James Penberthy - Music and Memories. David Reid S.
Preface
The son of Salvation Army officers, he lived in a musical household. His father, he claimed, could play any musical instrument and very well. James, as he was known, took to music when aged six and never abandoned it, despite the several interruptions caused by his father's postings to Perth, Adelaide, Broken Hill, Ballarat and back to Melbourne. Music was his whole life.
Like his father, James Penberthy mastered instruments quickly. As a high-school student in Melbourne he began to compose. Later, as a teacher at Mentone Grammar and Trinity College, he developed a talent he had to put aside for naval service during the war. On his return, he began formal studies at the Melbourne Conservatorium under the direction of Sir Bernard Heinze. Fellow students included Peter Sculthorpe, Rex Hobcroft, Keith Humble and Wilfred Lehmann. He supported himself by conducting for the National Ballet and National Opera companies, both founded in Melbourne at that time.
In 1951, on a Commonwealth fellowship, he went to Britain, France and Italy, studying under outstanding musicians such as Sir John Barbirolli and Nadia Boulanger and talking to dancers such as David Lichine and Yurek Shabelevsky. Soon after returning to Australia, he moved to Perth where, for twenty-two years, he was a leading light in the musical scene. He became music critic for The Sunday Times, continued composing and was a founder of the West Australian Opera Company. He wrote many operas, ballets and concertos as well as songs and chamber music. His output over some forty years after the war was large and varied. Much of it was performed and recorded. He was one of those Australians who threw everything they had into trying to provide their country with a homegrown music, often against serious personal and artistic odds. At a time when both audiences and officials treated local compositions with at best indifference and sometimes with contempt, he and others struggled on. Eventually many succeeded. Although audiences may still prefer the European classics, at least they are willing to give Australian compositions a fair hearing.
This is an engaging autobiography. Penberthy tells his story with an artless simplicity. The picture he builds of his early family life is graphic and compelling. The story rolls on relentlessly. His wartime experience as a naval officer, serving in the Pacific theatre, danger often being present, is sometimes alarming, sometimes comic. At war's end he had the responsibility of sailing, in a converted trawler with only a handful of men under his command, from island to island in the then Dutch East Indies to accept the surrender of large Japanese forces. His tales of men he met and their fates are gripping, often sad.
As a post-war conductor and composer, he knew almost everyone in the Australian musical scene. Many are mentioned in these memoirs. His contribution to West Australian opera and ballet was enormous. Late in his career he worked, first, at the Sydney Conservatorium and, finally, at Lismore, in northern New South Wales, where he led moves to found a small conservatorium. On retiring in the late 1970s, he moved to Yamba near Ballina, where he went on composing. He died in the Maclean District Hospital, NSW, on 30 March 1999.
Patrick Thomas, in The Australian, 16th Apr 1999 wrote:
“-Jim at his most charming was eloquent, gracious and pursuasive.
In the lecture theatre, his students admired his broad and intense love of nature
and of all things beautiful. His personal culture was clearly of the broadest of dimensions.
But James was no dilletante. He had been well trained in new overseas standards.
Although some may have found his music not to their taste – by no means uncommon
with contemporary music—he was undoubtedly one of Australia’s most creative artists, with a strong, truly distinctive streak.”
On 9th1999, Larry Sitsky wrote , in The Sydney Morning Herald:
“His sense of mateship was highly developed band one you became his mate by demonstrated credential and behaviour (willingness to take on “the Good Fight”), there was nothing he would not do for you”
Penberthy began to write his story in Perth in the early 1980s but put it aside until resuming in 1991. The prologue and first fourteen chapters which follow are derived from a draft manuscript, now in the possession of his son, David. To these have been added two others, derived from an interview which Penberthy gave to Laine Langridge in Lismore in 1988 as part of the Esso Performing Arts and Oral History Project of the National Library, Canberra. They have been augmented by extracts from another, much shorter, draft memoir found among his papers. Such extracts are indicated by square brackets, as are a few editorial interpolations of information from other persons and historical or technical facts. All parts have been edited and, in a few places, editorial interpolations are indicated, also by square brackets.
He had already given a brief interview in 1966 to Hazel de Berg, who was also collecting oral history for the National Library. In that early interview he revealed some of his aspirations as a composer. He was more interested in life and people than in music and art, he said. If he could not relate himself to other people and they could not see the sort of man he was, there would be no point in writing music. He believed that life was far more important than music or anything else. And yet he felt compelled to compose.
“If I could become a perfect composer, I believe I would
never write any music at all. I would sit and become a
perfect human being, and a perfect human being wouldn't
require to express himself in any other way except [in]
peaceful relationship with other people. This sort of thing.
I think theoretically; practically, I still write music
because I get a pain inside somewhere if I don't. I accuse
myself then in various ways of being lazy or unproductive.
I can't justify musical composition intellectually but I
can justify it physically in that it relieves me of some
sort of pain. I can't sit quiet. I've got to make a noise.
I'm truly an expressive person, I must talk my head off or
write music!”
Penberthy's story overflows with pictures of his life, his times and his friends. He is not, however, forthcoming in some personal details. He married Dorothy (Judy) Kerin on her twentieth birthday in August 1940 and a year later they had a son, David James. He and she were divorced in September 1947, when he had already begun an affair with Barbara Newman, whom he then married. They had a son, Richard. After this relationship failed, he lived with and eventually married Kira Bousloff, one of Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes stars, who had remained in Australia during the war, by whom he had a daughter, Tamara. This marriage too came to an end. He left Perth in 1974 with Claire Bramley whom he married soon after arriving in Sydney. They had no children. Finally, in retirement, he lived with Isabel Atcheson, who had been on his staff at Lismore. She predeceased him in 1998. Kira Bousloff died in Perth in September 2001.
James Penberthy had an active, a driven life. He threw himself into music, both as a conductor and a composer. He never gave up. Whatever the final judgement might be upon his contribution to Australian music, at least it must be said that he tried. He never lost faith and he never despaired. As shown in the last words of his personal account, he was grateful for having lived, remarking that for him it had been a wonderful life. There was nothing like creation, he said, "nothing like imitating nature, and the birds and the world. If there is a God, or if there's a life somewhere else, or creation happens some other way than in the Bible, or whatever happens, it's all so wonderful one needn't try to understand it."
Prologue
That strip of golden Western Australian sand, City Beach to Trigg Island, is a lotus land where young, middle-aged and old romantics run their lazy lives away. It was there, a few kilometres west of Perth that I spent twenty-seven years of the happiest living available to humans. Victoria, my birthplace, the main arena for my learning, my music, sport and that superior being, woman, had embraced the previous twenty-odd years of my life, but I had sneezed