The Gillham Affair: Artistic Freedom in an Age of Hypocrisy

“Cowards! Why did you not defend him?” Such were the last public words spoken by Maximilien Robespierre. Confidence in the leadership of this French revolutionary had begun to wain by 1794, particularly following his unpopular and, ultimately, fatal decision to purge Georges Danton. “The blood of Danton chokes you!” supposedly quipped Garnier de l’Aube as the National Convention’s jeers choked Robespierre, mere days before his execution. “Danton!” spat the Jacobin, summoning his strength. “You regret Danton? Cowards! Why did you not defend him?”

It is beyond the scope of Quadrant Music to begin excavating the Reign of Terror, even if this bloody historical episode did popularise many songs, from Rouget de Lisle’s Marseillaise to Grétry’s royalist lament from Richard Cœur-de-lion (1784), “Ô Richard, ô mon roi.” But, over the last couple of months, I have found cause to recall Robespierre’s fall with increasing vividness. In his final challenge to l’Aube, he chastises neither Danton nor himself but, effectively, the mob—the radicalised manpower through which he had exercised total control, and which was now condemning him to death. This, then, is the irony of Robespierre’s fate, as it is the irony of his modern-day incarnation: the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO).

In August this year, the Australian pianist Jayson Gillham (above) played a recital under the MSO’s banner at Melbourne’s Iwaki Auditorium. Gillham’s publicly-advertised program consisted of works which reflect his musical interests: Beethoven’s Waldstein (1804); Ligeti’s first book of études (1985); Fauré’s Sixth Nocturne (1894); and Chopin’s Opus 10 études, published in 1833. During the recital, Gillham announced that he would perform an additional work, a short piece titled Witness, written by the Brisbane-based Connor D’Netto, and offered the following remarks to his audience:

Over the last ten months, Israel has killed more than one hundred Palestinian journalists. A number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets. The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world. In addition to the role of journalists who bear witness, the word witness in Arabic is shaheed, which also means ‘martyr’.

This pronouncement set off a cascade of events. The MSO issued a statement declaring its stage to be not a platform for the expression of “personal political views” and, subsequently, cancelled an upcoming performance of Gillham’s with the orchestra. This generated public furore, which, in turn, led to the reversal of Gillham’s cancellation, which led to the MSO’s board forcing the resignation of managing director Dr Sophie Galaise, which led to Galaise taking to the Australian’s front page to air her laundry. At the time of writing, the Gillham Affair continues to evolve.

The Gillham Affair has, albeit for all the wrong reasons, generated nation-wide interest in Australia’s arts. Over time, perhaps subconsciously emulating the behaviour of stakeholders, commentators’ perspectives have warped. Take, for instance, the rather trite review of the MSO’s September concert of Smetana, Dvořák and Bruckner, which proclaimed, among other things, that because, “on two separate occasions”, mobile phones had rung during the performance, the public lacked “faith in the [orchestra’s] decision making”. I am also of a mind to disagree with the increasingly broad decrees that are now issuing from conservative circles. The Institute of Public Affairs’ John Roskam wrote for the Financial Review, “Great art is powerful because it transcends politics.” In my estimation, that is not true; the relationship between art and politics is especially nuanced, as are the inevitable issues which are born from this relationship.

What I should like to do, then, is refocus attention on the concrete facts of the Gillham Affair. From there, I address what I perceive to be the most critical lesson of this epic drama: that artistic freedom in Australia does not presently exist and that it must be restored for Australian art, artists and society to thrive.

Act I: Should Gillham have done it?

My answer is: on balance, no, he should not have said what he said and played what he played. But I arrive at this conclusion not through a desire to repress Gillham’s free speech; indeed, I should like our nation to speak its mind more frequently, as it did, courageously, during the Voice to Parliament referendum, in the face of immense political, corporate and rhetorical pressures to do otherwise. Rather, other metrics inform my judgment.

The first thing to consider is that Witness was an unadvertised addition to Gillham’s recital. Former Radio National presenter and Quadrant contributor Rachael Kohn states that, in her view, whilst performers are “free to contribute to political debate in the public square, they are not free to exploit a ‘captive audience’, who have paid to see them perform a specific role”. It seems to me to be a kind of contractual reality that when a concertgoer purchases their ticket, they do so based upon a finite number of expectations and that those expectations can only be strained so far. If one dislikes the music of Brahms, or Schönberg, or Taylor Swift, one is not likely to purchase a ticket to a concert of their works. If those members of Gillham’s audience who took issue with Witness and its accompanying remarks had been forewarned of its inclusion, they may simply have been content not to attend the recital. I empathise with any audience that feels “captive” during unexpected remarks, of any political flavour—or, even, expected remarks. There are few patrons who would give up the experience of live music because today’s operas, ballets and symphonies commence with a welcome to country. But that is not at all to suggest that, collectively, we patrons approve of these ideological preambles.

Second, what artistic sense did it make to include Witness alongside the other pieces in Gillham’s program? Even the most talented musicologist would struggle to establish a convincing relationship between D’Netto’s piece and Beethoven’s Waldstein. Musically, in craft, style and mood, as well as in extra-musical theme, the two works are alien to one another.  The same could be said of Witness and the included Fauré. The twelfth of Chopin’s Opus 10 études, colloquially styled the “Revolutionary Étude”, might offer some kind of tenuous narrative complement to Witness. The late-twentieth-century études by Ligeti themselves seem, at first glance, out of place against a program of Beethoven, Fauré and Chopin, but these études do bear a greater resemblance to D’Netto’s aesthetic. Witness is of little interest to me. What begins as a pulse-like elegy quickly achieves a degree of predictability, even despite interjections of highly pitched cluster chords, which, though occurring irregularly, themselves lose their surprise before long. I am no minimalist, so it is reasonable enough that Witness does not appeal to me. Ultimately, my suggestion is that Gillham was politically, not artistically, motivated to include D’Netto’s piece.

In any case, and third, what has never been discussed throughout the Gillham Affair, as far as I can ascertain, is the actual validity of the claims with which Gillham prefaced Witness. Douglas Murray has said about this Gazan war:

There’s only two ways to be in Gaza. One is to be embedded with the [Israel Defense Forces], as I’ve been. And the other is to have [the] permission of Hamas. Hamas are not very good hosts … So, most of the Western media rely on journalists who are Gazans—all of whom are operating under Hamas restrictions at best and most of whom are [usually] Hamas supporters.

Gillham’s remarks imply that Israeli forces have deliberately killed more than one hundred Palestinian journalists. To adopt Murray’s informed scepticism would be to question the complete accuracy of that inference. The possibility that at the heart of the Gillham Affair lies an erroneous statement is, it seems, distinct.

Intermission: Devaluing donors

Throughout the Gillham Affair, I have not understood, projected from some artistic quarters, the ire towards the orchestra’s donor class, many of whom are Jewish. In an essay for the online website ArtsHub Australia, Samuel Cairnduff asserted that cultural institutions “find themselves caught between competing loyalties [to] audiences [and] donors”. That Cairnduff draws a distinction between those who pay hundreds of dollars for their season passes and those who generously give tens of thousands is problematic in itself. Ultimately, whether standard concertgoer or magnanimous benefactor, we are all stakeholders in our cultural institutions, providing what we can when we can. More, the two camps are not mutually exclusive; audience members can evolve into donors, and donors usually attend the performances they finance. In my experience, wealthy individuals who simply strive for tax concessions make their donations to impersonal, conglomerate charities, whereas patrons of the arts are more invested in what they are sponsoring.

If a person gives large amounts of money to an organisation—and, importantly, that organisation continues to accept that money—then the notion that the person does not achieve for themselves, at the very least, a degree of influence over the organisation is ridiculous. The Australian Jewish Association put the matter succinctly: “If the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra wants to engage in anti-Israel activism, why on earth would Jewish donors continue to support them?” To rephrase the question, have our legacy cultural institutions become so conceited that they simply expect philanthropic leviathans, like the Besen Family and Myer foundations, to disinterestedly hand their money over in the name of art?

Throughout history, individual artists have relied upon private patrons. There would have been no Wagner without Ludwig II of Bavaria and no Tchaikovsky without Nadezhda von Meck. Without Paul Sacher, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Honegger’s Fourth Symphony would likely not exist. Only in the last fifty or so years, and especially in Australia, have “professionalised” cultural institutions imposed themselves as intermediaries between artists and financial stability. Some individuals, like Kim Williams, now chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, have contributed to breaking this impasse through privately commissioning Australian composers. I wonder if this decentralised model could be more widely implemented. In the wake of the Gillham Affair, trusts and foundations have cause to re-evaluate whether their generosity is best served by Australia’s cultural institutions, as opposed to individual artists of their own choosing. Both history and, I think, the present trajectory of Western art suggest the latter to be the more fruitful path. And, today, the Australian Cultural Fund provides accredited Australian artists with the necessary infrastructure to collect tax-deductible donations.

Act II: Politics, hypocrisy and freedom

Ultimately, the mistake that the MSO has made, and continues to make, from its board to its management to even its musicians, is to fight the Gillham Affair as if suffering from amnesia. For the orchestra to declare that its stage is not a platform for “personal political views” is incredible when each of its performances begins with a specially-commissioned welcome to country, written by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon. On the night of the Voice to Parliament referendum, the MSO performed Cheetham Fraillon’s Eumeralla, a War Requiem for Piece. This ninety-minute work takes for its extra-musical subject Australia’s so-called frontier wars and continues to be programmed by Australia’s orchestras. During the MSO’s October 14 performance, Cheetham Fraillon did not hesitate to share her personal political views on stage as news of the referendum’s defeat entered Hamer Hall, and the MSO, having already endorsed those views when the orchestra unconditionally embraced the Uluru Statement from the Heart, offered no objections during or after the fact. Cheetham Fraillon is serving a five-year term as the MSO’s inaugural First Nations Creative Chair; with her appointment to that post, she said:

Here is [the MSO] saying, “We have been on these lands of the Kulin Nations for 114 years, and what must that have been like 114 years ago for those people who were actively being disposed of their lands? And how do we mend that history and make a strong future?”

It seems to me that a large extent of Cheetham Fraillon’s remit at the MSO is to advance personal political views.

Historically, the orchestra has engaged in the expression of other such views. It participates in Mob Tix; that is, a discount ticketing scheme for Aboriginal Australians, as well as “Māori, Pasifika and First Nations people from other countries”. In 2017, it publicly voiced support for same-sex marriage. Upon taking part in the United Nations’ Beethoven Pastoral Project on World Environment Day in 2020, it said it sought to “inspire [Melbourne] to take a stance on climate change”. Also in 2020, it signed up to Keychange, a radical gender equality movement that, amongst many other things, demands that “elements of care” are incorporated “within work ethics to reduce competitiveness” (in other words, attack merit) and that “cis-men” take “proactive” responsibility to address “the [music] industry’s gender problem” (like, presumably, finding new jobs).

Based upon this history I cannot summon any sympathy for the ousted Sophie Galaise. Galaise has recently argued in the Australian that her dismissal as the MSO’s managing director was “not fair” and that the orchestra “should be a platform that is neutral and that focuses on doing good music”. Yet she was appointed in 2016 and presided over all the above political interventions. What did she think would come to pass when she took exception to Gillham’s actions after cultivating a concert-going community receptive to her radical smorgasbord? Even Galaise’s pleading of her case before the court of public opinion contradicts a directive she issued in 2020, which warned, “Speaking to the media can have a damaging impact on the MSO’s reputation.”

Nevertheless, the MSO’s long-standing dalliance with identity politics, climate change and gender equality is not entirely of Galaise’s own making. The fault lies with governments, and seriously so with the Albanese government. Here is but one example. In 2025, the MSO is set to derive approximately $12.8 million from the National Performing Arts Partnership Framework, the Commonwealth’s cultural investment fund that is administered by Creative Australia. The framework’s fine print specifies that a funded arts institution’s “strategic plan and proposed activities” must have some “alignment … with governments’ priorities.” One such priority is: “Developing First Nations arts and increasing … representation within programming, new works, organisational workforce and leadership”. Another is the removal of “barriers” to improve “performance across key diversity areas (including disability, gender, LGBTIQ+, age and cultural diversity) in arts practice, programming, employment, education, training, engagement and participation”. Whilst another priority is that institutions conduct regional, remote and international touring, it is far easier for the cumbersome orchestral beast merely to signal its virtue than it is to take Mahler into the outback.

More, governments’ ideological pressures are immense; the first actionable clause within Tony Burke’s ill-named national cultural policy, Revive: A Place for Every Story, a Story for Every Place, is to “implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full”. Consider, too, the September diktat from the Minister for Sport (my local member) that the boards of national sporting organisations must now meet gender quotas, “with government funding to be withheld from … organisations that do not comply”. If the Commonwealth is content to police Australian sports in this way, I fear we may count the days until the same fanaticism is imposed upon the arts.

All that the MSO—or, indeed, any cultural institution beholden to the “priorities” attached to state funding—need do is find the courage to explain to the voting public exactly how it is being held to ransom by ideology. But it will not do this, and not only because such bravery would incur the wrath of governments. My thesis is that, in fact, cultural institutions do not mind their ransom prices, so long as those prices continue to constitute left-leaning, virtuous agendas. Is this thesis corroborated by the MSO’s appointment of former Labor arts minister Peter Garrett to chair a review of the orchestra in the light of the Gillham Affair? Garrett himself would suggest so, announcing, “Performing arts organisations are facing complex issues around freedom of expression whilst maintaining long-term sustainability in a dynamic and, increasingly, highly charged environment.” That is, cultural institutions must formulate a strategy to continue their chosen left-leaning, virtuous agendas (“maintaining long-term sustainability”) without getting caught out, like the MSO (“complex issues”). The review, from its onset, is set to yield partisan conclusions.

Here, again, manifests the hypocrisy of Robespierre. That certain institutional quarters have invoked the ideal of artistic freedom throughout the Gillham Affair is to ignore the fact that those same quarters have contributed to the serious decline of artistic freedom. A recent 140-page report, Unpopular Opinions: Academic Freedom in New Zealand, by Dr James Kierstead has conclusively found, for example, that academic freedom in New Zealand has collapsed. The report cites university administrators as chiefly at fault, stating, “Administrators seem to assume that … if they allow academics to dissent from the orthodoxy, that’s going to hurt their university brand.” The same could be said, generally, about the boards and managements of Australia’s cultural institutions. To conform with the centralised priorities of a miserly government, or to conform with any ideology at the expense of merit and authenticity, and then to impose that same conformity upon others, is no artistic freedom.

It is possible that many of those musicians, unions and community advocates rising to Gillham’s defence are doing so because they feel the pianist’s now-evident flavour of politics—being, quietly, their own flavour of politics—is what is threatened, rather than the broader concept of artistic freedom. Would these same allies rise if, for instance, the shoe had been on the other foot and Gillham had included an unadvertised in memoriam to the Israelis murdered on October 7? I can find no evidence of the MSO’s musicians publicly organising, as they have amidst the Gillham Affair, to decry the orchestra’s embrace of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Mob Tix, climate change, and so on.

Recall the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s treatment of Barry Humphries, its own founder, in the later years of his life. Festival director Susan Provan openly admitted, “We can celebrate Barry’s artistic genius while not much liking some of his views.” But the renaming of the Barry Award constitutes nothing akin to a celebration of Humphries’s legacy. This duplicitous prejudice is endemic throughout Australia’s arts.

It is not politics that music must rise above but, rather, the political hypocrisy which dominates much of the West’s cultural infrastructure. Great art is not always political, but it can be, and we should not shy away from great art that is—such as Rule Britannia or Finlandia. More importantly, art is not always great, especially art that preoccupies itself with extra-artistic concerns. One consequence of the Gillham Affair is that, in my opinion, a fairly by-the-by piece has achieved national prominence through little to no consideration of its musical value. The same could be said of Eumeralla by Cheetham Fraillon. By artificially inflating the success of certain artworks—or, worse, artists themselves—meritorious voices are deliberately ignored. This is an erosion of free artistry.

Can patrons of the arts—or taxpayers, for that matter—truly declare that they are satisfied with the state of culture in Australia? The answer, I think, is self-evident. The Gillham Affair has exposed many of the underlying hypocrisies plaguing legacy institutions like the MSO. In turn, these hypocrisies affect what artwork by which artist is presented to the public, as well as what artwork by which artist the public’s taxes are required to subsidise. The Gillham Affair provides the impetus for a royal commission into the ideological, financial and foreign abuses in the arts. A judicial inquiry would, I think, go a long way towards reasserting the primacy of merit, authenticity and artistic freedom. Even a royal commission would not be any more expensive than the present cultural toll Australia is paying.

Alexander Voltz is a composer and the founding editor of Quadrant Music. Recently, his orchestral work “Dunrossil Elms” won the Symphonic Category of the 19th George Enescu International Competition