A new book by Bob Ellis

What are we here for?

In this extract from his new book, Bob Ellis faces the music.

'Bare Ruin'd Choirs Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang'

By Bob Ellis

The film shows Boyd, Professor of Music at Sydney University, trying to save a way of life, and a way of teaching music, while the bean-counters try to end it. They cut back the money she has to work with, and she copes with that; then they suddenly halve what's left.

And she changes mightily, from a dour shy keyboard academic to a placard-waving disrupter of traffic and an edgy smiling wooer of corporate money to carry on.

And all in vain. We watch her bring to an end, with a breaking heart, her choir first, then her opera studies, then her advanced counterpoint, Stravinsky studies, Japanese music, orchestration. She cuts the cost of the piano-tuner. She is harried and quarrelsome and always in crisis. And she only gets ten days that year to write Jesus Reassures His Mother, her choir piece on the crucifixion. Her department associate, Winsome Evans (vexed, red-faced, overweight, storming in and out), who has been there thirty years, has a heart attack. Both of them take on extra teaching, unpaid. In a startling scene Boyd in frustration damns the work of a mild young female pupil who then in tears rips up her own composition.

And much good music is never written, and hearts are broken, and careers aborted, and the innocent suffer and grieve, and no good comes of any of it as the numbers are crunched and egos smashed and dreams sent withering into the void.

In the same week as the film came out Jodee Rich of One.Tel, a company he'd helped ruin, tried to tiptoe away with seven million dollars, enough to fund Boyd's deficit a hundred times over. But his achievement, of course, was so much greater. He wooed a few Telstra customers to a rival hook-up that failed. She by contrast only enlarged the feeling heart of humankind and passed on ways of doing it. She must therefore be punished with whips and scorpions and he enriched beyond the dreams of all who dance and revel around the Golden Calf. He is clearly the more deserving. And his, alas, is the doctrine that will prevail.

Facing the Music is among the finest documentaries lately made (surpassed easily the director's previous work, Rats in the Ranks), in part because it asks the fairly important question of what we are here on earth for, and how it can be measured.

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