Lilburn blows it

Well, if I was beginning to reconsider my stance on Douglas Lilburn's music, he's just blown it by the selection that's being broadcast this morning on the Concert programme.

I've just listened to his setting for baritone and viola of a poem called Warning of Winter, by Ursula Bethell. Now I have a bit of a feeling for this poem because I also wrote a setting of it - you can hear it here being sung by tenor Brent Read, for whom it was written. I was listening to Lilburn's moaning/groaning version - the viola moaning along in the background - as sung by Paul Whelan, and it was only after he'd been singing for a bit that I realised it was the same poem. It took some time, because not only was the setting utterly different, but Whelan's words weren't particularly clear, I'm afraid.

The other two songs in this group by Lilburn are a little better, but the combination of viola and voice doesn't grab me, perhaps because there's not a sense of musical assonance between the two. It's a very dry kind of combination. (Gillian Whitehead uses similar sorts of non-assonance groupings with some of her songs - she seems to have a particular penchant for writing for voice and bassoon, with piano sometimes also included.)

Besides this batch, there were also some of Lilburn's electronic pieces. Piece being the operative word. Like a few of his piano pieces they're minimalist, having almost no length. The pieces in question were: God Save, and Cicadas, Oscillators & Treefrogs. They were 'realised' in the electronic music studios at Victoria University, Wellington. God Save consists of a smatterings and mutterings of God Save the Queen; the other piece requires intent listening to hear anything much at all.

Thank goodness the Concert programme has been playing some of his other work. I don't think Lilburn broke much new ground with his electronic stuff, or did himself any favours as a composer, just as Stravinsky seemed to go off into a cul-de-sac when he got into serial music. (Does anyone listen to Stravinsky's serial music?)

Lilburn and Whitehead

Heaven forbid! I may have to change my mind about Douglas Lilburn's music, which I've tended to dismiss for the most part for quite a long time.

He's the Concert Programme's Composer of the Week, and some of the music is actually....quite...listenable to. His Diversions for Strings has just been on, and has some real life about it, something I don't always associate with Lilburn. Even the Prelude & Fugue in G minor, Antipodes, which was on before that, wasn't dull. Have they suddenly discovered a pile of music by Lilburn which no one's ever heard before? Or is it just that I'm hearing a lot of this for the first time? Perhaps his 'other' music doesn't get played much - we tend to hear the same few things, particularly the Landfall in Unknown Seas, which always strikes me as a combination of poetry reading and string playing that just doesn't work. Maybe some of these other works will start to surface more regularly.

I might have to start liking the man's music after all...

On the other hand, I'm struggling a bit with the new biography of Gillian Whitehead at the moment. As far as I know her work is seldom played on the Concert programme - and if it is, it's passed me by. The book itself is fine, well-presented, thoroughly researched (though missing sources for many of its quotes) and includes a CD.

Well, I've listened to this CD several times, and it just isn't getting through to me. I thought maybe it was just this particular selection of music, and got a couple more CDs out of the library (the only two I could find in fact). They were even less listenable to. Spare and angular and full of sounds that don't sit well on my ear. There I go again: it's all about me.

Maybe now that I'm becoming more of an appreciator of Lilburn (though I've some ways to go yet) Ms Whitehead will have to suffer my cold shouldering as a substitute. I will keep on giving her house-room, as it were, but so far we don't appear to have got onto the same musical wavelength at all.

3 CDs

Tomorrow I have to take back to the library three CDs I've had over the holiday period. Lilburn's three symphonies are on one, David Farquahar's on another, and the third is a collection of pieces by Edwin Carr [pictured]. It has The End of the Golden Weather music on it (seems a bit bitsy to me); the Concerto for piano and orchestra (something I'd like to know better), Seven Elizabethan Lyrics, which are very pleasant, and An Auckland Ode, which I can't say I'm fussed much about.

Lilburn's first symphony still seems to me to be the best of the three - the second has advanced to that waffly Lilburn stage where it can't seem to make up its mind what it's going to do next, and the third hasn't really made any great impression on me. Admittedly I haven't given it as much attention as I might have done - between being out in the garden working a good deal over the holidays and being away for eight days, these three CDs haven't had their full quota of listening.

I might get all three out again, and familiarise myself with them further. Yes, even the Lilburn!

Forgetting wot I've writ!

The joy of old age. I wrote a post a few days ago comparing Lilburn and Delius, only to discover yesterday that I'd already done this back at the beginning of 2008.
At least the two posts were quite different, and I wasn't just repeating myself in total. It's fine to write about an idea twice; it's when you start saying exactly the same thing about the idea more than once that it's a bit of a worry.
My wife and I are heading off to a little town called Otematata tomorrow for a few days, and then we go on to Cromwell where we'll meet up with my daughter and grandson. (And possibly my younger son, who's working up there on a cherry orchard at the moment.) It's our annual holiday, but there's the threat of an interruption to it: I'm on the 'urgent' list to have some work done on my prostate (see much more information about this on workreport.net) and so there's a possibility that we might get called back to Dunedin. Hopefully not. It would be good to have a holiday without the interruption, especially for my wife, as this is the first couple of weeks she's had off in ages.
So blogging probably won't get done while we're away (still less if I wind up in hospital!).

The rather stormy picture of Cromwell's iconic fruit was taken by gak.

Some Lilburn Music

I’ve been ranting a bit about Lilburn in this blog recently, so to make some amends to his memory, I did two things. Got a CD of his symphonies out of the library – the first one is very listenable, and rediscovered a book of Occasional Pieces for Piano that I’ve had for some time, but had forgotten about.
The book contains some twenty pieces, only one of them, I think, going for more than a couple of pages. It opens with the Four Preludes 1942-4. These are obviously early Lilburn, and are worth playing. The first is a lilting ¾ piece with real shape and a sense of forward movement. The next is an Allegro one page piece that again goes somewhere. The third is a sostenuto e quasi lontano, which I presume means that it’s supposed to have the effect of hearing something in the distance. For the most part it works, although it seems to me it gets a little lost in the middle. And finally there’s a left hand/right hand chase piece in which the two hands don’t quite imitate each other. So far so good.
Two Christmas pieces for L.B, 1949, follow. Both do a bit of pseudo-bell-ringing, but otherwise aren’t much to write home about. The Allegro from 1948 is good solid little one-page piece, and then we have another set of Four Preludes, this time 1948-60, which presumably means they were written over that long stretch of time.
The first is a lovely limpid kind of thing that unfortunately collapses at the end into several bars of chords shifting down the scale and neither appearing to have anything to do with what’s gone before, or going anywhere themselves. The second is eight and a bit bars long (it takes up one line of music in this edition), and seems nothing more than a sketch of an idea. The third, like the first, has a nice limpid melody and resolves reasonably well into its ending. And the fourth is a nice Andantino.
Next in line is the Rondino, one of the few pieces in the book to have any sense of the celebratory. It’s great, and I’ve obviously done so work on it in the past, if my pencil scribbles are anything to go by.
The Two Preludes from 1951 are dreamy, impressionistic pieces, and both work pretty well. An Andante follows which starts off fine, but like the first of the 1948-60 Preludes collapses into waffle before it finishes. The Poco Lento is another dreamy piece that works, but it’s followed by Three Bars for M.N, 1968.
I don’t know who M.N was, but I have to wonder what he/she thought of the three bars. Three bars? These are typical of the period when some composers were writing a scribble of stuff on the page that ranged over the breadth of the piano, lacking harmony, melody, rhythm or anything else that might indicate that the composer actually cared. I’ve played these three bars several times, but can’t get any musical sense out of them.
The Adagio Sostenuto has a kind of Prokofiev feel about (made more noticeable by the fact that I’m playing a bit of Prokofiev at the moment). Personally I don’t find it works very wonderfully: chords hammered out in one hand while the other goes up and down scales to no apparent great purpose.
The Andante Commodo is again impressionistic, using broken triads quite successfully, and Still Music for W.N.R., 1973 is a similar moody piece, though not particularly ‘still’.
My quibbles aside, there’s quite a bit of very playable music here. The ‘Three Bars’ give hints of things to come in Lilburn’s compositional career, and to me it’s a dead end that not a few composers headed into. (That and the electronic music, which cuts out the middleman – the performer.)
So, Lilburn can stop turning in his grave. I’ve found some good things to say about his work! LOL

Southgate and Lilburn

Back when I was a youth, I made the acquaintance of Bill Southgate, through some musical things we were both doing at that time. And for a brief period I was a postie in tandem with his brother, whose name suddenly escapes me. He wrote poetry, some of which was already published at that time.
When my wife and I came back to NZ in 1974, Bill and his wife were on the same plane coming into Dunedin. We briefly renewed acquaintance while my wife listened with some astonishment to the racing commentary going on at the airport: the speed-speech of the racing commentator was vastly different to the keep-it-cool approach British commentators took.
Bill has gone on to become Sir William Southgate, one of New Zealand's best conductors, and also a composer of some note. (Well, a lot of notes, actually: he's written a variety of symphonic works, amongst other things.)
There's an article about him and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in the latest NZ Listener, which I found interesting because at one point he notes: 'I have clear short-term ideas on repertoire. A priority would be consolidating New Zealand's symphonic classics such as all three of Lilburn's, Carr's four, Farquhar's three, and Pruden. These four are our foundation composers. '
My ongoing to struggle to accept Lilburn as one of New Zealand's great composers, let alone a foundation one has been written about a number of times in this blog. But, believe it or not, I try to keep an open mind. I've been 'converted' to composers before whom I wasn't much impressed with. Lilburn is having a bit of struggle convincing me that he's one of those I should change my mind about, however.
Part of what prompted this post was that I just came across a copy of some occasional piano pieces by Lilburn, which I've had on my shelves for a long time, and occasionally play (as one would). Bill's mention of the three symphonies prompts me to check them out again at the library; one of them I do find quite appealing - probably the first. Maybe Lilburn and I will eventually become friends....maybe!

Reconsidering Lilburn

Apropos (oh, how I do love that word!) of a couple of posts back, the Elegy by Lilburn is available on SOUNZ for purchase. There's an LP version, and a cassette. Two different recordings: one is called Canzona: music for strings and voices, and the other is called, NZ Flora Series, Vol 2. Both have a mixed bag of other stuff on them, but the Lilburn in each case seems to be the same performance by Patricia Lawrey and Anthea Moller (mezzo-sopranos) and the Schola Musica.
I briefly debated buying the cassette (for NZ$19) - the LP isn't available for purchase or hire - but thought, Do I really want to buy something that I already don't have good vibes about? Nope, not at the moment.

Anyone who reads this blog frequently - as I do - will think I've got a snitch against Lilburn. I'll just state my case again, in case I haven't stated it clearly previously.
I think Lilburn, like some pioneer NZ painters, has got an overrated reputation. Being a pioneer, in the sense that he was probably the first NZ composer to make a name for himself as a [serious] composer rather than as a teacher or other academic, he has a place in NZ musical history. Regrettably, his music isn't on a par with his place in history; there are a few pieces worthy of attention, but somehow his status as a pioneer has managed to hoist up his compositions beyond their value. I wait for the day when we've got over the big deal of his pioneering effort, and have started to assess him against other NZ composers - of whom there are now a sufficient number to place him on the scale of worth.
I'm not saying we should throw out everything he wrote, but only that much of his work, while characteristic of him particularly, isn't terribly inspired - or inspiring. He seems to rely on movement without melody, movement without much harmonic interest, so that the ear constantly hears a limited range. He reminds me of Delius, one of the all-time great wafflers in composition. Let's keep Delius for the particular voice that he gave to the world, but let's not lay at his feet any great claims to him being startlingly original, or even inspirational to listen to. Delius is the great delineator of vagueness, and on that basis he has a certain standing. Lilburn seems to me to have taken a path of limitation: using as little material as possible, but not necessarily doing anything very exciting with it.

The 'grandfather of NZ music' strikes again

1st day of my holidays, and I woke at something like 4.30 am. Eventually went back to sleep, but some visitors got up early, and so most of us were around by seven. Finally lack of sleep caught up with me and I went back to bed, only to be woken by some music on the radio.
It turned out to be the end of Douglas Lilburn's: Elegy in Memoriam Noel Newson. From where I was in bed listening, it sounded as though the words came from Shakespeare - I caught 'nothing shall afright thee' or some such, but the rest of it was so badly articulated that I couldn't get the detail at all.
More than that though was the almost perverse way in which the string accompaniment seemed to be at odds with the singer(s). The latter were chauntering along in a banal enough way - the melody line, typically of Lilburn, having virtually no melody - but the strings kept fluffling around doing some chordal stuff that seldom integrated with the singers. And at the end, they played a few desultory bars and pretty well gave up. Lilburn the great pioneer New Zealand composer shoots music in the foot again!
I can't find much out about this piece of music (the few references on Google all seem to go to broken links). To be fair, I'll see if I can track it down at the library and give it another shot. But what I heard this morning (even coming out of a deep sleep) was enough to make me think that I'm not going to be impressed.
Later: I've just found a small amount on the SOUNZ site. The last piece, as I thought, was to words by Shakespeare: Fear no more the heat o' the sun. Herrick, Blake and Herbert are the other three lyricists.

Scoring for the orchestra

People who’ve been reading this blog for a while may have noticed that I have a bit of an anti-thing about Douglas Lilburn, who’s currently classed as a Great New Zealand Deceased Composer. In fact, he may even be The GNZDC.
As I’ve said on a number of occasions I find most of his music lacking in something. Not all of it – his earlier pieces have some energy about them, but as he got older things seemed to get less and less lively (I hesitate to call them lifeless), and then, of course, he went down the dead end of electronic music.
Anyway, all this is by way of mentioning that at the Regent Non-Book Sale last Saturday, I actually found a Lilburn score. A full score, in fact. I would have picked up more full scores (mostly in miniature form) if the woman in front of me hadn’t been hunting desperately for them. So desperately that she was tossing anything that wasn’t a miniature score to one side in a heap. I can never understand why people do that to books or music in a sale. It damages what are often already fragile items, and shows a complete lack of concern for other buyers.
However, I managed to snaffle the Lilburn. It’s a conductor’s score, rather than a miniature, and getting it for $3 was quite a bargain, I guess. Even though it was Lilburn (!). I did pick up one miniature score as well, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
I was interested in getting the scores, because it’s good to see what composers actually write when they’re producing full orchestral scores. Often the details are quite different to what you hear, and often you wonder why is there so much detail. Is it just to give the musicians something to do? Or to fill in the gaps? Or to add volume? It’s hard to know.
My one and only recent foray into the orchestral world – in terms of playing in the orchestra rather than composing for them – was when I played the piano part in Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica. The piano does quite a bit of work at times in this symphony, but to be honest, 60 to 70% of it goes unheard in terms of detail. It’s filler stuff, added to give depth to the orchestral sound. This was just as well, as not being the world’s best orchestral player, I often found it hard to keep to the conductor’s beat, and consequently was playing to a rather different drummer than the rest of the orchestra on more than one occasion.
There’s an advantage in being hidden under dozens of other orchestral sounds, of course. You note it most particularly when you’re suddenly not hidden. That’s really scary.
After that I was determined to stick to solo playing, or accompanying. That I know how to do.

Lilburn and Delius

Landfall in Unknown Seas, by Douglas Lilburn, has just been played on the radio yet again – this time with Sir Edmund Hillary doing the reciting of the poem (and not very well either, it must be admitted).
In spite of its ‘popularity’ this is an unexciting piece of music. The format doesn’t help much, with a person reading the poetry of Allen Curnow interspersed with string ‘interpretations’ of what’s just been read. Somehow it never takes off. The poetry is fine enough, but Lilburn’s music never rises to the occasion. In fact, it tends to flatten things out. As always, Lilburn fails to come up with anything except his usual chordal movement stuff, and after a while that gets tedious. It reminds me of Delius’ music, whose wandering compositions wax and wane in popularity. They never seem to have any purpose; they’re reflective, which is fine in music, but that’s all. Delius seems to have no other mood.
Lilburn has occasional moments in his compositions, moments when he finally seems to break out of the mode of the mind and into emotion. But he seems to hold back far more often than he lets loose, and in a composer that’s not a good trait, I don’t feel. Without some sense of passion, even if it’s only below the surface, music becomes a mere mood, and in Lilburn’s case it’s not a very interesting mood.

Drumming with Gareth Farr

In yet another attempt to improve my familiarity with New Zealand music, I’m listening to what is now a relatively old CD of Gareth Farr’s music.
Phew! There's an awful lot of noisy drumming. It might be fun for the percussion department, but I bet the strings and wind nearby find it all a bit too much for their ears.
Not that I dislike the music. Farr shares with John Psathas (another NZ composer whose music I like) the ability to write music with huge energy. It’s probably exhausting to play, but it certainly is invigorating, like taking a swim in the Southern ocean (especially around St Clair or St Kilda on a less than warm day). Perhaps this is an aspect of New Zealand music that imprints it with the flavour of the country. Compare it to the relatively lifeless stuff that our so-called most famous composer, Douglas Lilburn, produced (before he went off in the haywire world of electronic music). Some of his stuff gets moving, but for the most part it’s pretty tame. Okay, I don’t like Douglas Lilburn’s music. That’s it. I ain’t gonna apologize no more!
I remember being in the Milford Art Gallery here in Dunedin a long time ago, and expressing a similar opinion about the work of an artist which was on display. With considerable sense, the owner Stephen said, You don’t have to like everything, just because it’s there. In fact, he was even rude about that other icon of NZ art: Colin McCahon. I won’t say what he said, but it rather confirmed some of my feelings about that bloke too.

The photo, in case there's any confusion, is of John Psathas, courtesy of the Arts Foundation site.

Songs, smiles, singers, and a snout

This is going to be one of those compendium posts, where I do a quick squiz over the HitTail results from the last week or so, or at least the ones that seem interesting to me. Douglas Lilburn’s Sing Harry turns up again. It’s good to know that this song cycle by Lilburn continues to arouse interest, especially since it’s one of the few things he wrote that I think does! (Oh, dear, the old anti-Lilburn bias coming out again.)
Another NZ composer is also on the list - at least so it seemed when I first saw the reference. But I couldn’t quite figure out what why anyone would be looking for Snout Gareth Farr. Turns out that there’s an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company with the same name, and he was played Snout in a production back in 2002. So NZ’s Gareth Farr gets a look-in rather fraudulently.
The king of whistlers, Ronnie Rinalde, is still going strong. Except that his name is Ronnie Ronalde, and I’ve managed to misspell it in one of my posts - as the searcher did.
The Indian actor, Kavi Raz, whom I mentioned the other day in relation to the movie, The Golden Bracelet, is on the list, as is the Jazz/Funk group from Luxembourg, Funky P. More about them another time, as Roosevelt Isaac (their lead singer) has emailed me a few times recently to give me some further gen on their doings.
A couple of non-NZ composers make the list: John Adams, whom I’m going to check up on more when I get back home, and Michael Tippett, who’s been a regular visitor to the HitTail search results.
An interesting search for Jobs for Opera Singers didn’t seem to take the searcher very far, but it did turn up for me a site where most opera singers are listed, but not, rather to my surprise, Elizabeth Connell, who is certainly no minor artist. It’s an interesting site, nevertheless, with info about books, opera houses, and resources for singers.
And finally, my comments about the travelling exhibition of pictures of the smiling Christ comes up. But the results Google turns up (apart from the one on this blog) are from those places that turn Jesus into all manner of beings: smiling, sad, black, yellow, you name it. The one from picturesofJesus4you.com is very American, somewhat hippy and a jolly good chap. Okay, he’s a pleasant Christ, and certainly he’s smiling, but he lacks a bit of the awe I’d expect Christ to have along with his smiles. The artist is Frances Hook, by the way.

Lilburn and McGann

You can say ‘hypocrite’ if you like, but I have to admit that I’m listening to Lilburn on streaming radio at the moment. It’s his first symphony. Now let’s be clear; I haven’t changed my view that Lilburn at best is a master of movement without melody, as in this symphony, and even in this piece there are stretches where nothing is happening except rhythmic phrases. Time and again he seems about to break out into a real surge, a soaring, and time and again he breaks off. Given that, however, this piece is certainly more attractive than his later works, where he got into ‘modernism’ (of some sort) to such a degree that music flew out the window almost completely. And don’t even let’s go down the track of his electronic music. That stuff is akin to Stravinsky’s serial music, which he produced in his last years; music which is now almost never heard. I have some records somewhere of some of it, with Robert Craft (almost wrote Crafty) writing the notes in esoteric fashion. It’s all baloney, I’m afraid, as far as I can hear.

I’ve just noted too, while I was finding the streaming music on Radio NZ, that Brad McGann, the NZ film director, has died at the age of 43. For those who know more about him than I do, his other films will no doubt be remembered, but the only movie of his I ever saw was the brilliant In My Father’s Den, which came out only two or three years ago. A very strange movie, which could have easily gone so far into the ‘arty’ (as The Piano did) that it would have lost its audience, yet it somehow managed to keep the story in focus, and to offer excellent characters, and not a few surprises. It has to be regarded as a classic in the Crash Palace (with Bruno Lawrence) genre.

Lilburn exonerated

I've said in the past in this blog that I don't much care for Douglas Lilburn’s music. It sometimes seems as if the Concert Program is determined that I should like his music, because they keep on playing the bloomin’ stuff day after day, especially in their New Zealand Made section, which just happens to come on about the time I come home from work. I will now admit that his early symphonies are growing on me – I think it was the second that was on the other day, and I actually recognised it as being one of Lilburn’s symphonies. It still seems rather to me to be all hustle and bustle without much purpose but it’s creeping onto my list of listenable pieces. And, shock! horror!, I played the slow movement from his first piano sonatina in church this morning. What’s a sonatina? Who would really know? It’s something a composer calls a piece of music when he doesn’t quite think it’s up to sonata level. Maybe. Why did I play that movement in church? Or anywhere, if it comes to that. Firstly it’s got a pleasing dissonance about its main ‘theme’ (such as it is). And there’s some passion in it, something that seems to be mostly lacking in his music. And it suited the occasion. Our church generally has a Good Friday service in which, at some point, a young man brings in a heavy cross and carries it slowly down the steps to the front and up onto the stage, and then he proceeds to hammer three nails into it. It’s almost a tradition! And equally it’s almost a tradition for me to play something sombre to accompany the walk. I’ve used a Bach prelude a couple of times (the E minor, if I recall) and that’s been very effective. But I felt there was a need for a change, and the Lilburn sprung to mind. So there you are – he’s been somewhat exonerated.

Musicians, singers, athlete's fingers, et al

The Hittails reports continue to intrigue me, and are actually interesting in terms of what they dredge up. Here’s the most recent list.
How to find trade me members
Boat for workers
Anna Leese Maggie Teyte
Sings Harry Douglas Lilburn
Giles Hatterley Dawkins
Athletes hand athletes foot
Gareth Farr blog
The finding of Trade Me members is an interesting one. Certainly not a ‘key word’ phrase I’d have thought of. Euqally, the mysterious ‘boat for workers’ while it follows on my portmanteau comments, is odd. I’m not sure of the intentions of a person looking for a boat for workers. Some suspect character wanting to find a cheap boat to ship some refugees?
Anna Leese and the Maggie Teyte prize were only written about in the last few days, so I caught that one pretty quick!
My not-so-favourite composer Douglas Lilburn gets a look in, this time via Sings Harry, a song cycle I played with a friend of mine, Brent Read, a few years back. It has a rather skimpy accompaniment, I feel, perhaps because it was written for the guitar originally (if I have my facts right), but it is actually a piece of Lilburn’s I could be said to ‘enjoy’ – just. Brent is the tenor I wrote four songs for which he performed last year at a concert I put on. One of the world’s as yet undiscovered great voices!
I’d forgotten about the Hattersley/Dawkins connection – Mr Dawkins is another one of those people whose contribution to the humanities I don’t have a lot of time for, but here is, turning up on my doorstep again.
I’m not sure why someone would go looking for ‘athletes hand athletes foot’, but they did, and apparently this blog turned up in the results, in my athlete’s fingers post.
I’ve written about Gareth Farr more than on this blog, and will probably write about him again. There you go, Hittail!

Douglas Lilburn

I know Douglas Lilburn is supposed to be one of the greatest composers New Zealand has produced, but for the life of me I can’t enjoy his music. Almost without exception it seems to have nothing I can call a melody, or even a melodic line. Okay this might not be considered any big deal, except that he seems to rely on little rhythmic phrases or small movements repeated again and again, and in the end there’s nothing you can hang your hat on.
His early music almost gets melodic, and then it’s as if he eschewed (word of the day) the idea of melody and decided as time went on he’d go for nothing that struck anyone in the nature of a melody. Now there are plenty of composers who can’t be considered melodic in the first instance, but none of them seem quite to throw melody out the window, the way Lilburn does. By the time he’s in the middle of his career he’s writing stuff that floats around the piano but doesn’t seem to have any beginning, middle or end, and in his later works he’s even tossed that stuff aside and gone for electronic music – which of course makes him very modern and therefore the darling of all those who chase modernism as an idol to be adored at all costs. Even their musical commonsense.
I struggle to like his music, as I mostly struggle to like Colin McCahon’s paintings. I hear the crowd saying both are very good, but I struggle to hear or see it. More on this anon, no doubt!
Just remembered that I have performed Sings Harry with a singer, Brent Read, in the last few years, and yes, there is some music there, but.....
What am I trying to say about it? That it's an exception to my criticism above. Maybe. It certainly has a melancholic quality, but it's also fairly early in his canon.
You can hear some of his music by clicking here.