Organisations join to celebrate Lilburn

June 2011 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Douglas Lilburn, New Zealand’s most influential composer. A group of Wellington organisations are using this occasion to celebrate Lilburn’s music and to launch new initiatives relating to Lilburn’s work and life.

A concert, book launch, and website launch will take place at 5:30pm on Wednesday 8 June in Victoria University’s Hunter Council Chamber, and will include an address by the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, the Hon. Chris Finlayson. The event is a joint enterprise of the New Zealand School of Music, the Lilburn Residence Trust, Lilburn Trust and the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University Wellington.

The event will begin with a short concert presented by staff and students of the New Zealand School of Music, featuring a programme of music by Lilburn that intermingles little-known and little-heard piano pieces with key works from his electroacoustic period.

“This concert highlights not only the diversity of Lilburn’s electronic music from the 1960s and 1970s,” says concert curator and senior lecturer Michael Norris, “but also intersperses them with some of his little ‘sonic gems’ for piano. Colouristic and spacious, they show the degree to which questions of space, form and time informed his instrumental writing of this period.”

Norris adds: “We can only speculate what might have been if he had returned to the massed forces of the symphony orchestra at the end of this period. Instead, Lilburn retired from the Victoria University where he was teaching and his compositional output diminished.”

Meanwhile, the Lilburn Residence Trust — the trust responsible for administering Lilburn’s former Wellington home in Thorndon — is marking the anniversary by publishing a book containing in one volume two seminal talks by Lilburn: A Search for Tradition &  A Search for a Language:  the former given in 1946 and the latter in 1969. The book is illustrated with sketches and watercolours by his long-time friend and neighbour, Rita Angus, and reproductions of scores he wrote around the same time. An afterword by Jack Body reflects on the relevance of the talks for audiences today:  the book demonstrates that, even though we are in a new century, the issues of heritage, education and environment which Lilburn confronted decades ago, still challenge our thinking about New Zealand culture.

Proceeds from the sale of the book, which is published in association with Victoria University Press, will be returned to the Lilburn Residence Trust to allow it to continue with the maintenance of facilities at his former home.

The Lilburn Trust—the trust responsible for administering Lilburn’s endowment which has helped many musicians, composers and organisations over the years—will use the opportunity to launch a new website, providing information not only on the services of the trust, but also providing biographical and historical information on Lilburn’s life and work.