Interpreter of culture,conveyor of feel: Peter Beilharz’s musicality

I remember my first two Beilharz moments. I had only recently made the transition from a life in music to academia, when my teacher, Maria Markus, slid a slim volume across the table. It was Peter’s edited collection Social Theory: A Guide to Central Thinkers (Beilharz, 1992) containing his chapters on Althusser, Marx and Weber. Some years later, at the annual ISA conference in Brisbane, I witnessed my first Beilharz performance. A discussant referred to Peter’s ‘generosity’ concerning comments he had made on someone’s paper – a characteristic generosity that, as it turned out, was to enrich my own academic journey.

Then came other readings. Among them, Imagining the Antipodes (Beilharz, 1997), that beautiful homage to Bernard Smith, and the essays collected in Thinking the Antipodes (Beilharz, 2015), work on Zygmunt Bauman including Intimacy in Postmodern Times (Beilharz, 2020), which beyond its open-hearted portrayal of the friendship with Bauman sketches transatlantic/-pacific collegial friendships – strong bonds cultivated in a university system that had yet to embrace disruptive managerialism and the intellectual sacrifices it presaged. Time and again I was struck by something in his writing, in his interpretive accomplishments: I could hear something. And, it wasn’t just between the lines but the lines themselves. I could, it seemed, hear their music.

On page 109 of Intimacy in Postmodern Times (Beilharz, 2020) there is a photo of a young Peter sitting behind his drum kit. Half-open mouth, a shaded eye, flowing hair (imagine it moving in time with the groove), Peter is in the zone. He is inside music, entranced but not gone; present, serenely focused, yet not sealed in his own bubble. He is of the space musicians as creative co-listeners make as they respond to sonic energies in a timeless present that owes its very significance to era and styles, to cultural traffic, as Peter Beilharz, the interpreter of culture, might say. Most of all that image, hinting at no more than the sense of the moment, is a reminder that Peter knows that space; that he has not only been enveloped by it but has also woven its delicate fabric together with others to create something that, as with love, cognition fails to grasp, something that holds out to us a promise of the sacred – music.

And how can that experience ever leave you? It cannot and doesn’t. Its echoes remain as guiding resonances inside and outside of music. No mere illusion, the experience functions as a kind of ‘yardstick of freedom’ (Heller, 1985: 304), as a utopia tasted here in the real. As fleeting as the past itself, the experience transforms and leaves behind an ever yearned for telos. More than residual, sublimated, it permeates other modalities of communication, suffuses thought and hermeneutic pursuit. How can it not?

I was thinking along these lines when, as if to prove my point, Toward the Blues (Beilharz, 2023) arrived on my desk. I stress that this book about music came to my attention a long time after I had sensed the Beilharz musicality; it illustrates beautifully a thought I’d held for a long time. I heeded Peter’s suggestion to use this book about the Melbourne rock and blues band Chain – an exemplary product of cultural traffic between styles and genres – as a kind of score while you ‘plug in those cans and travel across time, towards the blues, close to the sun’ (Beilharz, 2023: 85). It will come as no surprise that Peter’s musicality should be most explicitly evident in this fine interpretive calibration of cultural production and social context; it is, after all, about music. But then the mandatory metaphorical rendering of music in language always also runs the risk of triteness, of profanation, of the destruction of aura. That is not the case in this piece of cultural sociology, because Peter’s musicality goes beyond his poetic diction, beyond the rhythm of his writing with its own inimitable flow and style. Although it is here, too, in his ‘trenchant prose and lucent style’, as Chris Wallace-Crabbe has it in his rollicking poem for Peter (Beilharz, 2015: x), in the easy slide from sober terminology to the colloquial – Australian modernity as ‘pimple on the arse end of world history’ (Beilharz, 2015: 11), comes to mind – and it can be sensed in his interpretations of songs in Toward the Blues, in his sense-making of cultural traffic. The interpreter and the musician are integrated in Peter Beilharz, conveyor of feel.

But what is feel? In music, it’s what musicians are judged for by their peers, and drummers foremost among them, because feel elevates metronomic time – beat – to groove. Feel urges and delays forward motion; it pushes and pulls. Genre specific, it is the temporal analogue to shifts between harmonic consonance and dissonance. Feel modulates dynamic range, choice of accent and timbre; it articulates. Feel amplifies or subdues the play of tension and release. Though a subjective capacity, feel nods to traditions, plays on collective aesthetics, on style, on ‘understood’ soundscapes – and responds.

Feel is a gift given as a reward for listening. Feel is musicality as visceral sense (Sinn); it makes music what it is: a mood-conveying medium. And ‘a mood’, after all, is ‘more infectious than an idea’ (Zeldin, 1994: 78). For the interpreter of culture, too, feel is a gift. Here, too, it is a reward for listening – for observation and reflection, for reading before writing, and for the pursuit of writing as thinking and thinking as writing. It’s a gift (Gabe) received for dedicated engagement (Hingabe). Here, too, feel transmits mood; it makes ideas infectious. When we sense it in another’s work, feel is what integrates ideas, what makes them resonate. Their cognisance on the part of the interpreter of culture becomes re-cognisable. We begin to understand.

Cultural musicality and musical sensibility meet in Peter’s uncanny ability to convey idea and mood as integrated whole. It allows him to check the pulse of cultural traffic, to get to the relational dynamism that makes place. It’s this, his very own musicality, that makes Peter Beilharz our foremost contemporary interpreter of the antipodean, conveyor of its feel. This, at least, is what I hear.

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Peter the drummer, Melbourne, 1973