Truth be told

This performance had me in a right quandary. There were so many issues to mull over and recoil from and despair of. I could have expected such a thing from our local group, A Chorus of Women. Their first performance was at Parliament House in 2003 in protest against the Iraq War. Not that it did any good, like the other protests, despite no WMDs and clear evidence against them from UN investigations at the time. And this performance was at the War Memorial, in the presence of its retiring head, a minister in the government that sent Australia to that very war. He introduced the concert by talking of a new exhibition about peacekeeping under an intrusive, illuminated sign for the sponsor of the theatre, itself a weapons producer. He announced that the peacekeeping exhibition will become permanent with the $500m AWM expansion which has been met with such disapproval, this being democracy and all. ACOW gave an abridged presentation, part concert, mostly slide-supported discussion, on the women's movement for peace around WW1. The full work was performed a year-or-so ago as The Peoples' Passion by Glenda Cloughley. Glenda was a major participant this day, too. Johanna McBride conducted. The choir is ~16 mature women, here accompanied by Lucus Allerton, John Smiles and Chris Latham. They took us through the stories of Jane Adams and the Traumatine March, Vida Goldstein, Eglantyne Jebb and various others, the 1915 International Congress of Women and its unanimous resolutions and their influence on the League of Nations, Julia Grace Wales and the Wisconsin Plan, the blockade and starvation in German/Austrian Europe after WW1 and the formation of the Save the Children fund. They spoke to the like-minded, introduced stories that are sadly little known, welcomed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. So my quandaries? That our marches and actions have such little influence; that we can so easily drop into tribal thought and speech (I have a go at the Left for this, being as I am a privileged, white, boomer male); that all this happened here, at the AWM, once so pure, increasingly a tool for the culture wars; that the welcome to country was so heartfelt while AWM refuses to recognise our own frontier wars. ACOW is for the good but I'm not sure how much change they can influence. Nor the rest of us given climate, Iraq, housing, NBN, subs, robodebt [now found illegal!] ... and SM's recent election victory. Nonetheless, I wish them well.

A Chorus of Women performed at the Australian War Memorial under Johanna McBride (conductor).

Small chorus of women

It continues to surprise me that new musical groups come out of the woodwork. This one was the Chorus of Women. It’s a simple descriptive name, so maybe that’s why I didn’t remember them, but this group is quite a celebrity and has been performing for a decade. It first sang at Parliament House in March 2003 when 150 women gathered to protest Australia’s entry into Gulf War II. We all know it made no difference, despite a massive movement around the world and the obvious deceptions (think aluminium tubes and portable chemical factories and many more). But this group got a feature on the ABC’s 7.30 Report and Phillip Adams described them as “the most controversial chorus in Australian history” and they have since appeared in theatres and pubs and universities and toured Australia and Bulgaria so they are renowned.

They come from a folk tradition and are non-adversarial and specifically claim lineage from the ancient choruses that spoke truth to power. We certainly need some of that. This concert featured a quartet from the larger choir. They introduced and sang nine songs and an encore over ~40 minutes, so some tunes were surprisingly short. This was four female voices, honest lyrics and original songs, accompanied by occasional guitar and bodrhan and recorder, predominantly triple times, frequent drones, sweet harmonies, some counterpoint, scales that sounded of the middle East or Scotland or olde England, Bulgarian female ululations. It’s not a music I normally hear, but I’m sure it’s common at the folk festival and vigils of all sorts. It’s honest and true and quite lovely, but I’m not sure it communicates too well these days. The audience was quite grey and I noticed a wry smile from a 20-something passing through the foyer. Despite my boomer status, it was too earnest and folksy for my tastes, but then I’m more ‘70’s than ‘60’s and I prefer Motown to Neil Young. But I admire Leonard Cohen and I can respect these singers and enjoy their skills and I respect what they stand for and highly regard that they stand for anything. So few of us do these days. It may be communitarian and folksy and it’s not the way of the Shiny Bums or the Cashews, but it’s immediately democratic and that’s citizenship in action (even if, in practice, it’s rolled by corporate lobbying). They sing of poverty and peace and Canberra’s fire and Gaia and they strive for wisdom and they are an open choir and welcoming (although I'm not sure where blokes stand in this openness) and they had some lovely soaring female voices, so all good.

A quartet from the Chorus of Women performed in the National Library foyer for the Canberra 100 Musical Offering. The quartet comprised Judith Clingan (soprano, recorder, drum), Meg Rigby (soprano, guitar flute), Johanna McBride (mezzo soprano) and Glenda Cloughley (alto). BTW, the stone from the Pantainos Library in the Agora, Athens, was a gift of the Greek Government to Australia. It’s embedded below one of the columns in the NLA’s foyer.

Chorus of Women website