A House for Peter Sculthorpe single work   biography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 A House for Peter Sculthorpe
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In the mid-1970s the composer Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014) acquired a petit, detached cottage in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra. The residence at 91 Holdsworth Street was based on one of the simplest variations of a dwelling: an entrance door flanked symmetrically by windows, its ready emotion reminiscent of a child's drawing, a symbol of a house as much as its reality. The building dated from the end of the nineteenth century, but Sculthorpe enjoyed repeating that it originated in the 1840s with a single room for a shepherd, invoking a distant, rustic past, perhaps a very distant past when gods could disguise themselves as shepherds. Associations between the composer and the house became entwined during the four decades of his residence. Informed passers-by might remark to their companions "That's Peter Sculthorpe's house", and leave them with this compound of ideas.' (Publication summary)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Southerly Words and Music vol. 76 no. 1 August 2016 10422309 2016 periodical issue

    'This issue presents writing by musicians and writers who cross mediums to collaborate and experiment in the spaces between words and music, including Hilary Bell, Phillip Johnston and Jonathan Mills. It includes archivist John Murphy’s reflections on Peter Sculthorpe’s house and Joseph Toltz writes of the experience of researching musical recollections from the Holocaust, and presents some of these memories from survivors. Michael Hooper shows how listening to Elliott Gyger’s operatic adaptation of David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter also re-attunes us to the novel. Dick Hughes speculates on the (jazz) music of heaven while David Brooks keeps an ear to the ground in a meditation on “herd music”. There is also the usual cornucopia of stories, memoir, poems and reviews, both themed and unthemed.' (Publication summary)

    2016
    pg. 121-125
Last amended 10 Nov 2016 12:00:06
Informit * Subscription service. Check your library.
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X