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

48
study with Vaughan Williams. It wasn't
just a question of hoping to learn some of
his technique, because at that time I was
dazzled by things like Lambert's Rio Grande,
and Walton's Belshazzar's Feast,and Sibelius
of course. I knew very little of Vaughan
Williams's music then, but there was some
curious 'mana' attached to his name, a sense
of absolute integrity, a feeling that he was
steering a sane course through all the welter 41
and confusion of twentieth century music making."
It is difficult to gauge Lilburn's opinion of the years he spent
at Canterbury College under Dr Bradshaw.
Certainly he felt piqued that
the University did not recognise, in any official sense, his winning of
t h e G ra1nger " pr1ze "42 - an d F orest was not a 11 owe d to b e conS1 "d ere d" 1n
lieu of the musical exercise Lilburn needed to complete his Bachelor of
Music. 43 Certainly, too, he champed at all the conventional harmony and
counterpoint texts, frustrated at the way they were set up as the overriding
authorities on compositional techniques. Yet, he seemed to hold
Dr Bradshaw in high regard, particularly for his dedication as a teacher:
" .•• we worked on the Kitson and Percy Buck
textbooks to get what is known as a 'thorough
academic training', and I should like to pay
Dr Bradshaw the tribute of saying that he
looked after our training with excellent
thoroughness. The aim of it all seemed to be
keeping your nose hard on the Kitson grindstone
for two or three years, at the end of which
time, you were likely to become a Bachelor of
Music, and then you were at liberty to do some
composing. Because the Doctor was a formidable
teacher, any composing you happened to do was
done in the vacations and usually not mentioned.
But in my final year as there was some money
offering for an orchestral work, I stayed away
from his classes for three weeks to write one.
When I turned up at last with my masterpiece, as
I thought it, his interest set me wondering
whether he had not been a little bored himself
with Kitson exercises year in and year out.- But
his job after all was to turn out Bachelors of
41 Douglas Lilburn, Vaughan Williams. Landfall vol.5 no.l, March 1951:58.
42 Lilburn, in Fragments of a stolen conversation (op.cit. p.19), states
"Despite the fact that I had won the Percy Grainger Prize ••• against
all comers I still wasn't eligible to qualify·for a BMus degree!- Nor
even after I'd come back here and won three out of the four
Centennial prizes I still wasn't qualified to take out a BMus degree.
So I thought to hell with that "
43 The exercise was proscribed as having to be written for chorus and
orchestra.