Douglas Lilburn

Douglas Gordon Lilburn, composer: born Wanganui, New Zealand 2 November 1915; died Wellington 6 June 2001.

Douglas Lilburn represented serious music in New Zealand culture to an extent not generally appreciated this far away: the current awareness about music is, to a large part, his doing.

The youngest of seven children, Lilburn grew up near Hunterville, towards the bottom of the North Island, on the family "station" (farm) which, typically for New Zealand, bore a Scottish name: "Drysdale" ­ the family had Scottish origins. Lilburn's perceptive father realised that his bookish son was unlikely to follow his brothers into farming and got him the best education locally available. But it was only in 1930 when, aged 15, he was sent to the Waitaki Boys' High School, on the south-eastern coast of the South Island, that he had his first piano lessons ­ and within two years he had composed his first piano sonata. In 1934 he enrolled in Canterbury University College, emerging in 1936 with his diploma in music.

While Lilburn was in his third year, Percy Grainger visited New Zealand and offered a prize for the best orchestral composition by a New Zealand composer. Lilburn had never heard an orchestra before but sat down and wrote the symphonic poem Forest, which won him Grainger's prize. The attendant publicity, reinforced by a performance of Forest in Wellington, convinced Lilburn père that his son's wish to go off to London, to study with Vaughan Williams, was a wise one, and so in 1937 he set off.

He stayed with Vaughan Williams until 1940, refining his craft and winning a Cobbett Prize, the Parry Prize and a scholarship. His success was not confined to Britain. A series of four composition competitions were instituted as part of the New Zealand centennial celebrations in 1940 and so Lilburn sent back his Drysdale Overture and Festival Overture and Prodigal Country, for chorus and orchestra. He won three of the four prizes and was in the news again.

It seemed an auspicious time to return and so, in August 1940, he went home, writing what was to be one of his most popular works, the Aotearoa Overture, shortly before he left ­ although immediately performed in Britain, it had to wait for two decades to be heard in the New Zealand the music celebrates. In the event, nothing rushed to meet him and between 1940 and 1946 Lilburn, now based in Christchurch, made ends meet with a series of musical odd jobs, writing criticism,teaching, conducting, and composing when he could.

A degree of security came in 1946 when he was appointed composer-in-residence to the Cambridge Summer Schools of Music (this Cambridge being just to the south of Auckland, on the North Island); he held the post for three years, returning for another festival stint in 1951. And in 1947 he began what was to prove a lengthy association with Victoria University in Wellington when he became part-time tutor in music; he was then made a lecturer (1949), senior lecturer (1955) and associate professor (1963). Finally, in 1970, he was awarded a personal chair in music and retired in 1979.

Lilburn's early music shows the influence of Sibelius and of his teacher, Vaughan Williams. The stamp of Sibelius is particularly strong in his First Symphony, composed in 1947: short snippets of thematic material gradually coalesce into larger forms, supported over extended, mobile bass lines. By the time of the Second Symphony (1951), the mode of expression is much more confident and direct, the language now echoing American composers like Walter Piston and, especially, Roy Harris ­ and like theirs his music evokes wide-open, large-scale landscapes. That's hardly surprising: Lilburn loved New Zealand's grandiose scenery and would escape to tramp around it whenever he could, repaying the debt in his music.

He now began to examine the output of composers like Stravinsky, Bartók, the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg and his followers and more modernish Americans, such as Copland, with predictable effects on his own music: in the Third Symphony (1961) the heroic gestures of the first are long-forgotten in favour of an elliptical terseness that just occasionally lets through a waspish touch of humour.

By then he was already experimenting with electronic music, a medium that continued to fascinate him over the coming decades. He founded the Electronic Music Studio at Victoria University in 1966 and remained its director until his retirement. His last compositions, which integrate electronic and live music, fuse together the two main strands of his creative development.

Lilburn was a role-model for younger composers. But he didn't just lead by example. He became the representative figure of classical music in New Zealand society, and he stood up for music's importance in it. He wrote, he spoke, he took public positions where necessary; he founded the Wai-te-ata Press to publish important new scores and the Lilburn Foundation to support a variety of musical endeavours. And his work threaded music through New Zealand culture: he set the words of local poets, such as Allen Curnow and Denis Glover; he wrote incidental music for plays, radio productions and films.

Besides the three symphonies, his output includes a generous quantity of other orchestral scores (much of it written for string orchestra), chamber music, works for organ and piano, and music for voices. His central concern, both in his music and his musical politics, was to establish a voice for New Zealand's musical culture that wasn't simply a hangover from the British Empire, and by and large he succeeded. The paradox is that, in spite of his strong public profile, Lilburn, a homosexual, was essentially a private man, and as he grew older he became more reclusive. But as he withdrew, his music stepped forward, growing continuously in popularity. Only a week before he died the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra were in the studio with his three symphonies, laying them down for the budget label Naxos in a recording that should help spread his name around the world.

Martin Anderson