Early life He was born in
Melbourne in 1945. He gained early prominence with two orchestral works,
Pan, the Lake and
Prelude for Orchestra, which were performed by the
Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1967 and subsequently recorded on
EMI. His career after then was less spectacular, and he had a propensity for hiding away and concentrating on composition without seeming overly concerned with performance. He rarely attended performances of his music unless they happened to be close at hand.
Career He lectured in Music and Computing at the
University of Tasmania for many years, including a period in charge of the small Music department there, and was a percussionist with the
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and the
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. During his time in
Tasmania he wrote mainly
chamber music, usually on commission for bodies or performers outside Tasmania. A notable exception is the Violin Concerto commissioned by the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music for
Jan Sedivka, who was soloist at the first performance in 1980 (with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra conducted by
Patrick Thomas). Cugley left Tasmania in the early 1980s to go to the United Kingdom and virtually disappeared into the
Dorset countryside, gaining a meagre income by selling his watercolour paintings, and then as a part-time lecturer in computing in
Bournemouth and
London. Unable to work for many years because of illness, he broke his silence and returned to composing only in the last years of his life. Since he was largely forgotten in his own country, and unknown in the UK, performances were few. He regarded this as an advantage, not only because he resented the work involved in preparing for performance as a distraction from composing itself, but also because he was acutely shy and hated being present when his music was performed. He claimed to hear only the wrong notes when his music was played. In 2010 he was working again on a set of
symphonies first started in 1973. His stated ambition was to die before they were complete, to save all the fuss associated with performance. He died in November 2010, aged 65. == Selected works==