Feature
Sound of silence
by Joanne Black
Attempts by New Zealand’s music community to set up a composer-in-residence scheme in Douglas Lilburn’s home have hit a sour note.
A year ago, when James Gardner became the inaugural winner of the Creative New Zealand/Victoria University composer-in-residence scheme, the one small glitch was that there was no residence. It exists in name only.
“How wonderful it would be if the composer in residence really did have a residence,” Gardner says in a brochure put out by the Lilburn Residence Trust.
The trust was established last year to try to turn the former home of Douglas Lilburn, the man widely regarded as New Zealand’s pre-eminent composer, into a base for the composer in residence.
The timing seemed serendipitous. Although writers’ residences have been successfully established in New Zealand for many years, there is not yet one for a composer; at least not a residency that offers a genuine roof over a genuine composer’s head.
Lilburn died in 2001, aged 85, having lived in his Ascot St home in Thorndon, a historic Wellington city suburb, for more than 40 years. Late in his life he had made enquiries about having the house used for a purpose like a residency after his death, but, according to Professor Les Holborrow, who was vice-chancellor of Victoria University at the time and who now chairs the Lilburn Residence Trust, Lilburn never found a satisfactory way to make the idea work, so dropped it. Instead, in his will Lilburn stipulated that his estate should be sold, with the proceeds going to the Lilburn Trust (separate from the Lilburn Residence Trust), the aim of which is to foster and support New Zealand music. That has left the Residence Trust at odds with the executors of Lilburn’s will and the Lilburn Trust.
Further encouraging those who support Lilburn’s house becoming a composer’s residence is that the house is just a short walk from painter Rita Angus’s cottage, now used as an artist’s residence. Lilburn and Angus were friends. The notion that after their deaths their homes would continue to foster creative talent pleases many in the art and music communities.
But despite this seemingly fortunate confluence of factors, the idea appears to be on the verge of foundering.
The executors of Lilburn’s will say that the problem is nothing more than a case of too little money being put up by those proposing a composer’s residence.
“I think that is what it boils down to, really,” says Alexander Turnbull Library chief librarian Margaret Calder, who is the administrator of the Lilburn Trust and one of the three executors of Lilburn’s will.
“Douglas was New Zealand’s pre-eminent musician and it surprises me there hasn’t been more of a groundswell of support for the idea of buying his house for whatever purpose musicians wanted it for,” Calder says.
“I am surprised that they haven’t been able to raise sufficient money. It’s not as if he died yesterday and we whipped in and sold it off immediately. They have had a few years. I think there’s been a lot of conversation – but I don’t suppose any of them are millionaires.”
But the Residence Trust says the executors of Lilburn’s will are being too pedantic in their interpretation of it, by insisting that the house be sold for the maximum price it can fetch on the open market and making no concession to keeping it in the music community, even for a purpose they believe Lilburn would have supported.
Furthermore, although the executors wanted the best price for the property, they and the Historic Places Trust have placed a draft covenant on it, essentially restricting development to the existing footprint of the house in order to protect the garden that Lilburn described as his jungle.
The Residence Trust says it has received advice that the covenant could devalue the property by a third.
“It’s daft, the whole thing,” says Lilburn residence trustee Scilla Askew, who is also executive director of the Centre for New Zealand Music.
“It would be so simple to have sorted it out.”
She says the trust always knew it would have to buy Lilburn’s house and was frustrated that it had got nowhere in trying to negotiate with the executors, or the
Lilburn Trust.
“We’re not asking for anyone to gift it to us. We always knew it would have to be bought. We’ve made an extremely fair offer.”
The trust had the house valued last year at $384,000, before the covenant was put on and before the property went on the market at BEO (buyer’s enquiry over) $420,000.
“We were told if we didn’t offer something substantial, we didn’t stand a chance, but we have to be prudent as well because we have to raise the money.”
Askew says that the Residence Trust has found it difficult to establish whether the executors have any sympathy for the residence proposal.
“We’ve had very mixed messages from them about whether they support the idea of it becoming a composer’s residence or not.”
Calder says that it is not the executors’ role to sell the house to the Residence Trust at a lower price than the open market might fetch, in the hope that might have been what Lilburn would have wanted.
“We haven’t done this without a lot of thought, but we really feel we have to follow the instructions in the will and that’s what we’re doing,” she says.
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