Nine Short Pieces for Piano (1965-66)
In 1967 Lilburn presented pianist, friend and colleague Margaret Nielsen with a folder of piano pieces labelled “Crotchety at 51!” The composer asked Nielsen to “Please see what you can make of these,” and eventually nine were selected to make a comprehensive sequence which, like the Symphony No.3, arguably becomes a corollary of Lilburn’s Sings Harry settings of Denis Glover’s poems. New Zealand likes its sages ordinary but reclusive, without sexual desire (or desire of any kind) and cynical of material progress, yet nevertheless blessed with a sense of vernacular elation. Lilburn and Harry are indeed two avuncular recluses – outdoor figures, the companions of hawks and deer. They are stone heads of reassuring integrity who, ‘crotchety at 51’, speak of a bitter-sweet point of balance at a moment between youth just past and age about to come. It is not difficult to hear the strain of Harry’s guitar resonating in the first piece; nor is it hard to trace the lines that criss-cross the face of this music as furrowed with bleakness yet graced by an awareness that all human experience is finally put into context against the power and beauty of the natural world. Expressed with exquisite subtlety, the Nine Short Pieces, each of which is based on a single idea, capture as well as anything else Lilburn wrote the essence of what he most valued. Like Harry, Lilburn would be content to ‘live it all again’, and be content also to cast out remorse.

Three Sea Changes (1946, 1950, 1972/81)
Set against the coastal landscape of New Zealand, these pieces are all concerned with the complexities and mysteries of the human heart. Steeped in memory and washed in brine, they celebrate a passionate engagement with the natural world and a continuity of human effort in the face of transition – in the face of love and loss.

The opening movement, vibrant with linear rhythms, is strong and clear whilst the altogether more introspective central piece, entitled ‘Prelude’, is resonant with the bleak undertow of unrewarded lives; the metaphysical quality of the closing movement speaks of the elemental imagination – which, in Sings Harry, is otherwise called “the flowers of the sea.”

Margaret Nielsen recalls Lilburn equating this sequence of movements with the three stages of human life. In so doing he may, in part, have been referring to the cycle of his own compositional style which these pieces represent: the first, completed in 1946, belongs to his early romantic aspirations while the second, dated 1950, represents the ‘searching rhetoric’ of his middle works; the third, sketched in 1972 and revised in 1981, comes at the end of his creativity.

‘Seven Short Pieces’ (1965-66)
These pieces come from the same folder as the Nine Short Pieces, the composer stating in an appended note: “The Nine Short Pieces were culled from this lot”; in both sets, ideas are seeded from single generative cells. Combining neoclassicism and serial technique with impressionism, these pieces juxtapose compressed motivic diction with the linear counterpoint of Bach and the sensuous language of Bartók’s ‘night music’. Composed in the mid-60s (nos.1-5 in 1965, nos.6-7 in 1966), the series exemplifies Lilburn’s move towards modernist expression and also a contemporary approach to landscape. Numbers 6 and 7 (No.6 is marked “attacca”), for example, can be heard as a ‘prelude and fugue’, whilst at the same time evoking the pictorial interface of a lake and river – the lake shining with star-like clarity and the river running in dawn-flushed counterpoint. What is signalled is the emergence of ‘inscape’, the nature of things, which is the principal site of meaning in Lilburn’s late electro-acoustic works.

‘Short Piece’ (1965)
The interweaving linear formations of this study evoke the play of waves on summer shores. This piece belongs to the same folder as the collections of nine and seven short pieces.

Prelude (1948)
This piece demonstrates Lilburn’s fascination with the authority and potency of Schubert’s voice. It tells a poignant story of solitude and the bitter-sweet sorrow of memory. Before us float images of shallow waters, leaves and moist earth, its hypnotic patterning bringing speculation continually to mind.

Sonata (1956)
The composer’s programme note for this work reads: “This Sonata may reflect some transition of style and also some stress of moving from the South Island to what proved to be a congenial new context of Wellington and its coasts. There are three movements as befitting any sonata and their unfamiliar patterns may reflect changing circumstances. In the mid-forties my Christchurch friend and colleague Frederick Page once complained to me: ‘Why don’t you write music with charm, as Lennox Berkeley does?’ But the Lennox charm was anathema to me, as my testimony now sounds. Rather I wanted a harsh rhetoric and sombre inscape, both gained from my experience and its analogy with the coasts, something that the painter Colin McCahon vouched for. I hope listeners may accept a rather grim first movement, along with the wayward wave-spun rhythms of the second, my coastal substitute for Viennese waltz-time, and then relax into some resolutions offered by the final movement.”

This sonata provides an outstanding example of Lilburn’s ‘orchestration’ of piano colour and his sensitive balancing of tonal relationships. Here the New Zealand landscape appears at once desolate and compelling, contrasting the raw textures of the brooding hills with the crestings of tides and luminous cloud formations. Throughout the sonata powerful linear rhythms convey to the listener a sense of nature’s force and energy, whilst Lilburn’s interest in the subtle inter-relationships between mountains, sea and sky mirror what it means to be a New Zealander.

‘Untitled Piece’ (1965)
No one can ever accuse Lilburn’s repertory of short pieces written during the 1960s as simple or superficial, yet they possess an immediacy that listeners find alluring and true. If their event-horizons are instant, their intensities are infinite and utterly absorbing. Lilburn had drawn a line through the manuscript of this piece, and although we usually have every reason to trust the composer’s judgement, in some special cases we have reconsidered it so as to allow a better appreciation of the fuller dimensions of his work.

‘Untitled Piece’ (1981)
Composed in 1981 from sketches made in 1973, this work is probably the last to have come from Lilburn’s pen. The music unfolds, song-like, in long-breathed cumulative phrases. Sharp and sad, haunted by glowing days and mist-filled nights, this evocation, in its supple beauty and clarity, seems flawless.

Sonatina No.1 (1946)
In an interview with Owen Jensen, Lilburn said how struck he was by painter Toss Woollaston’s remark that “international influences are what give our work manner, but environment should give it character”. This sonatina combines the geometric patterning of classical forms with the distinctive simplicity of colour and line that the composer so admired in the work of regionalist painter Rita Angus.

The sharp outline of the theme in octaves, scoured by the receding chordal responses which open the sonatina, represents the sculptural landforms of the Southern Alps. Here, snow-capped peaks appear to roll on forever and space is vast and relentless. Vertiginous structural chords, announcing the second subject group, lay bare the natural and geological foundations of the mountainous landscape, whilst the triplet flow of another secondary theme animates the texture. Carefully balanced bimodal harmonies render throughout the rich tonal contrast of monumental landforms.

The central movement, with its sarabande-like gestures, takes in and gives back signals of a universal solitude, while the semitonal dissonance embedded in the thematic texture is the sound of a lonely personal vernacular. The dulled, pulsed beat of the middle section is conducive to reverie and snowfall. A major modality graces the return of the opening material.

The three-note motive dominating the finale, combined with a fluid overlay of triads, evokes a sense of vigour, not unlike the rush of river water over boulders.

The first broadcast performance of this work was given in 1946 by Owen Jensen, and the first public performance was given by Lili Kraus in 1947.

A Musical Offering (1941)
Lilburn’s musical Christmas gift to Lawrence Baigent and Leo Bensemann in 1941 – the first of at least three such offerings dating from the 1940s – shows the composer in a merry mood. The collection, rich with bon-bons, commences with four ‘carols’ which ring out joyously or plangently with pealing bells. There follows a sequence for ‘musical box’, including a Scottish song (‘The Lassie’s Lament’) and reel (‘The Highland Gathering’). The original entertainment concluded with an uproarious ‘Bolero’ for six hands (presumably Baigent and Bensemann joined their friend) but this item is reserved for other piano-ensemble works later in the series. Lilburn titles the manuscript “A Musical Offering of Preludes, Musical-boxes and a Tempo di Bolero” with an ‘apologia’: “Musical-boxes says Lawrence / Excite my abhorrence / and these preludes says Bensemann / There’s really no sense in ’em”, followed by the musical quotation I do like to be beside the seaside reworded as “But we do like to swing the old Bolero.” Lilburn, relishing Baigent’s taste and Bensemann’s stringency, has written vulgarly and sentimentally; nor has he left out his own Scots persona – Lilburn’s family roots were in the lowlands.