Ричард Грэм Мил: Австралия композиторының өмірі мен шығармашылығы

Australian composer

Richard Graham Meale, AM, MBE (24 August 193223 November 2009) was an Australian composer of instrumental works and operas.

Meale was born in Sydney in 1932. At the time the Meale family lived in Marrickville, an inner suburb of Sydney. Meale's father Oliver was a foreman at a pipe works, and his mother Lilla Adeline kept house. A married brother David predeceased him. Meale was a prodigious teenager who left school because he hated exams. Burston had him at 14 reading Gertrude Stein and the whole of Marcel Proust. He was also borrowing modern scores from the remarkable collection of the City of Sydney Library. He studied clarinet, harp, music history and theory, but as a composer he was entirely self taught. Meale's reputation as a pianist grew exponentially with each premiere of new works by Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and other post war European giants, but especially the music of Olivier Messiaen. "To hear Meale play Messiaen is like hearing a sermon by John the Baptist," Melbourne critic Kenneth Hince wrote. Meale left the Conservatorium without a diploma. Meale worked 1963–1969 as an ABC concert and radio programmer. Five years working as a buyer for record shops had fed an innate curiosity into music from all cultures and periods.

Meale side stepped the well worn path of Australian musicians to England. Instead he played in the ethnic musical ensembles of Bali, Java and Japan at the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles and at other American institutions on a Ford Foundation grant. The result was two works exploring the world of the poet Matsuo Bashō and the Edo period in Japan, Clouds now and then and Cicada. Nocturnes, symphonic in scope but not in form, had responded to the symbolism of the heavens. However esoteric seeming, these works were intended, following McLuhan, to address the tribe of the emerging global village. John Carmody thought Nocturnes in particular a great and exciting score for a tribal world audience. In other words, Meale's music and audience were international, not to say other worldly; his nationalism was founded on a visceral attachment to home ground. But at home we should bypass a "stupid culture with its false ideas" in music as well as life. "[H]ow dare we inflict our concept of Australia which has been formed by a white English based people?" "Attempting to get a nationalism into Australian music by deliberate ploys [is] jingoism". So when Meale's break with modernism came in the late 1970s he could only present it as a personal and philosophical crisis, comparable to the change in Wittgenstein in World War II. In contrast, Meale's friend and rival Peter Sculthorpe (prompted initially by D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo) made a smooth transition to a nationalism based on the Australian landscape.