The composer Douglas Lilburn, musical tradition, and I

Michael Brown, the Curator of the music collection at the Turnbull Library gave an interesting talk about Douglas Lilburn and his musical tradition. Lilburn said in his lecture, A Search for a Language [p.72] ¹ 'I was not born into a musical family and had no proper musical training before a late age of 17'. Michael Brown disputed this claim. The Lilburns, were a Scottish family, they often sang Scottish songs, Douglas Lilburn was steeped in traditional Scottish melodies. This Scottish heritage is reflected in his music, pentatonic melodies, dotted rhythms, pedal notes echoing bagpipes, and melodies developing within a limited compass. So why did he saiy that he was not born into a musical family? Why did he belittle his Scottish musical heritage? To understand this we have to see Lilburn in context as one of the New Zealand artists who worked on forging a New Zealand tradition, a breakaway from the prevailing British tradition. These artists included the poets Allen Curnow, Dennis Glover and their contemporaries, the painters Rita Angus and Toss Wollaston and others who all worked within a general climate nascent nationalism. They looked down on those who preceded them, and their contemporaries who worked within an older, perhaps Edwardian idiom. They did not consider that they excluded from such a New Zealand tradition composers such as Richard Fuchs and Georg Tintner, artists like Frederick Ost, and writers like Karl Wolfskehl, and indeed they excluded people like me and all others who are in every respect New Zealanders, but carry their own personal cultural baggage, including in my case Hungarian gypsy and café music as well as a wealth of classical music. I don't hold this against Douglas Lilburn; he grew up in a different time, when New Zealand was much more mono-cultural, if we ignore Maoris, Dalmatians, Chinese and other minorities who had lived in New Zealand as long as British settlers. He lived at a time when New Zealand culture, with all its limitations, blossomed. And personally, I had great respect for Douglas Lilburn. He and I marched side by side, along with hundreds of others, from the Wellington Town Hall to Parliament to protest against the Vietnam War. We talked, had a conversation, but to my regret I can't remember what we talked about, I only recall the pride I took in being in the company of such a celebrated yet modest composer.

1Lilburn, Douglas, A Seartch for Tradition & A Search for a Language, 2011, Wellington

TPPA and my usually uninformed thoughts

Let us be honest, the government and the proponents of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement tried to foist on us a deal that is meant to be about free trade, but is in reality about the rights of international corporations, Big Business, to exploit the vulnerable. There are already no borders for Big Business. They shift profits from countries with higher taxation regimes to countries with no or less taxation. They lean on governments for concessions, threatening to take their business away if they don't get the special deals they demand. Free Trade deals are done between countries, as it was done between New Zealand and China, and is getting done between New Zealand and other Asian countries. These may, or posibles may not, have huge economic benefits for the countries involved. The China deal helped to keep the New Zealand economy afloat. We don't need 11 countries to agree to the same deal, which might impact on each country differently. New Zealand certainly didn't get the deal expected, and the benefits are still to be assessed. The power of Big Business, international corporations to influence New Zealand policies in the interest of corporate welfare and not the people of New Zealand is also yet to be assessed. Yet I believe that New Zealand has no choice but go along with the TPPA Agreement. New Zealand can't afford to be excluded from a deal that ties down its trading partners. Once Roger Douglas and the Third Labour Government bought into free market, free trade, libertarian capitalism, there was no turning back. 

My mother and I

It was my mother's yahr-zeit, the anniversary of her death this week. She died on February 12, 1993. She was a feisty old lady, though she would never admit to being old, she just stayed young for a very long time.  But it was my childhood memories of her that I recalled this week. I thought of her as the criminal who got us in to the opera performances at the zoo without paying. With my overdeveloped sense of what is right and what is wrong, and I can only blame my mother for that, I thought that it was quite wrong to sneak in to the performances without paying, but the show was all sold out, there was no other way. The animals in the zoo were all dead, eaten during the siege of Budapest, but during the summer they had great opera performances there. This must have been the summer of 1948, shortly before we emigrated to New Zealand. The operas we saw were Madame Butterfly, with the Japanese American soprano, Tomiko Kanazawa and Faust with bass Imre Pallo as Mephisto. Going to the opera was part of our preparation to moving to New Zealand, where we didn't expect to see opera, go to concerts, see plays. Poor old Laszlo Rogatsy, a talented young Hungarian baritone, with a promising future was living and starving in Germany after the war. He was deluded into coming to New Zealand by immigration officials who assured him that opera, yes. of course, every small town has an Opera House in New Zealand. They forgot to tell him that they had buildings, but no opera company. We knew better. My mother and father took us to concerts, to the National Theatre, where we saw a marvellous production of Richard III, a dramatic rendering of Petofi's Janos Vitez. We were equipped with a library full of books, which include great classics, but hardly any children's books. My father also tried to prepare me for the unpredictable hurly-burly of a new unknow country. I went to fencing classes, boxing classes, neither of which proved to be of any use to me in later life. But the music, the books, the cultural baggage stayed with me and defined who I am. My unscrupulous mother who didn't pay for our opera tickets knew what she was doing. She also helped me to hurdle the huge barriers of the English language, helping me to decipher the social studies and science textbooks, the totally inappropriate difficult and irrelevant English texts. And whatever I did, she supported me and was proud of even my smallest achievements. What can I say, I was very lucky with my parents.