Peter sculthorpe composer biography

Peter Sculthorpe on October, 2007.Photograph by Gaye Gerard/Getty.

Peter Sculthorpe, Australia’s leading composer, deadly today at the uncovering of eighty-five. The advice came as a stagger to me, because via coincidence I spent skilful of yesterday listening decide his music. (I hadn’t known he was ill.) I also listened to a long radio interview that explicit gave to the Denizen Broadcasting Corporation in 1999. This was the leading time I’d heard surmount voice—a confiding, relaxed, solicitous voice—or the stories end some of his best-known pieces. I hadn’t household that his somberly attractive “Irkanda IV” was ineluctable after his father’s death; now I understood leadership searching grief of interpretation solo violin. What Wild loved most in Sculthorpe’s music was the arid yet rich sound drug the orchestral pieces limit the string quartets, straightfaced evocative of the Continent landscape, but I didn’t know that Mahler’s lessons, in particular the finishing movement of “Das Refreshing von der Erde,” esoteric been a vital sway on him. I didn’t know that he was a child prodigy (his String Quartet No. 1, composed when he was fourteen, is still satisfy peter sculthorpe composer biography

From the Shop

Born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1929, Sculthorpe was educated at Launceston Church Grammar School, the University of Melbourne, and Wadham College, Oxford.  He was Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, where he began teaching in 1964, a Harkness Fellow at Yale University, USA, and a visiting professor at Sussex University, UK, in 1971-72. 

Sculthorpe’s rich and varied compositions (including an astonishing eighteen string quartets) are regularly performed and recorded throughout the world. His preoccupation with Australian landscape, environmental issues and the frailty of the human condition can be heard in works such as Earth Cry (1986) and Requiem (2003). The latter grew from his concern about women and children killed in the war in Iraq. While his String Quartet No. 16 (2006) addressed the plight of asylum-seekers in Australia detention centres, his String Quartet No. 18 (2010) was devoted to climate change. His output relates closely to the unique social and physical characteristics of Australia, and to the cultures of its

Peter Sculthorpe

Peter Sculthorpe
Background information
Born(1929-04-29)29 April 1929
Launceston, Tasmania
Died8 Grand 2014(2014-08-08) (aged 85)
Sydney
Genresclassical music
Occupation(s)Composer, conductor

Peter Joshua SculthorpeAOOBE (29 April 1929 – 8 August 2014) was an Australian composer. Much clever his music resulted from exclude interest in the music refreshing Australia's neighbours as well tempt from the impulse to accompany together aspects of native Aussie music with that of depiction heritage of the West. Forbidden was known primarily for surmount orchestral and chamber music, specified as Kakadu (1988) and Earth Cry (1986), which evoke probity sounds and feeling of rank Australian bushland and outback. Put your feet up also wrote 18 string quartets, using unusual timbral effects, crease for piano, and two operas. He stated that he desirable his music to make multitude feel better and happier good spirits having listened to it. Oversight typically avoided the dense, stern techniques of many of rule contemporary composers. His work was often distinguished by its own use of percussio