Last year’s ARIA Awards made headlines after several winners used their acceptance speeches to make important socio-political statements. The 2016 ARIA Awards are set to air next week, but this year’s ceremony honouring the standout stars of Australian music has already caused its share of controversy.
You may recall that last month Australia’s classical community was up in arms over the fact that Flight Facilities, the electronic duo hailing from Sydney and best known for dance floor fillers like ‘Down To Earth’ and ‘Sunshine’, received the ARIA Award for Best Classical recording.
Flight Facilities were nominated for their collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. “We’re stoked to be nominated for best classical album a year after being nominated for best dance — we don’t know how but thanks very much,” said Hugo Gruzman, one half of the Sydney duo, at the time.
The pair’s collaboration with the MSO was widely regarded as one of the best live events of the year and saw Flight Facilities and a string of guest stars meshing their classy electronic dance stylings with the grand classical instrumentation of one of Australia’s finest orchestras.
But as great as it was, it wasn’t classical music.
“The album consists of Flight Facilities’ original electronic music with the accompaniment of an orchestra,” Toby Chadd, manager of ABC Classics, told The Australian. “It feels like something is potentially wrong with the ARIA system to allow an album whose credentials are clearly in no way classical to win the classical award.”
“It has the potential to damage the integrity of that award,” he added. Indeed, what’s perhaps most curious is the fact that Flight Facilities alone were nominated for the Best Classical ARIA Award. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, who actually contributed the classical elements to the recording, were not included in the nom.
An ARIA representative told The Australian at the time that the “creative collaboration” between Flight Fac and the MSO met the eligibility criteria for the award and the winner was determined by a “specialist classic music ARIA judging panel”.
However, that did little to console those in the classical community who felt that handing the Best Classical award to an album that is essentially an electronic dance music album with orchestral elements undermined the Best Classical Album category and robbed a genuine classical artist of a prestigious accolade.
So how does an EDM album get to win a Best Classic Album ARIA Award? Well, it’s important and perhaps surprising to note that it’s the artists and labels who get to decide which category they submit their releases to. In other words, if a label feels like their rock artist has a better chance of winning in the blues category than the rock category, that’s where they’ll submit the album.
Speaking to Fairfax, ARIA CEO Dan Rosen was unapologetic about the Flight Fac win. According to Rosen, the ARIA Awards are “self-policing”, with each category left to its own devices in deciding what’s eligible for their own category. “If a judging school, because they’re experts, don’t feel that [an album] is worthy of that genre then they don’t vote for it,” he said.
A release similar to Flight Fac’s, Josh Pyke’s collaboration with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, technically would’ve been eligible for Best Classical Album, but it was instead submitted to, and won, in the category of Best Original Soundtrack/Cast/Show Album award.
“Very simply, we didn’t put it in Best Classical because it isn’t a classical album, so we didn’t feel it was the right fit for that category. I’m sure we could have done that if we chose to, but out of respect to the classical community it didn’t feel right,” Pyke’s manager told Fairfax.
And therein lies the rub. See, Flight Fac-gate wasn’t the first time that the ARIA Awards have experienced such a controversy. You may recall that there were quite a few raised eyebrows in the room when Melbourne psychedelic collective King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard picked up the ARIA Award for Best Jazz Album.
As the Sydney Morning Herald recently noted, managers who believe they may be up against stiff competition in one category can simpy slip their artist into a category where the other nominees are not as well-known. You could say this undermines the very idea behind the award, but it’s simply smart management.
So the next time you wonder why a rock band is accepting the award for Best Country Album or an album that had a steel drum on one track is being nominated in the Best World Music category, you can assume they just have a very switched-on manager.
