A Song of Islands is, in a sense, an autobiography - an expression of the composer's own emotional and other-personal nature - but one whose interior landscape reflects the psyche of a nation. Lilburn has noted that the early period of his creativity is revealed by successive unfoldings of his states of mind: "There's my threefold statement: first, the overture Aotearoa intuitively in 1940; second Landfall, explicit in the poem of 1942; and third, A Song of Islands, a considered song of praise, in 1946." Recalling the original title under which the work was first performed in 1947, Lilburn afterwards wrote: "It was then entitled Song of the Antipodes. But New Zealand perspectives have radically changed in the past 30 years and words like 'home', 'antipodes', 'empire' and 'colony' have lost value of meaning. So the work was later renamed in more intrinsic musical and regional terms."

The composer's revealing analysis of A Song of Islands, first printed in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra programme for a performance in the Christchurch Town Hall under Maurice Handford, 19 October 1978, is reproduced here.

"The title word 'song' is used in two senses: it implies a broadly melodic musical style, and it carries echoes of Walt Whitman's poems and their mingled descriptions and celebrations. The work may also reflect ideas held in common at that time by young regional poets and painters, friends of the composer, in a joint search for identity and authentic expression in a new context. All this carried an elated sense of dicovery, with intuitions of the strangeness and remoteness of the islands and their elemental ambience of oceans and mountains, and some realisations of human isolations imposed.

"The 'Song', or central musical idea of this work, is a chorale-like theme briefly announced at the outset in three phrases, and immediately darkened and developed as a symbol of oceans and of what has been described as the inherited memory of the primordial voyage shared by all New Zealanders. The next section considers the new land, exhilarating and mountainous, symbolised in the expansion of the Song on strings with antiphony of woodwinds. In an arch-like form, opening sections are reversed in recapitulation. The Song is again affirmed by strings and brass, but this human rhetoric finally sinks into awareness of the abiding oceans."