Routledge The Music of David Lumsdaine: Kelly Ground to Cambewarra

Product Description Australian by birth but a longtime resident of Great Britain, David Lumsdaine (b.1931) is central to both Australian and British modernism. During the early 1970s Australian musical modernism was at its height. Lumsdaine and his Australian contemporaries were engaged with practices from multiple places, producing music that displays the attributes of their disparate influences; 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, Cardew and many others who were Lumsdaine's contemporaries, colleagues and friends. Hooper presents here a series of analyses of Lumsdaine's compositions, focusing on works written between 1966 and 1980. At the early end of this period is Kelly Ground, for solo piano. One of Lumsdaine's first acknowledged works, 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. Hooper places Lumsdaine's music in the context of Australian and British avant-gardes, and reveals its elegance, lyricism and technical virtuosity. Review ... the book is constantly illuminating and a lasting contribution to the literature on a composer of fine integrity and sensibility... an important and noteworthy publication.' Tempo 'For me [chapter 3] is the most satisfying of the book as it problematises the continuum of the determinate [...] and indeterminate [...] compositional practice... Hooper is at his best when he is grappling with a work he admits he is not aesthetically comfortable with.' Music Forum About the Author Australian musicologist Michael Hooper was born in Sydney and studied performance at the University of Sydney (BMus Honours, MMus). His PhD, on the music of David Lumsdaine, is from the University of York. From 2008 he was based in London, where he was a Research fellow and Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music. Hooper is currently an ARC-funded Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales.