Landfall for Lilburn's mastery

By WILLIAM DART


Radio New Zealand's series for Douglas Lilburn, the 10-part documentary Douglas Lilburn: The Landscape of a New Zealand Composer, made an extraordinarily rich tribute.

The series captivated us on radio in 2002 and last year and now this extraordinary set of programmes is available in a handsome 10-CD set, freeing the voices and the music to speak and sing at the press of a button.

To get 518 minutes of prime heritage for a mere $150 is a steal, allowing us to eavesdrop on those who knew Lilburn - family, colleagues, performers and composers - as they try to get to the core of this elusive man who played such a part in getting New Zealand music to flourish and survive.

And what wonderful voices they all are. Above all, Lilburn in 1987, chuffed to remember his success 40 years previously in winning the Grainger Prize. Then, a few CDs further on, in 1971, having a gristly encounter with a Radio NZ reporter who tactlessly asks him, concerning electronic music, "Can't anyone just make these machines chatter?"

All these riches were brought together by producers Roger Smith and Gareth Watkins, inspired by the composer's death in 2001 and the terrible silence that ensued.

This was never going to be "a probing confrontational documentary", Smith says. "We are interested in meeting people and letting them talk."

Smith has many stories about getting together all those who were interviewed, including a wonderful tale of the resourceful Jeannie Lilburn, the composer's niece, improvising with a broom handle when Smith and Watkin's microphone stand vanishes in transit.

One useful addition to the CDs is the addition of track markings. Now you can go straight to that precious moment when Jenny McLeod outs Lilburn as "a closet rock composer. He grew up in the days before rock did come along," McLeod says, "but there are things about his rhythms that make me think he would have liked to have cut loose."

Or perhaps you might like to revisit one of Jack Body's many lively contributions where, with a background of chirping birds, he affectionately imitates an irritable Lilburn unwilling to get a hearing aid.

There is some analysis, but it's not daunting. Usually, the programmes cut to the interface between the man and his art.

Keen observations and images come from unexpected sources. Theatre guru Richard Campion hails Lilburn as a "Merlin in his electronic cave", and the violinist Dean Major earnestly suggests that Lilburn's retreat to the electronic studio was an attempt to avoid "becoming an anachronism in his lifetime".

As Major talks, we hear a few seconds of a 1978 recording of Lilburn's String Quartet, played by the Schola Musica Quartet. And the CDs' use of musical extracts is one of many delights.

Treasures from Radio New Zealand archives emerge, including rarities - some extracts from the National Orchestra's 1955 performance of the St Joan incidental music, the 1961 premiere of the Third Symphony - along with such curiosities as a 1972 performance of Landfall in Unknown Seas, conducted by John Ritchie, in which, alas, Bruce Mason doesn't get the chance to speak his Curnow lines.

Douglas Lilburn: The Landscape of a New Zealand Composer makes for compulsive edge-of-seat listening, - even the matter of Lilburn's homosexuality. My eyes moistened when Jeannie Lilburn seemed to edge around the issue, ending with a description of her uncle as "such a wonderful human being and, I'm sure, the most beautiful young man", followed by the modal cadences in St Joan.

While this is a central document and resource for our country's musical community, it is much more than just that. Douglas Lilburn: The Landscape of a New Zealand Composer is a fascinating glimpse of what how vigilant we need to be to ensure that the arts maintain a central place in our lives and land.

* Douglas Lilburn: Landscape of a New Zealand Composer is available for $150 from the Centre for New Zealand Music, PO Box 10042, Wellington.