Richard Meale

Richard Graham Meale, AM MBE FAHA (24 August 193223 November 2009) was a highly regarded Australian composer of instrumental works and operas, and an influential music educator.

Life and works Sydney 1932–1970 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 an engineer, and his mother Lilla Adeline was the daughter of Benjamin Richards, a former mayor of Marrickville. His elder brother, Colin Meale, was a high school principal.

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 collection of the City of Sydney Library. He studied clarinet, harp, music history and theory, but as a composer he was 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, 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. While working for the ABC, he continued his public career as a pianist and as a composer. Most of his work inspired by Javanese, Japanese and Spanish artforms (see below) was composed during his time at the ABC.

Los Angeles 1960–1961 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. "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. Adelaide 1969–1988 1972. The book is Lakatos & Musgrave's Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge published two years before. From 1969 to 1988 Meale was a member of the music faculty of the University of Adelaide, South Australia,

Meale's found stamina and discipline required by university work, paradoxically freed him to compose as an amateur, "purely for pleasure". In his 1972 book about Australia's contemporary composers, James Murdoch described Meale as "... the dominating figure in Australian composition".

But Coruscations was followed by a five-year silence. Though firmly part of the avant-garde among Australian composers, Meale experienced a stylistic rethink in the 1970s, abandoning an exclusively atonal approach in his orchestral work Viridian (1979) and his String Quartet No. 2 (1980) for a polytonal approach, and in later works embracing a frank tonality, with fin-de-siècle overtones, while retaining an individual voice.

The problem that I was encountering was brought to a head in 1979 when I began my Second String Quartet. Sadly, my best friend, Stephen Wilson, died after a sudden onset of cancer. It now became a matter of personal necessity to write a piece that would be a memorial to him. So it became clear that the work could not be based on any artifice; its existence had to lie in its emotional truth.

I found that I could not express certain things in the atonal idiom. I could not express genuine tenderness, affection, various other things. I thought there is something wrong with an art form that limits. It was then I began to have suspicion. I'm quite content, however, to say, look, it no longer suited me.

Whatever the motive, the results saw a steep decline in Meale's reputation. Modernists expecting constant innovation were dismayed to find Meale's style stuck somewhere between Debussy and Messiaen. Malouf also collaborated with Meale on his second operatic project, Mer de glace (1986–91), a tableaux-like juxtaposition of some ideas of the novel Frankenstein with the dealings of Mary Shelley with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.

Both operas are critiques of Romantic grandiosity. Voss is a German explorer of Australia, the unknown continent, confident that idealism will lead him to its heart. He forms a spiritual bond across time and space with Laura, an English spinster in Sydney able to follow his journey through sheer power of empathy. In the score of Voss, Meale quotes tinny piano dances to show the unknowingness of Sydney's 19th-century colonial society; this has the bracing effect of setting Meale's orchestration on the side of Voss's vain metaphysical ambitions. Use of a tonal idiom allows Meale exceptional freedom to quote with distancing, parody and irony snatches and patches of 19th-century music: a mock German Lied for Voss's cultural arrogance; a ripping parody of Violetta's waltz scene in La traviata for Laura's social isolation.

In Mer de glace the poet Shelley – scientist Frankenstein in fantasy – creates a man but botches the job. He is driven mad by the creature's demand to be loved. Systematically Meale sets the key of A minor for reality against the key of B-flat minor for madness – the two keys almost completely dividing the diatonic sound-world between them. The music refers often to Debussy (Nocturnes and Pelléas et Mélisande), Delius (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring) and Wagner (Tristan and Siegfried). But others – for instance Three Miró Pieces – continue Meale's illumination of other artists' work and his passion for Spain.

Table of works by Richard Meale This table has been compiled from the website of the Australian Music Centre, from the Meale entry on the website of the Move label and from performance times given by Apple Music. The items have been checked against Graeme Skinner's published list but work disowned by Meale has been omitted. Name!!Date!!Instrumentation!!Duration!!Detail

1. Aphelion; 2. Nocturne I: Perigee; 3. Zenith; 4. Nocturne II: Eclipse; 5. Nadir; 6. Nocturne III: Apoge. Section of the unfinished Mystical Voyage of Christopher Columbus. Haiku by Matsuo Bashō: clouds now and then/giving man relief/from moon-viewing. Haiku by Matsuo Bashō: soon it will die/yet no trace of this/in the cicada's screech. There is a quintet version of this work for keyboard and percussion.

1. Prelude, "Voyelles"; 2. Interlude I, "Fêtes de la faim"; 3. Sonata I, "Le bateau ivre"; 4. Interlude II, "Phrases – Veillées – Génie; 5. Sonata II, "Une saison en enfer"; 6. Postlude, "Une saison en enfer" – Matin – Adieu.

1. Tempo comodo; 2. Scherzo quasi una toccata; 3. Cantilena triste; 4. Ruvido; 5. Cantilena pacifica.

Libretto by David Malouf. The Alpine glacier Mer de Glace figures in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 1.On the Mer de Glace; 2.Prelude: Lake Geneva; 3.Village dance; 4.Mary Shelley's nightmare. Voice parts substituted by oboe, trumpet, cor anglais and saxophone.

A portrait of Mélisande in Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande.

1. Reverie; 2. Dance; 3. Threnody. An exploration of gamelan. Written for Meale's protegé and "adopted son" Matt Bailey, who played it at Meale's 2010 memorial concert in Sydney. Bailey mistakenly called Jack by Stapleton. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) in 2000.

In 1996, Meale was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the Australian National University. In 2000, he was conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of New England.

The Don Banks Music Award was established in 1984 to publicly honour a senior artist of high distinction who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution to music in Australia. In 1997, it was awarded to Meale.

At the 2002 Art Music Awards presented by the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) and the Australian Music Centre, Meale was presented with a special award for "Distinguished Services to Australian Music". He was the first person to receive such an award. At the 2003 awards, Meale's Three Miró Pieces was awarded best composition by an Australian composer; and orchestral work of the year.