The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports:
Jayson Gillham believes artists have a right to bring their whole selves to the stage.
“I believe that everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” the internationally acclaimed, London-based pianist says.
That’s why the British Australian musician, 39, is suing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) for discrimination based on political belief, after it cancelled one of his scheduled performances in August 2024.
His recital was cancelled after he dedicated a new piece by Australian composer Connor D’Netto to journalists killed in Gaza at a concert in Melbourne on August 11, 2024.
“Over the last 10 months, Israel has killed more than 100 Palestinian journalists,” Gillham said, introducing the piece, titled Witness.
“A number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets. The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.” …
In response to Gillham’s remarks, the MSO apologised for offence and distress caused and added it “does not condone the use of our stage as a platform for expressing personal views”, canning his next scheduled performance.
Within days, the MSO said cancelling Gillham’s concert had been an “error” and committed to rescheduling the recital.
But negotiations between Gillham and the orchestra quickly fell apart. In October 2024, he launched legal action in the Federal Court, saying the MSO had rejected “reasonable requests to remedy the situation”.
“This battle in the Federal Court is about defending everyone’s right to freedom of speech,” he said on Instagram. “It’s about ensuring artists can perform with integrity and without fear of censorship.”
In this piece I am not going to give my own, I think unremarkable, thoughts on conflict in the Middle East. I just want to think about Gillham’s claims about free speech.
If the Melbourne Symphony does not want guest performers making political statements during their concerts, it has every right to say so. If it “does not condone the use of our stage as a platform for expressing personal views”, then probably best to make this clear to any featured performer as they draw up their contract (and I don’t know if that happened in this case). Unless explicitly granted, no artist has complete freedom of speech on stage. An actor cannot decide on their own to interrupt a performance of Twelfth Night with a political dedication. Some performing arts organizations might think such political statements are fine, actually, and they can say so. Or a politically-oriented artist could produce their own shows, as Gillham seems to have moved towards. But if the MSO does not feel that way, there is no “free speech” right that overrides it.
The audience at an orchestra concert (Gillham does not raise the topic of “the audience”) is captive, and deserving of consideration; many of them, like me, might prefer to enjoy their orchestral music neat. To insist that they must be made to listen to the guest performer’s political thoughts, even when the orchestra management has said it doesn’t go in for that sort of thing, is self-indulgence.
And I doubt most artists would agree with a blanket “free speech” right at invited gigs anyway. Suppose a featured violinist, before their performance, said “I dedicate this performance to those who died, and their families, in the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, and support Israel’s right to self-defense and to bring justice to those who committed this heinous crime”. Would Gillham think that free speech deserves protection? Suppose a guest artist wanted to talk about other political issues, or value-added taxes, or the Westminster parliamentary system, or that Vegemite is an abomination? Suppose a guest artist addressed the audience with racist opinions on Australia’s Indigenous people, or made a grossly homophobic joke. The ABC story the next day would not be about “free speech”, but about demands that the musician never be invited back.
Here in the United States, there is an ongoing cycle in the discourse between “campuses need to allow free speech” and “no, not like that”. But to my mind the “no, not like that” people are in the right – for an institution to function, there will always need to be some boundaries.
Note the Gillham case is different from artists expressing political views in a separate forum from their contracted performance. The ABC story goes on to say,
It’s a cultural context that has seen the recent scrapping of a children’s book by an Indigenous author lead to a mass boycott of a celebrated publisher and the dis-invitation of a Palestinian Australian author causing the collapse of a writers’ festival.
But this is not the same situation as political statements being a part of the work or performance, and they shouldn’t be confused – the “cultural context” is quite different. To take their first case, the scrapping of the children’s book had nothing to do with the author, nor the fact that she is Indigenous (why even mention that?), nor the content of the book, but that the illustrator of the book had posted a viciously antisemitic article on Substack in the wake of the terrorist attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach (I won’t link to it, but you can find it in this story in The Guardian). Whether that was a good or bad decision by the publisher I leave as an exercise for the reader, though I do think it is up to them (and remember there have been protests over not scrapping books by notorious figures). If someone had written a brilliantly researched and presented account of the geological features of the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia, and then made horribly misogynist statements on social media, what would the reaction be to a university press going ahead and publishing it anyway? I have written before that if a publisher, or an orchestra, or a gallery, contracts with an artist whose politics are well-known, then there’s an obligation to stick with them, even in the face of protest (and any politics is going to draw at least some sort of protest from somebody). My university’s last-minute cancellation of an exhibition of the work of Samia Halaby remains a stain on its reputation. But I would grant that something new coming to light might warrant a reconsideration.
What the Gillham case is about is not “free speech”, but that he thought his speech, addressing his cause, at a Melbourne Symphony performance, ought to have been permitted. He can negotiate such an arrangement, but he can’t claim it as a matter of right.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
