Phillip Norman's biography of Douglas Lilburn is really good.
It's well-written and provides real insights into the character of New Zealand's greatest composer. Admittedly he has been greatly aided by Lilburn's diligence in keeping all his letters and diaries for posterity, but even with the luxury of much detail to pick and choose from, Norman demonstrates real insightfulness when examining his subject, asking thoughtful questions, and I believe, positing pretty accurate answers.
For me the most useful part of the book is the series of essays at the end which examines Lilburn's compositional techniques, in particular the essay on his electronic music. I for one did not know that the third of Lilburn's Three Inscapes (1972) is developed around the simple device of a minor seventh chord. I knew there was something consonant going on there, but I didn't think it was that intentional. Shows what actually being trained in music will tell you...* The essay also explains how, despite the change from conventional instruments to electronics, Lilburn continued to use serialist techniques - at least tonally if not timbrally.
Also interesting for me was the spat Lilburn had with Robin Maconie in the late 1960s. Maconie, a former student of Lilburn's, took potshots at Lilburn for his first electronic composition, The Return. The gist of Maconie's argument is that Lilburn should have been trying for something more carefully crafted, like Stockhausen's Song of the Youths, rather than what he considered to be The Return's crude musique concrete pastiche. Maconie was a Damstadt school adherent and later became an authority on Stockhausen, and his subtext is clearly "Stockhausen is way better than you, mate, you don't know what you're doing, stick to what you know and leave this new stuff to younger people". Later (2005), Maconie reaffirmed his views, noting that Lilburn was a minor talent, and New Zealand music criticism wasn't robust enough. He also alleges that Lilburn effectively banished him from New Zealand by telling him not to return there.
Even though I am a connoisseur (and sometime participant) in petty artistic stouches, this episode seems particularly pointless. Thrilling for sure, but a bit of an embarrassment all round (Lilburn responded with some ad hominem attack - not his finest hour). And the fact that Maconie is still whinging about it 40 years later just makes him a dork.
The reason I've highlighted this episode is that it's the only example of a frank appraisal of Lilburn's electronic music by others in the field that I've come across. One reason for this may be (it's a suspicion, though I honestly don't know) that current electro-acoustic practitioners in New Zealand music, many of them Lilburn's former students, are too polite to say anything, given his pioneering and all-round grandfather status. Certainly Lilburn's approach to electronic composition was very much suck it and see, rather than the careful mathematical/aural calculations favoured by the Damstadt School.
I want to understand Lilburn's value within the electroacoustic world because his un-systematic approach is more in line with 'popular' electronic music, and an appraisal of him would help me understand the relationship between industrial or 'noise' composers/performers and academic electroacoustic practitioners, two groups who occupy very similar territory. Sometimes I think the only real difference between the two groups is that electroacoustic composers are annointed with academic credibility, whereas the noise types are not. Sometimes I go with the electroacoustic crowd and take the view that electroacoustic composers apply a more rigorous form to their work, making it more sophisticated than just bolting together sounds simply because they sounds nice (or not nice, since a lot of noise music is intentionally grating). For after all, merely sounding nice isn't enough to make a work good, especially in situations where you could make a work more effective by employing a more complex and satisfying structure.
But then there's a danger that if you apply a form that is too complicated you remove any aesthetically pleasing features the piece once had. And thinking this, I side with the noise artists, taking the view that nine times out of ten a slowly developing drone is more moving and evocative than a series of randomly percolating dribbles that doesn't really inspire anything other than the response "gosh, there must be some really clever thinking behind that", and an uneasy sense that it's all emporer's new clothes. That noise is most 'real' you can really get with this sort of thing. One day I'll get round to doing electroacoustic courses at VUW and I'll resolve this shit one way or the other.
On the state of electroacoustic music as an art form, Norman offers this view:
The jury is still out on the electro-acoustic medium. Clearly electronic sound synthesis has revolutionised popular and commercial music, but equally clearly it has failed to make inroads into 'classical' concert calendars. Unlike its 'popular' counterpart, 'classical' electroacoustics has yet to find the appropriate platform or application to highlight its strengths. This may still be a discovery for the future.
This view of 'serious' electronic music as a failure is something I've seen mentioned elsewhere (I'd tell you where if only I could remember). Norman may be overstating the case, but it is true that Varese's Deserts is considerably less popular than Beethoven's 9th. Even so, many (most?) modern film soundtracks make use of musique concrete, both in sound 'design' and often in the music itself. (Indeed, some of the most exciting electroacoustic compositions I've heard are TV soundtracks from the 1970s - not just SF stuff like Doctor Who, but US TV audio depictions of inner psychological torment with oscillators and echoes.) Faced with these standard sound techniques, average Joe doesn't run screaming out of a theatre in horror. Admittedly in a cinema context electroacoustisms are presented in a subordinate role to the visual and narrative elements. They are icing. Even so, there is obviously potential for finding a form(at) in which electroacoustic musical techniques can be better appreciated. A good starting point would be sensory deprivation tanks and liberal dose of LSD.
* Though this reminds me of the time I set up a new Macintosh computer for a music school academic at VUW, and he informed me solemnly that the chord that sounds when a Mac is switched on was out of tune. My view (unvoiced) was that the detuning was intentional - they'd slapped a chorus on the sound file to make the sound richer. BONG!