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 SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (24 February 2009)

Heather Gilmore
“Sculthorpe donates $3.5m for new talent”
The Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 2009)

THE COMPOSER Peter Sculthorpe will lavish a $3.5 million gift tonight on the University of Sydney to create the nation’s first chair of Australian music.
            The emeritus professor, named one of Australia’s 100 Living National Treasures in 1998, wants the academic position at the university’s Conservatorium of Music to nurture a pool of young composers.
            Professor Sculthorpe, 79, will be honoured for his philanthropic gesture at the Dean’s Annual Gala Concert at the Con tonight before guests including the NSW Governor, Marie Bashir, Dame Leonie Kramer, artist Margaret Olley and vice-chancellor Michael Spence.
            Professor Sculthorpe said yesterday he wanted to commit the money while “still very much alive, thank you”.
            “I am proud of the music I have written, but this gift makes my life worthwhile,” said Professor Sculthorpe, who taught composition at the University of Sydney from 1963 to 1999.
            “Stockmarket willing, I hope to be able to bequeath some extra money [above the $3.5 million] to the university to use as they see fit.
            “For a number of years I have been aware of the number of chairs in Australian literature and wanted the same appreciation for Australian music. It doesn’t matter about the style of the music; it could be influenced by Asia or the Pacific, jazz, rock, anything. I have very catholic tastes, and would like the position to reflect that, though I am not being prescriptive.”
            Professor Anne Boyd, the first Australian and first woman to be appointed professor of music at the University of Sydney, said the endowment was an act of extraordinary generosity.
            “This signifies a special coming of age in our nation’s musical and cultural life,” she said.
            The dean and principal of the Conservatorium, Kim Walker, described the endowment as a “massive and marvellous breakthrough”.

 UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY MEDIA RELEASE (24 February 2009)

University of Sydney Media Release
“In the chair: the godfather of music composition”
(24 February 2009)

IN A MOMENTOUS development for the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, esteemed Australian composer and Emeritus Professor Peter Sculthorpe, has donated $3.5 million to endow Australia’s first ever Chair of Australian Music.
            The Conservatorium will honour Professor Sculthorpe’s generosity tonight at the Dean’s annual gala concert, with guests including NSW Governor and University of Sydney Chancellor, Her Excellency Marie Bashir, Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence, Dame Leonie Kramer, and artist Margaret Olley. The concert will feature performances from ARIA and APRA award-winning Conservatorium staff, students, international soloists, and guest artists.
            The multi-million dollar endowment will nurture generations of future young composers from Australia and overseas as part of the legacy of Australia's most prolific and esteemed composer.
            “The Con is in very good hands and I feel very comfortable and confident to bequest this new Chair at a time when music composition is making headway with younger generations,” said Mr Sculthorpe, who turns 80 in April.
            “My association with The Con goes way back. In fact, I have been associated with every director since Eugene Goossens in the 1950s.
            “Little did I know back then that the conservatorium would reach the heights it has today where it is regarded as one of the top ten music institutions in the world.
            “Given that we have Chairs of Australian Literature, the question I asked myself was ‘why not a Chair of Australian Music?’ It is a logical, timely and obvious move. And it was imperative that it be at Sydney's Conservatorium.”
            Mr Sculthorpe was awarded an MBE in 1970, and OBE in 1977 and an Order of Australia in 1990. He is one of Australia’s Living National Treasures.
            More than 300 of his self-penned manuscript scores are held in a special collection at the National Library.
            He said he believed the new Chair should retain a “flexible and fluid approach” to Australian music.
            “There definitely should be some emphasis on Australasian and Pacific regions, but it is also important that coming generations have the opportunity to experiment and reach out to all manner of influences.”
            The Dean and Principle of The Con, Professor Kim Walker, described the endowment as a “massive and marvellous breakthrough”.
            “I know Peter has been contemplating the need, and his desire for, such a Chair for many years. I am tickled pink that he has chosen now to make it happen ... it offers so many opportunities and will help lift The Con to even greater heights.
            “As the recognised Godfather of music composition, this proposed bequest adds to his deep, rich and universally renowned contribution.”
            Minister Assisting the Premier on the Arts, Virginia Judge, welcomed the news on behalf of the Government.
            “Peter is already immortal in Australian music. I am delighted that his incalculable contribution to our cultural life will live on through this gift.
            “The creation of this new Chair charges The Con to continue to build on its tradition of excellence, and consolidates The Con’s position as one of the world's leading centres of music education and scholarship.”
            Professor Anne Boyd, the first Australian and the first woman to be appointed Professor of Music at the University of Sydney, praised the endowment as “an act of extraordinary generosity.”
            “This will be the first named Chair of Australian Music in any University and signifies a special coming of age in our nation’s musical and cultural life,” she said.
            “It will ensure in a very special and exciting way that creativity, research and teaching in Australian music will continue to flourish and to hold a very significant place in Australia’s first University and its Faculty of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
            “In the process of articulating a musical identity for himself and for our nation, Peter Sculthorpe’s deeply original contribution to music in Australia is of towering and international significance.
            “His work as composer and as a teacher largely situated within the University of Sydney (since 1963) has had an extraordinary influence on several generations of musicians,” said Professor Boyd, who is Pro-Dean (Academic) at The Con.
            Mr Sculthorpe is currently revisiting songs he wrote 50 years ago to be part of the opening concert of the Canberra Festival in May.
            His Opera, Rites of Passage (1973), performed in a concert version, will be another hallmark of the Festival.
            The establishment of the new Chair is subject to the approval of the Senate of the University of Sydney.
            The new Chair will be announced tonight by Peter Sculthorpe himself, in the company of the Governor of NSW, Her Excellency Marie Bashir AC CVO, at the Dean’s Gala at The Con, Macquarie Street, at 6pm.

SCULTHORPE WORLD PREMIERES

 FEBRUARY SCULTHORPE PREMIERE

The World Premiere of Sculthorpe’s SONG OF THE YARRA will take place in Melbourne [AU] on Sunday 8 February 2009. The work has been specially commissioned for the grand opening concert of the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall in the new Melbourne Recital Centre. Soloist for the performance will be the internationally acclaimed violinist GIDON KREMER, who will appear with a cast of local performers led by the Victorian Opera Chorus, in the presence of the composer.

The concert falls on the 100th Birthday of the new hall’s patron, the remarkable Dame Elizabeth Murdoch.

For more on the 8 February opening see:
www.melbournerecital.com.au

 NEW ORCHESTRAL SCULTHORPE PREMIERED IN BRISBANE

The first performance of TROPIC for orchestra was given by the Queensland Youth Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Curro AM MBE, at the Concert Hall, QPAC, Brisbane QLD [AU], on Saturday 7 June 2008. 

“Australia's pre-eminent composer, Peter Sculthorpe, in an impressive coup for Queensland Youth Symphony, has written a new work for the tour and was present for its world premiere. Inspired by the landscapes of far north Queensland, Tropic is a haunting work with a strong melodic line representing various elements of indigenous culture. Notable is the extraordinary ``flights of birds'' played with great beauty by the strings, woodwind and percussion.” - Suzannah Conway, The Courier-Mail [Brisbane AU] (9 June 2008)

 EIGHTEENTH QUARTET FOR 2010 EDINBURGH FESTIVAL

This year, 2009, Sculthorpe will be at work on his STRING QUARTET NO 18 for the Flinders Quartet. STRING QUARTET NO 19 for the Tokyo String Quartet has been commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival and its Australian artistic-director Jonathan Mills, and will receive its WORLD PREMIERE at the 2010 festival.

 GOLDNER QUARTET RECORDS STRING QUARTETS 14-17

In Sydney in December 2008, the Goldner String Quartet went into the studio to record Volume 3 of their ongoing Complete Sculthorpe String Quartets series for Tall Poppies CDs. Volumes 1 (TP089) and 2 (TP090), including complete performances of String Quartets Nos 6-11, samples from Nos 1-5 and a selection of shorter works for quartet, were highly acclaimed on their first appearance in 1997.

For the new CD, Tall Poppies and the Goldners have programmed the four most recent complete works, STRING QUARTETS NOS 14-17. To be available separately as Volume 3, the CD will be released in April-May to coincide with the composer’s 80th Birthday and a special performance by the Goldner Quartet at the Arts in the Valley Festival, Kangaroo Valley NSW [AU], on Friday 1 May 2009.

For more on Arts in the Valley see:
www.artsinthevalley.net.au

For more on Tall Poppies CDs see:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~tallpoppies/

The San Francisco based Del Sol String Quartet has included Yearning, the third movement from Sculthorpe’s STRING QUARTET NO 16 on its newly released disc entitled Ring of Fire, on Other Minds CDs.

In his illuminating liner essay Charles Amirkhanian introduces the Del Sol String Quartet:
 

In Gramophone magazine’s US Edition (December 2008), Donald Rosenberg praised this “fascinating amalgam of recent works” played by the Del Sol “with a combination of ferocious attack, riveting interplay and silken splendour [ ...] All of the composers hail from — or have worked extensively in ­countries around the Pacific Rim. Although they represent different cultures and musical vantage-points, their identification with specific regional elements binds them here as an artistic community.”

In addition to works by Kui Dong (China), Chinary Ung (Cambodia), Jack Body (New Zealand), Gabriela Lena Frank (USA), Hyo-shin Na (South Korea), Zhou Long (China), John Adams (USA), Rosenberg admired “the despairing beauty of Peter Sculthorpe's Yearning (the third movement of his String Quartet No 16), with roots in a central Afghanistan love song.”

To order the CD online and to hear short samples the Sculthorpe go to: http://www.delsolquartet.com/sampleringoffire.html

 TENTH QUARTET FOR CLARINETS

A unique arrangement of Sculthorpe's String Quartet No 10 for clarinets features on a new MOVE CD (MCD 340, 2007), called Second door on the left, from Canberra-based clarinet quartet, Clarity (Nicole Canham, Lisa Manning, Samantha Kelson, Matthew O'Keefe).

The arrangement of just three of the work's five movements was made specially by Zach Clarke. But the new CD prompted Sculthorpe to make his own version of the remaining two movements for the group as Chorales (2008) for clarinet quartet
 

The original 1967 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recording of Sculthorpe’s 1961 classic, IRKANDA IV, with violin soloist Leonard Dommett (recorded in 1966) is included among the 2008 inductees into the SOUNDS OF AUSTRALIA national registry.

It is one of 10 historical sound-bites added this year to the National Film and Sound Archive’s registry of recordings that celebrate Australia's history and diverse recorded sound culture. Inaugurated in 2007, the registry invites annual nominations for 10 new additions to its list. This year, the original 1927 recording of Waltzing Matilda and the theme from the ABC Radio series Blue Hills were also chosen, along with the Aeroplane Jelly jingle and the piano roll of Percy Grainger’s Country Gardens.

Sculthorpe also has a special link with one of last year’s inductees, an historical 1899 recording of Tasmanian Aboriginal songs sung by Fanny Cochrane-Smith (1834-1905). Round the turn of the century Fanny’s grand-daughter Gladys married one of his distant cousins Percy Hobart Sculthorpe, forebears of the well-known Indigenous academic Gaye Sculthorpe. Peter Sculthorpe, meanwhile, back in 1953 was one of the first people in recent times to show interest in these recordings when he came across them in the collection of the Royal Society of Tasmania.

Already in 2007, Peter Sculthorpe joined singer Renee Geyer as a Patron of the Sounds of Australia Registry.

The Sounds of Australia homepage with links to 30-second out-takes from all the listed recordings:
http://www.nfsa.gov.au/whats_on/soundsofaustralia/index.html

“It’s exactly the way I wanted it to sound.” – Peter Sculthorpe writing to conductor John Hopkins in 1966 of Leonard Dommett’s performance as soloist, on first hearing the new recording

The Sculthorpe recording, originally on a 1967 World Record Club LP, has recently been digitally remastered and rereleased on CD by ABC CLASSICS (476 6338) as part of its boxed set 100 years: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra: A Celebration in Music.

2008 INDUCTEES TO THE NATIONAL REGISTRY OF RECORDED SOUND
1919 Country Gardens: (piano roll) Percy Grainger
1927 Waltzing Matilda: John Collinson (vocal), Russell Callow (piano)
1930 The Australian XI: winners of the Ashes
1938 The Aeroplane Jelly Song: Joy Wigglesworth
1949 Theme from Blue Hills: Hanmer's Pastorale
1957 Pub With No Beer: Slim Dusty
1967 IRKANDA IV: Peter Sculthorpe, Leonard Dommett (violin), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, John Hopkins (conductor), recorded July 1966
1968 Bird and Animal Calls of Australia (Jacaranda Press)
1972 Most People I Know (Think That I'm Crazy): Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs
1981 We Have Survived: No Fixed Address

2007 INAUGURAL INDUCTEES
1899 Fanny Cochrane Smith's recordings of Tasmanian Aboriginal songs
1910 Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's account of the South Pole expedition
1937 Radio serial Dad and Dave, episode 1
1943 The Majestic Fanfare: ABC news theme since
1950 Maranoa Lullaby: sung by Harold Blair, Australia's first recognised Aboriginal classical singer
1950 John Antill and Sydney Symphony Orchestra's Corroboree
1953 Shearer and unionist Jack Luscombe's three folk songs, recorded by oral historian John Meredith
1966 The Easybeats' classic pop song Friday On My Mind
1976 The Saints' thrash/punk classic: I'm Stranded
1983 The Warumpi Band: Jailanguru Pakarnu
 

The new National Portrait Gallery, which opened to the public yesterday, has been praised for its bold architecture and sense of Australian optimism. Several visiting directors of overseas national portrait galleries gazed enviously as the natural light filtered through the carefully designed clerestory windows and blinds.

Among the guests were some of the artists and the subjects themselves who adorn the spacious new walls, including indigenous leader Lowitja O'Donoghue, fashion designer Heidi Middleton and composer Peter Sculthorpe whose Archibald-winning portrait was painted in 1982 by Eric Smith.

Sculthorpe, who will be 80 next year, thoroughly approves of the painting's vivid orange background which he says reflects his cheerful nature.

''I have always liked it because until then people had always painted me as a dark, brooding kind of character, a German expressionist view of how a composer should look,'' he says. ''I am not like that at all. I am Australian. I am a sunny, optimistic, happy person.''
           
 Sculthorpe says he is thrilled to be in ''musician's corner'' facing rock'n'roll singer Johnny O'Keefe and next to opera singer Dame Joan Sutherland.

“My fondest memory is that Eric had [my portrait] on the back of a van and it rained on the way to the gallery, so when he got there he was busy touching it up, just outside the Gallery of NSW. ''What is extraordinary is that Eric wanted to give the painting to me and I had it at home, but I didn't have a wall big enough. Here it looks too small, at home it looked enormous, so I couldn't accept it. I think it went into Eric's son's garage for many years until the gallery bought it.'' Pointing to a blue brushstroke on the right of the painting, Sculthorpe recalls it was the final touch.

''I was over at Eric's place and he rushed at the painting and did that there a blue brushstroke, and said, 'Now I am happy with it.' ” [...]

The only thing brighter than the Sculthorpe painting was musician and artist Rolf Harris's outfit. Sporting a turquoise jacket, shocking pink shirt and gaudy tie, Harris competed with some of the most vivid portraits.” - The Canberra Times (5 Decenber 2008)
 

The NPG’s website hosts a new video clip of Sculthorpe, talking about his childhood, and about Eric Smith’s portrait:
http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/peter_sculthorpe.php

You can also download and read an interview with Eric Smith talking about his 1982 Archibald Prize winning Sculthorpe portrait in “Creative Space” (pages 26-27) in the National Portrait Gallery magazine Portrait 14 (downloadable PDF):
http://www.portrait.gov.au/UserFiles/file/Portrait14.pdf

The complete video and transcripts of the compelling 1998 Film Australia Australian Biography series SCULTHORPE interview by Robyn Hughes can be now accessed online. This is an invaluable resource of the first importance especially to secondary and tertiary music students studying Sculthorpe’s life and music.

"Peter Sculthorpe was interviewed for Film Australia's Australian Biography series in 1998. He describes the way in which Australian history and landscape have influenced him and tells of the emotionally significant events in his life which have found expression in his music. He also explains, with warmth and eloquence, the nature of his endless journey to try to create the perfect work of art, a journey that continues to motivate his work today."

To access this resource:
http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/sculthorpe/

As a quick reference, students and others can also download a 4-page study guide (PDF):http://media.australianbiography.gov.au/study/8075_ausbiosculthorpe.pdf
 

Alison Alexander’s The Companion to Tasmanian History is now available as an online resource published by the Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania. It’s entry on Sculthorpe concludes:

"Sculthorpe is arguably the most significant contemporary Australian composer, his work is widely performed and recorded, and he regularly receives commissions from overseas performing groups. He is the recipient of many awards, including election in 1998 as an Australian Living National Treasure.”

To access its Sculthorpe page complete:
http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/S/Sculthorpe.htm

 SCREENING OF RESTORED “AGE OF CONSENT”

There will be a special screening of a recently restored print of the 1968 Australian feature film, Age of Consent, with the original Sculthorpe soundtrack score reinstated, at the National Film and Sound Archive’s Arc Theatre, Canberra ACT [AU], during the Canberra International Music Festival, at 4.30pm on Saturday 9 May 2009.

In celebration of Peter Sculthorpe’s 80th Birthday, the NFSA is honoured to have the composer introduce the film at the screening personally.

Age of Consent, directed by British film-maker Michael Powell, was an adaptation of Norman Lindsay’s autobiographical novel, starring James Mason and the young Helen Mirren, and Australians including Max Meldrum, Frank Thring and Harold Hopkins. Sculthorpe himself joined the cast during filming on Dunk Island, on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef, in April 1968, and he composed the music back in Sydney in June-July 1968. In the score, Sculthorpe reworked with variations music from his own Small Town in scenes associated with the film’s lead role, artist Bradley Monahan/Norman Lindsay, as well as from his recent Balinese-inspired Tabuh-Tabuhan, music associated in particular with the dreamlike underwater scenes in which Helen Mirren’s character, Cora Ryan, swam naked, earning the film an R rating! The newly composed vocal title theme, meanwhile, Sculthorpe later reset for strings as the lovely Little Serenade.

Vincent Plush (Head, Recorded Sound and Cultural Programs, NFSA) writes introducing Age of Consent:

Age of Consent was the second of two feature films made in Australia in the 1960s by British director Michael Powell (1905-1990). The massive local box-office success of the first, They’re A Weird Mob (1966), proved critical to the revival of feature film production in this country. Although it would not take off appreciably for several more years, 1969 was still a significant year in the re-awakening of the Australian film industry, with the number of locally made features jumping from virtually none to half-a-dozen in the space of only a few years.

Peter Yeldham’s screenplay is adapted from the 1935 semi-autobiographical novel by the iconoclastic Australian artist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) whose famous nudes are brought to life in John Duigan’s film Sirens (1994).

This was a project much cherished by the late Australian actor-producer Michael Pate who had just returned from a long stint in Hollywood. Initially, Powell himself had dismissed Lindsay’s novel as “one of those girl Friday stories …obviously written for money”.  But whilst retaining the ironic humour and the setting on a Great Barrier Reef island, the creative trio of Powell, Yeldham and Pate transformed the fusty Edwardian artist of Lindsay’s novel into a more sophisticated and sensual contemporary figure. Their makeover was inspired by the Australian modernist painters who had risen to prominence in the 1950s and 60s. One of their number, Paul Delprat, supplied the actual paintings used in the film.

A triumvirate of co-producers comprised Pate and Powell and the actor James Mason who starred in the film, along with his future wife Clarissa Kaye. It also starred veteran Irish character actor Jack McGowan and the 22-year-old Helen Mirren, who had previously played supporting roles in three films. Amongst the Australian supporting cast were veteran Neva Carr-Glynn, Michael Boddy and a young Harold Hopkins.

Expatriate Australian artist Bradley Morahan (Mason), jaded by success in New York, feels the need to regain his youthful edge. He returns to Australia, where he sets up his ramshackle studio-house on a lonely island on the Great Barrier Reef. There he meets a wild young woman Cora Ryan (Mirren) who eventually becomes his muse.

After its opening at the Odeon Theatre in Brisbane on 27 March 1969, Age of Consent fared relatively well in Australia but had little success internationally. Initially released in London, the UK branch of Columbia studios, which had largely funded the production, then insisted on making changes to all subsequent prints released internationally. Not only were many early scenes in New York cut from the film, likewise the original score composed by the then-40-year-old Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe. His music was replaced by another by British composer Stanley Myers, today best known for his music to The Deer Hunter. Anthony Buckley, who worked on editing the Powell film, recalled that damage was also done to the original prints by projectionists frequently “souveniring” frames of sequences of Helen Mirren swimming naked underwater!

As a result, prints of the original quickly disappeared from sight, as did the subsequent career of Michael Powell himself. Apart from a few short features, including The Boy who Turned Yellow (1972), this was to be Powell’s last major directing credit before his death in 1990.

In recent years, there has been significant reappraisal of Michael Powell’s work, particularly in the UK where he is now something of a cult figure. As a result, the stocks of Age of Consent have risen markedly. The original Australian release was restored by Sony Pictures in time for Powell’s centennial in 2005. This occurred largely at the insistence of his widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, editor of many of the films of Martin Scorcese for whom Powell had been something of a hero and even a role-model. Sculthorpe’s original score has been reinstated, deploying the original quarter-inch-tape recordings preserved in the NFSA’s collections.

Classical music had always played a fundamental role in Powell’s films, notably in two featuring Australian dancer-actor Robert Helpmann, The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).

Similarly, Powell had always preferred Sculthorpe’s score, with its evocative touches of gamelan music. “The point is,” Sculthorpe asserts in the recent biography by Graeme Skinner, “Age of Consent was a commercial film and most of the people concerned regarded it as an art film.” To an extent, Sculthorpe’s music reflects that disparity, although the composer professes to be “by no means unhappy about that.”
 

 ACCLAIMED SCULTHORPE BIOGRAPHY GOOGLED

Sculthorpe’s authorised biographer Graeme Skinner’s highly acclaimed 2007 book PETER SCULTHORPE: THE MAKING OF AN AUSTRALIAN COMPOSER is now available for perusal online. Its publisher, Sydney-based UNSW Press, has recently uploaded the complete book into the international Google Cloud. As a result you can now also order a print copy of the book via the Google Books webpage.

Meanwhile the Google engine allows you to search a complete (minus copyrighted images) “preview” scan of the 2007 UNSW first edition. However due to copyright restrictions, the number of pages that may be viewed at one session, though generous (we counted 142 on first try) is limited.

 To go to the book direct online:
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=PH6M8JqMGBUC&printsec=frontcover#PPP1,M1 

Another option, the National Library of Australia hosted site, Libraries Australia bibliographic record has a list of Australian libraries that have copies of the book:
http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an41292651

 SCULTHORPE IN “SOUNDSCAPES OF AUSTRALIA” BOOK

Australia offers tremendous scope for understanding the relationship between music, spirituality and landscape. This major, generously-illustrated new volume examines, in fifteen chapters, some of the ways in which composers and performers have attempted to convey a sense of the Australian landscape through musical means. The book embraces the different approaches of ethnomusicology, gender studies, musical analysis, performance studies and cultural history. Ranging across the country, from remote parts of the Northern Territory to the bustling east coast cities, from Tasmanian wilderness to tropical Queensland, the book includes references to art and literature as well as music. Issues of national identity, belonging and aboriginalization are an integral part of the book, with indigenous responses to place examined alongside music from the western orchestral, chamber and choral repertories. The book provides valuable insight into a wide range of music inspired by Australia, from the Yanyuwa people to Jewish communities in Victoria; from Peter Sculthorpe's opera Quiros to the work of European expats living in Australia before the Second World War; from historic Ealing film scores to contemporary sound installations. The work of many significant composers is discussed in detail, among them Ross Edwards, Barry Conyngham, David Lumsdaine, Anne Boyd and Fritz Hart. Throughout the book there is a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of the music inspired by the sights and sounds of the Australian landscape. – From the publisher’s blurb

Download from the Ashgate site Fiona Richards’s introduction to the collection (PDF):
https://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Soundscapes_of_Australia_Intro.pdf 

A limited preview of the book and links for ordering a hard copy are also now online at Google Books:
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=QKdEMNzz-t4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Soundscapes+of+Australia

 THE PASSING OF WILFRID MELLERS

Wilfrid Mellers, one of Peter Sculthorpe’s closest friends, a teacher and mentor from their first meeting late in 1958, and later an inspirational writer and advocate of Sculthorpe’s music, died at his home in Yorkshire, England on 16 May 2008.

During Sculthorpe’s student years in Oxford, Mellers was Sculthorpe’s most important guide and mentor. Mellers himself was a former pupil of Sculthorpe’s two compositional tutors at Oxford, Edmund Rubbra and Egon Wellesz, but it is Mellers who Sculthorpe describes as “my first and only real composition teacher”. In his 1999 memoir, Sun Music: Journeys and Reflections from a Composer’s Life, he looked back on this time: “Wilfrid’s belief in me strengthened my belief in myself. I began to examine my life, my ideas, and my music, and to bring these together as one. My work began to show signs of maturing.”

“Mellers was open to all kinds of musical expression, anticipating the pluralism and multi-culturalism of the 21st-century scene rather than the inherited distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow. The centre of all this was Mellers himself, whose lecturing technique was uniquely charismatic. He was always a pioneer with an uncanny ability to see the way things were going, to find music that was not well known but ought to be and eventually would be."

Wilfrid Howard Mellers, writer and composer: born Leamington Spa, Warwickshire 26 April 1914; Supervisor in English and College Lecturer in Music, Downing College, Cambridge 1945-48; Staff Tutor in Music, Extramural Department, Birmingham University 1949-60; Visiting Mellon Professor of Music, University of Pittsburgh 1960-62; Professor of Music, York University 1964-81 (Emeritus); OBE 1982; married 1940 Vera Hobbs (marriage dissolved), 1950 Peggy Lews (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1975), 1987 Robin Hildyard; died Scrayingham, North Yorkshire 16 May 2008.

- Peter Dickinson (Obituary), The Independent [UK] (19 May 2008)

 “His Beatles lectures drew much attention but also consternation, from fellow-academics for trendiness and from the pop world for professorial interference in its affairs. However, he made his position clear in one of his most significant books, Caliban Reborn (1967), in which he insisted that, “Developments in pop music cannot be isolated from what is happening in ‘serious’ music, and the West’s veering towards the East and the primitive can be understood only as complementary to the East’s need of the West.” His pages on the Beatles in this book were developed into a longer study, Twilight of the Gods (1973).”

- The Times (Obituary) (20 May 2008)