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					Douglas Lilburn interviewed by Chris Bourke This is an edited transcript of the Chris Bourke interview with Douglas Lilburn - to our knowledge, the most in-depth surviving audio interview. It was recorded for a Listener article on 3 October 1985 at Douglas's Ascot Terrace home in Wellington. An abridged version appeared in Music in New Zealand in 1995. The original cassettes are now part of the Douglas Lilburn collection at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Chris: Wonderful 1940 Headline: "Enter the man who won the laurels" Douglas: Actually it was a bit like that because I stepped off a boat in August 1940 and one of the first things that greeted me was the news that I'd won this money. Money was pretty important in those days, no job, no income, two first prizes and a second added up to a good deal, gave me a bit of confidence to carry on. Then when I went back to Christchurch and really started to work down there, this gave me some backing, together with what I could earn from freelancing. Chris: Put a stamp on it that was going to be your life. Douglas: I think it did do that, I think everybody was too busy with the war to take too much notice of music. Chris: What music was in the family during childhood. Douglas: Very little, my mother was musical but had no training at all, my two sisters played the piano, the usual things, the Moonlight Sonata, Liebestraum and bits of Grieg… Chris: Quite a bit older than you. Douglas: Yes I was the youngest of seven, and not destined to be a farmer, so really they weren't too concerned when I showed an interest in music. Chris: Other children older, so like an only child. Douglas: In a sense I was, because the nearest ones were five years older, and when they went off to boarding school and my parents went overseas I was left almost as an only child in the Drysdale house. Chris: Music lessons. Douglas: Nothing at all until I was about ten or eleven, when I was at the Friends' School in Wanganui. It was a Quaker school and it gave me the best education I've had in my life, it was a marvellous place - it was so imaginative and it left oneself free and you were given assignments for a term and you worked at them at your own speed with no pressure… Chris: At the age of ten. Douglas: ...And we learnt French for instance by speaking French, we had French teas and things like that, we wrote our own plays and acted in them. I think it was unique in those days. Chris: Significant in forming your interests. Douglas: I think it would be because I enjoyed it so much, when I went on to another school in Wanganui, St George's, I found the teaching was good, but it was severe. Chris: How did you amuse yourself while on your own. Douglas: Well there were all these thousands of acres around and you could wander all over them, swimming, build houses in trees, chase turkeys over the hills, and all the farming things that went on and of course one was encouraged to work in the house, in the garden, to take part in everything, which of course was very good training because you never got bored, there was always plenty to do and one enjoyed doing it. But music - there really wasn't anything of significance at that time. Chris: No record players everywhere like now. Douglas: We had an old gramophone at the beach house, which was wrecked by the time I was interested in it. But I did in fact find I could play the Hallelujah Chorus by winding the disc around with my fingers. But really I had no serious music training until I was about seventeen. Chris: Near end of time at Waitaki Boys High School. Also, no music among extramural Otago courses. Douglas: None. I had no idea at all about the theory of music; it was my intuitive feeling for it. Chris: When formal training started. Douglas: There was a very good teacher in Oamaru called Miss Cartwright and she sent me to Ernest Empson in Christchurch and of course when I went there to the University I was able to take Music 1 with Dr Bradshaw and moved on from there. When I wrote my first piano sonata, I didn't know the name of a chord even [laughs] I just did it from intuition. It was a mixture of the Beethoven Pathétique and the Mozart Coronation Concerto and the Liszt Rhapsody, which were things I knew. The teaching at Christchurch was pretty good, but old fashioned I think at the University. Chris: You never did the final exercise for your Bachelor of Music. Douglas: No I didn't because I went off to London at that stage. In fact I was attempting to write an exercise on the text taken from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and understandably I came to grief! And had to abandon it. But I think I could readily enough have put in a work for chorus and orchestra two or three years later, I'd written a large work for the Royal College in London but it never occurred to me to do this for some reason. Chris: Wasn't important to finish. Douglas: It didn't occur to me that I would finish up in a University job. Because there were only three jobs in the country, three Professors of Music, and that seemed to be all that was offering. I just wondered whether I was very practical about anything at that time at all - probably getting along in a dream of some kind! I had some crazy idea that I wanted to be a composer so I think I had made the decision. It was a ridiculous profession to choose, offering no opportunities, no income offering. There was a good deal going on musically in Christchurch even during the War years. There were two very good choirs and a lot of chamber music organ recitals of course in the cathedrals, but I think probably the most important event was the establishment of the National Orchestra in 1946. Chris: At Waitaki, first idea to compose came during lunch. Douglas: That's right [laughs] I couldn't wait to get out and get it down. I'd been playing piano perhaps five years in a haphazard way. Chris: Bach Inventions. Douglas: No! I played dreadful things by Chaminade and used to try and bash my way through a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody. Chris: Romantic parlour stuff. Douglas: It was Ernest Empson who when I was eighteen put me on to Bach Inventions - and high time too. Chris: Interesting you didn't feel urge until then. Douglas: No, well I was interested in other things, I learnt shorthand and typing, and tried to write short stories, I was interested in designing houses, and I used to read enormously and widely. Chris: Being final son, no pressure on you to return and carry farm on. Douglas: Not at all - I had three elder brothers - all farming. I think they were just baffled by me. Chris: Father once said… Douglas: Oh yes, "If it had to be music, couldn't it have been the bagpipes". He liked the bagpipes because he was brought up in Scotland, just as he liked Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns but he didn't like Shakespeare. Chris: He grew up in Scotland. Douglas: He was born in about 1866. He took up land in the Mangamahu between Whangaehu and Turakina in 1890 and that was two years after he arrived here. Because he took about two years to move around and look at various parts of the country, learn the conditions of farming. Chris: Was Forest, which won the Percy Grainger prize, the turning point. Douglas: It really was, I think, it was something extraordinary that just happened to me again - we were not encouraged to compose at the University of Canterbury, just get on with your exercises, and I saw this prize offered by Percy Grainger and didn't do a thing about it until a month before the closing date, and then I had a brief Easter Holiday up at Mount Peel in Canterbury and somehow got the urge up there and set to and wrote an orchestra piece. I was in my third year as a student, and heard no more about this until the following November when a reporter and a photographer turned up at my doorstep to congratulate me. Chris: Had you done orchestration. Douglas: I'd begun orchestration, yes. I used to study scores, I used to hang around the lounge at the old 3YC of Broadcasting, looking through the plate glass at the orchestra. Also the Classical Hour recitals, because we had no radio or record player. Finally they invited me in because they were a bit puzzled at this strange person behind the glass [laughs] looking at them when they were playing! I was just fascinated. Chris: Hard for me to imagine the society with no radio or records Douglas: There was a radio orchestra conducted by Harold Beck which used to broadcast regularly… Chris: Live, as very few recordings. Douglas: ...and I don't remember that I knew anybody that played an instrument other than the piano. This is a most extraordinary development, what young people do now - performance, composition. Chris: Normal thing was for students just to learn the piano. Douglas: Yes. There was an older tradition of people who played in theatre orchestras -all that came to an end with the slump of the 30s of course - people like Vincent Aspey. Douglas: The other thing about Forest is that it was performed by the Wellington Symphony Orchestra under Leon de Mauny and the President of the Farmers Union wrote to my father and congratulated him on his son's musical success and I think that was a turning point, in persuading him to send me off to London with a small allowance to study at the Royal College of Music. He was very fair, because he said "Well, I don't know what he's up to, but after all, I had to make a decision to leave Scotland and come to New Zealand" and he was generous in giving me an education and not to expect the farm. It's the old Scottish tradition of course - the eldest son always got the land, and the younger son was packed off to University or became a missionary. Chris: What was the London scene like. Douglas: Oh, it was fantastic to arrive at my age having had so little experience of music and opera, ballet, and I was dazzled by it all. The old Queen's Hall was a lovely place for sound and the Sadler's Wells ballet; one would go for next to nothing to stand all through Meistersinger, Don Giovanni. Chris: Great names of era. Douglas: Oh definitely - Beecham and Toscanini - we were allowed to go to rehearsals. It was what is called a 'culture shock', and it took me quite a long time to adjust properly. On the other hand there was the very competitive feeling that one had to justify oneself and try to work very hard… and I did manage to win the coveted Cobbett Prize for composition against all comers. Chris: Who else was a student at the Royal College of Music at this time. Douglas: Richard Arnell for one - he's a well-known name in British music. Chris: Vaughan Williams always mentioned. Douglas: Well, he was a name out here of course, who commanded enormous respect through his music and through his personality too. There were more brilliant people on the scene - William Walton - I had notions of having lessons with him, but I didn't because I don't think he took pupils… colourful people like Constant Lambert… Vaughan Williams used to teach one day a week at the Royal College of Music. Chris: Vaughan Williams influence an indirect thing. Douglas: In a technical sense, yes, because he didn't try to teach a good deal of technique, he would leave it to somebody else to study orchestration or 16th Century counterpoint. If you wanted a degree you enrolled at Durham University. But he did have a knack of making one aware of when one was trying to talk sense and when one was trying to display a bit of technique. This was very salutary, that he would unerringly put his finger on the mark when you imagination faltered. It really wasn't until I got back here and learnt from Maurice Clare about string technique and later when the Symphony Orchestra was established I used to drop into the common room down in Waring Taylor Street and ask them about their instruments and write short pieces for them. Vaughan Williams didn't believe in any particular system of music, he just believed that one had to find ones own salvation, which is what he did himself of course through a long apprenticeship period. Chris: Were you very aware of what the European composers were up to. Douglas: You must realise that the Royal College of Music was very British… and Schoenberg, Webern and Berg were not heard of then, the College was still trying to come to terms with Bruckner and Mahler. Chris: Not even Debussy. Douglas: Debussy was all right. Chris: History books emphasise importance of these composers, whereas at time, much of world oblivious to them. Douglas: I think that would be true, and even a figure like Stravinsky was known only by his early ballets then. Chris: What was attitude to Stravinsky in the 1930s. Douglas: I can't remember any impact of hearing his music. Bartók, I heard through the Lyceum, the International Society for Contemporary Music. Chris: So they weren't even on the concert programmes in London. Douglas: Hardly at all, Beecham would occasionally play a work by Bartók but he would spend most of his rehearsal time on the Mozart and trust the orchestra to somehow get through the Bartók. Chris: So they weren't even mentioned, not even in a disparaging way. Douglas: I don't think it was of any concern to them, and I think they've always been a little like this - provincial, as it were, until the advent of a new breed of composer, Benjamin Britten. Douglas: Broadcasting has made tremendous strides, as far as contemporary music, but its much more apparent than real. Chris: Vaughan Williams - avoid being clever, don't compose to please yourself. Douglas: Well, he may have been reacting against people like Sorabji and van Dieren and Busoni. It was van Dieren who said, "lets make our music so difficult that it is not accessible to amateurs". But these things were never mentioned. I think with Vaughan Williams it was just inherent in the man's personality - a forthright, honest worker. Chris: Best teachers teach by osmosis. Douglas: The aim of education is not to teach but to equip the mind for learning. Chris: What did you do after you came back. Douglas: To begin with I had nearly nine months on the farm in Taihape, then for about three months I was guest conductor with a string orchestra and then I went back to Christchurch and lived in a single room and did a bit of freelancing, enjoyed life … and wrote music for people who were there - a lot of string music, for that reason... Maurice Claire had some really good pupils. Chris: Already had completed your Centennial pieces. Douglas: Yes, not so much major pieces but apprentice pieces done at the Royal College of Music, two orchestral overtures and a work for chorus and orchestra, but then I wrote nothing for a full orchestra again until about 1945. Chris: What was the attitude to a composer in New Zealand. Douglas: I think, one had a few good friends, but mainly the attitude was: don't we have enough good music already... Why do you have to come and do it differently? Chris: Hasn't changed much. Douglas: Oh, you can't believe how much it has changed! It sounds naïve but truly I grew up with the idea that all music had been written by great masters a hundred years before, overseas. And I didn't know whether anyone was allowed to do it here. Chris: Incidental Pieces- writing for theatre. Douglas: Oh, marvellous experience writing for Ngaio Marsh and her Shakespeare productions, you learnt a tremendous amount about pace and form. Chris: Always have to think of your listener. Douglas: Like any professional work of that kind - radio productions or commercials even - you have to say what you mean precisely in 29 seconds, neither more nor less - a very good discipline. Chris: The reason so prolific after war - people to play string pieces, theatre, national orchestra. Douglas: I think I was writing a great deal between say 1942 when I settled back in Christchurch and 1947 when I first came up to Wellington to teach partly because I had a great deal of time to myself. Chris: For income. Douglas: I used to do some Press criticism, I'd take any student who turned up at my doorstep, I did some arranging for the Broadcasting library and derived a bit of income from my theatre productions … and I had the prize money to fall back on. I even worked on the wharves, briefly! But one could live very simply in a single room, brewed my own beer and cooked on a gas ring … one just existed. Chris: Creative world in Christchurch at that time often mentioned. Douglas: It was a very enlivening place at that time. It used to be the proud boast of the Christchurch Press for instance that it was not in the hands of journalists … if you imagine from John Schroder the literary editor through people like Allen Curnow, Walter Brookes, Stephen McElraith, Julian Deans and Carl Straubel, about a dozen, whose names were familiar through their publications and so it was an enthralling paper. And at the Caxton Press was Denis Glover, Leo Bensemann, as a focal point. So it was a lucky context to be dropped into, there was nothing else like it in the country apart from the North Shore in Auckland. Chris: And that's the [Frank] Sargeson school. Douglas: Yes, and Fairburn. Chris: Apart from yourself, what was going on musically. Douglas: The Canterbury Graduate Composers Society [with amusement] they were called…please don't quote me. Chris: Support. Douglas: Well, they believed in what I was doing, in the same way that I believed in what they were doing, poets like Allen Curnow, painters like Rita Angus. Chris: All the arts mixed, was only encouragement you could get. Douglas: From peers? Very few cared … but one was lucky to have anybody at all. Another factor of course was the European people who came out here at the time of the war - what they called the refugees - these were highly civilised people who became part of society. I think they were the first people who made me feel that I should be proud of being a composer. Chris: Before that. Douglas: [Giggle] One was living in a slightly hostile world. They could be sometimes, yes. I can't define it, but what the poet [R.A.K.] Mason called that "far pitched perilous and hostile place" … though nobody was really sure whether he was talking about New Zealand or the earth and the universe. I suppose in the sense that one had a good context... These artistic people were new in various fields, but there was very little apart from that. So you used to sustain each other, rather than be sustained by society. But it's a bit difficult for me to generalise like that. I've never thought about it very clearly. Chris: Teaching slowed down output. Douglas: It meant that one had to work damn hard. On the other hand I was getting more stimulus from students and meeting a younger group of composers at the Cambridge Summer School. I did a lot of commission work at the time though, for the Film Unit and Broadcasting. If anything had to be reduced, it was social life. Weekends, evenings, were used for work. Chris: Stimulus from Cambridge students two-way. Douglas: Oh yes, this whole thing about teaching [chuckles] you learn more than you give, I'm sure. Its very much a two way process, otherwise its not effective. Chris: How did you see Cambridge generation, although ten years difference. Douglas: Roughly ten to fifteen years I think. It was very interesting because groups of composers tend to come in waves and Owen Jensen brought together a dozen people I suppose, who had just been waiting for the summer school…many of them went on to London and scholarships and many of them turned out to be very good composers. Chris: They had advantage of going to Cambridge Summer School and being treated as student composers, a justifiable thing to be. Douglas: Well Larry Pruden was a case in point - he felt absolutely isolated in New Plymouth before he turned up at that school. Chris: They received encouragement. Douglas: They also had a lot of energy and imagination of their own, all I was required to do was give them some direction, technically some of them. Chris: New Zealandness about your work … as though carrying a burden. Douglas: I don't think that relates to any particular period - I think that attitude probably came from early days as a student even in Canterbury when I realised what some of the poets and painters were doing showed an awareness of this country which I found very exciting. I was discovering through them, as it were, and certain aspects of form colour and rhythm clarity, I think I learnt from them. Because I grew up dreaming of Chopin, the paintings of Corot - a French romantic painter - I still go back to the Corot room in the Louvre, and of course they're terribly romantic…. Innocent fun. But one had to learn that one lived with bush and not with woods. I was aware… Chris: About the New Zealandness of sounds. Douglas: ...and of course the poets could make it so much more explicitly than I could … but I knew that I couldn't set those poems in an older romantic style. I had to throw out half the notes and make it a bit more 'stringy' or sharply defined in a sense. I think it all plays a part in cultivating a style… That old truism - "We are what we eat", but we are also the context that we move about in and our awareness of it. Douglas: I think this is something critics tended to say when they couldn't think of anything else to say about me "some indefinable quality of New Zealand" was a favourite phrase, [chuckles] what the quality was they could never quite explain to me. You wouldn't remember the old trains, when they stopped at a station half way up the line, somebody would come along with a metal hammer and strike the wheels one after another to see whether they might be cracked. That made a deep impression on me and I felt later that I was tending to do this with harmonies for instance. "Is that sound really valid to my experience or is it just something I learnt from a textbook or a score? Do I really believe that it's true, am I just using something?" It's fairly hard to pin all that down. Chris: We're about to come to what are regarded as two of the most important works - Sings Harry. Douglas: This was in my mind that possibly that phrase you mentioned … would stem from a cycle like the "Sings Harry" Glover's poems and the "Elegy" of Alistair Campbell. Chris: The literary world and you could combine to say something. Douglas: It's a way of searching out truth. When I went to the Royal College I used to write part songs in the English manner using English forms and I realised this is not my language. I had to discover my language in some way and this is why I think setting words of New Zealand poets or writing music for film where you've got a direct image to work from, you have to relate to those things - you can't help but try and do it. And out of a great deal of this sort of work then possibly a vocabulary, an authentic language develops. Chris: And it's a natural thing… Nationalism now a dirty word. Douglas: Yes, it's a dirty word for fairly good reasons, but don't think these things simply disappear, they simply go underground and they come up again with a different label on them - what used to be called nationalism is now environmental sound and very much in vogue. Nationalism - World War Two - a thoroughly nasty word. Chris: Apart from Vaughan Williams, Sibelius is the other composer often mentioned with your music. Douglas: Well he made a profound impression on me when I was first a student at Christchurch. You could in fact hear there was a language of a different kind, and something that I'd been waiting to hear. Although I like my Beethoven, my Brahms, my Chopin of course, but when I first heard Sibelius' Number Two, the slow movement, I felt I'd come home to something. Chris: The different flavour. Douglas: Yes and his rhythms of course derive much more from nature whereas traditional European rhythms derive from traditional dance or from those wretched military bands "pom pompa dom pom pah" Chris: What did you hear of the Viennese School after the war. Douglas: Very little until quite late. I must say I heard Schoenberg Gurrelieder before I went off to England, played on the radio, and I wrote a longer letter to Professor Shelly about it and got a longer letter back [laughs]. I was bowled over by this piece and he was probably bowled over to get a letter about it. But it took me a long time to come to terms with the later Schoenberg; in fact I've never really come to terms with it. I've not been able to hear works like Wozzeck in the theatre and feel it would be important to do this, and Webern has always seemed to me like a slightly foreign language. Douglas: I remember Stockhausen, when I went to Darmstadt, talking about one or two works in class and he had all these students counting rows - serial rows; he kept on saying "schnell schnell - you must do it fast" - and somebody pulled up in the middle of a row and said "Was ist Das?" - he couldn't get this number right. "Das geht nicht" he said "Ach ja ja" and off he went again. I thought it was the silliest nonsense I'd ever heard. I supposed it is one way of playing a game but it never seemed very relevant really to music. Chris: That school did have its influence though when you started to experiment yourself. Douglas: Yes, but not just because of that school - I think it came rather more from studying some of the later Stravinsky works. When he was using modified serial technique - throughout the 50s. It was later I went to Darmstadt, I went overseas in 55 and 56 but it wasn't then I went to Darmstadt, I was exploring twelve tone music at that time, though I hadn't come to terms with it. I think this influence begins to show in some works of the 50s like Quartet for Brass Instruments and the Wind Quintet, Three Songs for Viola and Piano, and an orchestral work A Birthday Offering. In that case I was using just four notes and playing with them in serial manner - its hard enough to put four or five notes up in the air and keep them up, rather than twelve. Chris: What did you do during that 1955 trip. Douglas: I went straight over to Tanglewood Summer School where the Boston Symphony Orchestra spent its summer holidays, hoping to work with Copland, but he wasn't there I'm afraid, and worked with Roger Sessions who I didn't get on with very well, and I couldn't bear the heat and humidity day and night 100 degrees. And I was utterly disappointed that we were not allowed as students to go into rehearsals and we couldn't properly hear concerts because all the seats were sold to patrons of the Boston Symphony Orchestra so it was like being in the centre of Athletic Park while they are playing up the back of the grandstand - literally - so I headed over to London and later in the year worked with Ben Frankel which was good for technique again. Douglas: I think I made a first acquaintance of serialism in that trip overseas but when I came back I had to work very much on my own but I kept studying it to see what it could do for me and finally this bore fruit, if at all, in the "Third Symphony". But even that is only modified serial technique and I think that is as far as I would want to take it. Chris: I'm reflecting the emphasis that the Victoria Music Department put on Serialism. Douglas: Well it's much easier to talk in class about serial works… new maths. Chris: Third Symphony beginning with serialism in "Sings Harry". Douglas: I was horrified when Ross came out with that article in Canzona. It bloody well didn't. The symphony began with a twelve-note row on the trumpet, which appears at figure twelve in the score, that was what the French called Le Donner - the given thing. Chris: Ross Harris also said - it doesn't matter if it's conscious or un-conscious. Douglas: Well I wrote a brief note back to Canzona and said this is ridiculous and the fact that I use a three note theme spanning four notes is a way of avoiding a triad later on. And the fact that it bears any resemblance to "Sings Harry", you might as well say that Beethoven was making a reference to Napoleon every time he wrote an E flat triad. Which is absurd. Chris: Here's the quote: "Whether the composer intended it or not, sub-consciously or consciously, the influence can still be there" Douglas: Well, his guess is as good as mine, but I had one of his students come up to me after a performance in the music room, "My word Mr Lilburn" she said "that was very interesting. You write pastoral music, don't you? You were a pupil of Vaughan Williams weren't you" and I knew right away where she got all that from, so I teased Ross about this later and he had the grace to blush I must say. Chris: That Canzona analysis business is a bit esoteric for our readers. Douglas: Yes, but these people judge everything in terms of pitch relationships - I think that is nonsensical. My main response is always to the rhythmical thing and the span of the rhythmical thing, the energy of it, and if that is alive it doesn't matter what notes you have, it'll still get through. Chris: All part of communicating which is the whole point. Douglas: Yes it's the vitality of it. Chris: Ross [Harris] once talked to me of the pressure on a composer from society to write a symphony. Douglas: I think this is a slightly romantic idea isn't it - true of 1880 not 1980. Chris: Is this what led to first and second symphonies. Douglas: No - the opening of the "First Symphony" just came to me on the Port Hills one day and I thought 'that is the start of a symphony' and the rest of it came bit by bit - once you've got something with that core of energy other things use it as a catalyst according to appropriate imagined groups around it, and out of that suddenly one day you get a sense of form, the thing that Mozart said came to him in a flash. I think it was much easier for Mozart because he was using familiar harmonies and key schemes. Chris: You would also want to experiment with the symphonic form just to make use of the orchestra. Douglas: I don't think I'm conscious of trying to experiment with the symphonic form at all, I just followed my nose in a slightly erratic way, slightly erratic because I didn't have very great technical training, I only had this quite rudimentary training at Canterbury College before I went overseas to London, and I only had two-and-a-half years in London. Put that against what most people would get - ten or twelve years. Chris: Working in dark. Douglas: Not really - intuition that's all - I simply wasn't interested in a lot of things that the symphonic technique can do, what is called development of material, just seemed a played out game. Chris: You've brought up the idea that a theme comes to you and you think well that has to be a symphony. Douglas: It's the germ of a symphony, what Beethoven used to call a 'Bild'. He used to put these down in his notebook and they mightn't bear any resemblance to any final product except that they carried the energy. Chris: You're composing to say something rather than to stretch yourself. Douglas: I think you could call it an inner compulsion, put this on the psychiatric couch and it might be a way of saying to my family, well I may be no good as a farmer but I'm all right as a composer. This may be part of it too. Its very easy to put labels on things and think you understand them - you don't, you just suppress your understanding once you put that label on something. Chris: I'm really getting at why you got into serialism. Douglas: Well, I got the impression that I was becoming pretty old-fashioned through being isolated out here for so long Chris: One has to keep pushing the barriers. Douglas: Sure. Chris: To be relevant to the time. Douglas: Well, one's time and place perhaps, but no times or places are the same. Chris: So what goes on in Europe… Douglas: Is not really relevant to a New Zealand audience, though one should be aware of it. The danger of feeling like that of course is that one can very easily become complacent - a little islander. I have always taken I suppose what is called a middle road - the kind of thing Freddie Page held in contempt, but for me I think was necessary - I was mainly a few jumps ahead of my audience when I wrote those pieces, but of course time moves very fast. Chris: I wouldn't say the Third Symphony was the middle road. Douglas: No - a pretty old piece called Diversions for String Orchestra was a "way out contemporary piece" when the Boyd Neel Orchestra first played in the Wellington Town Hall. Yes! [chuckles] nothing in a New Zealand work like that had ever been heard. Its just five short movements, colourful, light-hearted. The B minor Sonata for Violin was played up in Wanganui and this dazed critic wrote "the atonal complexities of Mssrs Farquhar and Lilburn". [chuckles] One has to try and take a bit of that into account but mainly I just wrote what I wanted to write. Chris: You're playing down your roll as an innovator. Douglas: I never saw myself in that role I think unless it was to try to relate sounds more directly to my experience in this country, rather than to overseas traditions. Chris: Then we move on to electronic music, you're so much a part of developments of era. Douglas: Various things there. One, that after I'd done the Third Symphony I just felt that I had got myself into a swamp of serial technique and that I had to get myself out of this again, because I was going in the wrong direction and the other thing is that the whole medium of electronic sound was rather more like painting, in the sense that you're not dependent on performers in order to have a result and when you make a gesture in the studio, it's a bit like putting a brush stroke on canvas, and if you don't like that stroke, you can alter your controls and do it again right away. This gives me a great feeling of freedom and independence from certain kinds of performers here who just rejected my work out of hand, a work like the Quartet for Brass Instruments you see in 1954 was just handed back to me and I was told it was unplayable so it went into the draw until Martin Lodge pulled it out and thirty years later some students played it no problems at all [laughs] I had to live through that period. A lot of works I've had to wait up to twenty years to have performed or a second performance. Chris: Someone coming to your music through recordings would find the real innovations are hidden as they haven't been recorded. Douglas: That's only true except they may have been recorded late and understandably, popular pieces like "Landfall.." got recorded sooner and rightly. Then the other thing about the electronic studio is the feeling that it gave me that I was entering into a total heritage of sound, not just a narrow segment of sound that we call music. And of course I grew up not so much with music but with environmental sound in my years of imagination, so it was like coming home in a sense to use that sound. It was a very liberating thing for one's imagination, once I began to learn the techniques by which I could do this. Chris: In early days of electronic music, based on tape recorder not synthesisers, so natural sounds played a much larger part. Douglas: And I found for instance writing incidental music for plays on Maori themes for Broadcasting, one couldn't use an oboe or trumpet with all their European associations but one could take natural sounds and make a kind of texture out of them. Chris: Where did you first hear of things happening in electronic music. Douglas: I think probably through Fred Page who used to keep up with his European information which I had no time to do and at some stage he got the first recording of the Stockhausen Gesang der Jünglinge and at a certain point I borrowed a little Sony recorder and an oscillator from the Physics department and set up in the Music Room and made some exhilarating noises through them, and then I had the opportunity to go overseas to Toronto and finished up working there for three or four months. Chris: Why Toronto. Douglas: Because I'd met Boyd Neel who was the Dean over there and I'd read some article about the studio in Toronto which interested me. It was one of the few places offering at that time. The British hadn't begun at that stage. I suppose I was taking a big dive which took seven years to come to the surface again, but I just felt it had to be done. I'm feeling a bit dry .. would you like a Vino or something? [Both leave for the kitchen and then return] Chris: What was the attitude to your electronic experiments. Douglas: Oh I think a lot of people were very upset about it, my colleagues, "Why does he have to do that?". But you see the interesting thing was that the studio quickly became a focal point for other composers: Jack Body, Ross Harris, John Cousins, John Rimmer and a good many more and this was the best thing that could have happened for it. It gave them a place to work when they came to Wellington and it gave us a meeting ground. Out of that of course came two more studios - one in Auckland and one in Canterbury. Douglas: Equipment, valve oscillators, was picked up off the floor of Broadcasting Stores, but I had some support from Broadcasting who took the line, well this could be a sort of annexe for their productions department, and very good people like Bill Austin there. Chris: I've been trying to place you in the international development of music. Douglas: I don't think I have a place in the international development of music; I've never been part of an avant-garde movement or anything of that kind, and I never wanted to be, because my upbringing led me to distrust anything of that kind. We're getting on complex ground… Chris: You didn't stop composing for traditional instruments. Douglas: Up to a certain point I thought I could make use of those instruments, validly to say what I wanted to say, but I didn't want to move into a contemporary field or make them do things they weren't designed to do; I'm quite happy to leave that to younger composers. If I were going to make a different kind of sound I'd prefer to do it through electronic instruments. Chris: We should write in instruments of the era. Douglas: To me those older instruments, the violin, they embody a civilisation, initially, and I don't like to go against the grain of that. It's common knowledge that orchestral players used to leave their good instruments at home when they had to play a contemporary piece. They didn't want to ruin a bow by playing the wood on the back or something like that - they'd use a second hand bow. That didn't interest me. Chris: You didn't straddle the two, electronic plus instrument - like the early electronic pieces. Douglas: They had done that and had come back, so that it was either one or the other. One of the reasons is that orchestral players don't like to be left to do the composing. Even that brilliant group of Stockhausen's protested at him giving them verbal directions and telling them to play. They want something on paper. So this happened to be the period when I dived into the studio and could ignore it all. Chris: You were still writing pieces with poetry etc, working the two forms in. Douglas: I've never tried to be too analytical about what I'm doing, it seems to stem from an age when one cannot really analyse. Mozart said it had something to do with the shape of his nose I think, why he wrote the way he did. I've always felt that I'm a little bit out of time with what I've written, but on the other hand my work doesn't seem to date - things like Aotearoa Overture have a sort of freshness and exhilaration about them still, if I may say that. Douglas: I've always felt too that I'd like my music to be a bit like a parable - both very simple and to have many degrees of meaning, according to how far one wants to move into it. I think that might be true for something like the Nine Short Pieces for Piano - they can be listened to very simply on the surface; if you go looking for structure then there are quite adequate structures. Chris: Are natural sounds a big part of your electronic music. Douglas: Not as much as I thought they might, because in fact they turned out to be very intractable - those beautiful bird songs [laughs] as rough as can be when you come to analyse them - full of gutturals and sibilants. Chris: Availability of equipment very important to what you write. Douglas: Up to a point, but I was impressed when I was in Toronto by Gustav Ciamaga. He said the best composition comes out of the small studios with limited equipment - the big studios are so preoccupied with the technological race they haven't got time to deal with composers. I took that to heart too, Just as I always liked the fact that Haydn said the font of his originality was his isolation at Esterházy.. Life is full of paradoxes of all kinds - I think they're very important. Chris: Like the thing, it's what you leave out that's important. Douglas: Very often it is - you have to know what can be left out. But for all that I keep coming back to the Bach inventions, two and three part, because I think they're such absolute models of poetry, of logic of clarity [chuckles]. The Fugues are grander models…but the little inventions are like jewels. Chris: Staying with the electronic world, in only fifteen years the technology… Douglas: The technology can only develop given enough finance and you can only get enough finance in the short term if you aim for the commercial market .. It was just a stroke of very good luck I think that the Putney synthesisers were developed in London with some help from Tristan Carey. Chris: Monophonic and simple. Douglas: Not too simple at all - I did most of my work using them, and especially when you could link a couple of them together. What Ross [Harris] has up there now - I don't go up into the place because of course, its somebody else's kitchen, can't go back - but what I've heard of new developments, they all seem to me to be a rather stereotyped product. Very skilful, too skilful in a sense, the machinery takes over. I want to do something different, I don't necessarily want to do what the machine wants to do [chuckles]. Chris: Using sampling synthesisers Electronic music has taken a backward step. Douglas: I don't think we should be doing this kind of thing, what I know of - I've heard a bit of what the Fairlight can do and am not at all impressed, and have heard the Synclavier - a monstrous thing, and I've heard this new gadget that Ross [Harris] has got [DX7] I'm very impressed, but it's not what I want to do… Chris: To get away from tonal music. Douglas: But I think to do that, you lose 90% of your audience. There's the danger that it just becomes just another kind of Wurlitzer Organ. So I think a much more helpful development is what Jack Body is doing. - joining Eastern and Western music. Chris: So the direction of electronic music is shaped now by commercial requirements. Douglas: They can only build it if they can sell it to pop groups. Hours and hours of razor blades, splicing, standing on one's feet ten, twelve hours a day [laughs]. The keyboard can be used in that world too - the keyboard played quite a part in Carousel - you can use it in quite different ways, not as tunes but to bring in voltages, which operate on whatever sound is going through. Its awfully simple now - I often think that Franz Liszt was the first synthesiser - he spent all those years practising on the piano to get those cascades of sound and nowadays any kid can walk into the studio, plug in a sine tone and a couple of modulating frequencies and the machine will do it, and one hundred variants of it. Chris: I can understand you saying now that its "somebody else's kitchen". Douglas: Exactly. I had fifteen years up there, that was enough.. and I think the last piece that I did really brought me full circle to what I'd been wanting to do all the time: take the natural sound of the river and lake at Taupo and weave it into the texture of the electronic sound and fuse them in some way. Chris: So the Soundscape has brought you full circle, you've said what you wanted to say. Douglas: In those terms, yes. My Scottish great aunt lived till 94 [laughs] so I might suddenly at 77 get lit up. I've been loafing for a good long time now, but not entirely, I've had a lot of other things to do: put my estate in order, establish a trust fund, to clean out a fifty year accumulation of manuscripts and papers and letters and try to make some sense of it which nobody else could do, and to get what is relevant into the Turnbull library.