clouds now and then
giving men relief
from moon viewing
soon it will die
yet no trace of this
in the cicada's screech
ailing on my travails
my soul wanders
over withered mores
Three Haiku by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694).
The snow upon my lifeless moutains
Is loosened into living fountains
My solid Oceans flow and sing and shine
A spirit from my heart bursts forth
It clothes with unexpected birth
My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine
Oh mine, on mine!
Gazing on thee I feel, I know,
Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow
And living shapes upon my bosom move;
Music is in the sea and air,
Winged clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
'Tis Love, all Love!
Percy Bysshe Sheely (1792-1822).
Both these poems were part of funeral.
Amanda Meale, with her short bleached hair and face puffy from crying, began her recollections of Richard Meale, haltingly. I would like to begin, she said, by making two corrections to a piece that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. I flinched inside. This was a town that regarded the SMH as the Bible, but was it really necessary to start a eulogy correcting a lazy journalist's words? She read out the offending quote, along the lines Richard Meale had altered his compositional style in later years to enhance his public appeal. This is incorrect and ill informed, she said. And indeed it was. Anyone who knew Richard would have known that the idea he altered his style to appease anybody was completely ludicrous. He just wasn't that sort of person.
But after this odd beginning, she settled into it, clutching the hand of her young adult son; obviously a nice young man; clutching his hand and begging the audience's forgiveness, explaining that he was there in case she couldn't make it through. She, too, she explained, suffered from the family disease; that is, depression.
I strode off straight afterwards; I had left an 85 year old woman in the car - Joyce - and it was a terribly hot day. I had taken her to the movies - The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls, if you must, my weekly good deed, and I had parked her under the minimal shade in a corner of the carpark, with the windows and doors open after begging her to keep me company on the trip to the Northern Suburbs crematorium, all the way to the North Shore, past Lane Cove, past Chatswood, past middle class suburbs we rarely ever went to. The heat was gusting on a 40 degree day and I hadn't seen Richard in years; not since the seventies when I used to go around to his house many an evening; and we would sit and get utterly smashed - he always bought red wine by the carton.
The strains of a segment of his work Clouds Now and Then filled the chapel; I hadn't heard it in decades and yet it was immediately recognisable, astonishing, instantly classic, hallucinatory in intent and feel.
Perhaps his work Very High Kings, in terms of the name at least, would have been more appropriate.
Richard was the lure, the intellectual Godfather, of a group of talented, crazed, young men, all gay, who all liked to get smashed. It was the 70s, but he was the most successful of them in terms of creative achievement and public acceptance; and money. He held down jobs at the university while the rest of us got wiped and lived what could only be described as fairly bohemian lifestyles; the two I think of are Ian Farr and John Bygate. They're all dead now. In a sense Richard's passing, his funeral, was, for me anyway, a final farewell to all of them. The others had died in Adelaide; and I hadn't been able to make their funerals. Mentioned in the eulogies, was what was described as Richard's quixotic choice to move to Mullumbimby on the NSW North Coast, a hippy haven in the 70s, much to the shock of the locals, and now routinely described as Newtown with dairy farms.
For years after he went up there I would get postings of how he was going; increasingly isolated, increasingly alcoholic, increasingly shambolic; lost in the beautiful world of the imagination and creativity we had all once sought as the only worthwhile path of human endeavour. I was just a crazed young rent boy up the Cross in the late sixties when the thread began. Rescued from a drug referral service for teenagers by Harry Godolphin - also dead now - he gave me acid and took me to see Hair; and finally, one day, after much preparation, I was allowed into the inner sanctum, to meet John Bygate, renowned for his good looks and wild ways; and talent. Books and records lined his Paddington terrace, provided by a sugar daddy; and he was always scribbling away writing bits of music; working towards the great Australian masterpiece.
It was all very high culture; and as a boy from the suburbs where the only novel in the house for many years had been Gone With The Wind; until my father bought The Britannica Great Books - along with the Britannica Encyclopaedia, it was all wildly impressive.
Bygate had been at the ABC where Richard had also apparently worked or been involved for a period; and was close, at the time, to Meale, through some musical and personal connections. Long before I met him Richard was spoken of in a kind of awe; the one of them that was successful. Ian Farr, too, whose own short, sweet compositions had bought him an entry in the book Australian Composers, was part of the same domain. We all expected him to go far.
I didn't get to know Richard well until I began hitch hiking regularly down to Adelaide in the seventies; spending a couple of years there in love; completing a thesis at Flinders University; and I forget now exactly how the connection was made; if it needed to be made at all. It was probably Ian Farr who introduced us.
With work and chaos I've missed a lot of funerals in recent times, but Richard's, I just had to go. It wasn't just a mark of respect, it was somehow an essential thing to do. I've been to a lot of jobs over the years thanks to my job as a general reporter; but this one was certainly different. For a start, there was a group of classical musicians in the corner playing Clouds Now And Then as the guests, or were they mourners, arrived. The musical establishment, although I don't know them, had shown up in reasonable force. But how many of them had known him personally it was difficult to say. I suspected not so many. The so-called quixotic move to the North Coast had happened years ago; many years ago now; more than 20 years; but there were none of the ragged tribe that he might have befriended up there.
And even when I had known him, his inclination to isolate was becoming strong. The massive Australian heat enveloped the crematorium. The strains of Clouds Now and Then filled every corner; people took their seats. I sat next to a group of three men in their 50s, neatly turned out, greying hair, intense, intelligent faces sad, perhaps, but with little sign of genuine distress, as if they had gathered at another classical conert. A man from the Conservatorium, his name escapes me now, played MC. There were all the appropriate valedictions. The man who had written the music for the opera Voss. The man much admired as one of the true genuine geniuses and authentic voices on the Australian serious music scene.
And then Brett Cottle, CEO of the Australiasian Performing Right Association (APRA), stood up, and read a eulogy written by Andrew Ford, who could not make it because he was performing in Melbourne. It was typical, somehow, of the impersonality of the thing that the eulogy should be read by someone other than the person who wrote it.
"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. Richard was a generous colleague, a shrewd judge of music - and of people - and an honest and considerate friend.
"Music really mattered to Richard. It was important. Not some deluxe item, not a fashion accessory, not an entertainment (or not simply an entertainment). Music might be playful, it should certainly be alluring, but at heart it was intensely serious.
"Richard's creative life was driven by several paradoxes. He was, without a doubt, the most cosmopolitan Australian composer of his generation. For a start, he was supremely well read - poetry, plays and novels, but also - and particularly - philosophy. His ears were open to all sorts of music; his mind was open to everything. And it was in his mind that he first began to travel, through European music and literature, through Asian art. His imagination took him round the world, even before the Ford Foundation Scholarship did....
"When you listen to Clouds now and then or Images (Nagauta), you are hearing pure Meale. No quotations, no musical dress-up. And yet you sense a stillness, a timelessness that you feel can only have come from a genuine engagement with these other cultures.
"It was the same with Spain. Richard drank in the language, the poetry, the painting and the music. But the works that sprang from this - Las Alboradas, Homage to Garcia Lorca, Very High Kings and (let's not forget) the Three Miró Pieces: they are Richard, through and through. They are intense, passionate and intricate. They are also, it seems to me, Australian.
"So here's the first paradox. For when he actually went to Spain, Richard was surprised to discover that the light there reminded him of Australia; and that he wanted to come home.
"He would continue to steep himself in European culture, but he felt the need to be apart from it. He would love Lorca and Rimbaud, Bach and Bruckner, Monteverdi and Messiaen, but he would love them from afar."
"I thought of those years long ago; of all the people who had gone; and tears trickled unbid down my face. A corsage of white, elegant flowers draped the coffin. And each time I looked at it came the shocking thought of the body inside, the person I had known, and the markers of time that were killing us all.
"Ford went on to record: n a way, I think it was the same with his friends. He loved his friends, too, but he came to feel the need to distance himself from us. This was behind his faintly quixotic move to Mullumbimby at the start of the 1990s. From then on, most of his friendships - most of the time - were conducted on the telephone.
"One of the last times I saw Richard - it was in 2007 - we ended up talking about God. It wasn't a long conversation: neither of us believed in Him. I said to Richard something stupid along the lines of it being essentially liberating that we didn't have a deity. We were responsible for our lives and our world, so we just had to try to be nice to one another. Richard gave me one of his more withering looks and growled, 'But I don't wanna be nice to people!'
"Now this wasn't strictly true. In fact it's another paradox. Part of him craved company. When he lived in Julie Simonds's granny flat in the first part of this decade, Julie's children, Matt and Caitlin, would try to get out of taking Richard his mail. Because they knew they'd never get away. There was no chance of just handing the letters in at the door, they'd have to stay for a chat and the chat would turn into a harmony lesson. The whole thing might easily take an hour. And yet, they came to regard Richard as their grandfather, and, when they were out together, Richard took to introducing them as his grandchildren, enjoying the confusion this caused on the faces of his old friends.
"At the end of his life, Richard moved in with his niece Amanda, and he found, I think, a true kindred spirit, someone with whom he could be as quiet or as gregarious as he liked. Someone who simply understood him.
"A good example of the gregarious Richard was the National Music Camp at Monash University in 2005. The artistic director Richard Mills invited Richard to be the composition tutor. It was a brilliant idea, but on Day One the signs weren't good. When Richard walked into the staff bar that first night, he looked crestfallen and said he wasn't really drinking any more. His doctor had told him he had to cut it out, and it was the same with the cigarettes. To be social, though, he'd have a glass of red and just sort of sit on it all night.
"The plan lasted nearly three-quarters of an hour. He ended up having quite a few glasses of red, and before the night was out, he was in the doorway lighting up his fags.
"On the morning of Day Three, I bumped into Richard's composition students. They were looking bleary-eyed, and, in one case, actually ill. It turned out that the night before they'd gone for a drink with Richard. (The innocence of youth!) They'd finally got to bed around 5 am. Richard himself showed no ill-effects. He was having a ball."
This, really, was the side of Richard I knew; or had known, long ago, in his prime. It had seemed at times that an entire generation had died off of alcoholism and addiction; AIDS picking off those the bottle or the needle had missed. Such remarkably clever, such talented people. All of them gone. Another tear trickled down my face. Amanda Meale had spoken very movingly about the man she had known, the personable, difficult, frail, increasingly sick, ever more impossible person who, at the same time, had been almost clairvoyant in his intimacies, so touching, so perceptive. The man who had a family and people who loved him; not just an obscure figure revered only in the corridors of high art. The increasing difficulty of dealing with him as he aged came as no surprise whatsoever. He had been difficult even when he had been wonderful.
Back then, back when I had got to know him; none of us, either, had known the consequences; as we downed each bottle and congratulated ourselves on the torrents of mysticism and ecstasy, drunken lucidity and penetrating insights we had managed to provoke; outraging the mainstream as we proceeded. And creating the most pure, abstract, highest form of art.
And this is the exact period when I knew him:
"As the Music Camp proved, Richard was a very good teacher. But he wasn't a born teacher; he had learnt on the job. Those who first studied with him at Adelaide in the early 1970s report that he could be doctrinaire and forbidding. Classes might be inspirational but occasionally also terrifying. Richard felt that everyone else should be as fascinated and informed as he was when it came to the music of Stockhausen, the poetry of Mallarmé and the philosophical writings of Wittgenstein. At the very least, they should want to be fascinated and informed. One suspects not many of his students measured up."
I would go round to house at night, sometimes on my own, sometimes with friends. As I mentioned, he on his university wage bought red wine by the carton. We, on nothing more than the dole or student allowance or cobbled together incomes from part time jobs, were almost always broke and thought this was the height of indulgence. We were happy to help him consume it all; our own private party; our own secret enclave; our own elite circle of the doomed; destined, we still thought, for greatness. Not with a bang but a whisper was not possible; not back then.
Then he spoke of Voss, based on the Patrick White novel, with a libretto by David Malouf, and it seemed that this channel of greatness would always be ours; that somehow destiny had chosen us for these great works; and our drunken enthusiasms and learned raves; those intense bits of time when he insisted we listen to something, they were all gone. Bygate spiralled from being the best looking kept boy in Sydney, established in a gorgeous house lined with books and records; to moving from one flat to another in an increasingly derelict succession. The first money I ever made out of writing was a story about Bygate; when I was co-winner for a short story competition in Adelaide in 1974.
Andrew Ford's other tale, before the eulogy ran out, was also classic Meale; and here it is in full:
"It would be hard, truthfully, to overstate Richard Meale's importance to Australian music. But alas, it's proved all too easy to underestimate it.
"Our mass media prefer people whose ideas will fit neatly into the boxes they've already constructed. Richard's ideas were too big to fit. To make matters worse, he wasn't interested in giving interviews. In fact he hated all that: 'You always end up saying something stupid,' he told me. Unguarded, more like.
"In a way, it's a shame he didn't give more interviews, because at his most cantankerous he'd have made fabulous copy. Sometimes, I suspect, he would drop a contentious remark into a conversation just to see what would happen. But I don't think he ever spoke meretriciously. When Richard said something outrageous, he meant it. He spoke his mind, even when he spoke it too bluntly.
"In the popular press, though, Richard held his peace. So they forgot about him. When a reporter rang me for a comment on the day he died, she wasn't even sure how to pronounce his name. 'Is it Meal', she said, 'or Mealy?'
"It's ironic. In the late 1960s and 70s, the newspapers were interested enough in Richard Meale and Peter Sculthorpe to create a rift between them. It wasn't a real rift, more a beat up, but how extraordinary it seems, from here, that the press should have cared that much about concert music! Now half the time you can't even get your concert reviewed.
"It was a beat up, but if newspapers are writing about a rift between you and someone else - a friend, a colleague ... a competitor - well it becomes hard not to get caught up in it. And Richard grew wary of Peter. At least on the surface.
"But I'd like to finish by telling you a Richard Meale story. Anyone who met Richard has a story about him. Most of you here will have dozens of stories. Still you probably won't know this one.
"One day in 1993, Richard rang up. For many years he had served assiduously on the board of APRA - the performing right association - and now it had fallen to him, at the forthcoming APRA awards night, to present an award to Peter Sculthorpe. It was the Ted Albert Memorial Award - for a lifetime of achievement - and as Peter's colleague, contemporary and the only classical composer on the board, Richard was clearly the man for the job.
"Well he didn't want to do it. He told me he hadn't followed Peter's career, he didn't know his music and he couldn't imagine what he might have to say. Would I do it?
"I said, 'No, Richard. You must do it. It would be a good thing for Australian music.'
"He wasn't buying this, of course. So eventually I agreed to write a speech for Richard to read.
"As I wrote, I came to feel I was engaged in some great purpose. Working for the general good. I praised Peter's qualities and those of his music, and I praised them from what I took to be Richard's perspective. Single-handedly, it seemed to me, I was healing that rift, bringing our two most famous composers back together, uniting Australian music and musicians.
"I sent the speech to Richard. And I printed out a second copy to take to the dinner in my jacket pocket. I just had a bad feeling that, come the big moment, Richard might have locked himself in the toilet.
"But no. There he was. On stage. Speech in hand.
"And so he began to speak. And they were not my words. They were better than my words. They were his words. Personal words. Whatever he might have felt about Peter and about the rift, he couldn't help but stand there and speak the truth, honouring another composer's work and another composer's uniqueness.
"I began by saying that Richard Meale was caring and generous, and that he was shrewd and honest. I think all those qualities shone out of his speech that night in 1993.
"They shine out of his music too. And as long as his music is played, those qualities will continue to shine and to transmit themselves to anyone with the time, imagination and ears to hear.
"And so now it's up to us to honour Richard Meale's work and Richard Meale's uniqueness.
"We do this, very simply, by playing his music. As well as we can. Again and again."
I don't know what my story of Richard Meale particularly was. Except that he was the intellectual high priest of a small group of aspirant composers, hedonists and bingers who, too, even after the deaths of my friends, lived on in increasing frailty and difficulty. He outlived John Bygate. He outlived Ian Farr. He most certainly outlived Harry Godolphin. And now, as my own blood pressure goes haywire and thanks to a mercilessly demanding job, constant harassment from upstart bosses 20years my junior, and my own stupidity in having let them walk all over me and having tried to paper up the crecks by working hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime, I think: it's not worth the candle, there has to be another way.
And it doesn't matter how clever you are, how gifted, how outside the box, the bottle catches up to all of us; and if not the bottle, then time itself. It's time to take stock in my own life; to induce some common sense, as not only the peers fall over like sad bowling pins in muffled clay; but theirt Gods, their people, their intellectual lights and leaders. Meale was, to us, the talent, the one of us who had succeeded in the real world, despite our propensities to outrageous oblvion, but it all ends the same way, in the hallucinatory pitch of Clouds Now and Then straining through the chapel, the curtains closing on a coffin and a life, the white flowers bought espeically for the occasion going up in flames with all the rest.
I walked outside into the gusting heat, seeking first water and then looking around; as others did, not quite knowing what to do; what pose to adopt. The curtains had drawn and the flames would leap; but Meale didn't have children or a wife or come from a large suburban family; heartbroken Amanda and his nephews and nieces were about all there was. Many of the others were professional colleagues; apart, of course, from Jack, who they said was like an adopted son. I can see why, I thought, as I watched him briefly in the crush of people leaving the chapel. You would have been very handsome in your day. You're obviously a very sensitive person. Richard would have adored you. Ther was a strange gap: for a minute I thought, do I go up to Amanda and introduce myself; do I say what a great speech you gave; do I say I'm sorry for your loss?
I looked at the sombre, well dressed crowd as they gathered in the heat; beginning to talk to each other as if they were at a party; some, wondering, just like me, quite what to do. But I had an 85-year-old woman with leukemia in the car waiting for me in 40 degree heat; a woman who had been enormously kind to me and who's funeral, no doubt, I would have to attend in the coming years.
So I strode off through the ehat, barely looking at the people I didn't know anyway.
There was a wake. "Richard's family suggests that those wanting to gather might do so at Great Northern Hotel, 522 Pacific Highway, Chatswood." It wasn't one of his odl haunts that I knew, and seemed more practical than atmospheric a choice of venue; but what would I know. Yet again I was sober; trying, perhaps, to avoid the fate of all my old friends, and while once I would have gone and written myself off and had a great time with a bunch of strangers and walked away friends for life with various characters; this was a different era, a differenet time, and drinking mineral water at a wake just isn't quite the same. Goodbye Richard; that's all I can say. You were great company in your day; those days when our very select little group would head over to your hosue in Adelaide and sit around on the carpet or the coucn on the ground floor and drink your booze and smoke your dope and right ourselves off. Or those evenings when I went alone; and shared what we shared. So so long mate; good luck on the other side; there's music in heaven too.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/23/2750731.htm?section=justin
Australian classical music composer Richard Meale has died in Sydney aged 77.
Meale is credited with helping to define contemporary classical music in Australia through his contributions as a lecturer and as broadcaster on the ABC.
His most well-known works include Very High Kings, Three Miro Pieces and his 1986 opera of Patrick White's Voss.
Sydney Symphony's managing director Rory Jeffes says Meale's compositions were unique.
"So much modern music is very derivative, but he wasn't afraid to really set new standards," Jeffes said
"I think that kind of creativity doesn't come around that often and I personally am very saddened by the fact that we won't hear new and great creative ideas coming from Richard."
http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/vale-richard-meale-24-august-1932-23-november-2009
Richard Meale (24 August 1932 - 23 November 2009)
personal reminiscences by David Worrall and Ross Edwards
by David Worrall and Ross Edwards
© Bridget Elliot Richard Meale inspired and influenced several generations of Australian composers through his music as well as his engaging mind. David Worrall and Ross Edwards both studied with Meale - here they share some of their personal memories about their passionate teacher.
Richard Meale's funeral will be held on Friday 27th November at 1.15pm at the Northern Chapel, Northern Suburbs Crematorium.
David Worrall
Even though Richard Meale's death in the early hours of Monday morning was not unexpected - his health had been declining for quite some time - it has come as a shock for those who knew him as the intensely human being that he was.
He was fond of pronouncing in feigned seriousness that he would outlive us all. And still he might, even in his passing. His deep intuition was supported by such a keen intellect that one could rarely guess what position he would take on any of the wide range of subjects that took his interest. Music from many cultures and periods, from opera and gagaku - and all things Japanese - to David Bowie and Tom Waits; from flower arranging to bullfighting; Bishop Berkeley to Wittgenstein; Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Jean Genet, Gertrude Stein and of course Enrique Granados and Federico García Lorca.
Richard Meale was a public figure and a private man. There is much to be written about his music and his role in public life - a task I leave to those more scholarly and objective than I. Except to say that he undertook his public roles - as an academic involved in curriculum reform, as a founding member of the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust and later as a long-term Board Director of APRA - very seriously; I only ever knew him to be well prepared and presented - ready to listen to other's points of view but equally to argue a case when he thought it was warranted, even at the expense of his own health.
This valediction, however, is of the private man: the teacher, the friend. I went to study with him in Adelaide in the early 1970s, on the advice of Ross Edwards, who spoke so warmly of the guidance he had received from Richard and so generously introduced me to him. Following an initial trial by candlelight, in which my commitment to composing was tested, never my talent, the formal lessons were soon abandoned in favour of evening visits a couple of times a week - sometimes with my contemporaries and our partners, but just as often not.
Over the many years I knew him, we argued about everything. To Richard, an argument was a pleasure you engaged in with your friends, else why would you bother? Unfortunately he would sometimes second-guess himself and try to overture a friendship in the same way, and then be surprised when the results were unpleasant. On a personal level, many people found him difficult, obstinate, even cantankerous. Those who loved him did, too, but knew we were with someone very rare, very special. Our passions for contemporary music were often in conflict: his intense need for the lustre of music to be beautiful prevented him from enjoying the Hellenic grandeur of Xenakis, the playful inquisitiveness of electronic music or the relaxation of ego in the aleatoric. During the years I was with him, he transitioned from modernist to mannerist and the metamorphosis was an intensely organic one, in line with his preference for the subjunctive over the symbolic. For me Patrick White's Voss is a chapter conclusion; for him, but a full stop. In private we argued about everything - the more intense the better. As he aged he became susceptible to malintended gossip, but as long as he was sure of your loyalty, he was vigorous!
If Richard developed an interest in something, he was infectious in wanting to engage you to obsess in it with him. It might be a new understanding of an old work. I remember one day listening with him to the opening of Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune at least a dozen times to explore the implications of the pause and its second beginning. But equally it could be the similarities and differences between cooking and composing - he was a fabulous cook - or his passion for the Japanese board game Go, his attempts at beating the early chess machines by playing unusual moves, and his intense competitiveness when engaged with you across the board, often while listening to music. Arnold Bax will forever be linked in my mind with the Sicilian Defence in which Black, along with the contrabassoon and bass clarinet, is playing for advantage not just equality.
On reflection, his enormous commitment to mentoring many of us is a legacy of his intense communalism and generosity of spirit. Richard was very aware of his position as a recipient of a tradition going back through Winifred Burston, Busoni, Liszt, Carl Maria von Weber and Gluck, and his desire to help us find what it was in us that made us want to compose was so empowering. Through all this, Richard drew out of us how to be composers with an intensity most of us couldn't have done ourselves. Apart from his fabulous music, this generosity of time and spirit will be carried by many of us in our music and our mentoring. As Lorca writes, and to which Richard refers in those astonishing final pages of his Homage:
Yo canto su elegancia con palabras que gimen
y recuerdo una brisa triste por los olivos
(I sing of his elegance with words that groan
and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.)
Ross Edwards
In the early 1960s, when I'd just left school, prospects were bleak for young Australian composers, whose best option was to go overseas to study and probably end up staying there. Things began to pick up when Professor Donald Peart established a branch of the ISCM which operated from the Music Department of Sydney University, and John Hopkins was appointed ABC Director of Music. About this time Richard Meale emerged as a bright beacon, a vital force that connected us with exciting developments in Europe, North America and Asia, and provided, through his own outstanding creative work, a source of hope and national pride.
In my late teens, having heard Richard's early compositions and performances, I plucked up enough courage to ask him to teach me. He agreed, refusing to accept any payment. Informal lessons with Richard were the highlight of my existence. His mercurial personality I found both alarming and invigorating. He was one of the most persuasive and inspiring people I've ever met, with wide-ranging interests outside music, which was his greatest love. He'd blaze with sudden enthusiasms - some brief but spectacular; others, as for the music of Debussy, enduring throughout his life.
As a teacher - he later became my supervisor at The University of Adelaide - he was never less than totally engaged. He could encourage or pour scorn as he saw fit, but you always felt he cared at a deep level as you came away from lessons with your head buzzing, all fired up to read Lorca, McLuhan or Camus ('if you don't read this you're a fool', he would say). Over several decades his students - many of whom have achieved prominence - have experienced this kind of passionate exhortation, perennial in style but ever-changing in content.
And just as his teaching never got into a rut, the same could be said of his eagerly awaited compositions as they emerged, each exploring new ground, often producing both outrage and wild enthusiasm at their first performances. For all his consummate professionalism I think of him as being at heart an amateur composer in the real sense of the word. All his music was produced first and foremost as a labour of love. He had a hit-or-miss attitude to deadlines which made programming new works a nightmare - none was considered ready for public presentation until Richard was completely satisfied with every detail of its immaculately notated score. Generations of devoted students have stayed up, night after night, copying parts - by hand in the days before computers - in a sometimes vain effort to get them on the music stands in time for the first rehearsal - an experience they'll always remember.
Richard cared passionately about people. He was by nature extremely generous and I recall with gratitude many instances of his personal kindness. He had an enormous capacity for friendship. He was also capable of paranoia and misjudging the actions of people well disposed towards him so that friends and colleagues sometimes became estranged. He was utterly hopeless in money and many other practical matters.
He worked hard in the interests of fellow composers and was a powerful spokesperson - often behind the scenes - for Australian music. He was extremely fortunate, especially in later life, in receiving the friendship and loving care of Julie Simonds and her family: Pete, Matt and Caitlin; and his niece Amanda Meale. He was a quite extraordinary human being who would have excelled in very many fields. How fortunate are we that music chose him.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/music/celebrated-composer-embraced-the-Vale
world/2009/11/23/1258824669823.html
Asutralia has lost one of its finest composers with the death of Richard Meale, whose music embraced both Western avant-garde and Asian classical music.
"He changed the face of Australian music,'' said the composer Peter Sculthorpe. "In the 1960s, more than anyone he made Australia aware of the music of Europe that was being written at that time."
He also introduced Australians, Sculthorpe among them, to the sound of the Indonesian gamelan.
The Herald music critic Peter McCallum said the composer's early works reflected a European modernism but with a distinctive voice.
"He was one of the earliest to embrace what was then a very exciting style of modernism, as defined by Boulez and Stockhausen, and wrote some extremely important works in that style," said McCallum. "He later moved on from highly concentrated style he developed. He did that deliberately in order to re-engage with the wider public.''
Meale's most significant works include Very High Kings (1968), Incredible Floridas (1971) and the opera Voss (1986), based on Patrick White's novel. Commissioned by the then Australian Opera, Voss was a landmark in the company's history and in the opera landscape.
Opera Australia's former artistic director Moffatt Oxenbould said Voss demonstrated that creating an Australian opera was not a "dreaded obligation" but could be genuinely engrossing experience.
Jim Sharman, who directed Voss, described Meale, who was 77, as a formative creative influence on himself and many other Australian artists.
"I always found him lively, generous, inspiring, provocative and challenging. He was also, in the best sense, an internationalist … Richard will be remembered as an outstanding composer.''
Sydney Symphony's managing director, Rory Jeffes, said Australia had lost a unique creative spirit. The orchestra had a long relationship with Meale, commissioning many of his works.
"Richard's distinguished contributions to Australian musical life as composer and teacher have enriched our culture,'' he said. ''[He] helped define Australian contemporary classical music.''
Meale, who was born in Sydney, studied piano, clarinet, harp, history and theory at the NSW Conservatorium of Music but was self-taught in composition. In 1960 he began studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he concentrated on Japanese court music and gamelan.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/restless-spirit-foundthe-music-in-voss/story-e6frg8n6-1225802461207
OBITUARY: Richard Meale. Composer. Born Sydney, August 24, 1932. Died Sydney, November 23, aged 77.
ALONG with Peter Sculthorpe and Nigel Butterley, Richard Meale first came to prominence in the mid-1960s as part of that Sydney-based triumvirate announcing a new modernist period in Australian music. His music continued to create debate until the end.
A prodigious teenager who left school because he hated exams, Meale was largely self-taught as a composer, though he took lessons at the NSW State Conservatorium in harmony, clarinet, harp and piano, the latter with the great teacher Winifred Burston.
At the conservatorium, he fell in with a coterie of devoted colleagues, among these soprano Marilyn Richardson and her husband, flautist Peter Richardson. Together, they laboured to prepare the first Australian performances of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which they took to the 1964 Adelaide Festival.
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's early works - pieces such as Homage to Garcia Lorca for double string orchestra (1964), Nocturnes (1967) and the even more grandiose tribute to Christopher Columbus Very High Kings (1968) - inhabit an assured, elevated terrain, earning him the respect and admiration, if not the unequivocal adulation of musicians and music lovers.
Meale was never one to court facile approval. He was single-minded, resolute, even obstinate. Difficult and contrary, scathing in his dismissal of easy options, he appeared to cultivate enemies as much as he embraced a small circle of adored friends. With the mind and temperament to match those of Patrick White, who admired him above all Australian composers, Meale looked at times like a deracinated cleric from a canvas by El Greco.
Five years working in record shops fed an innate curiosity into music from all cultures and periods. This served him well during his period as an ABC concert and radio programmer (1963-69). Earlier, in 1960, Meale spent 14 months overseas, mostly at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied and performed music from Bali, Java, India and Persia.
All these encounters with non-Western music fired students in his early years as a teacher at the University of Adelaide. Initially, the newly minted teacher was quite doctrinaire, reading from the bible of Boulez, but failing to find an analytical code to crack Debussy's Jeux. Intently political, his was the guiding voice that reformed a fractious music department and set for it an international agenda.
The most illuminating and inspirational composition lessons with Meale sprawled over long, claret-infused evenings at his tiny terrace home in North Adelaide. He devoured the operas of Monteverdi, Mussorgsky, Debussy and Janacek, argued the tenets of Gramsci, Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein, extolled the delights of Godel's theorem and miniature Japanese roses, relived the sensual excesses of Rimbaud and Mallarme or the sun-drenched memories of Lorca's Spain.
In Adelaide he moved into the orbit of South Australian premier Don Dunstan, with whom he shared many tastes in culture, cuisine and philosophical outlook. In 1971 Dunstan appointed Meale to the new Adelaide Festival Centre Trust. One of their more memorable appearances together was at the Adelaide Zoo at the 1974 festival, when Meale conducted an ensemble while Dunstan delivered the verses of Carnival of the Animals on an elephant.
That same year, Dunstan persuaded Adelaide University to establish a fellowship in composition, lessening Meale's teaching load.
He retired from the university in 1988, having attained the position of reader in composition.
The appearance of the orchestral Viridian (1979) and the Second String Quartet (1980) stunned the Australian composition establishment. The archpriest of high modernism had embraced euphony and tonality. No other composer had the capacity to articulate such radical changes of direction in Australian music.
A restless spirit, Meale left Adelaide in 1991 and moved to a rambling house in a rainforest near Mullumbimby on the NSW north coast. On his frequent visits to Sydney, he stayed with music publisher and broadcaster Julie Simonds and her family, eventually residing there until 2007. Then he moved in with his niece Amanda and her family in Frenchs Forest.
Meale was best known for the opera Voss, and in Canberra, in May, 15 national institutions jointly conducted a four-day exploration of the multidimensional offspring of the 1957 novel by White. Its appearance at the 1986 Adelaide Festival with music by Meale and libretto by David Malouf was historic, some calling this production by Jim Sharman the arrival of "the great Australian opera".
While a second Meale-Malouf collaboration from 1991, Mer de glace, was generally regarded as the more technically developed work, it is Voss that captured the public imagination.
In The Weekend Australian's Review section on Saturday, composer and broadcaster Andrew Ford suggested that a new production of Voss should be one of the first priorities of incoming Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini.
Presciently, he notes that 2012 would be an appropriate year: it is White's centenary and would have been Meale's 80th year.
Meale's poor health and absence from Canberra weighed heavily on the surviving players of The Voss Journey , of which I was a co-curator. His absence was made more poignant by the world premiere of his last orchestral work, a vibrant four-movement, voice-less Suite from Voss by the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, also performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in September.
In 2004, the National Library of Australia acquired Meale's papers, 87 boxes in all.
Andrew Ford's eulogy in full:
http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/richard-meale-eulogy
