Natural light
  • News and Blog

Peter Sculthorpe 1929-2014

10/8/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Peter Sculthorpe was Australia's foremost composer, and the first to create a truly Australian musical voice.  It was on his return from studying in Oxford that Sculthorpe decided that his western musical heritage needed to make room for other influences, and these included aboriginal meoldies, the sounds of nature, and influences from neighbouring Asian countries.

Pieces such as the 1960s series Irkanda - “scrub country’ and Kakadu (1988) established him as the country’s leading painter of landscapes in sound.  The vastness and silence of the outback, or the thronging of Australia’s wetlands, became his primary influences.  He, in turn, became an environmental activist, contrasting the aboriginal peoples’ sense of being part of nature with the negative impact wrought by the arrival of Europeans.

He worked closely with aboriginal musicians, most notably didjeridu virtuoso William Barton, for whom he wrote Earth Cry, a piece that exploits traditional imitative music to invoke the sounds of wildlife such as magpie geese.

Picture
Kakadu, named after the famous National Park in the Northern Territory, is a typical example of his response to landscape and his use of native music.  “This enormous wilderness area stretches from coastal tidal plains to rugged mountain plateaux, and in it may be found the living culture of its Aboriginal inhabitants, dating back for fifty thousand years. Sadly, today there are only a few remaining speakers of kakadu or gagadju. The work, then, is concerned with my feelings about this place, its landscape, its change of seasons, its dry season and its wet, its cycle of life and death.”

Peter Sculthorpe's Jabiru Dreaming - third sonata for strings, will be toured in the UK as part of a concert by the Scottish Ensemble between 26 and 30 August.  One of many pieces influenced by his visits to Kakadu, "it contains rhythmic patterns found in the tribal music of the Kakadu area. Some of these patterns also suggest the gait of the jabiru, a species of stork". See What's On for details.

Peter Sculthorpe b. Launceston, Tasmania 29 April1929;  d. Sydney 8 August 2014
Picture
Australian black-necked stork, often known as Jabiru
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Welcome

    to 
    NATURAL LIGHT
    a site devoted to nature, and artists who are 
    inspired by it

    editor Laurence Rose

    Follow us on 
    Facebook and Twitter
    Email us

    RSS Feed

    Tweets by @Naturemusicpoet

    Archives

    October 2018
    September 2018
    May 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014

    Categories

    All
    Australia
    BBC Proms
    Biodiversity
    Birds
    Campaigns
    Cheltenham Festival
    Conversations
    Endangered Species
    Environment
    Fenland
    Festivals
    Flamenco
    Hear And Now
    Iceland
    Landscape
    Literature
    Moth
    Music
    Norfolk Festival Of Nature
    Olivier Messiaen
    Peter Sculthorpe
    Poetry
    Re:Tweet Of The Day
    RSPB
    Sibelius
    Soundscape
    Spain
    Ted Hughes
    The Long Spring
    Uplands
    Wetlands
    Words
    WW1

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.