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

But, the "zombie on the horizon" in the form of electronic music
fascinated him.
He decided that ".,. the best way to exorcise this
demon, as any other, was to meet it on friendly terms II ,24
126
Lilburn saw in electronic music the opportunity to return to his
music of the 1940s, drawn, as it was, from the sounds of the New Zealand
environment.
The wealth of sound available in the electronic medium
meant that he could explore the music of his roots ~n
possible in his writing for traditional instruments.
".,. with this new electronic medium I can,
for the first time, enter into and explore
my own total heritage of sound, meaning
all sounds, not just the narrow segments of
them that we've long regarded as being music.
Meaning, that now, I can take for a starting
point many of the natural sounds that have
"been in my ears since childhood, and use
these much as I would use conventional
musical materials, This does seem to me a
fascinating, strange and truly contemporary
situation, and I shall be glad to live along
with it for a time."25
ways that were never
It is to Lilburn's credit as a pioneer of composition in New
Zealand that it was he who led the way into this new medium, both in a
compositional sense, and in the practical sense of establishing a studio
for composers' use.
"JB: With your transition to electronic music
was that an inevitable process and was it an
easy process?
DL:No I don't think it was either inevitable or
easy. It simply happened as a result of a confluence
of many things, partly of the fact that we began to
hear about this new medium and were interested in
it and felt that New Zealand should have some
station in a university where it could be explored
and where it could be taught finally, and as a
medium of course as soon as I met it, it simply
f:ascinated my ears and the whole technique involved
with it is again fascinating becau~e it's rather more
like painting in a sense that you get your sound result·
immediately" back from whatever you do and if it
doesn't happen to come out just as you want it you
simply adjust controls and do it again, like doing
another brush stroke, I suppose.,,26
24 Douglas Lilburn, Christchurch Society for Contemporary Music address,
p. 16.
25 ibid.p.17.
26 Jack Body interviewing Douglas Lilburn October 1975. Unpublished
typescript of taped interview. Copy at Alexander Turnbull Library.
pp. 3-4.