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

The Return was, with great rapidity, scheduled for commercial
release by Kiwi Records, coupled on an L.P. with Lilburn and Campbell's
38
song cycle Elegy. The record was released in 1967 and The Return, in
particular, was greeted with enthusiasm by most commentators.
131
However,
as Lilburn pointed out in his 1967 talk to the Christchurch Society for
Contemporary Music, that:
nAn even younger generation of composers
returns from Paris and Cologne to say politely
but firmly - What you are doing is regressive.
Regressive is a new word, a U-word, maybe
meaning reliance on tradition. Now I resent 39
being called regressive, but I have to face it."
One such composer was Robin Maconie, who, shortly after returning to New
Zealand in 1965, launched a vituperative attack on Lilburn's The Return
through the pages of Third Stream!
"Already Lilburn's Return has been written off
as a masterpiece. Whatever the work's merits,
they are not made any more apparent by the
encomiastic fibrillations of local gossips as
they are neither obscured by the studied
silence of those better qualified to pass
opinions
As an electronic study, Return is primitive
and repetitive,. ,1140
Maconie compared The Return with Stockhausen's Gesang der Junglinge and
concluded that the comparison is "hardly flattering to Lilburn".
Maconie
went on to severely criticise Campbell's text as typifying the fact that
"New Zealand poets do not sing", and completed the article with the
observation that the work:
" ••• turns out to be avery mechanical nightingale.
Lilburn's recent Poem in Time of War 1967, on the
other hand, is, though still no masterpiece, an
electronic work of substantially more merit; a
happy sign that the composer's own development
is not being hampered by well.-wishers ,114 1
Surprisingly, Lilburn was stung into replying in the following issue of
38 Kiwi SLD-13.
39 Douglas Lilburn, Christchurch Society for Contemporary Music address
p. 17.
40 Robin Maconie, A very mechanical nightingale. Third Streamno.3,
May 1968:35-6.
41 ibid.