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

14 I
established, that 'Nothing is capable of being
well set to music that is not nonsense'.
All of this music has been performed and well
received in countries as far apart as New
Zealand, the U.S.A., Israel and Britain, though
Lilburn's is a style which could only have come
from a native New Zealander. Both his example
and his teaching at Victoria have been crucial
in the development of New Zealand composition.
Befor'e him, New Zealand was 'full of musical
amateurs', like the underworld of Shaw's Man and
Superman, where, you will remember, 'music is
the brandy of the damned'. The emergence of a
professional composer like Lilburn is part of
the process by which New Zealand has ceased to
be a place of exile and has become, for us who
live here, a centre in its own right. This does
not mean that music has ceased to be the brandy
of the damned only to become a comfortable home
'brew, but that music has become for us the
distillation of our own sense of our own place -
in this case, not only in the echoes of bird
song in the violin sonata or the piano Chaconne,
but in the lean spare texture of the music,
evoking the empty land celebrated by our poets,
in which 'The plains are nameless and the cities
cry for meaning'.
In this way Douglas Lilburn, by standing here
today in his own right, stands also for all the
artists who, in the latter years of the century
we are celebrating, have helped us to come of
age as a people, 'Offering', as Charles Brasch
has said, 'soil for our rootless behaviour'.
So he has much in common with Denis Glover's
Harry in the aim to
Sing of all things sweet or harsh upon
These islands in the Pacific sun,
The mountains whitened endlessly
And the white horses of the winter sea.
Mr Chancellor, I present Douglas Gordon Lilburn,
composer, for admission to the degree of Doctor
of Music, honolt..i.-6 c.a.tIha.."19
Significantly, the University of Otago announced the establishment
o f t h e Mozart Fe 11 ows h··
~p ~n Compos~t~on
. . 20 at t h'
~s Centenn~a
. I C
onvocat~on.
.
19 Alan Horsman as in John Steele, Douglas Lilburn - Docto~ of Music.
Douglas Lilburn op.cit. p.77.
20 See Appendix A9.