Sydney 1932–1970 Meale was born in Sydney in 1932. At the time the Meale family lived in
Marrickville, an inner suburb of Sydney. Meale's father Oliver was an engineer, and his mother Lilla Adeline was the daughter of Benjamin Richards, a former mayor of Marrickville. His elder brother, Colin Meale, was a high school principal. Meale was a prodigious teenager who left school because he hated exams. Burston had him at 14 reading
Gertrude Stein and the whole of
Marcel Proust. He was also borrowing modern scores from the collection of the City of Sydney Library. He studied clarinet, harp, music
history and
theory, but as a composer he was entirely self-taught. Meale's reputation as a pianist grew exponentially with each premiere of new works by
Pierre Boulez,
Karlheinz Stockhausen and other post-war European giants, especially the music of
Olivier Messiaen. "To hear Meale play Messiaen is like hearing a sermon by John the Baptist," Melbourne critic Kenneth Hince wrote. Meale left the Conservatorium without a diploma. Meale worked 1963–1969 as an
ABC concert and radio programmer. Five years working as a buyer for record shops had fed an innate curiosity into music from all cultures and periods.
Los Angeles 1960–1961 Meale side-stepped the well-worn path of Australian musicians to England. Instead he played in the ethnic musical ensembles of Bali, Java and Japan at the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the
University of California, Los Angeles and at other American institutions on a Ford Foundation grant. The result was two works exploring the world of the poet
Matsuo Bashō and the
Edo period in Japan,
Clouds now and then and
Cicada.
Nocturnes, symphonic in scope but not in form, had responded to the symbolism of the heavens. However esoteric-seeming, these works were intended, following
McLuhan, to address the tribe of the emerging global village.
John Carmody thought
Nocturnes in particular a great and exciting score for a tribal world audience. In other words, Meale's music and audience were international, not to say other-worldly; his
nationalism was founded on a visceral attachment to home ground. But at home we should bypass a "stupid culture with its false ideas" in music as well as life. "[H]ow dare we inflict our concept of Australia which has been formed by a white English-based people?" "Attempting to get a nationalism into Australian music by deliberate ploys [is] jingoism". So when Meale's break with modernism came in the late 1970s he could only present it as a personal and philosophical crisis, comparable to the change in
Wittgenstein in World War II. In contrast, Meale's friend and rival
Peter Sculthorpe (prompted initially by
D. H. Lawrence's
Kangaroo) made a smooth transition to a nationalism based on the Australian landscape.
Adelaide 1969–1988 From 1969 to 1988 Meale was a member of the music faculty of the
University of Adelaide,
South Australia, Meale found the stamina and discipline required by university work paradoxically freed him to compose as an amateur, "purely for pleasure". In his 1972 book about Australia's contemporary composers,
James Murdoch described Meale as "... the dominating figure in Australian composition". But
Coruscations was followed by a five-year silence. Though firmly part of the avant-garde among Australian composers, Meale experienced a stylistic rethink in the 1970s, abandoning an exclusively atonal approach in his orchestral work
Viridian (1979) and his
String Quartet No. 2 (1980) for a
polytonal approach, and in later works embracing a frank tonality, with
fin-de-siècle overtones, while retaining an individual voice. :The problem that I was encountering was brought to a head in 1979 when I began my Second String Quartet. Sadly, my best friend, Stephen Wilson, died after a sudden onset of cancer. It now became a matter of personal necessity to write a piece that would be a memorial to him. So it became clear that the work could not be based on any artifice; its existence had to lie in its emotional truth. :I found that I could not express certain things in the atonal idiom. I could not express genuine tenderness, affection, various other things. I thought there is something wrong with an art form that limits. It was then I began to have suspicion. I'm quite content, however, to say, look, it no longer suited
me. Whatever the motive, the results saw a steep decline in Meale's reputation. Modernists expecting constant innovation were dismayed to find Meale's style stuck somewhere between
Debussy and Messiaen. Malouf also collaborated with Meale on his second operatic project,
Mer de glace (1986–91), a tableaux-like juxtaposition of some ideas of the novel
Frankenstein with the real dealings of
Mary Shelley with
Percy Bysshe Shelley and
Lord Byron. Both operas are critiques of
Romantic grandiosity. Voss is a German explorer of Australia, the unknown continent, confident that idealism will lead him to its heart. He forms a spiritual bond across time and space with Laura, an English spinster in Sydney able to follow his journey through sheer power of empathy. In the score of
Voss Meale quotes tinny piano dances to show the unknowingness of Sydney's 19th-century colonial society; this has the bracing effect of setting Meale's orchestration on the side of Voss's vain metaphysical ambitions. Use of a tonal idiom allows Meale exceptional freedom to quote with distancing, parody and irony snatches and patches of 19th-century music: a mock German
Lied for Voss's cultural arrogance; a ripping parody of Violetta's waltz scene in
La traviata for Laura's social isolation. In
Mer de glace the poet Shelley – scientist Frankenstein in fantasy – creates a man but botches the job. He is driven mad by the creature's demand to be loved. Systematically Meale sets the key of A minor for reality against the key of B-flat minor for madness – the two keys almost completely dividing the diatonic sound-world between them. The music refers often to Debussy (
Nocturnes and
Pelléas et Mélisande), Delius (
On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring) and Wagner (
Tristan and
Siegfried). But others – for instance
Three Miró Pieces – continue Meale's illumination of other artists' work and his passion for Spain. ==Table of works by Richard Meale==