The Music of David Lumsdaine

Australian composer David Lumsdaine (b.1931) is a highly important figure in mid-to-late 20th-century British modernism, a longtime resident of the UK, as well as a significant figure in Australian music. Hooper presents a series of analyses of his compositions focusing on works written between 1966 and 1980. At the early end of this period is Kelly Ground, for solo piano, which is one of Lumsdaine's first acknowledged pieces. Kelly Ground connects explicitly with the music of high modernism, employing ideas about temporality as espoused by Ligeti, Stockhausen and Boulez, to form a new ritual for the (now mythical) Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.The period discussed in the book is vital for understanding the development of Australian music, for it is during the early years of the 1970s that Australian musical modernsim was at its most prevalent. Lumsdaine and his Australian contemporaries were engaged with practices from multiple places, producing music that displays the attributes of their disparate influences, and in so doing they formed a new conception of what it meant to be an Australian composer. The period is similarly important in Britain, for it saw the rise to prominence of composers such as Birtwistle, Davies, Goehr, Gilbert, Wood, Maxwell-Davies, Cardew and many others, who were Lumsdaine's contemporaries, colleagues and friends. Hooper discusses Lumsdaine's music in the context of the avant-garde sensibility led by Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono and reveals why some feel it was possibly the most lyrical and elegant music of its time.