“Landscapes” program note
From Irkanda III
Peter Sculthorpe was born and raised in Launceston, Tasmania. He began writing music at a young age, and studied composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Sculthorpe then spent several years running a hunting and fishing store with his brother until his compositional work eventually found a footing overseas, as it was considered too modernist for Australian tastes at that time. Sculthorpe won a scholarship to study at Oxford, and spent the years 1958-1960 there, before returning to Australia to be close to his terminally ill father.
Irkanda III is the third of four Irkanda works written in the 1950s-1960s by Sculthorpe. Irkanda was defined by JH Sugden as an aboriginal word meaning ‘scrub country’, and was the name of a railway halt in Queensland’s North Coast line. Sculthorpe used it to mean ‘a remote and lonely place’ also describing his first Irkanda work for a time as ‘an aboriginal burial rite.’ Irkanda III, written in 1961, was Sculthorpe’s first commissioned work, and he later withdrew the second and third movements. He inscribed the score as ‘Music to be always austere, Australian’, and states that ‘the brisk outer sections frame a slow, central section evocative of Australia’s outback landscape’. Scholars argue that Sculthorpe’s knowledge of the outback was, at this point in his life, not one of personal experience but more of imagination. Sculthorpe’s piano writing in this work is reminiscent of Bartok or Stravinsky’s ‘primitivism’ with its driving rhythms, dissonant to virtually atonal harmonic language, and dry, percussive articulation. In the slow middle section especially, Sculthorpe uses expressive string techniques such as harmonics, mutes, sul ponticello and tremolos to create a ghostly sound-world. The texture eventually breaks out into another rhythmic march section, ending with strident fff gestures in all instruments.
Peter Sculthorpe in Sydney in the mid-1960s. Photograph by James Murdoch, from Peter Sculthorpe: His music and ideas 1929-1979 by Michael Hannan.
The score and parts can be purchased from Faber Music.