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Welcome to
www.petersculthorpe.com.au The official website of The Sculthorpe Office Last updated 13 March 2008 |
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PETER |
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COMPOSER |
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| PETER SCULTHORPE was born in the city of Launceston, in Tasmania, Australia, on 29 April 1929. For the last 45 years has lived and worked in Sydney. He is widely recognised as one of Australia's most significant creative artists, and one of the world's leading composers for the concert hall. |
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The most original sound to emerge from Australia since Nellie Melba and the first to show awareness of regional contexts; it established Sculthorpe as musical figurehead for the entire Pacific basin. |
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Norman Lebrecht |
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| In the composer's 79th year, The Sculthorpe Office is launching this new official website, its contents authorised by the composer and edited on his behalf, to be a definitive resource on his life and music, in print, in performance, in review, and on disc. |
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Since 1965,
SCULTHORPE has been published internationally by Faber Music. This year he will complete several new works in preparation for celebrations at home and abroad of his 80th birthday in 2009. He is currently working on a major new commission for the official opening of the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre, on 9 February next year. |
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A recent
SCULTHORPE
world premiere, on 29 November 2007, was that of String Quartet No 17 (2007) by the Goldner Quartet, at Musica Viva's Huntington Estate Festival, Mudgee, Australia. |
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Sculthorpe has written his String Quartet No 17 playfully aware that with this number he goes one better (numerically) than Beethoven’s tally of complete string quartets. With this in mind, Sculthorpe has drawn his work’s motivic kernels from the little motto themes that Beethoven placed at the head of the final movement of his last quartet, accompanied by the German words for: Must it be? It must be! | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Roger Covell The Sydney Morning Herald (5 December 2007) |
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| Please bear with us ... | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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This
is the first edition of this site, published on the web in March 2008,
and it is still under construction. It is intended to complement
Faber Music's
excellent
SCULTHORPE
webpages, and will gradually be expanded to include a regularly
updated official chronological CATALOGUE OF MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS (with discography), a selection of his own PROGRAM NOTES on musical works and other writings, a SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY, and links to other recommended web resources. |
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Already available,
meanwhile, |
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SCULTHORPE
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| NEWS & EVENTS | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| November 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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The long-awaited SCULTHORPE authorised biography (Part 1, 1929-1974) was released on 19 October 2007 and was officially launched by the composer himself at Sydney Conservatorium on 16 November. It is on sale now at good bookstores and by online order.
Graeme Skinner |
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[An] absorbing book ... [a] carefully documented chronicle ... providing gracefully vivid descriptions of the music itself ... The author's manner is quiet, clear and unpartisan ... Skinner's mastery of his sources [...] sets high standards for biographical thoroughness and provides, in an attractively readable way, a vivid sense of Sculthorpe's day-to-day discovery of music and people in a significant period of our artistic history. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Roger Covell The Sydney Morning Herald (1-2 December 2007) |
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| Graeme Skinner’s superb new biography ... [a] meticulously researched book, drawing on copious archival material such as letters and press notices, as well as interviews both with Sculthorpe and many of his associates, has the feel of a grand symphony, its peculiar music made audible by fact rather than intrusive authorial interpolation. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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William Yeoman The West Australian (3 January 2008) |
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| A significant authorised biography of Australia's best-known composer ... This book has been said to have comparable significance for music as David Marr's biography of Patrick White had for Australian literature. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Blackwell (UK) online (January 2008) |
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| One of the great strengths of the book (apart from its comprehensive and meticulous research) is the deft way in which the author interweaves discussion of the music with the details of the composer’s life: our art does emerge from what we are and what we have learned and imagined. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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John Carmody The Australian Literary Review (6 February 2008) |
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February - March 2008
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Sculthorpe in
Danelle Bergstrom’s portrait of the
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Danelle Bergstrom, Two Movements - Peter Sculthorpe (2008) (© The artist) |
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SCULTHORPE has been captured many times on canvas, by among others Russell Drysdale and Judy Cassab. He has been the subject of two previous Archibald entries. Eric Smith’s portrait of him won the 1982 Prize. Reproduced on the cover of Sculthorpe’s 1999 memoirs, Sun Music, Smith's painting is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra; for online catalogue entry see: http://www.portrait.gov.au/static/coll_738Peter+Sculthorpe.php. Adrienne Levenson’s painting of Peter was hung in the Salon des Refusés in 2001. |
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| March 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
BERMAGUI Four Winds
Festival
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| May 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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SYDNEY
(AUS) TBA SCULTHORPE and biographer Graeme Skinner will be guest speakers at the 2008 Sydney Writers’ Festival |
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CANBERRA
(AUS)
Friday 9 May
2008, National Library of Australia SCULTHORPE will attend the Canberra International Music Festival, |
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INTERNATIONAL CONCERT DIARY
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| January 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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SAN FRANCISCO
(USA)
Tuesday 29 January 2008, Berkeley City Club |
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The first half of the program was dominated by Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe’s 16th String Quartet ... Kent and the Del Sols gave this one its didgeridoo-included premiere a little over a year ago at San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival. |
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The piece is in five brief movements, the didgeridoo appearing in all but the central one. Its subject is the experience of asylum-seekers — mostly people who fled Afghanistan and its environs in the wake of 9/11 and the U.S.-led war against the Taliban — who reached Australia only to be held in remote internment camps. The odd-numbered movements take their thematic material, Sculthorpe writes, from “an ancient love song from Central Afghanistan.” The intervening movements are brusque scherzos titled, respectively, “Anger” and “Trauma.” From the quartet came yearning, passionate strains, moments of eerie calm, and strange birdcalls. Sculthorpe seems particularly fond of the “seagull-cry” effect that a cellist can make with a glissando in artificial harmonics (a device first introduced into a piece, I think, by George Crumb in his 1971 Vox Balaenae). But in addition to the gulls there came flocks of other, weirder fowl; the end of the fourth movement was beset by them, chattering and squawking sul ponticello. The didgeridoo most obviously anchored the music with its powerful low drone (on three different pitches over the course of the piece), but there were subsidiary effects — not only the wash of higher harmonics that is the instrument’s most characteristic sound, but also a startlingly physical rhythmic huffing in places and, once, a wild call like an elephant’s bellowing. The last movement, “Freedom,” is meant to represent “dreams of a free life beyond confined spaces and razor-wire fences.” The opening, though lovely, initially affected me as cheap: Here was the Afghani tune of the first and third movements, only now rendered in radiant major mode, all its anguish (and all its augmented seconds) vanished. Complexities and tensions crept in over time, though, and the music took on a richer sort of elevation. In places, the string harmonics and the wash of harmonics from the didgeridoo meshed in such a way that I couldn’t tell which was which. It was heady stuff, and played with dedication and concentration. |
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Michelle Dulak Thomson San Francisco Classical Voice (March 2008 online) |
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| This list of recent and forthcoming SCULTHORPE performances will be updated regularly as information comes to hand |
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| February 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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BRISBANE (AUS) Thursday 28 February 2007, 7.30pm, Powerhouse |
Brodsky Quartet |
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| Brodsky Quartet (UK) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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From Nourlangie
(1993) String Quartet No 11 (Jabiru Dreaming) (1990) |
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| BRISBANE (AUS) Friday 29 February 2007, 7.30pm, Powerhouse | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brodsky Quartet (UK) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lament (1976) for string quartet | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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