Peter Sculthorpe was Australia’s best-known composer and was widely held to be the most important creative musical spirit the country had produced. Beautifully written and fastidiously researched, this authorised biography provides an insight into Sculthorpe’s formation years: his quest for personal voice, and his arrival – through many creative friendships and collaborations – at a place in the collective heart of the nation. It charts the realisation of a youthful vocation to become not merely a composer, but an Australian composer.
Graeme Skinner’s biography is also a social history, examining Sculthorpe’s unique role in the creation of Australian musical modernism in the 1960s – an important era in Australia’s cultural evolution.
