Research-led and scholarly publications

Douglas Lilburn, a New Zealand treasure

Douglas Lilburn occupies a pre-eminent position in New Zealand music, with a legacy extending well beyond his compositional output. As a composer, teacher and mentor he presided in innumerable ways over the artistic growth of New Zealand from 1940 onwards. From the early works redolent of the influence of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, to the electro-acoustic pieces of his later years, his works have been instrumental in establishing a genuinely vernacular voice in New Zealand classical music. Douglas Lilburn (1915–2001) grew up on ‘Drysdale’, a hill–country farm bordering the mountainous region at the centre of New Zealand’s North Island. He often described his boyhood home as ‘paradise’ and his first major orchestral work, Drysdale Overture (1937), written while a student under the aegis of Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in London, conjures up the hills, bush and stream as primal sites of imaginative wonder. At this time Lilburn wrote his Festival Overture and the Sonata 1939, together with other works that expressed national pride: a cantata entitled Prodigal Country (1939), and the Aotearoa Overture (1940), which has become a New Zealand classic. Although these works were written in his student years, their content, style and general confidence reveal Lilburn as an achieved artist. Returning to Christchurch, Lilburn banded together with an innovative group of painters, poets and publishers who were to prove influential. In 1947 Lilburn joined the staff at Victoria University College in Wellington and completed several works that received high critical acclaim, including two symphonies, two piano sonatas, and the Alistair Campbell song cycle Elegy (1951) – a vision of the titanic indifference of nature. Lilburn’s final years were spent quietly at home in Thorndon, Wellington, tending to his garden and, until the onset of arthritis, playing his beloved August Förster piano. He received the Order of New Zealand in 1988.

The Complete Piano Music

The Douglas Lilburn Piano Music Series comprises of eight volumes published in tandem with the award-winning recordings by Dan Poynton. The series includes 46 works (10 larger works such as sonatas and sonatinas, and 26 smaller works under 5 minutes) – a high total that came as a surprise to the editors when they set about compiling the composer’s extant piano works from files at the Alexander Turnbull Library at the outset of the project. Writing in 2011 about the insights to be gained from studying Lilburn’s output for piano, Rod Biss commented that “the symphonies and overtures are the public Lilburn striving to create a music that belongs to New Zealand. But the piano music lets us hear a more exploratory, unusual and quirky side of him. This music is more personal. He reveals deep emotions, struggles with strange harmonies, flirts with atonality; he listens to and records the sounds of birds in his garden.”

For those considering better acquainting themselves with Lilburn’s piano music, Hoskins suggests starting small. “The sonatas, two sonatinas and the chaconne are bound to make an impression but I find they are not necessarily the right place to start; rather, begin with the shorter lyric pieces that touch on ecstatic and meditative moments of experience, and provide helpful clues to the interpretation of the larger works.” Biss, meanwhile, stresses the overall accessibility of Lilburn’s pianistic oeuvre. “This music is for anyone who plays the piano; in no way was it intended for professionals alone. Lilburn was a good pianist but he had no interest in unnecessary virtuosity or pianistic display. For teachers, it will be a goldmine.”

Reflecting on his involvement in the project, Hoskins states that “Douglas Lilburn’s contribution to the pianist’s repertoire remains unsurpassed in New Zealand and it has been a great privilege to get to know it first-hand.”

The editorial process

Editorial oversight for the series has been handled by Dr. Robert Hoskins, formerly an Associate Professor at Massey University and the New Zealand School of Music, and Rod Biss, formerly of Schott London, Faber Music and Price Milburn Music, who was instrumental in first publishing Lilburn’s piano music in the 1970s. Having worked with Lilburn directly on these early publications, Biss has revisited original source materials for the series. Together, the editors have carefully considered and clarified Lilburn’s manuscripts and early publications in preparing these volumes as both scholarly and practical editions for performance. Working so closely with Lilburn’s piano music allowed Hoskins and Biss to gain some interesting musicological insights into the composer’s sonic preferences. Our editions of Lilburn’s piano music publishes definitive new texts based on close examination of manuscripts and published editions that have been collated to produce versions that are meticulously faithful to Lilburn’s intentions. Lilburn always had a clear idea of how he wanted his works to sound, and this is reflected in the attractive clarity of composer’s manuscripts (this is not to say they were without their idiosyncrasies, such as Lilburn’s practice of writing stems on the wrong side of noteheads).

Douglas Lilburn: Complete Piano Music Edition

Volume 1 • PEL01 • ISMN 979-0-67452-124-6

Volume 2 • PEL02 • ISMN 979-0-67452-125-3

Volume 3 • PEL03 • ISMN 979-0-67452-126-0

Volume 4 • PEL04 • ISMN 979-0-67452-127-7

Volume 5 • PEL05 • ISMN 979-0-67452-128-4

Volume 6 • PEL06 • ISMN 979-0-67452-129-1

Volume 7 • PEL07 • ISMN 979-0-67452-130-7

Volume 8 • PEL08 • ISMN 979-0-67452-131-4

Referring to the editorial process for Lilburn’s Sonatina No.2, published in the eighth volume of the series, Biss remarks “… it had always seemed to Hoskins and I that the pedalling also added a crucial element to the harmonies of the piece. There were effects where the pedal would sustain a bass note while unexpected chords floated above in the right hand; Nielsen referred to them as “poignant dissonances”.

Generally speaking, Lilburn is very precise in his notation but there was a certain individuality about his manuscript: he would, for example, group quavers so that the performer knew which one carried an emphasis instead of grouping them in regulation threes and fours; he indicated some pedalling but generally preferred to signify what he wanted with phrasing marks; he also brought to his writing an awareness of string bowing and his piano music has many examples of phrases with dots or tenuto marks below them. “Sometimes” says Hoskins “we have had to look beyond the letter to the spirit or slant of the manuscript to fully harvest his intentions. But there is always the ‘devil in the detail’ causing restless nights: the BÍ on the third beat of the Right Hand of bar 371 in the great Chaconne, for example, has been queried by some performers who believe that Lilburn intended a CÍ so what to do? Well, we have retained the holograph’s BÍ in our edition as it seems to be in keeping with the patterns Lilburn has established.”

This edition comprises of eight companion volumes to accompany the recorded series and draws on the expertise of Robert Hoskins and Rod Biss who was instrumental in first publishing Lilburn’s piano music in the 1970’s. Together, the editors have carefully considered and clarified Lilburn’s manuscripts and early publications in preparing these volumes as both scholarly and practical editions for performance.

Douglas Lilburn: Piano Preludes

PEL13 • ISMN 979-0-67452-303-5

This gathering of shorter pieces includes music that Lilburn composed in his initial years as a freelance composer, as well as the very last work to come from his pen. Clear-eyed and felicitous, they are nevertheless shot through with something transcendental – a strange and beautiful excitement.

Douglas Lilburn: Piano Sonatas

PEL11 • ISMN 979-0-67452-301-1

This volume comprises of Lilburn’s four piano sonatas. The sonata in F sharp minor is a work of pure Romantic sensibility, while the sonata for piano in A minor reveals Lilburn’s very sharply realised visual sense. There is a bracing, lyrical power to his 1949 sonata, the curve and grain of the music partaking of an impressive physical space. The second sonata, from 1956, provides an outstanding example of Lilburn’s “orchestration” of piano colour and his sensitive balancing of tonal relationships.

Douglas Lilburn: Piano Sonatinas

PEL12 • ISMN 979-0-67452-302-8

And about phrasing, Biss observes he hated a vague slur aimlessly floating for bars in the air, Lilburn wanted his students to think like violinists. “Imagine, how a string player would bow that phrase, or how a singer would breathe,” he’d say. If you thought like a violinist, he told us, you would end up with phrasing that made musical sense.”

This volume contains Lilburn’s two piano sonatinas. Sonatina No.1 combines geometric patterning of classical forms with the distinctive simplicity of colour and line that the composer so admired in the work of the regionalist painters. Composed in the Autumn of 1962, Sonatina No.2, together with Symphony No.3, provides the fullest expression of Lilburn’s last notated music before he turned to the electroacoustic medium.

Douglas Lilburn: Pieces for Piano

PEL09 • ISMN 979-0-67452-289-2

Lilburn Trust

Pieces for Piano introduces students of intermediate to advanced levels (Grades V to VIII) to some of the most loved, interesting and more unusual of Lilburn’s works for piano. Here he provides Christmas celebrations for his friends, breathes the fresh air of mountains and ocean, and explores unusual modes and tone rows, discovering a strange but nevertheless beautiful atonality.