Sculthorpe Remembered

Horace is said to have advised fellow authors never to publicise any of their writings, however time-sensitive, till at least nine years had elapsed; but then Horace, dying as he did in the year 8 BC, did not have to confront the demands of cyberspatial correspondence or of utilities invoices thoughtfully printed in red ink. Much of the following was originally written in the fortnight just after Peter Sculthorpe’s death. The responses it met from magazine editors in the USA, the UK and Australia varied from “Sorry, not really of interest to American readers” via “I say, old chap, who was Sculthorpe?” to “Sod off, Stove, you f***in’ Nazi.” (It will require no undue skill to match the responses to the correct nations.)

In recent months, what with the releasing of compact discs devoted to Sculthorpe’s piano works, and with the Henri Dutilleux affair having convulsed France as few worldview clashes since Sartre-versus-Aron have done, the issues raised by Sculthorpe’s creativity and awe for East Asian cultures may have acquired a new weight. Whatever the truth on that score, at least I had a slight personal acquaintance with Sculthorpe; so much obituary nonsense was written about him by those who never so much as met him that in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is not so much king as Boswell.

Early in 1936, Wodehouse told a friend: “Doesn’t Kipling’s death give you a stunned feeling?” To any literate Australian who came of age during the 1970s or 1980s, the demise on August 8, 2014—in a Sydney suburb, Woollahra—of Peter Sculthorpe inspired a similar condition of near-disbelief. True, he had been ailing for months; but near-disbelief persists. One would perforce be at least seventy years old to retain clear memories of an Australia where Sculthorpe’s name counted for nothing.

As that statistic implies, Sculthorpe’s career longevity has to be reckoned with. Rare is the composer who stays at the top of his game—with neither gauche juvenilia nor drivelling senilia to embarrass posterity—for five decades. This feat Sculthorpe managed. “Schoolboy Composer Writes Opera”, blared a headline in the Examiner (chief newspaper of his birthplace, Launceston) during his childhood. Said opera remains unpublished, but it is improbable that its exhumation would have disgraced him.

Aged only twenty-six, in 1955, Sculthorpe had already had his Piano Sonatina—still one of his finest compositions—performed at a Baden-Baden festival. By the time I met him (I could scarcely say I knew him) in 1980, he had become as immovable an institution in national art as Menzies became in national politics. And, as with Menzies, such staying power could with excessive ease be underrated, in fact be mocked.

It speaks well of Sculthorpe’s capacity for disinterestedness that he refused to bawl me out. He must by this stage have divined the role which he played in the private demonology of his fellow Sydney University academic: my father, David Stove. By some improbable and luckless planetary alignment, both men found themselves serving on the same Academy of the Humanities committee (this service being a chore which my father routinely loathed, but which he equally routinely never boycotted, and never dared delegate to others). Admittedly, it would be false to suggest that Sculthorpe moved Dad to the same detestation as did Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Whitlam, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and anybody ascribing original sin to cricketers. Equally invalid, though, would be the concept of Dad showing hypocritical politeness to the man. It is entirely plausible that if Dad had unleashed his free-floating id upon committee meetings, an accurate transcript of the ensuing minutes would have included what follows:

Sculthorpe: Good morning, Professor Stove, how are you?

Dad: Shut up you bloody communist, why don’t you get back to Hanoi? And while you’re at it, shave off that disgusting moustache, it makes you look like John Lennon.

From which readers will infer that Dad found Sculthorpe’s appearance no less irksome than Sculthorpe’s music. Even in 1980 the Sculthorpian attire inclined to ostentatious casualness. Ten years earlier, as surviving photographs confirm, it had foreshadowed Cheech and Chong.

So the potential for “issues”—as we would now say—in any contact between the musician and the philosopher’s son loomed like distant thunder. But in his few dealings with me, Sculthorpe could not have been more courteous. Other undergraduates, far better acquainted than I with him, reported likewise. With his fame, he had every motive for pulling rank. In my presence, he never did. Nor (and this does him still more credit) did he blatantly drop rank, after the fashion of those antipodean god-professors from yore, who micro-managed their students’ social lives as a prelude to dominating their sex lives. (Many of my compatriots can still recollect the pre-feminist collegiate maxim, “A lay for an A.”)

Sculthorpe enjoyed greater esteem among critics and audiences than among his fellow composers. That same year, 1980, brought forth—in the July number of 24 Hours, an Australian arts magazine long since defunct—a terrifying two-page attack on him by his Canberra-based foe, the émigré pianist-musicologist-composer Larry Sitsky. This attack savaged each aspect of Sculthorpe’s worldview and exterior, while cleverly skirting the libel laws by not using Sculthorpe’s name once. It must have inspired in its victim a homicidal anger. Yet not through so much as a raised eyebrow did Sculthorpe reveal to us the hurt he surely experienced.

About another rival, the late Richard Meale (probably most celebrated for his opera Voss, not performed till well after the events described here), he spoke with gentle affection. During the 1960s and 1970s, Sculthorpe’s and Meale’s respective advocates conducted journalistic combat which in retrospect seems as addled as European music’s far more famous and ferocious pamphleteering battles: Brahms versus Wagner, Debussy versus Ravel, Elgar versus Sir Hubert Parry, and so forth. In such quarrels the artists themselves habitually behave with a tact foreign to their respective cheer-squads. So in this instance. Sculthorpe found unfathomable Meale’s increasing fondness for Sir Arnold Bax (“whom I always thought simply a bad composer”); but of ill-will towards Meale’s abilities he felt no detectable hint. And regarding Bax, he might perfectly well have changed his mind later on. In 1980 almost nothing by Bax could be heard, by Sculthorpe or any other Australian, on disc (LP back then, need one say).

Even before long-time Sculthorpe champion Tamara-Anna Cislowska had given us an overdue CD intégrale of the man’s piano writing (ABC Classics), most of Sculthorpe’s output—the Sun Music series, Memento Mori, Irkanda IV, Mangrove, the Requiem, the string quartets, the aforementioned Piano Sonatina—ended up on commercial recordings. These recordings will enable future generations, as Matthew Arnold might have said, to see him steadily and see him whole. From Opus 1, the largely self-taught Sculthorpe exhibited a stylistic freshness which many weightier and more polyphonically versatile composers crave in vain. He never played the piano or any other instrument at a professional standard. (To arts administrator James Murdoch, he asserted that his slow reflexes debarred him from instrumental proficiency.) And this very lacuna might have been his creative deliverance, as it manifestly became the creative deliverance of Berlioz, although Berlioz conducted at a world-class standard and Sculthorpe did not, to my knowledge, conduct at all.

At no stage could Sculthorpe be mistaken for either Webern or Messiaen, however obviously he shared Webern’s unease with large forms, and however great a debt his own orchestration owed to Messiaen’s scintillant, clangourous timbres. (Surely Yeats had something like Messiaen’s Des Canyons Aux Étoiles in mind when, in “Byzantium”, he spoke of “that gong-tormented sea”?) Nowhere did Sculthorpe lastingly sound like anyone except Sculthorpe. To have one’s voice recognisable in the first five bars of every single work, for whatever medium, which one composes: that is a musical fate most would envy.

One hostage to fortune he did give. Through a malign fluke which he could not have predicted, Sculthorpe’s adoration (not too strong a word) for Indonesian culture coincided with the post-1965 kakistocracy of Suharto’s goons. In any other country than Australia, this kakistocracy’s very name—“New Order”—would have set off conservative alarm-bells. But since the New Order’s East Timor subdivision concentrated on killing Catholics with a genocidal zest beyond Titus Oates’s or the Ku Klux Klan’s most pornographic daydreams, all was joyously forgiven it.

Be it newly stressed: the public Sculthorpe (and the public Sculthorpe is for most of us the only Sculthorpe) remained so much the aesthetician, so little the ideologue, that he cannot have apprehended the correct nature of his earthly paradise’s rulers. Nor, had he suspected the truth about Indonesia’s statist terrorism, would he have been other than horrified. Yet, as with Shostakovich and Stalin, the question must be faced somehow, even if most of us (like “jesting Pilate” in the classic Bacon essay) would prefer “not [to] stay for an answer”. The question being: how much autonomy can any outstanding composer keep, when the country which he loves to the inmost core of his being (it can be, but need not be, the country which issued his passport) is ruled by the most globally resourceful branches of Murder Incorporated?

(Right now the subject of how France’s leading post-Messiaen composer, Henri Dutilleux, behaved under Vichy is being furiously argued about in Le Monde and Le Figaro as well as the specialist press. One can only hope that people keep their tempers at the next big Australian musicological conference, and that this conference does not turn into a variant of the once-world-famous late-nineteenth-century Parisian cartoon by Caran d’Ache. Panel 1: Paterfamilias at domestic dinner table: “Above all, let’s not speak of the Dreyfus Case!” Pandemonium-saturated Panel 2: “They spoke of it.”)

Few Australian public figures stayed as private as Sculthorpe. Whatever physical relationships he had, he kept largely under the radar. (Engaged twice, he married neither fiancée.) His 1999 memoirs comprise little more than a catalogue of duty done. Any formal religious beliefs he retained, he nowhere flaunted. That he shared with Sibelius—not among his favourite composers—a heartbroken, near-pantheistic, cognisance of natural beauty (in particular Australian landscapes’ natural beauty) is observable from every musical phrase he wrote.

I have wondered several times, and never more often than since his death, how much he owed this painfully acute awareness to his Tasmanian origins. Even today, the Tasmanian-born individual, however suave in comportment, will seldom be mistaken by mainlanders for one of their own. As well suppose that an Alabaman will pass—or indeed want to pass—for a native of Massachusetts. (The cultural and pedagogic gap between island and mainland yawned still more abysmally in 1929, the year of Sculthorpe’s birth, than it does now.) To pronounce with greater firmness than that on Sculthorpe’s inner life would be, for us outsiders, impudent. But enough has been said to show how little he had in common with the screeching, cocksure pagan Oxbridge demagogy of a Richard Dawkins and a Christopher Hitchens.

During that final struggle in his hospital bed, so dignified a figure as Sculthorpe might well have reflected on the dying Sir Walter Scott’s plea to his biographer: “Be virtuous … be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.” The Sculthorpe whom I met, rarely but (for me) profitably, gave me every indication of being not just a greatly gifted man, but a good man. I shall miss him much more than, in my green youth, I would have considered possible.