Classical music This article is more than 9 years oldObituaryPeter Sculthorpe obituary
This article is more than 9 years oldLeading contemporary composer whose work was inspired by the landscape and culture of his native AustraliaPeter Sculthorpe, who has died aged 85, was Australia's foremost contemporary composer. From the start of his career, he set out to create music that would not depend on European manners and cultural traditions, but would be specifically Australian in idiom. His contemporaries Russell Drysdale (a close friend), Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan had established a true national school in painting; like them, Peter believed that Australia is primarily a visual culture, dominated by its landscape. His own music, with its blocks of non-developing material and its overall flatness and scarcity of dramatic gestures, even resembles the landscape in the look of the notes on the page.
For melodic inspiration, he turned first to Asia – Indonesia and Japan – and then, in the second half of his life, to the music of indigenous Australians, which sustained him as English folk music had sustained Vaughan Williams. Like Vaughan Williams in Britain, in Australia he became a much-honoured national figure, whose music affected not just a small coterie, but a wide range of people from all parts of society. He was that rare figure in contemporary classical music, a natural communicator.
Peter was born in Launceston, Tasmania, and grew up in the nearby village of St Leonards, where his parents ran the general store. His father Joshua was a third-generation Tasmanian; his mother Edna, a Yorkshire woman, had been a teacher before her marriage and encouraged her son to write and paint. He began piano lessons at the age of eight: after his first lesson, he spent the next week writing music, thinking that was what he was supposed to do, but at his next lesson his teacher caned him for not practising. Peter carried on composing, first in secret, then with his parents' approval. He attended Launceston Church grammar school and at the age of 16 went to Melbourne University to study piano.
Returning to Tasmania in 1950 after graduation, he was unable to find adequate work in music, so he joined his younger brother, Roger, in managing what he calls a "huntin', shootin' and fishin' shop" in his engaging autobiography, Sun Music (1999). He continued to compose, and in 1954 wrote his first significant piece, a sonatina for piano based on an indigenous Australian legend, which was chosen to be performed at the 1955 ISCM festival in Baden-Baden, Germany. In 1958 he was awarded a scholarship to study abroad, and went to Wadham College, Oxford, where his teachers were Edmund Rubbra and Schoenberg's pupil Egon Wellesz. Neither had much influence on him; more important was his friendship with the critic and composer Wilfrid Mellers, who shared his admiration for DH Lawrence and encouraged his independence from Europe.
When in 1961 his father died, Peter gave up his PhD and returned to Australia. He wrote Irkanda IV for solo violin, strings and percussion in his father's memory: it became one of his best-known pieces and exemplifies one of his seminal themes, the lonely figure in the desert landscape. In 1963 he was invited to teach composition at Sydney University, a post he held until 1999. He was a natural teacher, and his pupils included Ross Edwards, Barry Conyngham and Anne Boyd, now the senior figures in Australian music. He lived in Sydney for the remainder of his life.
In 1965 he began the Sun Music series, four orchestral pieces that brought him temporarily into the avant garde. The conductor Bernard Heinze had suggested that he write a piece "without rhythm, melody or harmony". When Sun Music I was played in London it attracted the ear of the music writer and publisher Donald Mitchell, who invited him to join Benjamin Britten in the newly created publishing house Faber Music. He went on to compose around 250 works, including the music theatre work Rites of Passage (1972-73), for the opening of the Sydney Opera House; the television opera Quiros (1982); Requiem (2004) for chorus, orchestra and didgeridoo; many orchestral pieces, notably Mangrove (1979), Earth Cry (1986) and Kakadu (1988); and 18 string quartets. Most of these works are passionately concerned with, as he said, "nature, the environment, and more recently, climate change". But Peter also claimed that Australia is one of the few places in the world "where one can honestly write straightforward, joyful music" – and he did. He was made MBE in 1970, OBE in 1977, an officer of the Order of Australia in 1990, and an Australian National Living Treasure in 1998.
I first met Peter in 1972 when he was visiting professor at Sussex University and needed someone to assist him in the composition of Rites of Passage. We immediately became friends, and in 1974 he invited me to stay at his house in Sydney where we collaborated on the music for a television film, Essington, with a script by Thomas Keneally. In subsequent years we wrote two more film scores together, I continued to visit, and he also came to stay with me in London. In his exquisite Georgian house in Sydney, full of works of art including a world-class collection of Chinese ceramics, we would talk for hours at night over a bottle of whisky, with Peter drinking 90% of it. The next morning Peter would begin composing promptly, showing no signs of a hangover.
He seemed a genuinely happy person, for the most part content to live by himself, though warmly attached to his circle of close friends. He never married: when I first knew him he became engaged to Boyd, but they decided mutually to break it off.
Family life did not suit him: "I feel that my works are my children", he said, "and most of them are rather demanding."
Peter Joshua Sculthorpe, composer, born 29 April 1929; died 8 August 2014.
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