Out of the ordinary: the quotidian in the music of Graeme Koehne

Abstract

This article evaluates the compositional aesthetic of the Yale-educated, Virgil Thomson-trained Australian composer Graeme Koehne (b. 1956). Focusing on three recent works by Koehne (In-Flight Entertainment, The Ringtone Cycle, and Mass for the Middle Aged), the study maps his aesthetic and praxis onto philosophical, intellectual, and aesthetic strategies aligned with the everyday, or quotidian, and its artistic expression. Philosophically, Koehne’s creative locus intersects with the idea of the ecstatic quotidian, as articulated by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Intellectually, the world that the three works inhabit can no longer be described accurately as postmodern. Koehne’s approach is to chronicle the vicissitudes of life in what Gilles Lipovetsky argues is today’s hypermodern world. Like Marc Augé in his promotion of a more anthropologically orientated supermodernity, Lipovetsky is concerned, as is Koehne, with the way we as individuals negotiate the complexities, excesses, paradoxes, and anxieties of twenty-first-century life. It is argued that Koehne’s music has much in common aesthetically with the neo-realism that has emerged in literary circles as a counterweight to postmodernism. In so doing, the essay encourages a re-evaluation of notions of postmodernity as they are applied to music.