.. and the damn thing doesn’t understand the phrase ‘Just shut up, will you!’ People will drive of the road screaming that they can’t take any more of The Eagle’s Greatest Hits’. You can take and initiate phone calls and have your text messages read out to you. My Subaru which has a dashboard that was designed by someone who reads Manga comics and thinks that the lights of Yokohama by night are equal to the Mona Lisa does some of this and it is of some use on long commutes down the coast. But often now I leave everything off and enjoy the pleasant sound of my car depreciating.
Once upon a time a heater was an optional extra in a car, and a radio a luxury that only the owner of a top of the line De Soto or Rover could expect. Our first car didn’t even have the luxury of being able to start unless it was on a one in five slope and the doors staying on was also something that couldn’t be relied upon in the rain. Now the owner of a slightly more up market vehicle can expect a multi-channel system from exotic hi-fi manufacturers such as Mark Levinson or B&W providing a quality of musical experience that is infinitely greater than the $999 surround sound special from Hardly Normal attached to their wall sized flat screen television. Depressingly, even though their automobile has such great capability, they will listen to highly compressed sound from their player which has the depth and accuracy of a bit of string and two tin cans. The joys of MP3 compression.
But the car will start every morning so one can ease of into the next two hours of traffic jams with not a worry in the world, descending into some form of amnesiac coma that will see one waking up at the age of fifty-five redundant, divorced and in need of prostate surgery.
So good can car systems sound that I have a friend who inserts his audiophile grade hearing aids and goes out to his Audi in the carport to listen to Mozart when in need of psychic nourishment.
Get into the city or the ubiquitous malls that loom over the suburbs like serried ranks Mount Dooms and not only is there a different sound track in every shop competing with the business next door but also a visual wall of retailers each vying to stand out from its neighbour. The sound track, scent and the colour scheme instantly identify the target audience to within a lifestyle millimetre so that blindfolded I can tell you which one is possible pitched a my demographic. Very, very few by the way.
The shopping strips of old are now just as bad except that every tram that rolls by is totally covered in an advertisement as is every second car. And, as I have observed before, every sixth car is driven by a humanoid clone with his hat on back-to-front with the door panels flexing under the force of ten fifteen inch woofers. Every shop sign is deliberately at odds with its neighbour, every frontage awning and entrance desperately striving for some individuality so that everything merges into a painful cry of ‘How do I get away from here?’ Because I usually can’t find what I want – often because the outlet that you remember fondly from what seems from only a year ago - went out of business in 1984.
Some nine years ago I found myself in Venice when the Architectural Biennale was on and where the Germans in their pavilion noted that it is the interstices between ‘good’ architecture that actually define a city. The mosaic of fast food outlets, carpet warehouses, garages and opportunity shops defines the look of Australia far more than Federation Square and our varied Galleries. In much the same way that the fact that the streets are full of water defines Venice.
One of the reasons that we tend to like Paris more than Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney or Perth (apart from the food, style, art and people) is because – at least in the centre defined by the less savoury banlieue whether proche, moyen or grande - there is a rigidly defined and enforce architectural style and control of signage. The only time this happens in Australia is in some of the older inner city arcades built in the 19th Century whereas the periphery is actually far more representative of the Australian ethos. To drive into an Australian metropolis is to traverse some of the outer circles of Hell.
But as the general cacophony increases, where restaurants are too noisy to hear the person opposite you shout that your pants are on fire, I have observed that the audience for classical music is vanishing in Melbourne. This confirms my idea that we are used to sound but no longer used to music.
The last three classical music concerts to which I have been the audience filled slightly more than two thirds of the hall and was older, greyer and probably hard of hearing. And I can’t blame the concert halls, the chosen works or the orchestras. They were all world class – in fact in the case of the Australian Chamber Orchestra - arguably one of the best bands in the world. Nor can it be the price for one of the concerts cost only $30 for which I got to see eighty musicians and a chorus of equal or greater number …. so by one measure I was getting value for money way ahead a Rolling Stones concert. There were, however, no video screens, no pyrotechnics, no scantily clad dancers and no ringing ears at the end of the performance. And a couple of times the fat lady got to sing.
To which the general response is ‘Who cares? Classical music is an elitist irrelevance whose time has passed.’
Except that we are defined by our past, a past defined as much by Bach, Mozart and Philip Glass as it is by The Beatles or Benny Goodman : it is the heritage from which even the best and worst of contemporary music springs. But with musical education in schools largely ignored the prospect of a long-term audience for classical music is uncertain, an anomaly in an age where performers and orchestras alike are probably the best we have ever known.
Without knowledge of history we are fated to make the same mistakes again and again. Miley Cyrus anyone?