peter sculthorpe
music
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Born in Launceston in 1929, Peter Sculthorpe was educated at Launceston Church Grammar School, the University of Melbourne, and Wadham College, Oxford. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, where he began teaching in 1964. He was a Harkness Fellow at Yale University, USA, in 1966, and a visiting professor at Sussex University, UK, in 1971-72. He has taught at universities within and outside Australia, and he holds honorary doctorates from Tasmania, Melbourne, Sussex and Griffith. An Officer of both the Order of Australia and of the British Empire, in 1998 he was elected one of the National Trust of Australia?s Living National Treasures. In 2002, he was elected to Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Peter Sculthorpe has written works in most musical forms - especially orchestral, chamber, and instrumental - and his output relates closely to the unique social climate and physical characteristics of Australia, and to the cultures of its Pacific Basin neighbours. His geographical outlook as an Australian caused him to be influenced by much of the music of Asia, especially during the 1960s by that of Japan and Indonesia. In recent years his music has become more deeply influenced by the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island music and culture in which he has taken a lifelong interest.
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Sculthorpe's work is the subject of four books, the first by Michael Hannan (Peter Sculthorpe: His Music and Ideas 1929 - 1979, University of Queensland Press, 1982), the second by Deborah Hayes (Peter Sculthorpe: A Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Press, 1993); and the third by the composer himself (Sun Music: Journeys and reflections from a composer?s life, ABC Books, 1999). The fourth, Graeme Skinner?s authorised biography, Peter Sculthorpe: The Making of an Australian Composer (UNSW Press), covering the years 1929 to 1974, was published in Sydney in 2007, and a fifth, by Fiona Richards, is forthcoming.
Sculthorpe celebrated his 80th birthday in 2009. His eighteenth string quartet will be premiered in 2010.
