K smiled and chuckled as I played this interview with Peter Sculthopre (1929 - 2014) where he speaks about being reprimanded as a child for daring to compose because all the composers were dead. Now he is dead.
"That's just how he was. Warm, quite dry, and really lovely. He liked a good curry" They had met in the 70s, and K would house sit when he travelled. In a spooky ever closing loop, Sculthorpe then lived in a tiny terrace house, which he described as a decorated passageway, immediately next door and identical to where we now live in Sydney. It was a time when Peter was increasingly attracted to the east and Shinto, although Australia, its landscape and ancient inhabitants would always be his inspiration. He told the story of being in Oxford and the suggestion: 'you must like it here, it's quite old' to which he said: 'well, you should come to Australia where it's really really old'.
The recurring theme of all the obits is he was the first to show us the landscape musically through our own (he was says his) ears. I'd say rather like a musical Fred Williams, whom I'm equally mad about, if you like that kind of analogy, which I don't. Of his own admission, his work became increasingly political and environmental as the impending planetary crises became ever more pressing.
More good biography here.
The first Sculthorpe I remember was his opera "Rites of Passage" which I now read was commissioned but not ready for the opening of the Sydney Opera House where War and Peace did the job instead. About all I recall were dancers running frantically across metal sheets making percussion. It was the early 70s, and in retrospect a time which increasingly looks to have be a free-wheeling whirl of creativity and exploration with the likes of Peter Maxwell-Davies Miss Dunnithorne's Maggot and whoever whatever filling the house. Nowadays, if it isn't Boheme, no one wants to know.
Limelight has a marvellous interview The Sound of Home :
"My main influences these days are to do with the environment and climate change. It has its seeds in a work like Earth Cry from 1986 in which I was saying we should listen to the cry of the earth as the Aborigines have done for many of thousand of years. Then maybe we'll get the country right. Later in a work like Memento Mori I used Easter Island as a parable for planet Earth and population growth. The way they chopped down all the trees and ended up cannibalising each other. Couldn't even make canoes to escape the island"
His relationship with the SSO was strong. In tribute, the SSO dedicates this week's performances (Brahms Second Symphony and Strauss Four Last Songs, Robertson / Brewer) to his memory and will play his Momento Mori as an encore.
Addit 13 August :
Andrew Ford's (ABC The Music Show) well informed remembrances of Peter Sculthorpe are here from Inside Story. One is starting to get the sense that he didn't set out to create Australian music, or music which reflected Australian-ness, but rather he composed what was within him, and that necessarily was of this place. That said, he did write Kakadu before going there, imagining it, and was later surprised by its reality.
And The Music Show segment on Peter Sculthorpe is podcast here.
