Peter Sculthorpe: The Making of an Australian Composer (review)

In this thick, information-packed volume Graeme Skinner chronicles the first forty-five years of the life and career of Peter Scul thorpe (b. 1929), one of the most prominent Australian composers of his generation. Skinner, a Sydney musician and writer who has worked closely with Sculthorpe for some time as compositional assistant and compact disc annotator, plans to examine the years since 1974 in a second volume.

Like other composers of his generation, Sculthorpe was schooled in European romanticism in the 1940s and adopted some postwar modernist techniques on his way to finding his own idiom. He explores images and stories from Australian art, literature, history, and geography, and relates his music to his experience of Australia. Histori cally, he was among the Australian cultural leaders of the 1960s who helped create increased financial and educational support for composers, more performance opportunities, and receptive audiences for new Australian music, at home and abroad.

Peter Sculthorpe: The Making of an Australian Composer is the fourth, and by far the longest, book to tell Sculthorpe's story. Skinner relies heavily upon the previous three, although he is fairly dismissive of them in his foreword. The earliest, Michael Hannan's Peter Sculthorpe: His Music and Ideas 1929–1979 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982), covers roughly the same years but is more technical. Hannan, one of Sculthorpe's students at the University of Sydney beginning in the late 1960s, analyzes Sculthorpe's famously distinctive melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic procedures and their origins, illustrating his remarks with abundant music examples. My volume Peter Sculthorpe: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993) is a reference guide to the composer's music through 1992, its performances, and its critical reception. Scul thorpe's own engaging memoir, Sun Music: Journeys and Reflections on a Composer's Life (Sydney: ABC Books, 1999), recounts experiences, impressions, and feelings that have affected his art.

Skinner's original intention was to rectify "countless small points" in these books, especially regarding chronology. He began in 1998 to "sift through" Sculthorpe's papers, the extensive collection of concert programs, reviews, interviews, academic papers, journal articles, book chapters, and other items, recently deposited in the National Library of Australia (NLA) (http://www.nla.gov.au/epubs/sculthorpe/ [accessed 19 November 2008]). His preparations took a new turn when, "a year after I started researching, Peter thrust into my hands a bulging folder of letters to and from his parents" (pp. 8–9). Skinner also examined other unpublished correspondence, some of it held privately and some only recently made public in the NLA and other library collections. He interviewed some of the correspondents and many other people in Sculthorpe's life, and Sculthorpe himself.

Several times in his foreword, Skinner mentions, with the baffled dismay of the novice scholar, that "limitations of space" have prevented him from including everything he learned. In many passages in the book he seems to be trying to cram in as many bits of information as possible, leaving it to the reader to decide how the bits might be significant in relation to one another or to a larger issue. In other passages he repeats, rather than summarizes, mate rial from some previous book, using space that might better be devoted to his new discoveries. The book has not been carefully edited and, its interesting subject notwithstanding, it is not easy to read.

Skinner has organized his material chronologically. The first four chapters discuss events through 1955; each of the remaining ten chapters focuses on only one or two successive years. In a brief afterword, Skinner previews his projected second volume. The book includes many photographs and a few short music examples. Perhaps to save space, there are no lists of illustrations or examples, no work list, no bibliography, and no discography. References are cited in almost twenty-three double...