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This score is a Student Workbook and is not covered under the AMCOS school licencing scheme and cannot be photocopied.
For Lilburn's only full-length choral work, Prodigal Country (1939), the composer set excerpts from three poems to music - Robin Hyde's Journey from New Zealand, Allen Curnow's New Zealand City and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Across a single, winding movement, Prodigal Country conjures nostalgia and strangeness through its sung text and drifting melodic contours. The imagery of the river dominates the work, which, for Lilburn, seemed to represent freedom, while elsewhere Hyde's evocative landscape is rugged and harsh, Curnow's text emphasises the hesitancy and unease reminiscent of the Depression and Whitman's romanticism is celebrated through Lilburn's lyrical, melodic treatment.
Douglas Liburn occupies a pre-eminent position in New Zealand music, with a legacy extending well beyond his compositional output. As a composer, a teacher, and later as a warm, generous and encouraging background presence, he presided in innumerable ways over the artistic growth of this country. His music, from the early works redolent of the influence of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, to the electroacoustic pieces of his later years, makes up a corpus of works that has been instrumental in establishing a genuinely vernacular voice in New Zealand classical music.
