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

latter building on the pointillism of Webern's later works.
The
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perfection of the tape-recorder and its growing commercial availability
in the late 1940s gave strong impetus to initial developments in the
field of electronic music.
By 1954, the first electronic work to be
fully notated in score form had been published (Stockhausen's Studie 2).
Even the older, more established composers had begun showing cognisance
of the serial techniques.
Copland's Piano Quartet of 1950 showed the
composer using serial techniques for the first time (the work is based
on an eleven-note row) and Stravinsky, from about 1952, began espousing
serial procedures.
That Lilburn's older-styled Symphony No.2 was written at a time
when compositional preoccupations had swung in radically new directions
overseas is more a comment on the relative geographic and artistic
isolation of New Zealand than on Lilburn's perserveranc~with
a proven
mode of expression. There is little to suggest that Lilburn had heard
any examples of the new overseas music in New Zealand prior to the
composition of Symphony No.2.
For example, the concerts of the
Wellington branch of the International Society for Contemporary Music
featured no serial works in its concert programmes until as late as
1955 when Stravinsky's Septet (1952-3) ~as presented. As one of the
founders of the Wellington Branch, Frederick Page, later wrote:
"In our first seven years [1949-55J Khachaturian,
Hindemith, Honegger, Piston, Racine Fricker,
Poulenc, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, were the
'moderns', and modern music was virtually
diatonic with knobs on."l
The fact that Lilburn chose to embrace the new compositional
techniques immediately following his trip overseas in 1956 makes his
achievements as a composer in New Zealand all the more noteworthy.
1955 he had firmly established himself as the leading New Zealand
composer. and his works were at last beginning to come to general attention.
His music had become, admittedly to a limited degree, acceptable. For a
composer of lesser curiosity, the temptation to remain with the
established style would have been irresistible. As it was, Lilburn's desire
to speak with a contemporary voice, acceptable in an international context
if not a New Zealand context, resulted in the change of compositional
direction so evident in A Birthday Offering of 1956.
Lilburn's embracing of the new compositional techniques so soon
By
Frederick Page, Contemporary music in New Zealand (2). Landfall
vol.20 no.3, September 1966:283.