Clive Douglas

Australian musician, conductor and composer. Born on 27 July 1903 in Rushworth, Victoria, and died 29 April 1977 at East Brighton, Melbourne. " His extensive travel as staff conductor on country tours inspired works in which he sought to capture the quality of the landscape and to find a musical idiom 'so entirely Australian that no other influence can be felt'. Wongadilla, Namatjira and Sturt 1829, among other compositions, reflected this interest. Douglas's incorporation of melodic materials derived from Aboriginal song was another distinctive feature of his output. These two characteristic elements led some writers to associate his work with Jindyworobakism, but nowhere did Douglas suggest any such connexion, and the application of this term to music is problematical. "Douglas's style was colouristically tonal, although influenced by modalism, exoticism and a slightly dissonant harmonic palette. His music is structured by means of conventional thematic and contrapuntal devices, and occasionally possesses an episodic character. He was little interested in the more progressive musical developments of his time, although he experimented with a modified serialism in such works as the Divertimento No.2 for Orchestra and Three Frescoes. In the late 1960s, after retiring from the A.B.C., Douglas visited Europe where he promoted Australian music and absorbed current influences. In his later life his music received only moderate attention at home and abroad, and, with the emergence of new generations of progressive Australian composers, it has been substantially eclipsed, yet Douglas was one of the country's most consistent and committed composers in a period when a creative musical life was struggling to assert itself." - Australian Dictionary of Biography