Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001) grew up on ‘Drysdale’, his parents’ hill country farm bordering the high mountain plateau at the centre of New Zealand’s North Island. He often described his boyhood home as “paradise” and his first major orchestral work, the Drysdale Overture (1937), written whilst a student under the aegis of Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in London, explores the home hills, bush and stream as primal sites of imaginative wonder. Recalling the impression of ‘Drysdale’, the composer wrote “I’m left with that lovely Mark Twain image of Jim and Huckleberry drifting their barge down that great river, looking up at the stars and wondering ‘whether they was made, or only just happened.’” Other prize-winning student works included a choral cycle Prodigal Country (1939) and the Aotearoa Overture (1940) which became an instant New Zealand classic.

Returning to New Zealand, Lilburn settled in Christchurch where he had formerly studied. Here, he banded together with an innovative group of painters, poets, publishers and theatre directors who were to prove vastly influential. Settings of the poets Allen Curnow and Denis Glover, for example, resulted in two iconic works – Landfall in Unknown Seas (1942), a voyage of spiritual discovery for narrator and string orchestra, and Sings Harry (1954) which harvests the smell of gorse fires, the sparkle of mountain tarns, the reality of farmhouse dung and the jocular honesty of an ‘old-timer’. Lilburn dedicated occasional piano pieces to artist Leo Bensemann and Caxton Press editor Lawrence Baigent, and his extended orchestral tone poem A Song of Islands (1946) finds its parallel in the regional paintings of Rita Angus.

In 1947 Lilburn joined the staff of Victoria University College in Wellington and completed a series of works which received high critical acclaim, including the Symphony No.1 (1949), the Sonata (1949) for piano, the Alistair Campbell song cycle Elegy (1951) – a vision of the titanic indifference of nature – and the fervently loved Symphony No.2 (1951).

Lilburn composed the Symphony No.3 (1961), along with Sonatina No.2 (1962) and Nine Short Pieces for Piano (1965-66) in response to a stimulating period of sabbatical leave. Masterpieces of style, these works seem to get to the bottom of life’s essential needs. Their witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and the non-human, in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. From this point until his retirement, Lilburn concentrated on the relatively unexplored territory of electroacoustic music. His final years were spent quietly at home, tending his garden and, until the onset of arthritis, playing his beloved August Förster upright piano. Douglas Lilburn received the Order of New Zealand in 1988.