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