listening—in.
There was not much live popular music. There was an exuberant boy in high school whom we intellectuals affected to despise but whom I secretly envied for his ability to play pop tunes by ear; “Darktown Strutters Ball” was his signature tune. He later had a very good dance band. But it never occurred to me to try it for myself.
Playing by ear was a skill I acquired only years later in my first teaching job in a large country secondary school with no money to buy sheet music. Every Friday morning I had to take the whole school—750 pupils—for singing, with a huge brute of a piano missing one caster so it looked like the Titanic going down. Each pupil had a copy of the school songbook with words only of a hundred or so hearty, patriotic, and folksy songs, leaving me to make up the accompaniments. I remember the thrill when in the third line of “Santa Lucia” I discovered the V of II–II progression.
The only other live popular music I heard came from a dreary little trio of bored local musicians—piano, sax, and drums—that droned its way, Victor Sylvester style, through foxtrots, quicksteps, and waltzes at teenage dances organized by the upper-class mothers of the town. I attended these affairs under bitter protest seething with a rebellion that hadn’t yet acquired the nerve to surface.
I vividly remember hearing a symphony orchestra live for the first time. I was twenty, and it was the newly formed New Zealand National Orchestra in the fine old Wellington Town Hall, built barely sixty years after the first British settlers had landed on the foreshore. It didn’t sound at all like the records I’d been listening to. Those records gave an impression of a sonic space that was completely saturated by the sounds, but this sound was thinner, finer, and there was space around it. It didn’t completely fill the hall but left the music room to breathe. I was, and remain, enchanted by it. Later I discovered that the London Royal Festival Hall, despite all attempts to “fix” the acoustics, had something like the same sound (interestingly, it was not liked by either performers or audiences).
My medical ambitions had to be postponed, as the year in which I passed the entrance exam for what was then the only medical school in New Zealand was the year in which the soldiers came back from the Second World War, many of them already holding medical entrance certificates and wanting to get back to study. Rightly, they were given preference over youngsters like me, so there was no room in the medical school for me and a number of my contemporaries. They told us that science graduates would get preference for admission, so a dozen or so of us gritted our teeth and set out on science degrees.
To my astonishment I found the whole course fascinating: zoology, botany, organic and inorganic chemistry, and geology (geomorphology opened my eyes to the New Zealand landscape, while paleontology and stratigraphy vanquished convincingly and forever any literal interpretation of the Old Testament and with that most of its authority). Zoology in those days was mostly comparative anatomy, and I did my dissections of those unfortunate creatures with a zest and a perpetual astonishment at the unity in variety that they displayed. What I didn’t understand then was that I was learning about relationships—relationships between the parts of an individual creature, relationships between those relationships in another creature, and relationships between relationships between relationships between groups and groups and so on until the whole living world could be seen to be related. Can you imagine how I felt when, in May 1975, according to the date I wrote on the flyleaf, I read Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, picked up casually in a bookshop in London?
I remember our prof of zoology giving us a few lectures on a new science, called ecology (none of us had heard the word before), while our geology prof, one of the last of the old-style heroic Victorian naturalists, talked to us about Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift (“Most geologists think it’s rubbish, but some of you might find something in it”). I used to spend weekends at the marine biological station down by the harbor, up to my thighs in gooey mud, counting ascidians and other creatures of the tidal zone, and other weekends up the rivers of North Otago looking for, and finding, abundant creatures of the Cretaceous, and even a perfect vertebra of a moa, the two-meter-high flightless bird that was hunted to extinction by the Maori in the eighteenth century. I polished it and used it for years as a paperweight.
In the meantime my interest in music was broadening and deepening. I took piano lessons from a German Jewish refugee musician and read everything I could find about it and listened to whatever I could hear. I even composed a few little pieces including an attempt at a piano sonata, not really knowing what I was doing as I had never studied what was called “theory.” Finally, with my BS degree behind me, I confronted my parents with what I now really wanted to do, which was to practice music. They grilled me carefully and finally agreed to support me through a music degree. In March 1949 I began my studies in the newly established Department of Music at Victoria University of Wellington, with one classroom over the chemistry labs, so that there was always the faint smell of hydrogen sulfide. It doubled as concert room with the addition of a standard lamp. It had a piano and a record player, a senior lecturer and a lecturer, and that was it. The lecturer was Douglas Lilburn, New Zealand’s first professionally trained composer—he had studied at the Royal College of Music and with Vaughan Williams—and although the bachelor of music syllabus didn’t require one to play a note on an instrument, we were taught very thoroughly the rudiments of composition. In order to graduate we were required to compose a large-scale piece for chorus and orchestra. Mine was a setting of W. H. Auden’s Look, Stranger, composed in ignorance that it had formed part of Benjamin Britten’s cycle On This Island (I still like mine better). The choir of Wellington Teachers’ College did a roughish but enthusiastic performance of it with two pianos, and it turned out pretty well I think. I studied piano with a wonderful teacher who had been a pupil of Bartok in Budapest and had done a PhD in Vienna (thank you again, Adolf Hitler), and I became a competent pianist with an LRSM (Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music) behind me.
We were thoroughly grounded in the history of Western music, harmony, canon, fugue, orchestration, and so on. When I look at some of the posh American universities with their millions of dollars of buildings and equipment, I don’t feel at all envious. I was taught pretty well. My one regret is that when in my second year I was offered a post as a kind of répétiteur with the Wellington Amateur Operatic Society (despite the name they did mostly musicals, pre-Oklahoma!), I asked Douglas if I should take the job. His reply was terse: “If I were you I’d keep my ears clean.” So I turned the job down and have regretted it ever since as an opportunity lost to learn essential skills on the job.
I started at Wellington Teachers’ College in 1952 but left after one year, with the blessing of the principal, to work with a small group that was trying to get an educational animated film studio started in a small town north of Wellington. It was a bad time; to keep the place alive I taught all day in the local secondary school and worked on filmmaking all night—that is, when we were not taking part in endless rows provoked by the pugnacious little Scot who had started the thing and finally destroyed it with his quarrelsomeness and touchiness. It was at the end of 1958 that I finally got up the courage to get the hell out and went back to teaching. I had written a handful of scores for short films and had learned a lot, so that when I got a letter from a dance teacher in Wellington inviting me to compose a score for the first ballet to be entirely created by New Zealanders, I jumped at it. It was in two acts, three quarters of an hour long, the biggest thing I had ever attempted. It was performed in Wellington in February 1960 with a mainly amateur cast and was reckoned a success, though today I find its treatment of Maori culture cringe making—it was based on a sentimentalized version of a Maori legend and featured Maori maidens in brown body stockings dancing on points. I don’t think anyone would dare produce it today, although it was revived and toured in 1970 by the newly formed Royal New Zealand Ballet.
I’ve never had such a high in all my life as on the night of the orchestral rehearsal, hearing my music played by twenty-five good musicians from the New Zealand National Orchestra (NZNO). A friend of mine described the music as Sibelius and water, which I took as a compliment. I was happy not to conduct. That was done
