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

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Interval
10. Orchestra, "Stray Sunbeams" Huerter
11. "MISS HOOK OF HOLLAND" Rubens
an operetta in three scenes.]6
Other smaller concerts were scattered throughout the year,
highlighted by the appearance of invited local artists. Although the
school had no full-time music teacher, it had a number of part-time
teachers: Messrs F.C. Burry, J.B. Fergusson, C.W.Nayler (all 1930-2);
R.J. Meldrum (1930-3); and Miss Hood (1933). In 1931 a new organ was
built in the Hall of Memories (the School Hall). The inaugural concert
for this was given by Dr J.C. Bradshaw, the designer of the organ's
. f . . ] 7
speC1 1cat10ns.
No mention in The Waitakian is made of Lilburn in connection
with school music activities, although in his final year at school he was
pianist to the school orchestra, and had been receiving piano lessons
throughout his time at school,firstly from one of the school's part-time
teachers, and from ]932 from Kate Cartwright.
" ••• I'd been put with one of their three
bumbling old men - he was impossible, and then
I wanted to go to the person who I knew to be
a good teacher, Kate Cartwright, who had produced
some distinguished pupils down there • • • but I
wasn't allowed to go to her because she was a
Catholic, and this seemed to me iniquitous. And
so, happily, on Saturday afternoons, the football
matches used to be played at the Athletic Park
just down the railway line from the school, so
we'd all charge down there to go to the football
match, and I would charge on another hundred or
two yards and have a music lesson with Kate
Cartwright, and then join the crowd as they came
back again ••• "IS
Lilburn played only a relatively minor part in the extracurricular
activities at the school, limiting himself to involvement in
debating, public speaking, the activities of the Lantern Guild and
reporting for The Waitakian.
He gave "authoritative dissertations"
(short competition speeches), on "New Zealand Unemployment" and "Douglas
Credit", and his debating experiences included affirming "That the
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17
18
J.T. Holloway, Concerts and entertainments. The Waitakian vol.17
no.2, December ]931:195-6.
I
J.C. Bradshaw was, at that time, Organist and Director of the Choir
at the Christchurch Cathedral, New Zealand, and Lecturer in Music at
the Canterbury University College.
Douglas Lilburn as in Fragments of a stolen conversation, op.cit. p.18.