IMSLP Forums

I have searched for a number of Australian composers, such as Peter Sculthorpe, Sarah Hopkins, Ross Edwards and Helena Kats-Chernin, but to no avail. There are a lot of international composers available, but none of the big names of Australian music.

Can we assume you are implying you have searched for these composers on IMSLP to no avail?

Yes, you assume correctly. As a music teacher in NSW, there is a compulsory topic of Australian music and it would be helpful to access a range of Australian music on a site such as this one. Peter Sculthorpe is considered one of the most significant Australian composers, yet I can't find one single score of his. I've also tried the others. There are many more, but I became a little discouraged.

Peter Sculthorpe seems to still be living, or at least was still living and composing in the late 80s. This would make him under copyright for a very long time, which means no one can post his music here.

Sarah Hopkins, born in 1958, same thing.

Ross Edwards, born 1943, same thing.

Elena Kats-Chernin, born 1957, same thing.

These composers' works need to be purchased. For free downloads, you need to make sure you are asking for composers who are out of copyright, I'm afraid.

Ok ... I understand. Thanks for clearing this up for me

Geordie,

perhaps try contacting the Australian Music Centre to see what music of these composers they would be inclined to let you obtain evaluation scores of – though they might merely refer you to the composers’ respective publishers!

By the way, slightly in response to Steltz’s previous post, all of the composers are definitely still alive! And even if one of them were departed this world, Australia’s copyright laws have comprised a 70-year post mortem term of copyright protection since 2006, which will lock up all of these composers’ works for most of the 21st century.

Cheers, Philip

Adding to Philip's point, you might ask the composers if they would like to make their work available here under one of the various license options we have available for copyrighted works. We do get quite a bit of traffic after all, so a perusal score or three might not be such a bad idea - even for their publishers.

the most recent Australian composer who has a work represented on IMSLP (and only one of his first two quartets from Sibley- I have both downloaded therefrom, should upload the other, will soon) - is Alfred Hill. As I expect you know (sorry!!) a number of less recent composers who had scores published in Australia (whether or not born there) have had works digitized by the National Library of Australia and this has been a useful source of scores for us. (The USA Library of Congress has in a somewhat similar project I believe, in this case in coordination with Duke University in North Carolina US, scanned in a number of scores/parts/etc. published in the USA in the 19th century/early 20th century...)

Happy 82nd birthday, Peter Sculthorpe!

(The extreme longevity for quite a number of 20th century composers isn’t exactly going to help swell the ranks of Australians represented on IMSLP. Alfred Hill isn’t exactly recent, Eric, and there are more recent composers than him! I think you meant most recent composer in the public domain.)

yes. (and alas eg Margaret Sutherland is not alive to have a birthday celebrated, for instance, but fortunately died more recently at least.)

Unless like some other composers on the site he gives permission (himself or through people he knows - in a convincing fashion) then it will be probably at least 50 years before his works show up here and probably rather more than that (since he is, at last knowledge, still alive? Though I was going to say that about e.g. Harald Genzmer a few years ago, stopped to check and he had died a few months before (it can be an in-flux statement- in one direction...)

Hrm.
"Peter Joshua Sculthorpe AO OBE (born 29 April 1929)"...
still alive so far as known.

Then again, in only a few years we should be able to host works by composer Dorian Le Gallienne (who died in 1963), and they're good stuff. (And while he died less recently than did Hill, Roy Agnew's music is @IMSLP and is worth a look (and much of it has been recorded on CD over the last 20 years or so. Hill has done even better, with many of his quartets and orchestral works reaching recording, a CD of 2 of his 11 quartets and his quintet for piano and strings (and voices) - completing their cycle? - being released this month by Naxos Records (volume 4 in their series).)