The beginnings and development of a New Zealand music: The life ...

seemed; had been lost. Only Sings Harry and Suite for Orchestra remained
to be written before the close of what Gordon Burt described as " ••• the
first and spectacularly productive phase of Lilburn's career.,,40·
In his lecture "A Search for a Language ,A1 Lilburn stated:
109
"I think I was lucky again to be a university student
in that Christchurch of the thirties, less, retrospectively
for-its music than its ferment of poetry and
painting and politics. I'm not concerned here with
the validity of that local movement, but rather with
the fact that it was positive, stimulating, energising.
By the early fifties the main force of it had gone,
and I remember at that time being desperate for belief
of some equivalent kind. This belief, of course,
belief held in common, is surely another form of
environment, something ltd enjoyed for a long period
in the more stable South Island.
But I was now in Wellington, subject to gusty
international winds, baffled by a new school of poets
writing didactic, unsingable verses about their sex
and their suburbs; and irritated by the perceptive
insistence of my good friend, Frederick Page, that I
should be taking stock of larger muscial trends.
By this time I had, in fact, worked through to the
end of a long apprentice period of composition based
on that literary nationalism of the thirties, and
I was about due for a shock and a change."42
This tshock' came in June 1955, when Lilburn took sabbatical leave and
travelled overseas, leaving New Zealand for the first time in fifteen
years. Lilburn's first stop was for the Summer Music School at Tanglewood
in America.
Europe.
Following that, came a period of study in England and
Lilburn later described his sabbatical leave as:
tI ••• in many ways a painful experience. And I realised
accutely how provincial and inadequate my musical
knowledge and composition technique were in face of
the new musical context I found there. 1t43
This 'shock' was not. just brought about through the sudden awareness of
his own compositional predicament, but also through the strong reminder
that New Zealand was still many years behind overseas countries in
40 Gordon Burt, Composers in CANZ - a Survey of New Zealand Composers.
RNZ. A series of ten radio programmes beginning Friday 13 June 1975 at
8pm. Unpublished typescript, programme I, p.5.
41 Douglas Lilburn, University of Otago Open Lecture.
42 ibid. p.16.
43 Douglas Lilburn, Christchurch Society for Contemporary Music address,
p. 15.