JAMES STRECKER: If you were asked for 50 words for an encyclopedia to summarize what you do, or have done, in the arts, what would you say?
ELIZABETH RUMSEY: Ensemble musician; my instrument is the Viola da Gamba in all its various forms. I play music of the last seven centuries (mostly 16th and 17th), and together with my colleagues use the different voices of the instruments of those times to bring clarity to the music and make it more approachable for modern audiences.
JS: What important beliefs do you express in or through your work?
ER: Playing music that has no audio-recorded history throws up some challenges, and all of us who play this music have slightly different reasons for using the historically-informed-performance approach. Mine is that I love this type of music, and I personally get more out of it the better I understand it. I also enjoy the way things like reading from original notation or playing instruments with technical and tonal constraints provide a method of communication that is absent when these small paths of resistance are not there, and add colour which can be woven into the performance. Playing with this philosophy inevitably involves compromise – none of us has been trained in the way that a 17th-century musician was, or has the capability or even opportunity to think like them, since we must always switch between styles and eras. What defines our personal approach is where we choose to put those compromises, and I do believe that any approach is valid as long as it has a reason; this is what will make it convincing.
JS: Name two people, living or dead, whom you admire a great deal and tell us why for each one.
ER: My husband David Rumsey, who died a year ago. He was an incredible musician in every way – a performer, teacher, researcher, consultant, conductor and composer. Uncompromising in expectations and yet with a great depth of humour (he had a lot of affection for Percy Grainger, if only for the piece that obliged David in his capacity as organist to play the ukulele with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra), he was also very generous with his time and knowledge, and many of the messages or letters I received after he died were reminiscences in that vein. He had a great knack for connecting different aspects of life, and many of his ex-students will remember his insisting, when they were travelling through Europe to hear and play different organs, that they also experience things like the local cuisine, architecture and language, to better appreciate the instruments and associated music. I especially admired that he was constantly open to new ideas, never dogmatic or snobbish about his research, and ferocious in pursuit of knowledge, whether it be the interpretation of a hundred-year-old recording or the best way to get a good espresso out of our coffee machine.
The second is my mother, Sue Jones. As new immigrants to Australia with two small unwilling children in tow, my parents had to start again from almost nothing, and even through what must have been extremely difficult times she maintained an atmosphere of great creativity at home, and encouraged me and my sister to do everything in that line that we could think of. She is a pianist and cellist, teaching the piano to children and adults and playing a very active role as a cellist in the amateur chamber music and orchestral world, so that I grew up playing in all sorts of different ensembles and with many different types of musicians.
JS: How have you changed since you began to do creative work?
ER: I realised relatively recently that a worthwhile performance will only come from my believing what I am doing at that moment.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?
ER: Keeping sight of the fact that what we do is indeed important; it sometimes seems, when looking at what is happening outside this little bubble of art music, that it’s immoral to spend so much time and energy on something which isn’t actively helping to fix at least one of the innumerable serious problems faced by pretty much everyone else.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life.
ER: I travelled with my husband to Portugal in 1999, and we visited my godfather there. He took us to a little basilica near his village, and in this intricately decorated church – not a single bit of the wall inside was not gilded, painted or tiled – were two very small 17th century organs. One was completely unplayable, but David was able to play the other one for a few minutes, and it was the first time I’d knowingly heard a historic instrument of any sort. Since then I have heard and even played many more historical instruments of various types, and it’s always enlightening in some way or other.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about what you do?
ER: Perhaps that it never stops? To have music as a profession means that it becomes a lens through which you see everything else. I look at a 17th century painting of the Nativity in which there are angels around the crib, and think “Why are you all just standing there? Where are your instruments?” (so that I can count the strings, of course). And by training yourself to listen, you ensure that you can only shut it off with difficulty. Background music in a restaurant is something that you have to listen to, however bad it is. If you are sailing, the rigging sings at different pitches when the wind changes; a German train plays a scale as it accelerates; a church bell chimes the quarter hour in an uncomfortable tuning. And in another sense, it never stops because there is always more work to be done, something to read or a piece to learn more thoroughly, preferably yesterday.
Another thing that has come up occasionally is that some people think the scope of my repertoire is limited. They see what I do as only a small part of “classical music” (which in itself is a small type of music, right?), so how much time can that take up, really? I don’t think I can even begin to answer that.
JS: How and why did you begin to do creative work in the first place?
ER: I don’t think it was ever really a choice. Because I played various instruments as far back as I remember – apparently when my sister started learning the violin, I pestered my parents until I was also allowed to play, and a thousand thanks to them for putting up with a 3-year-old hacking away at a tin violin – it’s always been a background to my life. Even though I went through stages of wanting to do various other things, when I went to university there was no question of doing anything other than music as a main study, and of aiming to be a professional musician. If things ever get a bit difficult, I can remind myself that I’m pretty lucky to be paid for doing something that I would do anyway.
JS: What haven’t you attempted as yet that you would like to do and please tell us why?
ER: There is an infinite number of things I would still like to do! I haven’t attempted them yet because I was doing something else, and I will get to as many of them as possible before I die.
JS: What are your most meaningful achievements?
ER: I can’t point to anything specific, but to be a part of a musical ensemble, however big or small, is something very special.
JS: What advice would you give a young person who would like to do what you do?
ER: As hypocritical as it may sound, given that being a musician is the only thing I do, I would say: make sure you can do something else as well. A parallel strand of interest and income is something that many musicians opt for later in their careers, and if you can train for another profession simultaneously, it will probably save a lot of effort later on. Even if you don’t use it, no outside knowledge is wasted.
JS: Of what value are critics?
ER: Any musical circle has a tendency to be rather self-referencing, so it’s good to get an outside perspective. We might not agree with the review – I think everyone knows whether or not they have played or sung well – but it’s very important to know how it reaches the audience.
JS: What do you ask of your audience?
ER: Don’t throw tomatoes? If I’m doing my job properly, nobody should need to ask anything!
JS: What specifically would you change about what goes on in the world and the arts?
ER: Difficult to say how it could realistically be changed … what would benefit the arts is effectively the same as what would benefit many other things in society; less focus on making things cost-effective, more on rewarding excellence (even if it is not necessarily obvious), avoiding the idea that elitism is necessarily bad (snobbishness, yes; pursuit of the best possible result, no), put money into the small things that need help rather than the big things which basically fund themselves.
JS: If you could relive one experience from your creative life, what would it be and why would you do so?
ER: I registered for my husband David when he played the Trois Danses by Jehan Alain in Trondheim, many years ago. Normally I avoid doing that because for a non-organist it’s incredibly stressful, but in that case, we had enough time to rehearse, and the music is so complex that you almost need to be involved to understand it. I don’t think there is a recording of him playing that set of pieces, and I would like to hear it again.
JS: Tell us what it feels like to be a figure who is presented somehow in the media. What effect does this presence have on you?
ER: I’m probably cheating with this question, since I avoid most social media. I do appreciate that it’s important for a lot of people, but I would dearly love for music to be a medium that is only, ever, live. There has been some interesting research into the effect of recording on performance practice in the last hundred years, and it’s pretty clear that live music is very different to recorded music, and the recording industry has substantially changed audience expectations and the way that musicians present any sort of performance.
JS: Name two places you would like to visit, one you haven’t been to and one to experience again and briefly tell us why
ER: A place to visit again would be the Whitsunday Islands on the Great Barrier reef, because it’s a beautiful place and quite possibly doomed by government greed and ineptitude. Somewhere I haven’t been yet but always wanted to is the island of Flores in the Azores. There is something very appealing about that group of islands in their splendid isolation, in the middle of the ocean and yet directly in the path of so much travel over so many centuries.
JS: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on, are preparing, or have recently completed. Why do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?
ER: One of my instruments is the Lira da Gamba, or Lirone. This is an instrument which was used mostly in Italy and southern Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, to accompany laments and melancholy texts, and invocations to the gods. It probably originated in Italy as a larger version of the Lira da Braccia, but what we have now are mostly reconstructions of later instruments (c.1600) and I am working on finding that earliest incarnation of the instrument, with its particular tunings and way of accompanying singers. It’s a very small corner of historical performance practice, but does contain some extraordinarily beautiful music which I think is worth opening up to the particular colour of the early lira da gamba.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
ER: There seems to be a significant diminishing in public support of the arts, which is rather depressing, but there is also more widespread grassroots support through crowdfunding sources and the like. So, the old system of patronage is being revived in a very democratic way! It would be much better for us to be able to rely on government funding, but this harks back to an earlier question – without significant political change in other areas it seems unlikely that the arts will be given much priority in the near future.
JS: Finally, what do you yourself find to be the most intriguing and/or surprising thing about you?
ER: How do you answer that when it’s not about someone else? I rather hope that by now there are no more surprises …