Douglas Lilburn's musical legacy a rich one

By TARA WERNER

Composer Douglas Lilburn died at his Wellington home last week, aged 85.

For those who knew him personally, Lilburn's passing brings more than a deep sense of loss - it is as if an era has passed. As a composer, teacher and long-time loyal supporter of fellow New Zealand composers, he stood out as a seminal force in this country's musical heritage.

And one where the New Zealand landscape deeply mattered. Whatever the medium, Lilburn's music seemed imbued by the distinctive characteristics of our geography, whether it be the soaring mountains of the Southern Alps or the translucent blue lakes of Central Otago.

As a man he was an interesting mix of contradictions, a life-long bachelor, highly private with a distinct dislike of any kind of publicity. And yet one with an open-door policy for those who had a passion for composition.

I well recall the time when, as a precocious teenager, I turned up very early one morning at his isolated holiday cottage at the foot of the Pisa Range in the Upper Clutha Valley.

I had hitched a ride on a sheep truck from a farm nearby, and knocked on his door without prior arrangement. Yet he greeted me with no hint of surprise, and we spent the next hour happily chatting about the electronic piece he was working on.

Then he politely but firmly showed me to the door, unaware that he had instilled a determination in me to study with him at Victoria University in Wellington. A few years later, as a music student in his composition class, I saw the same contradictions. There was always an edge of formality to him, a quiet reticence, and yet he could be warmly encouraging.

Lectures in the mid-1970s took place in the electronic music studio in an old house at 44 Kelburn Parade. It consisted of two musty rooms, a larger studio with electronic equipment and a smaller space for undergraduate students.

As a lecturer he used silence to great effect, and woe betide those who did not hold an opinion about the composition we were closely dissecting. By self-admission he was conservative, and yet he was not beyond playing Pink Floyd loudly on the stereo to make a point. His aim was to open our ears, and encourage us to find our own voices.

Given his penchant for privacy, it seems remarkable that his home was always open to his students. His cottage was filled with books and now-famous New Zealand paintings. There seemed to be a slight austerity to his surroundings, despite the jungle-like garden and the mellow view across Bolton St to the harbour. An austerity that underlined his emotional distance from people.

Possibly he felt the only real way he could express himself was through his music and gave encouragement in other, practical ways.

He stopped composing on his retirement in 1980, preferring to work on gathering together his scores and sketches that were to become the initial collection at the Alexander Turnbull Library's Archive of New Zealand Music. Then in 1984 he established the Lilburn Trust, which actively promotes New Zealand music. This quietly spoken yet forceful personality may now be gone, but nonetheless he leaves an important legacy.

That legacy goes well beyond his financial support of New Zealand composers and his many beautifully crafted works, which alone have won him international recognition.

One that contains a challenge, first given by him to students at the inaugural Cambridge Summer School in 1946: "I want to plead with you the necessity of having a music of our own, a living tradition of music created in this country, a music that will satisfy those parts of our being that cannot be satisfied by the music of other nations."

That the challenge has been readily taken up by a host of younger composers once taught and influenced by him speaks volumes.