Richard Meale

Richard Graham Meale, AM, MBE (24 August 1932 – 23 November 2009) was an Australian composer of instrumental works and operas.

Meale was born in Sydney and studied piano with Winifred Burston at the NSW State Conservatorium of Music, as well as clarinet, harp, music history and theory, before studying at the University of California, Los Angeles and other American institutions on a Ford Foundation grant.

From 1969 to 1988 he was part of the music faculty of the University of Adelaide, South Australia

Meale was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1971. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985.

In 2000, Meale was conferred Doctor of Letters honoris causa by the University of New England in New South Wales

He died in Sydney on 23 November 2009.

Initially firmly part of the avant garde amongst Australian composers, Meale experienced a stylistic rethink in the 1970s, abandoning an exclusively atonal approach in his orchestral work Viridian (1979) and his Second String Quartet (1980) for a polytonal approach, and in later works embracing a frank tonality, with fin-de-siècle overtones, whilst retaining an individual voice.

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