David Lumsdaine

David Newton Lumsdaine (born 31 October 1931) is an Australian composer. He studied at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music (as it was then known). He moved to England in 1952 and for a while shared a flat with fellow expatriate, the poet Peter Porter, with whom he collaborated on several projects including the cantata Annotations of Auschwitz (1964). In London he studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Lennox Berkeley. In 1970 he took a lecturing position at Durham University. In 1981 he took a post as senior lecturer at King's College London. He is published by The University of York Music Press and Universal Edition.

In 1979 he married the composer Nicola LeFanu.

Lumsdaine has disowned all works he composed before Annotations of Auschwitz (1964). His first acknowledged works were composed using a variety of pitch and rhythm techniques associated with serialism - techniques such as pitch rotation or permutation, and isorhythmic structures linking pitch and duration together. Central to all of Lumsdaine's work is the notion of 'ground', a term borrowed from Baroque musical terminology (specifically Purcell). Lumsdaine's grounds are rarely literal repeated bass-lines, though superimposed rhythmic periodicities can be a feature. More commonly, the ground is a strict harmonic-temporal framework from which the music departs and to which it returns in many different ways through the work. Sometimes - as in 'Mandala V' - the ground is a slow-moving chord progression, a kind of background harmony whose progressions and changes underpin the structure of the work. One of Lumsdaine's main personal contributions to the evolution of serial technique is his development of the 'Gemini' matrix - a manner of slowly transferring from the pitch content of one hexachord to another.

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