The discipline of a musical life laid the foundations of Kim Williams’ multi-stringed career. The pay TV boss tells Larry Schwartz about the long-running soundtrack that moves him still.
WHILE film and television make him feel Australian, Kim Williams says music made him who he is. The Foxtel chief executive who has headed the Australian pay television company for close to a decade, started out as a classical musician.
It would seem to be central to all he does: “Music has provided almost a natural prism through which I observe and perceive things . . . I always have music in my head ? I carry it around and it resonates inside me.”
Williams will reveal his favourite music when he delivers the annual Kenneth Myer lecture as 2010 Deakin University George Fairfax Fellow in Arts and Entertainment Management next week.
Williams met Fairfax, the late actor, director and arts manager, in the early 1970s, when he was “appointed as an impossibly young 20-year-old to become a foundation member of the Music Board of Australia Council”.
In his draft speech, “Growing up in Arts”, Williams says: “Put simply, music made me who I am, in my formative years,” while “film and television have enabled me to feel confidently, and frankly, passionately Australian”.
Just as passionate is his call for a continuing national investment in the arts and more private and public support for creative endeavour. “I think it’s a very, very severe problem frankly,” he says. “I think we are living through one of those periodic poor times where a degree of commitment and engagement is at a bit of a low point.”
Williams will share tales of the quick-tempered music teacher in Sydney’s western suburbs who taught elocution, pianoforte, banjo, violin, singing and music theory.
When Williams made a mistake she would push his fingers on to the banjo strings so forcefully they sometimes cut into the flesh. She told his mother his fingers were weak and urged her to soak them in brine. He remembers being “transfixed with fear when the day of the fateful music lesson approached each week”.
“No doubt my memory has exaggerated the ferocity of the dear old thing,” he says. “I don’t think she liked kids a lot.”
Williams is the elder of two children of a Greater Union “film booker and buyer”. “Dad would usually arrange a screening for my birthday parties,” he says. “Certainly there were lashings of Laurel and Hardy and that sort of thing.”
He was born in 1952, three years after Blue Hills began its 27-year run on ABC. The first music he recalls hearing “with striking clarity” was its evocative theme.
He was about nine when his grandfather gave him his old banjo. It was “monstrously large ? more than half my then height”.
His grandfather was a banjo player, whistler and singer. “I remember that I used to be quite puzzled when I was playing certain tunes that I didn’t know because they weren’t part of domestic circumstances when I was a kid. He would, of course, recognise them immediately because they were very much part of the music that informed his youth.”
After a few years he switched to flugelhorn ? the only instrument then available in the school storeroom ? and took up the clarinet at 12 with the encouragement of his close friend, conductor Richard Gill.
Music, he says, “is very character forming”. “To study music well you need to embrace a whole set of practical daily disciplines that are rudimentary to . . . the whole process of being a musician. It changes the way you think; the way you work; the way you approach problem-solving; the way you approach managing your affairs.”
Later, at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, he studied with Douglas Gerke and finally Donald Westlake, whom he cites as one of his biggest influences. His friends included Ross Edwards, Peter Sculthorpe and Nigel Butterly and he says they benefited from frank criticism and feedback. He does not believe Australians handle criticism well.
Encouraged by Donald Peart, inaugural Professor of Music at the University of Sydney, he organised events for the International Society of Contemporary Music, managing concerts, contracting musicians, scheduling rehearsals, writing advertisements and brochures and even selling the tickets. He says his most valuable experience then was “a catalogue of screw-ups”.
He played clarinet with chamber orchestras and “casual gigs” with Westlake, then the principal clarinet at Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
As general manager of Music Rostrum Australia he organised festivals in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in 1974 and 1975, with Roger Woodward as artistic director. He recalls “the feeling of creeping incapacity” as board member Donald McDonald told him they needed a detailed cash flow. “I replied, ‘Certainly, Donald, as long as you first tell me what it is.’ “
Though he has a special fondness for chamber music, his interests vary from Japanese and Indian music through to Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton, artists that he says are “still pretty central to my taste”.
Williams, who studied with composer Luciano Berio while living in Italy from 1975 to 1977, wrote his first compositions in his early teens, continuing into his 30s. “I loved writing music and will probably go back to it for personal pleasure at some later time in my life.”
These days he no longer has an instrument; he asked after his grandfather’s old banjo some years ago but his family no longer knew its whereabouts. The clarinets he loaned to a student years ago have “never boomeranged”.
The Age, 01-May-2010
Larry Schwartz Writer 