Richard Graham Meale, AM, MBE (24 August 193223 November 2009) was an Australian composer of instrumental works and operas.
Life and works
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 a foreman at a pipe works, and his mother Lilla Adeline kept house. A married brother David predeceased him.
Meale was a prodigious teenager who left school because he hated exams. In the 1960s he studied piano with Winifred Burston at the NSW State Conservatorium of Music. Burston had him at 14 reading Gertrude Stein and the whole of Marcel Proust. He was also borrowing modern scores from the remarkable collection of the City of Sydney Library. He studied clarinet, harp, music history and theory, but as a composer he was entirely self-taught.
From 1955 to 1960 he worked in record sales and as a buyer for a Sydney electrical appliance chain.
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, but 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 had been notating his own compositions since he was four; his powerful 1960 Sonata for flute and piano was the first work to survive his self-criticism. Technically the structure of his work was from early on atonal in the manner of the international avant-garde, though rarely fully serialist.
In 1964 he conducted the Australian premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (52 years after the Berlin one) with the soprano Marilyn Richardson as the voice. 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. While working for the ABC he continued his public career as a pianist and as a composer. Most of his work inspired by Javanese, Japanese and Spanish artforms (see below) was composed as an ABC employee.
He was by the 1970s a member of a group of gay men — including composers John Bygate and Ian Farr — bent on exploring extremes of experience, inner and outer, through drink, drugs and sex — getting "smashed". He remained an active member of this group throughout his career until all except him had died, often of AIDS or overdoses. Aesthetically their search for extreme experience showed eventually in his compositions inspired by Arthur Rimbaud (Incredible Floridas) and by Christopher Columbus.
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.
Spain
Classical Spain was another world that called. Very High Kings (Columbus's grateful salutation to Ferdinand and Isabella) is Meale's tribute to the mystical ambition of Christopher Columbus; Los Alboradas to the Spanish troubadours; Homage to García Lorca is what it says. There is an agony in Lorca's poetry, there's a sound in his language which reflects this as well; there's an agony in the images, it's the agony of life and of coming to terms with dreadful circumstances, which is what he had to do and which has been the Spanish lot a lot of the time ... this had triggered a sort of response to this because I suppose of my own personal agonies.
Yet Meale's trip to Spain showed that his attachment was to works of art and imaginary worlds: the actual Spanish light reminded him painfully of Australia and he returned home.
I was not happy as a traveller, I did not feel really at home anywhere I went, even in Spain which was the most I felt at home, I still was a foreigner. I missed Australia, and I can't tell why. It's just this is what I grew up with and this is the thing I wanted to make meaning of in my life.