Don Kay

My compositional career, spanning over seventy years and including well over 300 works, has over this time gradually evolved to a point of conscious endeavour to create a music primarily concerned with contributing to the enrichment of Tasmania’s overall artistic culture.

I am a fifth generation Tasmanian of Anglo-Saxon stock and am very conscious of the need to acknowledge and work hand in hand, as it were, with Nipaluna’s first peoples.

As a much younger person I desired to emulate the music of the English pastoral composers such as Vaughan Williams, Holst and George Butterworth, whose styles were heavily influenced by English folk music. I spent six years in England in my twenties developing and expanding my compositional technique, quickly moving well beyond those early models and realising I was not English. My return to Tasmania in 1964 was revelatory, having been out of the state for virtually fifteen years. In no time I realised my mission was to achieve the aim stated above.

I endeavoured to develop a personal music language by composing a music accountable to the sounds, colours and patterns of the Tasmanian natural environment, rather than the inherited procedures of conventional European harmonic and rhythmic patterns. Slowly a style has evolved which is a mix of these various influences. 

I am at a point in my old age of composing intuitively, led by my ear, endeavouring always to be true to the initial motivation.