Douglas Lilburn’s Complete Electro-Acoustic Works

Describes the genesis of electro-acoustic composition in New Zealand in the context of Douglas Lilburn’s Complete Electro-Acoustic Works and the subsequent fate of these early recordings.

Upon their initial release, Douglas Lilburn's avant-garde compositions of the 1960s, which embraced an 'Indigenous' musical language and resisted the sounds of Empire, were ignored if not outright rejected.

In 1963, Douglas Lilburn, New Zealand’s leading classical composer, left the country on a journey of discovery. He sought a way to embody the sounds of ‘place’ (specifically Aotearoa New Zealand) in his music, and the then-new field of electro-acoustic music promised a potential means to achieve this dream. On his return home he struggled to establish this new medium in a frankly unwelcoming environment, using improvised equipment sourced from a public radio studio. Eventually, in 1966, the first electronic music studio in the Southern Hemisphere was installed in a basement at Victoria University. Lilburn’s electro-acoustic work was seen by the establishment as an aberration, and very little of it was commercially available in his lifetime. Finally, in 2004, a complete release of all his extant electro-acoustic work was made available as a multi-CD set. Despite the initial skeptical reception of this work, Lilburn’s vision has inspired and continues to inspire subsequent generations of experimenters, many of them outside the Conservatory, and many outside New Zealand as well.

This is the first book that highlights and uplifts Douglas Lilburn's later-career electro-acoustic works. Bruce Russell gives these compositions the dutiful attention they deserve and contextualizes their influence in the past decades and their impact today. Unlike existing scholarship that glosses over this part of Lilburn's career, this book celebrates his experimental work and identifies its importance to the development of a national sound and decolonial mindset.