Richard Meale
Meale's father Oliver was an engineer, and his mother Lilla Adeline was the daughter of Benjamin Richards, a former mayor of Marrickville.
[7] 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, but especially the music of Olivier Messiaen.
[8] In 1964 he conducted the Australian premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (52 years after the Berlin one) with the soprano Marilyn Richardson as the voice.
[10] He was by the 1970s a member of a group of gay men — including composers John Bygate and Ian Farr — bent on exploring extremes of experience, inner and outer, through drink, drugs and sex — getting "smashed".
Aesthetically their search for extreme experience showed eventually in his compositions inspired by Arthur Rimbaud (Incredible Floridas) and by Christopher Columbus.
[12] 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.
Yet Meale's trip to Spain showed that his attachment was to works of art and imaginary worlds: the actual Spanish light reminded him painfully of Australia and he returned home.
[11] 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.
[17] 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.
Meale found the stamina and discipline required by university work paradoxically freed him to compose as an amateur, "purely for pleasure".
[10] For the Australian pianist Roger Woodward Meale wrote Coruscations, a complex piano piece, widely admired internationally, adapting a serial technique of Boulez.
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.
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.
[28] The music refers often to Debussy (Nocturnes and Pelléas et Mélisande), Delius (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring) and Wagner (Tristan and Siegfried).
[9] Shelley himself is given a Siegfried-like Heldentenor part and his creature a Fafner-like grossness to match; but the would-be Siegfried of Mer de glace is reduced to moral nullity by his failure to take responsibility.
On his visits to Sydney Meale "stayed with music publisher and broadcaster Julie Simonds and her family, eventually residing there until 2007.
He alludes to Wittgenstein, contrasting an imposed formalism — atonalism like the Tractatus — with music as an embedded form of life — like the Philosophical Investigations.
