Peter Sculthorpe, who has died aged 85, was Australia's foremost contemporary composer. From the start of his career, he set out to create music that would not depend on European manners and cultural traditions, but would be specifically Australian in idiom. His contemporaries Russell Drysdale (a close friend), Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan had established a true national school in painting; like them, Peter believed that Australia is primarily a visual culture, dominated by its landscape. His own music, with its blocks of non-developing material and its overall flatness and scarcity of dramatic gestures, even resembles the landscape in the look of the notes on the page.
For melodic inspiration, he turned first to Asia Indonesia and Japan and then, in the second half of his life, to the music of indigenous Australians, which sustained him as English folk music had sustained Vaughan Williams. Like Vaughan Williams in Britain, in Australia he became a much-honoured national figure, whose music affected not just a small coterie, but a wide range of people from all parts of society. He was that rare figure in contemporary classical music, a natural communicator.
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