National Library Home > News & Events
Gateways

A Composer’s Legacy

Robyn Holmes and Richard Meale sieve through papers

Robyn Holmes and Richard Meale sieve through papers

Boxes of Meale’s papers ready to go to the Library

Boxes of Meale’s papers ready to go to the Library

Richard Meale, one of Australia’s most original composers, died on 23 November 2009 at the age of 77. Meale was an inspiring and gifted musician, a driving creative force in Australian music and a leader in his generation. Along with Peter Sculthorpe, Meale brought international attention to Australian music in the 1960s. In 1986 he achieved a highpoint of public recognition with the premiere of his opera Voss, on Patrick White’s novel with libretto by David Malouf, the first full-length Australian opera to be taken into the national company’s repertoire. The National Library of Australia, with the National Film and Sound Archive and other institutions, fortunately celebrated the significance of this major work through the series of ‘Voss Journey’ events in May this year while Meale was still alive to appreciate the renewed interest in his work.

The National Library holds the personal archive of Richard Meale (MS 10076), which I had the privilege to collect in 2004. I was also able to complete an extended oral history interview with him in March 2009, his last interview. I speak of this as a ‘privilege’, for, as a curator, these shared intimate moments spent with great Australian artists are always a learning experience and often deeply moving. Respecting Richard’s privacy, I have not spoken publicly about the experience but perhaps now is the moment to share my curatorial story which no doubt will resonate with others’ collecting experiences.

In 2004 I drove Richard, by now ill and residing in Sydney, in a four-wheel drive to his abandoned house in the rainforests outside Mullumbimby, crossing 11 flooding creeks to find his house—and his collection—being overgrown by vegetation, living creatures and mould.  Richard, much like Patrick White, had vehemently denied keeping anything but, as a former student and then long-term colleague of his at the University of Adelaide, I did not believe that he would have ever destroyed his work. Thus my determination and persistence to cajole him into this visit.

And I was right. We did find his ‘stuff’, albeit chaotically and carelessly shoved into cupboards and corners, and spent an extraordinary week piecing his life’s work back together (along with confronting the spiders’ webs and the creatures of the night). Richard was also a person who argued passionately, intelligently and vehemently with those he respected, I think to provoke a kind of intellectual euphoria that mirrored his constantly questing mind. I therefore also spent the week under intellectual scrutiny, challenged, questioned, forced to justify my every action and belief over a lifetime in music. We came away, I think, more intimate and respectful friends—and I had earned for the Library the right, and the responsibility, to become the custodian of his work. His inhibition about being ‘on the record’ by any means other than performances of his music continued, however, and it was only with extreme reluctance that he finally agreed that I could interview him for the Library’s Oral History Collection.

Richard’s archive is largely a musical one. Although an astute judge of character, Richard was never one much to trust anyone, so committed little to paper in the way of letters and diaries, and probably destroyed (or failed to care for) much of what he wrote or received. The exceptions were the commendations of the colleagues he respected most. When we discovered a long-lost letter from Patrick White, confirming that Patrick had indeed been deeply moved by Voss, his excitement led him to race around the room (even with his emphysema), holding it aloft and shouting ‘I told everyone he loved it!’ White, at least at one time, admired Meale above all other Australian composers, as had critics such as Curt and Maria Prerauer, whose manuscript papers (MS 10040) reveal early on remarkably perceptive insight into Meale’s compositional thinking.

What Meale did commit to paper were his musical ideas. He read and wrote musical scores like other people read and write books. His archive reflects this, full of sketches, fragments, ideas tried and discarded, large musical works, such as his operas painstakingly forged through version after version. We even found archival recordings of Meale composing Voss at the piano and talking about it as he proceeded bar by bar, providing unique insight into the compositional process. Meale also lovingly kept his collection of music that he had learned as a pianist with his teacher Winifred Burston at the then New South Wales State Conservatorium in the 1950s. She was perhaps the most influential person in his life, introducing him to a vast range of new music, to ideas, to the writings of people like Gertrude Stein, Garcia Lorca and Wittgenstein. This music—Bach, Debussy, Bartok, Mussorgsky, Bax, Janacek, Schoenberg—had informed his early career as an outstanding pianist and underpinned his love of music that could express extremes of beauty, intellectual rigour and the ‘duende’ ever present in his emotional experience.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Meale premiered a remarkable range of new music in Australia, including the first performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire at the 1964 Adelaide Festival. In his role as programmer at the ABC during the 1960s, he also discovered and broadcast to Australian audiences recordings of a wider range of music than had been heard previously, including works he loved like Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Debussy’s Nocturnes, and notably forging public enthusiasm for new music. He also featured the music of Japan, India and Indonesia, which he had embraced during a period of study in ethnomusicology at the University of California on a Ford Foundation grant in 1960. The timeless quality of these ancient musics is effortlessly absorbed into his own musical language in such works as Clouds now and then.

It was in the 1960s that his formidable orchestral works, such as Homage to Garcia Lorca (1964), Nocturnes (1967), and Very High Kings (1968) brought him international acclaim, particularly when exposed overseas by ensembles like the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and a publisher contract with Universal editions. Typically of Richard, the programs and memorabilia preserved in his collection are hardly comprehensive, suggesting a chaotic or, at best, serendipitous approach to document keeping, yet still reflect highlights of his career. This is a collection that needs the accompaniment of the oral history interview. Equally, the collecting process added some value. As we found scores and sketches of these early works in his house in 2004, I was astonished to realise that Richard remembered, indeed revisited, every single note he had ever written. Seating him at his desk in appalling light, I insisted he notate on the top of each musical sketch what it was. ‘Ah, my first attempt at the first four bars of the Nocturnes!—I tried to write this so many times—starting out is always the hardest for me!’ I wish I had brought a tape recorder along for that week.

In more recent years, after retirement from university teaching and from public life (with the exception of his role on the APRA Board), Meale came to focus on the interior world of the mind and music as he retreated to his rainforest. The archive shows this: the work slowed down and the record-keeping becomes more minimalist. But the musical abundance of the collection remains potent as the large-scale works, such as his second opera with David Malouf Mer de Glace, take centre stage, providing rich fodder for future researchers, composers and performers.

In the last two months of his life, Richard discussed with me the options for future use of his collection, and he decided, willingly, to open his collection and interview fully for research and public use after his death. The ABC broadcaster and composer, Andrew Ford, opened his eulogy at Meale’s funeral held in Sydney on 27 November with the following: ‘In Richard Meale we have lost a bold and passionate musical imagination, a curious, penetrating, original intellect, a profoundly caring conscience and a mordant wit.’ Vale Richard Meale!

Robyn Holmes
Curator of Music