Obituary: Edwin Carr

By WILLIAM DART

Composer. Died aged 76.

Within hours of the death just over a week ago of Edwin Carr, one of the more colourful figures of New Zealand music, National Radio's What's Going On had organised an interview with composer and conductor Kenneth Young.

The tributes continued the next day. Concert FM's Upbeat! enlisted a handful of friends and associates to contribute, along with generous selections from Carr's music. In the evening, James Judd dedicated an NZSO concert to him (although it's debatable whether Ted would really have wanted John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano pursuing him into the next world).

In his time, Carr wasn't frightened of an adventure or two. His OE started in London, studying with Benjamin Frankel, but eventually he sought out the Italian experience, working with the composer Petrassi, and getting involved with an adventurous new dance company - Il Nuovo Balletto d'Italia.

Carr wrote much for dancers, and this was the most easily and often praised aspect of his output. Nevertheless, he was a serious and committed symphonist.

His first symphony, in 1981, was a effervescent tribute to his idol Stravinsky.

His second, in 1984, was inspired by the Jewish writer Karl Wolfskehl who lived in exile on Auckland's North Shore for the last decade of his life. The writer had already been responsible for Carr's Five Wolfskehl Songs.

In many ways, Carr himself was an exile. That sweet, precocious little boy who had trained himself to recite Ronald Frankau monologues in an impeccable English accent was perhaps doomed to feel alienated in our Kiwi brutalist society.

As the years passed, bitterness crept in. Many of us in music circles have "Ted stories". Sometimes his barbs amused, at other times they hurt. The irony was that Carr did not need to feel threatened by what was going on around him. Works such as his First Piano Sonata (1954) or the fine Edith Sitwell settings of 1966 needed no apologies.

Many waited for his autobiography. When A Life Set to Music appeared last year, it told a fraction of what could and should have been told. Worse, it was disappointingly mellow, and its generally slapdash presentation a cause for sadness.

The question is: did Edwin Carr ever recover from a truly idyllic childhood? His introduction to the world was through the magic of gramophone records and dance parties, an "enchanted time" as he would later describe it.

In my mind, I can still see the boy dancing a child's version of the foxtrot and tango to the family's Apollo gramophone, like a flashback in a Peter Wells film.

The dances play on, as if from an old phonograph, in Carr's 1996 The End of the Golden Weather, which, like the Bruce Mason play that inspired it, was a voyage into the past, to that territory of the heart we call childhood.

This and other works have been released on a Kiwi Pacific disc of Orchestral Works. The composer gave the newly pressed CD his blessing days before his death.

With a vista of his Waiheke Island on the cover, Carr's brilliant evocation of a fading Takapuna summer rests alongside the glittering diamonds of the Second Piano Concerto. The unique voice may have been silenced but the music is as fresh as when it was written.