The Compleat Larry Sitsky

Our new year heralds the ninetieth birthday of the Australian musical polymath Larry Sitsky. Four generations of audiences, artists, teachers and students have now benefited from his vast knowledge, unfailing creativity and exuberant musicianship. Born in China’s Tianjin (then Tientsin) to emigré Russian-Jewish parents, his early years were marked out for Japanese occupation followed by revolution. When he was seventeen his family sought refuge in Sydney, and by the mid-1960s he had joined the staff of the then Canberra, now Australian National University School of Music, of which he is still an active member today. His early years, with their exposure to Hebraic, Russian and Chinese traditions, suddenly changing to the new sounds of Australia and then America, keenly stamped his developing ear.

This year is also the centenary of the death of the equally diverse Italian Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), who so influenced Sitsky’s musical aesthetic as composer, pianist and scholar. It is timely that the ANU Press, in appreciation of this double anniversary, has just published Sitsky’s monumental, three-volume The Compleat Busoni. Its first two volumes range over Busoni’s (I) compositional output for piano and (II) works for other genres, while the third provides Sitsky’s “solutions” to poignant questions left hanging by Busoni upon his death. How should his unfinished opera Dr Faust be finished? How might Busoni’s monumental late work, Fantasia Contrappuntistica, “definitively” be realised, both in two-piano format and as a veritable Concerto for Orchestra? Over their one thousand pages, this succession of volumes unfolds new insights into Busoni’s career, style and beliefs, in particular helping to give perspective to Busoni’s fascination with piano transcriptions of other composers’ music. The most well-known of those take organ works by J.S. Bach for their subject.

Sitsky’s “compleat” purpose is to demonstrate what the significance of Busoni could be now, well into the twenty-first century.

Sitsky’s long voyage of Busonian discovery has been underpinned by a sense of mission that he inherited in the 1950s from two influential piano teachers: Winifred Burston in Sydney, and Egon Petri in San Francisco. Both had been devoted students of Busoni in Berlin and they sought to propagate the secrets of his phenomenal pianism, his distinctive stances on music’s artistic role, and his deeper aims as a composer. As long-term holder of that torch, Sitsky’s “compleat” purpose is to demonstrate what the significance of Busoni could be now, well into the twenty-first century. These volumes trace an ever-broadening curve, starting with Sitsky, the pianist and composer, writing fairly technically about Busoni, the composer for piano; then going on to a wider aesthetic embrace of Busoni’s underlying philosophy, across all musical genres; and finally evidencing Sitsky’s skills as textual scholar and interpreter in offering completions to key works left unfinished by the departing Busoni.

What has changed, you might ask, during Sitsky’s deep, seven-decade engagement with Busoni? Well, Busoni is now much more accepted as a controversial, polymathic genius than he probably ever was in life. He has not been forgotten by history, despite some quieter decades of renown following his death. Resources thought lost amid the rubble of 1945 Berlin, or subsequently locked up behind the Iron Curtain, have increasingly been rediscovered, even reinstated. Moreover, Busoni’s music, writings and recordings are now more easily disseminated in our digital world than ever before. As indeed is Sitsky’s three-volume contribution from ANU Press, the digital platform of which provides free downloads of all its titles: https://press.anu.edu.au.

Robyn Holmes, the Chair of ANU Press’s Music Editorial Board, suggests that it is not only Busoni but Sitsky himself who is “this COMPLEAT musician … pianist, composer, arranger, scholar and writer, idealist, philosopher, mystic … Larry exhibits all such attributes”. She concludes that Sitsky “may just as well have been describing himself”. Among the wealth of insights in The Compleat Busoni, I want to highlight four, as Sitsky’s portrayal of Busoni helps to illuminate key aspects of his own creative trajectory.

Busoni was, claims Sitsky, “very slow in that his personal style [of composition] had not arrived until his forties”; yet he was “extremely fast in the purely technical aspects of mastery”. In fact the latter may have helped to delay the emergence of the former. “Like Bartók,” notes Sitsky, whose sheer facility as player and composer caused him early to run through several periods of experimental modernism, and a highly eclectic performing repertory, before settling down into a constantly transforming maturity from around 1987, when he was in his early fifties. “Like Sitsky,” I hasten to add.

There was an ever-present duality in Busoni’s personality: Italian by birth, yet German by intellectual inclination. This duality had its roots in Busoni’s upbringing in that “melting pot” Italian town of Trieste, then technically part of German-speaking Austria, yet with growing Slavic and Jewish populations. Sitsky, in his tender years, experienced a similarly entrepôt apprenticeship that fostered the formulation of his distinctive “sound world”, but also his broader approach to Old and New worlds. Some decades later, as international relations thawed, Sitsky was pleased to be a cultural ambassador in early Australian delegations to both the Soviet Union and mainland China.

There was, third, an intriguing balance of scholar, performer and composer in Busoni’s arrangements of the music of others, and in the creative rearrangements of his own works, to which Busoni applied similar principles. Sitsky expresses these debts of Busoni to his predecessors so elegantly in The Compleat Busoni’s first volume: “If Bach taught Busoni the art of counterpoint and structure, if Mozart taught him clarity and conciseness of form, then Liszt taught him to write specifically for the piano.” Busoni believed that all musical works were “constantly in progress” and that they generally lacked “a definitive form”. Yet Sitsky, after decades of careful work, does finally, in the third volume, claim his own two realisations of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica—itself a fantastic homage to Bach’s incomplete The Art of Fugue—as worthy of the “definitive” label of which Busoni was so suspicious.

A final highlight of this Compleat Busoni is the astounding array of evidence brought to bear on Sitsky’s depiction of Busoni thanks to Sitsky’s role as Cold-War sleuth, dogged correspondent, and digger-up of “curiosities” quietly held in obscure libraries or in zealously guarded private collections. Over decades he diligently tracked these holdings, leaving no stone or recalcitrant archivist unturned. This self-critical, forensic nature of Sitsky’s musicology is the same nature observed in his tightly self-analytic investigations of key stylistic turning-points in his own compositional career.

If, in writing these volumes about Busoni, Sitsky in fact demonstrates his equal completeness as a musician—“pianist, composer, arranger, scholar and writer, idealist, philosopher, mystic”, as Robyn Holmes lists—then we might look to see how well preserved is the legacy of The Compleat Sitsky himself.

The aesthetic influence of Ferruccio Busoni, then, is present already in Larry Sitsky’s early emphasis upon a “New Classicism”, which he hoped for among the leaders of the Australian new-music wave of the 1960s, among which he included himself. Others he identified as possible members of such an Australian avant-garde were Nigel Butterley, Richard Meale, George Dreyfus and Helen Gifford. By “New Classicism”—in Busoni’s usage, “Young Classicism”—Sitsky meant a form of consolidation, even a “oneness”, seen in “the mastery, the sifting and the turning to account of all the gains of previous experiments, and their inclusion in strong and beautiful forms”. (I am grateful to Raymond Shon, whose own contribution you may find overleaf, for so lucidly explaining this aesthetic aim to me.)

If, in writing these volumes about Busoni, Sitsky in fact demonstrates his equal completeness as a musician—“pianist, composer, arranger, scholar and writer, idealist, philosopher, mystic”, as Robyn Holmes lists—then we might look to see how well preserved is the legacy of The Compleat Sitsky himself. With prescience, the National Library in Canberra early established a Sitsky Collection (principally, MS 5630) over half a century ago, in 1972. Here amid the stacks we perhaps come closest to the detailed legacy of the all-round Sitsky: at all manuscript stages of the composer or arranger, from sketch to score. And here we find his collections of the music of others, some of these leading to his anthologies and books about Russian and Australian musics, in particular, along with myriad recordings of a younger and an older Sitsky, as piano recitalist, chamber player and, occasionally, concerto player. He was, it seems, never drawn much to conducting.

Then in the National Library’s Sitsky Collection there are found his extensive published and not-so-well-known unpublished writings, including interviews, speeches and personal papers. Sitsky has always sought to keep his compositions in print, and currently has over seventy, mainly more recent works in the catalogue of Wirripang (Sydney), the impressive publishing “Home of Australian composers”. A broader representation of over two hundred compositions from right across his career is found in the holdings of the Australian Music Centre. You could conclude that the Compleat Sitsky’s legacy is well documented, readily to be found, and open for public examination.

Harder to archive in file boxes or digital repositories, however, are his decades of work as a teacher: a teacher of the piano, of chamber music, and of composition and musicology. As he explains today, for the benefit of incoming piano and composition students, “My teaching philosophy is closely connected with my life experience as a musician; it predicates the notion of a ‘complete’ musician rather than a specialist … As a teacher, I have endeavoured to act as a role model and engender in my pupils a similar outlook towards the profession.” His emphasis on the early development of student self-sufficiency and confidence in their own creativity is, perhaps, downplayed in these days of depressingly uniform, institutionally-sanctioned “student experiences”. Sitsky continues: “I feel that a good teacher should aim to make himself redundant; our role should also be that of a facilitator and problem solver, whether it is the fingering of a difficult piano passage, or the structure of a new composition.” This nurturing aspect of The Compleat Sitsky lives on most impressively through his several hundred alumni as they ply their trades in concert halls, lecture theatres and teaching studios across Australia and, indeed, the world.

I am old enough to remember the thirty-two-year-old Larry Sitsky as an “Angry Young Man”. I first met “Mister Sitsky” in 1966, when I was eleven, at my first audition at the new Canberra School of Music. (It was then located in a hastily converted mothercraft centre, next to the Manuka Pool.) What were the views then of this creative whirlwind, recently blown in from Queensland? Quadrant had just published one of his more polemical articles, from which I quote:

Among the most despicable attitudes of mind to music on the current scene is one of smugness, self-righteousness and finality of judgment. We are riddled with “experts” who know how music of the 17th century was performed, and would have no other [view]; who have decided on and neatly filed away their “perfect” performance of a piece, probably heard on a gramophone recording, and again will admit of no other interpretation; who, whilst unable to play a single instrument well enough to pass a child’s examination, will gleefully pass judgment on artists who have probably spent more time studying a page of music than they have [altogether]; [people] who teach composition and judge new works (and old ones) without being capable of constructing—let alone composing—a bar of interesting music themselves. These people are eunuchs. To quote the famous Australian cellist Lauri Kennedy, “they know all about it, but can’t do it”.

Sitsky then went on to position himself like this:

My interest in music is not antiquarian. If I perform a piece, it is not “old”, but alive. In other words, if the music is alive, whether written yesterday or in the 17th century, it is worth playing. If a transcription is necessary, to a large or small extent, I accept it as not destroying the essence of the piece, but sometimes even illuminating it. If the piece is dead, I am not interested in it. Exhumation and ancestor-worship are not part of my make-up.

With that refreshing blast captured in Quadrant’s September-October issue of 1966, and cheekily titled “Transcriptions and the Eunuch”, I can only look forward to the impending creative surprises from Sitsky in his tenth decade. He may have completed his Compleat Busoni, but Busoni’s legacy will still inspire his own “complete” philosophy, and sustain his wish, stated in the preface to his Dr Faust completion, that “in its due time” this Sitsky version of Busoni’s opera, found in ANU Press’s new publication, will appear live on an opera stage. Indeed, in 2017 he composed his own “totally virtual opera”, Doktor Faustus, “after Thomas Mann”, to pave the way.

Malcolm Gillies is a musicologist and retired vice-chancellor, now living in Canberra.

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