Philip Norman: Douglas Lilburn: His Life and Music

Philip Norman's biography of Douglas Lilburn is a ground-breaking achievement for New Zealand music, a publication that will put our leading composer up there alongside his more widely celebrated colleagues in the literary and visual arts.

Norman's 468-page tome has not only caught the essence of the man, but also the environment that created him.

How many knew that, while studying in London, Lilburn spent his Cobbett Prize winnings, paying for a friend to have an abortion in Zurich? A later relationship with Rita Angus, resulting in a miscarriage, seems to have been shielded even from some close to the composer.

From the other end of Lilburn's life are the sorry rifts with historian John M. Thomson, and sparrings with the testy Edwin Carr.

Lilburn was a man of contradictions; essentially a loner, he was inclined in later life towards cantankerousness. Yet, he also supported and encouraged those who followed. In Norman's pages one can read of his pioneering work with the Waiteata Press, his battles with the Australasian Performing Right Association, and the eventual foundation of the Lilburn Trust.

An honest discussion of Lilburn's sexuality seems important in times when, only recently, the diaries of one of his contemporaries have been destroyed by descendants.

Norman is the perfect scholar and gentleman, sympathetically assessing through the words of the composer himself, and those of lovers like the painter Douglas MacDiarmid.

Norman also provides invaluable background to the composer's music. Having set to music the words of Denis Glover (Sings Harry), Allen Curnow (Landfall in Unknown Seas) and Alistair Campbell (The Return, Elegy), to name but three, Lilburn's dealings with poets are significant.

Norman's book is handsome to look at, too, with hundreds of images, and unexpected portraits of the composer.

A handsome colour section shows the sketches around Rita Angus' 1945 Lilburn portrait. The final painting is on the book's cover - alas, with type superimposed on its clouds.

Inevitably, there is the occasional slip-up, with misspellings of names from Para Matchitt to Andersen Tyrer, although a few are clearly indexer's problems. Unbelievably, Carraigh Thompson's name does not even appear in the index.

More worrying are omissions. Norman seems unaware that the film score Journey for Three was released by the TANZA label on 78s and a short bibliography of Lilburn's writings ignores his challenging essay on "Elgar and Radical Bias" in a 1936 issue of Tomorrow. Jill Palmer's important publication of Lilburn holdings at the Turnbull is also unacknowledged.

But, for all its problems, this is a fascinating study and thoroughly recommended.

* Canterbury University, $55