David Lumsdaine, who has died aged 92, was a remarkable figure in the contemporary music world. Primarily a composer, he was also a noted teacher, and an expert in wildlife sound recording, something which continued to preoccupy him when around 1997 he stopped composing, saying: “‘I have not retired but my muse has retired me.”
This is paralleled by his rejection or destruction of the many works he had written before 1964. However, his more than 30 years of mature composition reveal an outstandingly imaginative approach in his music, which is sometimes formidably complex but always direct in its expression.
The cantata Annotations of Auschwitz (1970) was one of several collaborations with his close friend the poet Peter Porter, another native of Australia resident in Britain from the early 1950s. It was the first work that Lumsdaine was to acknowledge after a long apprenticeship, and one of a relatively small number of vocal pieces. The flowering of his many chamber and orchestral works did not come until his rediscovery of Australia and its landscape.
Not that he ever forgot them: the challenging piano piece Kelly Ground (1966), showing the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, was a dramatic portrayal of the last years of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. It established him as a leading figure of the British avant-garde.
His music is not easy to categorise. Not long before his first return to Australia in 1973 he composed another Australia-based work, the extraordinary, nearly hour-long narrative of Aria for Edward John Eyre, with its combination of soprano, narrator, electronics, improvisation and ensemble. It was followed by the orchestral piece Hagoromo, commissioned for the 1975 Proms but not performed until 1977 in Paris with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Boulez, and reaching the Proms in 1980 and 1983. These two works are among those available on CD. Mandala 5 (1988), was the first of several collaborations with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, notable among which was A Garden of Earthly Delights (1992).
As an organiser at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), London, and in teaching posts at Durham University and King’s College London, he threw himself into developing new opportunities for composers. He was essentially a cosmopolitan, occupying a unique niche through his thinking, his musical language and his approach to composition.
Born in Sydney, David came from a family both sides of which had established themselves in Australia in the early 19th century. His father, Paul, was a property manager. while his mother, Marjorie (nee Jarrett), came from a farming background. David was able to play the piano by ear from the age of four, but his father’s death from cancer when he was only 10 meant the curtailment of a happy childhood. At Sydney high school he had a sympathetic and encouraging music teacher, and he went on to study at the Sydney Conservatorium and as a general arts student at Sydney University, graduating in 1952.
During this period he composed incessantly, while supplementing his scholarship by working as a tram conductor. But he was aware that he needed to broaden his horizons, and in 1953 he left to study in England, first privately with Mátyás Seiber and later with Lennox Berkeley at the RAM. Gradually establishing himself as a composer during the 1960s, he worked initially as a schoolteacher, then as a general freelance musician. From the mid-60s he ran the Manson Room, a centre providing resources for composers at the RAM, and he was heavily involved with the Society for the Promotion of New Music.
In 1970 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Durham. There he did a great deal to encourage new music, setting up one of the first PhD courses in composition, and establishing an electronic music studio. Notable among his electronic works is Big Meeting, a montage of the 1971 Durham Miners’ Gala. In 1981 he moved to King’s College, London, where he shared a joint post with his wife Nicola LeFanu. He retired from teaching in 1992, moving to York, where Nicola was appointed professor in 1994.
Over many years he had recorded birdsong, and from the 1980s onwards he released many “soundscape” CDs. Thousands of his birdsong recordings are publicly available in the National Sound Archive at the British Library. Wildlife recording was a constant preoccupation, a vital strand of his life, although sounds of nature did not often infuse his music. While it did not stop him from continuing to record, it was his increasingly poor hearing that contributed to his withdrawal from composition.
Politically he was always a radical, a fiercely committed activist and pacifist throughout his life. He joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament early on, becoming a member of the Direct Action Committee and a founding member of the Committee of 100. In the 1970s he was drawn to Zen Buddhism, another of the fascinating elements which made up his exceptionally strong personality.
His marriages to Margery Van Clute in 1955 and to Edna Perry in 1969 ended in divorce. In 1979 he married LeFanu, and she survives him, along with their, son Peter, and his daughters, Sarah and Naomi, from his second marriage.
• David Newton Lumsdaine, composer, born 31 October 1931; died 12 January 2024
