Music byPeter Sculthorpe

(cast)The People and Musicians at Gapuwiyak Community

Music Teacher Colleen Lenord

Wire Music Alan LambComposed & Recorded on the Faraway Wind OrganFitzgerald, Western Australia

Chamber Music David MatthewsConductor William MotzingMusic Recording Supervisor Ron PurvisMusic Recording Engineer Mike StavrouMusic Recorded at Studios 301 Sydney

Performed bySydney Studio MusiciansTogether with theAustralian Chamber Orchestraand the Phoenix String Quartet

'I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls'The Bohemian Girl Act 11Music by Michael BalfeSung by Vanessa FallonPiano played by Leon Gibbons

'O Mistress Mine'Music by Peter SculthorpeLyrics by William ShakespeareSung by Nicholas RontleyMargo AdelsonClare MacleanKathy Marsh

'John Peel' 'Cheer Boys Cheer' 'The British Grenadiers'Played by the Burwood Brass Band (NSW)Under the direction of Bryan Seddon

'King of the Fairies"Arranged and Played by Doug Kelly

Bill O'TooleAndrew de TeligaWinsome Evans

'Dark Island' 'No Awa to Bide Awa' 'Green hills of Tyrol'Bagpipes Played by Graham Hardy

Thanks toAustralian Music Centre

Peter Sculthorpe was one of Australia's foremost composers of classical music until his death in August 2014. Tasmanian born, his first score for a feature film was the low-budget 1962 children's feature They Found A Cave, which was filmed in that state.

He next did the score for Michael Powell's Age of Consent, but there were disagreements about the score he devised, with it being dropped and replaced by a conventional outing from British composer Stanley Myers. (It is now available on the restored region 1 DVD 'director's cut' edition. It is a muted piece which Sculthorpe acknowledges was written under the influence of Balinese music, with Dunk island a kind of Bali substitute for him).

According to Sculthorpe, he was busy writing the Sun music ballet score in 1967-68, working with Robert Helpmann, but he always loved the notion of movies - he'd been aware of Powell since Red Shoes - and found working with Powell incredibly easy.

Disgruntled Columbia executives aside, whom Sculthorpe said found the score "too sophisticated", Sculthorpe would go on to become an elder statesman of the Australian classical music scene, and his work for the movie is a gentle, beguiling and engaging work using instruments that clearly unnerved parochial American executives.

According to Manganinnie's executive producer Gil Brealey, the experience had so soured Sculthorpe that he had resolve not to write another film score.

It was David Williams, then head of Greater Union distributors, who persuaded Sculthorpe to do the score for Manganinnie.

Burke & Wills was Sculthorpe's next, and last major score for a feature film. He had a troubled relationship with the demands, and compromises involved in scoring for film.

The result is surprisingly conventional, though it proves that Sculthorpe could write traditional heroically flavoured music, while also dabbling with electronic moments associated with the landscape and the Aboriginal presence - though the wire music is by Alan Lamb. Sculthorpe has his own site here, and there is a wiki here, and he is also present at the Australian Music Centre site here (The AMCis thanked in the film's credits).

(Below: Peter Sculthorpe)

(Below: Peter Sculthorpe meeting up with Michael Powell's son Kevin Powell to reminisce about Age of Consent in the extras on the special edition DVD, and below that, Sculthorpe being interviewed)

In the usual way for the times, a CD was released of the film's score to coincide with the film's release in 1987 in the United States:

CD American Gramaphone (USA) AGCD900 1987Composed by Peter SculthorpeProduced by Chip Davis & Graeme CliffordEngineered by Mike StavrouBalanced by Peter Sculthorpe & Mike Stavrou

Recorded in AustraliaMastered by Clete Baker, Sound Recorders, Omaha, NebraskaMusicians: Sydney Studio Musicians, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and the Phoenix String QuartetAboriginal music played by the Gapuwiyak CommunityHarp solo: Louise Johnson

King Of The Faeries (A group of folk musicians lead by Doug Kelly)Sand DunesWillsʼ Variations:The Croquet WaltzThe GrailThe Cricket QuadrilleWillsʼ DeathThe DreamDream SequencePremonitionWire MusicDreamtime (Aboriginal)I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls(From Act II, Michael Balfeʼs opera “The Bohemian Girl”). Soprano: Vanessa FallonDawn TravellingBurke And Wills MarchThe SearchJuliaThe GulfThe Coolibah TreeStarsBurkeʼs DeathJulie Reprise

Alan Lamb, who did the wire music, has only a notional wiki here, but there is a much more lengthy exposition of his work, at time of writing, here, which includes this explanation of how his wire music came about:

One night in the summer of 1975, during a holiday on the island of Mull in North West Scotland, he (Lamb) pulled to the side of the

road in his van, intending to sleep. Later, he was awoken by the sound of another major sixth, but this time it was not a dream. He had stopped beside telephone wires which sang throughout the night, the sound waxing and waning with the wind. There were fascinating structures of ever-changing rhythm and harmony, giving rise to melodies which unfolded until dawn. Hearing the wires sing Lamb felt emotionally transported and became determined to record and play their music.

Later, in 1985, Lamb returned to Australia to take up a Senior Research Fellowship and to pursue postgraduate research into neural circuitry at the University of WA. He settled in Fremantle, where he now lives. Although his medical and scientific career progressed, he felt deeply frustrated in his attempts, before leaving Scotland, to record the wire music. Low winds and problems with microphones and machines meant the cassettes he brought to Australia only contained a few ghostly hums buried in noise. Worse still, he discovered the wires in the country around Perth did not sing because they were sheathed to prevent metal fatigue, which was caused by the same vibrations that produced the music.

A breakthrough occurred in 1976 when Lamb visited his sister and her husband at `Faraway', their farm near the Fitzgerald National Park in the Great Southern Region of WA. In the vast landscapes of the area, one becomes very aware of plains, sky, wind and seemingly limitless space. Running along the farm boundary, Lamb found a half-mile stretch of abandoned telephone wires: 12 poles and six wires, all intact and unsheathed... and all singing softly in the wind. They ran north-south, the best possible orientation for the prevailing east wind. Lamb was able to buy them for $10; and thus began Lamb's Faraway Wind Organ project.

More than 10 years later, in 1986, the farm is vacant, the poles are falling over and the wires have succumbed to lightning and rust. But in the intervening years Lamb - while working towards his aesthetic ideals - has learned to record the singing wires and compose music with them, in accord with the natural forces which produced the music.

Typically, prior to composing, Lamb will spend a few days or up to several weeks recording, sometimes amassing up to 40 hours of

tape or even recording almost continuously for more than 24 hours. At these times, he becomes aware of correspondences between the sounds and cyclic changes brought on by day and night, the weather and the seasons.

From his pool of raw material he chooses sounds for compositions. This involves a prior stage of cataloguing and memorising. Sounds are classified according to pitch, rhythm, timbre, predominant key structure and emotional color. Details of accidental sounds such as percussive impacts, squeaks and so on are noted. Lamb gradually memorises their general structure, then reflects upon and mentally re-arranges sections until compositional ideas begin to emerge. In general, these tend to disclose certain temporal and harmonic orders suggested by the recordings.

Finally, the ideas are realised using multi-channel tape, then modified until an optimum form crystallises. The entire process may take a few months or more than a year to reach completion. Even so, Lamb often revises or discards compositions.

He is sure other compositional approaches are possible, and believes he has only exhausted a fraction of the possibilities. Wire music, he believes, has an infinite range - at least equal to that of the piano.

(Below: Alan Lamb)

The chamber music by David Matthews reflects another Sculthorpe collaboration - they were both represented on the score for Manganinnie. Matthews has a wiki here, and his own website here.

Balfe's The Bohemian Girl is too well known to detail at length here. It has a wiki here. While this site hasn't been able to confirm it, it is

likely that singer Vanessa Fallon was the same Fallon who also worked on early Wiggles shows and shows such as ABC for Kids. She graduated with a BMus (Voice) from the NSW Conservatorium and did a post graduate diploma.

The Shakespeare set to music by Peter Sculthorpe comes from the Fool singing in Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III, in two slightly separated verses in the play:

O Mistress mine, where are you roaming? O stay and hear! your true-loveʼs coming That can sing both high and low; Trip no further, pretty sweeting, Journeys end in loversʼ meeting— Every wise manʼs son doth know. What is love? ʼTis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; Whatʼs to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty,— Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty, Youthʼs a stuff will not endure.

Doug Kelly, who contributed a folk music track to the film, with a group of folk musicians, has been around the around the Australian folk music scene for years and has appeared in a variety of bands, from Tansey's Fancy to Sirocco, and more recently with NSW folk singer Mandy Breeze doing a back to the roots duo album Simple Folk.

Finally, after his death, Peter Sculthorpe was given many warm obituaries. Given David Matthews appearance on the film score for Burke & Wills alongside Sculthorpe, it seems fitting to quote his farewell to Sculthorpe in The Guardian on 13th August 2014, available online here:

Peter Sculthorpe, who has died aged 85, was Australia's foremost contemporary composer. From the start of his career, he set out to create music that would not depend on European manners and

cultural traditions, but would be specifically Australian in idiom. His contemporaries Russell Drysdale (a close friend), Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan had established a true national school in painting; like them, Peter believed that Australia is primarily a visual culture, dominated by its landscape. His own music, with its blocks of non-developing material and its overall flatness and scarcity of dramatic gestures, even resembles the landscape in the look of the notes on the page.For melodic inspiration, he turned first to Asia – Indonesia and Japan – and then, in the second half of his life, to the music of indigenous Australians, which sustained him as English folk music had sustained Vaughan Williams. Like Vaughan Williams in Britain, in Australia he became a much-honoured national figure, whose music affected not just a small coterie, but a wide range of people from all parts of society. He was that rare figure in contemporary classical music, a natural communicator.Peter was born in Launceston, Tasmania, and grew up in the nearby village of St Leonards, where his parents ran the general store. His father Joshua was a third-generation Tasmanian; his mother Edna, a Yorkshire woman, had been a teacher before her marriage and encouraged her son to write and paint. He began piano lessons at the age of eight: after his first lesson, he spent the next week writing music, thinking that was what he was supposed to do, but at his next lesson his teacher caned him for not practising. Peter carried on composing, first in secret, then with his parents' approval. He attended Launceston Church grammar school and at the age of 16 went to Melbourne University to study piano.Returning to Tasmania in 1950 after graduation, he was unable to find adequate work in music, so he joined his younger brother, Roger, in managing what he calls a "huntin', shootin' and fishin' shop" in his engaging autobiography, Sun Music (1999). He continued to compose, and in 1954 wrote his first significant piece, a sonatina for piano based on an indigenous Australian legend, which was chosen to be performed at the 1955 ISCM festival in Baden-Baden, Germany. In 1958 he was awarded a scholarship to study abroad, and went to Wadham College, Oxford, where his teachers were Edmund Rubbra and Schoenberg's pupil Egon Wellesz. Neither had much influence on him; more important was his friendship with the critic and composer Wilfrid Mellers, who

shared his admiration for DH Lawrence and encouraged his independence from Europe.When in 1961 his father died, Peter gave up his PhD and returned to Australia. He wrote Irkanda IV for solo violin, strings and percussion in his father's memory: it became one of his best-known pieces and exemplifies one of his seminal themes, the lonely figure in the desert landscape. In 1963 he was invited to teach composition at Sydney University, a post he held until 1999. He was a natural teacher, and his pupils included Ross Edwards, Barry Conyngham and Anne Boyd, now the senior figures in Australian music. He lived in Sydney for the remainder of his life.In 1965 he began the Sun Music series, four orchestral pieces that brought him temporarily into the avant garde. The conductor Bernard Heinze had suggested that he write a piece "without rhythm, melody or harmony". When Sun Music I was played in London it attracted the ear of the music writer and publisher Donald Mitchell, who invited him to join Benjamin Britten in the newly created publishing house Faber Music. He went on to compose around 250 works, including the music theatre work Rites of Passage (1972-73), for the opening of the Sydney Opera House; the television opera Quiros (1982); Requiem (2004) for chorus, orchestra and didgeridoo; many orchestral pieces, notably Mangrove(1979), Earth Cry (1986) and Kakadu (1988); and 18 string quartets. Most of these works are passionately concerned with, as he said, "nature, the environment, and more recently, climate change". But Peter also claimed that Australia is one of the few places in the world "where one can honestly write straightforward, joyful music" – and he did. He was made MBE in 1970, OBE in 1977, an officer of the Order of Australia in 1990, and an Australian National Living Treasure in 1998.I first met Peter in 1972 when he was visiting professor at Sussex University and needed someone to assist him in the composition of Rites of Passage. We immediately became friends, and in 1974 he invited me to stay at his house in Sydney where we collaborated on the music for a television film, Essington, with a script by Thomas Keneally. In subsequent years we wrote two more film scores together, I continued to visit, and he also came to stay with me in London. In his exquisite Georgian house in Sydney, full of works of art including a world-class collection of Chinese ceramics, we would

talk for hours at night over a bottle of whisky, with Peter drinking 90% of it. The next morning Peter would begin composing promptly, showing no signs of a hangover.He seemed a genuinely happy person, for the most part content to live by himself, though warmly attached to his circle of close friends. He never married: when I first knew him he became engaged to Boyd, but they decided mutually to break it off.Family life did not suit him: "I feel that my works are my children", he said, "and most of them are rather demanding."• Peter Joshua Sculthorpe, composer, born 29 April 1929; died 8 August 2014.

(Below: David Matthews)

With the DVD of the film running some 2 hours 15 minutes, as well

as the underscore, there's plenty of room for incidental staged music, including the didgeridoo, an Aboriginal corroboree, bagpipes playing at key symbolic moments (though actor Chris Haywood only mimes the playing), a string group, and Greta Scacchi, also miming, doing a couple of numbers. The NSW Burwood Brass Band is also on hand to launch the expedition on its way.

(Below: some of the incidental scenes of music in the film).