Australia’s finest composer has died aged 85, after a long illness.
>For many, Sculthorpe defined what it meant to be an Australian composer and defined a uniquely Australian sound.
Born in Invermay near Launceston, Tasmania in 1929, Sculthorpe studied at Melbourne University before moving to the UK study to Oxford University where he studied with composer Egon Wellesz. Parodoxically, it was in Oxford that the seeds of his Australian sound – dry, distant and lonely – were nurtured.
When he returned to Australia in 1961, Sculthorpe’s instinct to develop an Australian style which turned away from Europe, resonated with arts leaders, such as “Nugget” Coombes, chair of the Elizabeth Theatre Trust and the first Australian Council for the Arts and critics Kurt Preraurer and the Herald’s Roger Covell.
He would become our most acclaimed contemporary composer, admired for pieces like his 1960s series Irkanda – “scrub country’ – which, for Sculthorpe, was emblematic of the silence of the Australian landscape, and later work such as Kakadu (1988), Memento Mori (1993) and the Rites of Passage, originally commissioned for the opening of the Sydney Opera House.
His last major orchestral workwas his Requiem (2004) for mixed chorus, didjeridu and orchestra written for the 2004 Adelaide Festival. However, he remained active in as a prolific composer of chamber music and as a re-arranger of his own music. An album of his solo piano compositions, played by Tamara-Anna Cislowska, is set to be released this September.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/australian-composer-peter-sculthorpe-has-died-aged-85-20140808-1014h1.html#ixzz39mZDPb94