and Bali; not in world music jam sessions, Grabowsky says, but in "highly structured explorations of other musical practices, resulting in works of considerable depth.
"Music is more powerful than we ever give it credit for," Grabowsky says. "Music can achieve dialogue where words are unequal to the task.
"The history of music in America is the reverse of American political history. In music, black music wins out over the white music and becomes the dominant paradigm, which is certainly not true of society yet."
On Friday, Ruby's Story uses music to bring us the story of Ruby Hunter who, with her husband Archie Roach, sings and narrates her tale.
"Ruby's Story is a love story as well as a metaphor for the way we treat indigenous people. It's about Archie and Ruby, incorporating some of the darker aspects of growing up as stolen children, reclaiming their identity through finding each other and having the determination to establish a meaningful existence.
"The whole issue of the stolen children is a hot potato in Australian politics. Our Government refuses to recognise it and apologise for it.
"When Aboriginal people get together, emotions are close to the surface. They have this sense of family which is linked to place. It's very intense and very moving. The way they relate to stories and share them reminds us of the way that people need to be part of each other's lives for the whole situation to improve. Aboriginal people engage with each other."
Hunter says Ruby's Story is a piece of "deep, deep feelings. There's a birthing song from the time I was born, and songs about children's games, and Archie's Took the Children Away [her husband's celebrated protest ballad of 1990], which is the centre of the piece."
Hunter, like Grabowsky, knows the power of music. "When we went overseas, Ruby's Story moved others who identified with certain songs. Children have been taken in many different ways, but people love their land and now want to identify with that land."
Saturday's Passion is the AAO's take on Bach's St Matthew Passion, although Grabowsky warns this is not a literal reading, but "a series of works based on or reacting to it from a number of perspectives".
Grabowsky's contribution is based on Bach's first chorus and incorporates everything from Outer Hebridean psalm-singing to a New Orleans funeral march.
He singles out Hunter's contribution. "Archie and Ruby add another dimension. There's something timeless when you hear Ruby sing the melody of the Bach chorale. It's like a voice speaking to you from out of the distant past and quite an extraordinary experience."
Sunday's offering is a premiere, The Hollow Air, a collaboration between Richard Nunns and composer Phillip Slater. "It's a significant transtasman collaboration and in the spirit of the cross-cultural work the AAO has been doing over the past decade," says Grabowsky.
"I don't think we have nearly enough to do musically with New Zealand. You New Zealanders punch way above your weight. It's a country we admire tremendously. It's wonderful to have such a coherent place to play. "
Nunns hints at what we might expect. "One of Phillip Slater's phrases is that it's an exploration of emptiness, a kind of interior-exterior focus.
"For me it's an exploration of the instruments I play, and the human breath as evinced when their sounds are reworked through Greg White's electronic manipulations."
Nunns chuckles at combining "Western instruments from a very dry and vast country with whispers resonating from our long, thin, lush, green, once bush-covered land".
Three nights will offer everything from the visceral, emotional songs of Ruby's Story to the mysterious soundworld of The Hollow Air all brought to life by these self-confessed larrikins from across the ditch.
"The larrikin Australian individualism has made us the improvisers we are," Grabowsky laughs. "We've had to be, we improvised our nation in a sense. We were brought here under unusual circumstances and have had to contend with significant problems.
"That irreverent Australian character is an attempt to hide something quite serious , but we Australians don't take ourselves too seriously."
Who: The Australian Art Orchestra
What: Ruby's Story
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Fri Mar 16, 7pm
What: Passion
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Sat Mar 17, 7pm
What: The Hollow Air
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Sun Mar 18, 7pm
