Locating Why I Compose

This exegesis is fuelled by a desire to understand why I compose and what influences my music making in all its facets. In this opening section I will provide a background to my music making and my life more broadly. As this section shows, what I do as a musician has been heavily influenced by a number of significant life experiences. This is all about the people, the places, the beliefs and the engagement with them. Here I canvas what music making was and has become in my life and, in doing so, cast a spotlight on family, friends, colleagues and those who have mentored me.

Life, for me, has always been viewed from the perspective of how I hear it. What I see and sense in other ways is often funnelled through the sieve of music and musical expression. I find that, often, my life's experiences are reported through, or related to, musical events, or to times of creative consideration and contemplation; the experiences of the present and also the past. The future may well be reported on in a similar fashion.

My being seems to have been consumed in a world of musical outpouring. I am a practitioner at various levels and also a teacher. I create art for others to engage with; it is for their enjoyment and edification and for the pleasure of others. My immersion in music, in all its manifestations in my life, has been complete and captivating.

I make music compulsively. I listen to music compulsively. I share music enthusiastically and with an unbridled passion and fervour. It is apparent to me that through music, I have found a way to communicate and share life with others that is more potent and satisfying than any other pursuit I have undertaken. Music has provided both a means to live and some meaning in living.

In this section I will share and reflect upon my personal journey into composition, located in a broader musical life. Those who have had significant influence on me and moments in my life that have shaped who and where I am will be introduced. To elucidate in such a manner will give context to the folio of works presented earlier and also to the research question posed for this investigation. It will give a perspective to the study - a study located within the vast landscape of my personal and professional life.

My first encounter with music

In February 1966, at the age of 12, I was given the opportunity to learn to play a brass instrument – a bugle in the school cadet band – and, from that point on, music has had a grasp on the expressive and emotional way I interact with the world. Bruce Armstrong was the man who gave me the chance to realise my music through performance. He was the bandmaster of the Warragul Combined Schools (High and Technical) Band and a metal-work teacher in the Technical School in Warragul, Victoria.

Cadet Hultgren in the back rank in the second file from the right

He had a background in high quality brass band activity and he brought to me not only the possibility of playing an instrument, but his passion and enthusiasm. (Being the bandmaster was not even part of his teaching load). It was his school band, and the band I eventually joined, that came to my primary school to take part in the ANZAC Day ceremony in 1965. It was his student who played the Last Post, setting alight a desire in me that became the genesis of my professional trumpet playing career. Armstrong gave me lessons on the cornet. Money never changed hands and I am not even sure if the book, the ubiquitous "A Tune a Day", was ever paid for. He was the first in a line of generous, considerate people who made music making possible for me.

It was later in that first year of playing that a fascination with how music was constructed, the order and structure of the composer's labour, overtook me. I became consumed by how works were written, and how they were formed. The tonal material was what drew me along with the incessant rhythmic energy. I would hear the work in rehearsal and stay behind to read through the conductor's score. There were times when as a young teenager I would stay behind after a concert at the local Salvation Army hall. When others had gathered in the church hall for supper or snuck outside to flirt, I could be found, head in the score, desperate to understand the intricacies of the composer's mind and intent.

Encouragement abounds

Those times, when I was in my teens, engrossed me not only musically, but also spiritually. It was then that I had my first encounter with Christianity and became an active Salvationist. In those days membership of the corps band was dependant on being a member of The Salvation Army. The local bandmaster questioned my commitment to Christian values to ensure I was not feigning faith so I could play in the band. In my youthful way I had 'found the light' but embarked on my musical pursuits with possibly a little more vigour than I did my spiritual studies.

Each band practice brought new vigour to my enquiry about how people composed and why they might express themselves as they did. My recollection is more on what they did than on why they produced this or that work. I can recall being captivated by the works of Eric Ball, Leslie Condon, Ray Steadman-Allen, and others, as they presented their Christian experience through music and sought to bring 'blessing' to others via their musical offerings.

I had begun to scribble simple arrangements of hymn tunes and folk songs. Armstrong was keen to support me at school too and allowed the school band to play through my clumsy arrangements - the first setting was Johnny Comes Marching Home, I believe, orchestrated for brass band, as I understood it to be. His enthusiastic response to work that was littered with compositional inconsistency built on my passion and mitigated my youthful fears of inadequacy.

The encouragement of resident Salvationist musicians in Warragul (1966-1968) and then Melbourne (1969 and onwards through my early professional life) drew me further into the web of music-making. They supported my playing and were enthusiastic about my compositional prowess. Immersion in arranging other's melodies lead me to an interest in composition itself. My early sketches display evidence of the mix of Biblical influence and fumbling with harmonic and contrapuntal understanding. The first arrangement I produced at the local corps was of the Welsh hymn tune Blaernwern. It was marginally better than what Armstrong had been forced to deal with.

Stewart Dawson, the bandmaster at the Warragul Corps of The Salvation Army, showed me what dedication in rehearsal was. The manner of his work, prising the musical from the committed amateurs with patience and grace, was a bench mark, I sense, to which I am only now attaining. He also persuaded my brother Ross and I to join with two other young musicians, also brothers, Graeme and David Faragher to practice together whenever we could. Our quartet become a capable and energetic musical force in the local band and was a source of much musical and compositional awareness for me as we practised and transited through a vast array of works on those long Sunday afternoon practice sessions.

At the time when young people of my age were buying Beatles recordings I asked my mother for a budget priced LP of Beethoven's 5th symphony for my 16th birthday in 1969. It was ninety–nine cents and still an impost on a meagre family budget. I was able to obtain a ragged copy of the score and I set about learning how to be Beethoven myself, without recourse to theory or composition lessons. I didn't know what music theory was, I just knew there must be a specific pattern of placing the notes together which was then pleasing or rousing or reflective, and I was seeking that secret.

My arrangements were now being played at a new school because Dad had been transferred in his work for the Victorian Railways. The family, my parents Harold and Lucy, myself and my siblings Ross and Heather, moved from the comfort and wonder of the small country town to the, then problematic, western suburbs of Melbourne. My brother and I joined the school band and I was awarded bandsman of the year for the last two years I was there, grade 10 and 11 - 1969 and 1970. We also had our Salvationist membership transferred to Williamstown Corps and came under the tutelage of Norm Jagger. A former coal miner and brass band devotee, Jagger enhanced the love I had for brass music and was a fervent advocate of my practice and my fledgling compositional pursuits. I still hold dear the Salvation Army Tune Book, for Solo Cornet, he gave me as a gift.

The seeds of a professional life

Mrs Cronin, the librarian at Williamstown Technical School observed the growth of my compositional abilities. I am not sure how she knew of my skill but one day she called me into her office to give me a collection of music textbooks, from her husband's library, to aid my musical development. She obviously knew that with my poor working-class background, my family could not have afforded to pay for music lessons in performance or theory and composition. Her thoughtfulness and her husband Basil's generosity aided in my development and gave me an example I seek to live by.

Similar generous support came from another too; a man I will always hold dear in my heart, Richard Slade. He was the music teacher at 'Willy Tech', the affectionate and disparaging term used by all to describe a very working class, tradesman production-line school. He was a man of vast 'gigging' experience, with a passion for music making and a heart for young musicians. He took me under his wing and gave me his trumpet. I could never have been able to buy an instrument myself and here, in my own hands I held 'my' instrument. Old and having seen its very best days, Slade's thoughtfulness brought me to another chapter in my rapidly developing musical life.

(The young Hultgren, on the left, at Williamstown)

My capacity on the trumpet soon became reasonably solid. Bruce Armstrong had given me those half dozen lessons, the tutor – "A Tune A Day" – and pushed me out onto the troubled waters of teaching myself more about how to play. Richard Slade had armed me with the equipment to play but my learning was based around what I could pick up from books, begged and borrowed, what I could glean from the conversations of more experienced players, and many hours of practice.

Having progressed through my country school cadet band to a city school concert band, I must have been considered to be of a reasonable standard for one day without any inkling, the principal trumpet of the Central Band of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) knocked on our door at home and told my parents that he had heard of my skills and wanted me to audition for the band.

(Hultgren invitation to enlist and playing trumpet with the show band of the RAAF)

They responded with some reserve I recall - well, Mum did; Dad was watching football. She invited him in and they talked with John Hickey about what it would mean and why he had come to see us. "RAAF Central Band needs good players...we have no music school like the Army and Navy...we enlist capable players from civilian life to fill the ranks of the band", he said. He said he had "heard of my skills" and felt that I would be a prime candidate for a trumpet position with the RAAF. Listening intently to all of this brought a little excitement and some trepidation to my heart and mind. I was sixteen, somewhat taken aback, and just a little bit pleased with myself as well.

After turning seventeen, and finishing eleventh grade somewhat cursorily, in January of 1971, I enlisted in the RAAF. My love affair with music became all the more intense as I sat in one of, what many asserted to be, the finest military bands in the world. The sounds of wonderful playing, superb compositions (we recorded the published works for band of Percy Grainger for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) over a number of sessions) and a banquet of musical styles surrounded me. There were many more opportunities to interrogate the score here. I would take them and, at times, copy them and sit and read until my eyes hurt with tiredness; writing out the chords, noting the themes, commenting on the scoring. I wanted to know those secrets and I had an overwhelming desire to write. Though I hadn't finished formal secondary school education, with no music theory training at all, I had now embarked on a long period of self-edification. In fact, this was a theme which transited through this full-time professional period to the teaching life that lay ahead.

Composing consumes

Central Band allowed me to play with my compositional ideas. I had the chance to try out compositions, but only an occasional piece for the pressures of a professional calendar imposed itself on my desire to tinker with the ensemble's sounds. There was also the work in the community I was able to involve myself with which located me amidst and across various styles and instrumental and vocal combinations.

At one stage I led and wrote for a jazz rock band in The Salvation Army called Solid Rock. We even played at Sunbury, Australia's version of the Woodstock Rock Festival. In the same space of time I composed a major work for the General of The Salvation Army, the churches' world leader, for his visit to Melbourne. It was commissioned by Ken Smith (who eventually became Head of Brass at the Conservatorium in Sydney) for he and a colleague, Mac Carter, to play (trumpet and trombone) accompanied by the Melbourne Staff Band of The Salvation Army, conducted by Bandmaster Colin Woods. Woods and Smith displayed great faith in my fledgling abilities as a composer.

The centre of my world changed somewhat when, on one of the Central Band tours, I met Denise Slattery at Amberley Air Force base in Queensland. It became a long distance romance which eventually evolved into marriage and a young family. We were both twenty years old when we married in December of 1973 and none too sure of what such a commitment would mean. The promises I made then I was sure I would keep for a lifetime for I had made them to God. My commitment to my marriage was, for a time, almost as strong as my desire to compose – and composing was consuming!

In the early years of our marriage I had the opportunity to extend what I was doing in my composing career through working with Bob Plasto. He was a reporter and producer for the ABC's A Big Country series. He contacted the Director of the RAAF, and conductor of the Central Band, Squadron Leader R.A.Y. Mitchell and asked if there was someone who might be able to write the music for a documentary on the Roulettes, the RAAF aerobatic team. I was dragged from the band's soccer match to meet him and was given my first 'jersey' as a television sound track composer. "The Roulettes" score (1976) was nominated for a Penguin award - Australia's Grammys of the time. The success of that endeavour lead to further collaborations between Plasto and myself and a further nomination for a Sammy (1979) award (closely related to the stature of the Penguin awards) for my score to "The Quilty".

Concurrently I was composing works in a jazz rock style (for Solid Rock mainly), though most often arranging in that genre. My serious work was for brass band and smaller ensembles. From the work I wrote for the General to works for young musicians, I took every opportunity to scribble notes on a page and to hear them played or sung. I was playing in a variety of ensembles (for example, The Australian Brass Choir) as well as my full time position in the Central Band, and had an almost unfettered access to styles, composers, ensembles and sound scapes. All such situations added to my aural imagination and teased my growing desire to know more about composing and to inform my expanding knowledge and skill base.

On leaving the Air Force in January of 1977, I took up the position as brass teacher at the Ballarat and Queen's Anglican Grammar School, a large regional private school in Victoria. I moved my young family into a miner's cottage, with walls made of wallpaper and hessian, on the outskirts of the city and set about starting a new life for us all. The first of my three children with Denise, Meagan (b. 1976), was born in the year before moving to Ballarat and Rebecca (b. 1977) was born there.

Not long after my arrival in Ballarat I was appointed to lead the local Salvation Army Band at Ballarat Central Corps, and I threw myself into the administration and spiritual shepherding of the flock which was my band. My composing for them was constant and I also arranged a great deal of music to suit the needs of worship and the ensemble instrumentation available.

My musical maturity far outstripped my spiritual astuteness and circumstance saw me leave that church-based position after only 18 months of service. My faith and my marriage to Denise both began a steady descent into oblivion from there until the middle of 1983. My music kept growing and, on reflection many years later, I wonder if my interest was more in that than the wonder of both family and a "peace that passes all understanding". I sense, from the perspective of age and time, that I was much more interested in my musical standing and popularity than in the welfare of my family and the sanctity of my marriage. There may even be evidence of the fractured nature of my personal life in the fractured form of the first movement of my concertino for trombone. Though completed and premiered in 2006, the first movement - a distorted parody of a waltz - was written in sketch form during my time in Ballarat, where the first notes of marital discord sounded.

Mum passed away (1980) in the midst of this period of turmoil though at a time amidst the troubles when all the emotional ills had appeared to be healing. Luke, my eldest son, was born toward the end of the period of marital disintegration, in January of 1982.

Young Musicians

The school location provided me with an environment which evolved to become a central part of my life – working with and training young musicians. I had already composed for professionals and some amateur performers but here I explored the realm of the enthusiastic young aficionados who seemed as consumed as I was and who would play all day if they were allowed.

I wrote for concert band, full orchestra and string orchestra as well as for chamber groups and solo instruments. We had some fine players at the school amongst the staff and students, and I was able to play with both my growing awareness of capacity in the younger and less experienced, and to continue my compositional experimentation with the better players available to me.

My composing for television continued with the work for producer Bob Plasto, noted above, and another score for his documentary Bert and Shane (1979) was produced. Colleagues from the music staff at Ballarat Grammar played in the recording session for that production. Other commissions came and went though my professional work as a composer became more scarce than I would have liked; possibly more reflective of my capacities than I might have been aware of. Arranging work became more what I did in the professional domain of writing music and I established quite a solid reputation as one who could quickly write the 'set' for a cabaret or club singer.

My work as a trumpet player was not as active as when I was in the Air Force as I was endeavouring to concentrate on my work in school teaching and to also save a marriage. I had come to realise that the performance life of the professional musician can place great strains on relationships, so decided to let that part of my musical life take a back-seat for a while.

Finding my place

In a desperate attempt to secure my marriage in January of 1979 I moved to Queensland, Denise's home state. I auditioned for a position with what was then the Queensland Theatre Orchestra, accepted the job offered and then declined it after the Queensland Education Department offered me an opportunity to work as an instrumental teacher. The position they proposed was sixty percent teaching in a series of schools and forty percent composing and arranging for the state-wide instrumental music program.

It was the then State Coordinator for Instrumental Music, Donald Britton – another person of generous spirit – who gambled on placing me in the blended position of instrumental instructor and composer/arranger. This mix of teaching and writing (and being at home at night) drew me in; I would be able to immerse myself in the two areas which had become the real centres of musical passion in my life – teaching and composing.

I found teaching to be infectious. I found myself wanting to know how best to teach and not just how to teach the child in a lesson room with instrument in hand, but how to teach from the podium as well. "How do I teach as a conductor?" I asked myself. This was the time when conducting became more of a focus in my musical life. It began as an extension of teaching and it may well be that still. Whatever the situation, it was at Kelvin Grove State High School (1979 – 1991) that my skills in, and enthusiasm for, conducting came to the fore.

(Hultgren conducting the Kelvin Grove State High School concert Band at the inaugural Australian Band and Orchestra Clinic held at Dallas Brooks Concert Hall, Melbourne 1985)

During my time with the Education Department in Queensland my marriage to Denise finally failed irreconcilably (1983). I became a single parent and immersed myself in my career and endeavoured to love my children as I felt I might not have done in the past. I had dispensed with my Christian faith and sought solace in other forms of spiritual enquiry and the company of people. With Mum's death and an unsuccessful marriage those early years at Kelvin Grove were formative in developing musical responses to life's situations.

Sadly, the evidence of the impact of life at that time on my compositions is found in their incompleteness. The concertino noted above was followed by a trumpet concerto, still incomplete. The pursuit of works of symphonic proportion can be found in the folders of sketches, incomplete and cast aside, that I still hold in cabinets and boxes in a store room at home. Locked away in those archive boxes of old sketches are works that investigate broadening tonality, that have jagged and twisted melodic contours and which meander structurally – an apt summary of my life during this period as lone father and unfulfilled composer.

Matters would change and the blessing of propinquity was evidenced when I was asked to go out to dinner by the beautiful woman who was secretary at Kelvin Grove Primary School, where I also taught. In December of 1985 I married Julie, a little over a year after our first dinner together, and I wrote some of the music for our garden wedding. She became the step mother to my children and helped form a stable and loving home. The girls lived with us and began to play the cello (Meagan) and viola (Rebecca) through the instrumental program at the Kelvin Grove Primary School. As a pianist, Julie also brought music into the home and I began to write small pieces that would allow the girls to play accompanied by her.

The experience of writing for my children and my wife, as well as my teaching, shaped my composing. Although I still wrote 'professional level' works, I was revelling in learning more and more about writing for young musicians and those less experienced than the expert group I had once worked in and written for.

Composing and arranging music for inexperienced musicians brings its challenges and also various levels of satisfaction. The pedagogical and consequent technical constraints in writing for the less able would seem obvious. To then position such constraints alongside variation in age and experience within an ensemble magnifies the challenge presented for the composer. The effort expended in composing for these less experienced and less able players can be significant, but the impact of such exertions are mitigated by the sense of wonder that, in my experience, often comes as those players arrive at the realisation that what they are performing was written just for them.

There is an abundant creativity and inventiveness required in that process. I had come to believe that, just as the deft scoring of a master work is studied and dissected in the music analysis class, so the deft scoring of a work for the inexperienced should be similarly dealt with in the composition or orchestration class. I also became convinced that making music by performing in an ensemble is not just for the elite but for as many as may like to be involved. The skill level of those less experienced players can become a point of contact and a creative stimulus for the considerate composer and it need not restrict their creativity. On the contrary, there is no lack of opportunity for them to be creative or to sound creative. It just presents that opportunity in an alternative form.

The rewards in both forms of compositional pursuit became more valuable to me. I found that to write for young musicians, overflowing with enthusiasm is no less challenging than composing for the consummately capable university level or professional players I worked with as well. In my view, the beaming smile of acknowledgement from the energetic first-year band member sits solidly alongside the 'good jo'' of the professional walking from the recording session. Similarly, the tertiary player whistling a tune from one of my compositions gives me a sense of genuine satisfaction.

Here, with the Queensland Education Department and at Kelvin Grove, I found myself in a place where I could give voice to my musical ideas and allow others to do so too, by playing the works I wrote for them. I hadn't lost my desire to write for the advanced players, or the opportunity, but I had discovered another way to give of myself compositionally and another manner in which to give a voice to others. In 1989 Julie and I decided that the voice of young musicians in Australia needed to be heard through music written specifically for them. Brolga Music Publishing Company was born that year – on the dining room table in fact. It has grown since then, under Julie's leadership and direction, to become an Australian voice, heard internationally.

Much of the output of that time (1979 - 1991), was music written by me as composer and arranger for the Queensland Education Department's Instrumental Music program. It is a collection of one hundred and eighty five works, and many of the manuscripts are held at the State Library of Queensland. During that period I was also writing on commission, as well as compulsively, and the combined collection ranges across ability levels traversing age, skill and musical awareness. Many of the works have now been published by Brolga and many other international publishing houses and, beginning with Yamaha in 1987, have found their place in programs across the world from rural and suburban school music departments to concert halls such as the Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall.

(The very first royalty cheque from Yamaha Australia, August 1988)

Training the trainers

In 1991 I moved to Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The Head of Music at the time, Adrian Thomas, came to view my work at Kelvin Grove and asked me to take up sessional work within the music department, specifically in the area of training pre-service instrumental music teachers via second study, conducting and curriculum study. I took leave from Kelvin Grove and Education Queensland, to pursue that opportunity and eventually won a full time position within the Academy of the Arts at the Kelvin Grove campus of QUT.

Over time I devoted more and more effort to the preparation of instrumental music teachers. My immersion in such effort also focused my work in composition. Unfortunately, less professional level commissions came my way and, to some extent, people began to think of me as a 'school band' composer. I was not concerned with that label but the desire to write works for professional level players, with the specific challenges that brought, remained with me.

I established relationships with many of the world's leading instrumental music pedagogues and authors and have formed life-long friendships with a number of them. Relationships such as those have not only allowed me the opportunity to take my work overseas but have also given me the good fortune to host many of those experts on visits to this country. They have also provided me with the chance to build my career and publications record internationally via their networks and relationships.

Brolga Music continued to grow and its works were heard across the globe. Julie and I formed the Queensland State Youth Wind Ensemble, in the middle of 1998, which provided opportunities for young musicians from country areas particularly to access the finest music and musicians. The graduates from the program in instrumental teacher training I established at QUT made their way into the Queensland state and private school system and, arguably, began to have a positive impact in the instrumental music domain across Queensland.

The exigencies of the professional life continued to play havoc with my private life during my time at Kelvin Grove and QUT. Finding the balance between professional and personal life is an extremely complex process. I found my pursuit was more toward professional satisfaction than home life, though I convinced myself I would not make the same mistake in a second marriage as I had in the first. Yet I felt continually drawn to what I might achieve and how I might be perceived and found myself placing my professional aspirations above the needs of family and marriage.

My interest in young, school-aged musicians, as well as on those who would eventually teach them, saw me apply for the position as Head of Pre-Tertiary Studies at Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University in February of 2001. (I love to teach as well as compose and conduct and this has led to my continued immersion in a life of teaching and the chance to train the next generation of ensemble conductor/teachers for schools. I have the privilege of nurturing the desire of those who wish to teach and developing their capacities to do so alongside of that.)

Where I am now professionally

At present, now as Head of Open Conservatorium, I participate in the training of undergraduate students to be musicians, through performance in ensembles, and I work with post graduate students in their growth as teachers and, occasionally, as composers. My education students are both pre-service and in-service; they are those from the undergraduate program who wish to be instrumental music teachers and those who have come from the music profession and need to re-skill to take on that teaching life. Many of the latter are in a similar position to that in which I found myself - a professional musician with no formal qualifications who sought to become a teacher.

Working with younger musicians takes up much of my time as I lead the pre-tertiary program at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University (QCGU). I engage actively in the program across a broad landscape of projects. Working with ensembles from third and fourth graders through to young adults impresses on me the need for quality in materials at all levels and of quality leadership on the podium as well as the instrumental music classroom.

All of this demands my constant connection with ensemble repertoire for it is the core teaching and learning base upon which my work is founded. This has led me to become involved regularly in the reviewing of new repertoire. New music resources are sent to me by publishers for this review process and I produce a document of new music for school bands and renew the orchestra list each year. (That such a small number of new full orchestra works is published each year mitigates the need to produce a specific yearly list for that ensemble.) This annual review of repertoire reveals an overall lack of quality evident in the published materials offered each year at the younger and more inexperienced levels.

These fledgling musicians demand quality by their very involvement. The route I have been on, which I modify as required, is to provide that quality and to do so by my personal leadership, my training of leaders, my reviewing and selecting of repertoire and my composition of new works to add to the canon of extant materials.

Where I am now personally

In the midst of my professional and private life my pursuit of some spiritual understanding continued to press in on me. It came to the fore again at the time when I was enticed away from QUT to the QCGU.

Personally, I feel I am now in a space where I find a substantial reason 'to be' as a musician. Where I am at present allows me to act as a musician and to speak as a musician. It also enables me to empower young musicians and display to them that speaking in and through music is a valid and potent way to communicate.

It is also a place where I have again found happiness in my family relationships and the warm embrace of renewed faith. The bounty of my family life, and reasons to write, have been enlarged with Emma (b. 1989) and James (b. 1991) and my grandchildren, Corey (b. 2000), Ella (b. 2005) and Charlie (b. 2008), have added to the wonderful family I have.

This is a different place for me spiritually, both as a person and as a husband and family man. I do not compare the religious experience of former years to this time. My sense is that my pursuit of faith in my youth was to help me find solace outside of a dysfunctional family. In December of 2000, my Christian conversion was about my sinfulness and not a pursuit of emotional comfort. I had experimented with what could be found in other faiths and philosophies but all my engagement in those investigations was around gaining some satisfaction for me. The experience I have in Christ, as a Christian is want to explain it, is certainly more than I had sought; more than the finding of one's self or the attainment of some level of personal benefit. What I experience is "a peace...which passes all understanding", as the apostle Paul described it to the church in Philippi, and a sense of purpose beyond a personal desire for satisfaction.

I tend to fight against the religiosity which can abound in the practice of faith. My relationship with Christ is what propels me to relationships with others and to endeavour to be Christian in all I do, and not just espouse Christian values. My Christian faith has given me a reason 'to be', as a person and not just as a musician. Having now outlined my musical and personal journey up to this point, the vicissitudes and victories of life, I feel lead inexorably into the purpose of this research.

Why do I compose?

In recent weeks I asked my Graduate Diploma of Education students why they play their instrument.

"Give me the reason you play", I demanded.

Most felt troubled that they could not find a suitable assembly of words that would describe what it is that drives them to pick up the instrument and practice, day after day. They felt at a loss to designate what it was that compelled them to submit themselves to the leadership (or tyranny) of a conductor through hours of rehearsal. There was silence when I asked them to defend their choice of instrument and their choice of vocation.

"Why would you do this?" I stabbed at them.

It was Tegan who said, "I just have to; I can't live without it."

"Then why teach?"

"I want kids to be able to do this too; to be able to play and enjoy themselves", she stammered.

This made me wonder if they understood the indefensibleness of the position they held. They are training to be teachers, people who bring to young people the capacity for music making, but they found it difficult to describe why they would themselves play an instrument. I could not shatter the comfort they have in their art and the way it sustains them just because they where not able to defend why they would seek to engage others in the pursuit they could not articulate. Yet, even after sharing my musical life's story with you, I stand similarly condemned.

Over the years that "I just have to" has been my answer to why I compose. There is an ineffable compulsion; there are no words that can explain the overwhelming desire and need to compose. The unutterable is what compels me and it remains, for now, inexpressible. Yet it is this which I seek to interrogate here as my central research question.

Why do I compose? After reflecting on the personal journey I have just shared, I wonder whether the 'why' changed over the years. I think it has and I wonder whether it is in response to my change in spiritual heart reflected in the story above. I am immersed in a spiritual life which is deep and rich and which has changed me in many ways. My hope is that telling my story may well be valuable to others facing similar questions in their musical lives or at least of interest to some.

When I consider all that has happened during my life, I view it as forming how I am in a positive manner. The overview of what has taken place, and how it has led to my work as composer, conductor and teacher, has shown the way in which a complex web of experiences can manifest themselves in the sounds that emanate from my scores. From the very first encounter with the Warragul Combined Schools Cadet Band through to having my works played on stage at Carnegie Hall, the incidents in my life have been significant in shaping the nature of my musical expression.

Do I engage in composing to make a difference in young people's lives as Armstrong, Dawson and Slade did in mine; or to help them find a voice, as being in band did for me? Is the concern I have for training the next generation of young conductors informed by why I compose? Is there a connection also to why I once played or why I now conduct? I know I have to compose – I'm compelled in fact – but most often the reason to write comes through circumstance, a commission or an event in my life which gives rise to realising the compulsion. The output ranges from the musically simple, such as The Young Master's Concert (for mid first year players) I am working on at present to the complexity of Bright Sunlit Morning, my musical and spiritual response to the horror of the attacks on New York of September 11th, 2001.

In the following chapters I interrogate the 'how to' of composition, not for its edifying quality but more so because it casts light, in many ways, on why I compose. When I describe the instrument choices and the melodic construct I have chosen at various times, such as in the consideration of Jessie's Well, I am acknowledging skill-based matters which serve the need to compose. The reflection on orchestration and timbral juxtapositioning in My Sister's Tears goes to display how I seek to tell a story more than giving just a scholarly consideration of the craft which underpins my writing.

Such considerations reveal that what I desire to unearth is why I compose; what propels me to place "black dots on white paper", in what Honegger described as "a gentle form of madness" (in McBeth 1994, p. 13). I will explore this question as this study proceeds, and seek an answer. The answer I uncover will not only serve to address the requirements of this exegetical study but would allow me to answer my students were they to stab such a question at me as I did them. My answer may provide them with a more complete awareness of why they 'do' music and why they seek to engage others in that 'doing' too.