His primary schooling began at the local Pukeroa School and continued at the Friends' School in Whanganui, after his parents retired to the city in 1925.
He spent two ears at St George's Preparatory School, where he continued his piano lessons before being sent to Waitaki Boys' High School in Ōamaru.
Shy by nature and unused to boarding the young Lilburn found it difficult to fit in at first but gradually his confidence grew.
He left school at the end of 1933, moving to Christchurch to study journalism and music at Canterbury University College (then part of the University of New Zealand).
In 1937 he began studying at the Royal College of Music, London where he was tutored in composition by Ralph Vaughan Williams and remained at the College until 1939.
The two men remained close and in later years Lilburn would send Vaughan Williams gifts of New Zealand honey.
Back in NZ in 1940, Lilburn served as guest conductor in Wellington for three months with the NBS String Orchestra.
There followed time as a freelance composer and teacher and between 1946 and 1949 and again in 1951 he was composer-in-residence at the Cambridge Summer Music Schools.
During these years he was heavily involved in NZ arts activity, and became friends with other artists such as Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, Rita Angus, and Alistair Campbell.
In 1947, Lilburn took up a position at Victoria University as part-time lecturer in music, becoming a full-time lecturer in 1949, senior lecturer in 1955. He was appointed Associate Professor of Music in 1963 and Professor with a personal chair in music in 1970.
Following visits to studios in Europe and Canada in 1963, Lilburn founded the electronic music studio at the university - the first in Australasia - in 1966 and was its director until 1979, a year before his retirement.
The NZ Symphony Orchestra has recorded most of Lilburn's major works, including his three symphonies composed from 1949 to 1961 - the Drysdale Overture (1937), Festival Overture (1939) and Prodigal country (1939).
