We have been notified of the death of David Lumsdaine, husband of the British composer Nicola LeFanu.
Arriving in London to study in 1952, he held lecturer positions at Durham University and Kings Colllege London.
Lumsdaine composed nine works for orchestra, none of them designated symphony or concerto.
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Mandala: why so obviously stealing a piece by Bach, fiddling-around it a little bit and publish it under your own name?
It is an arrangement, as an hommage:
https://musictrust.com.au/loudmouth/mandala-3-music-by-david-lumsdaine-and-nicola-lefanu/
How about RIP David Lumsdaine? Or is that not part of your EQ?
Is “Good composers borrow, Great ones steal!” relevant here?
Nice…you should take up writing obituaries!
Come on – show a bit of respect.
RIP David.
Jan Kaznowski
This sort of thing has been done before!! This time Schoenberg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0SCdwGBQJ4
‘Mandala 3’ is a 40 minute work. The video above is the first movement only (4 minutes). Lumsdaine makes this perfectly clear in his programme note, with a clear reference to Bach.
Did you bother to listen to the work or even take one minute to read the programme note? Or do you just enjoy criticising people who died this week?
You should be ashamed.
Pity he’s no longer around to answer your question, John.
David was an inspiring figure and a fine composer – I took over his post at King’s (which he shared with Nicola Lefanu) in 1993 and it was quite an act to follow! Although he largely ceased composing a couple of decades back, he continued making high-quality nature and birdsong soundscapes. He wrote slowly and methodically and taught several generations of students both at Durham and at KCL. A long, rich and very full life. RIP David.
Quite some people here appear to find it very difficult to make a distinction between the music and the person of the composer.
I listened to the entire first movement, I read the description, but I found not much composition in it so that it is not a really new piece but an arrangement with some deviations. It is a matter of balance of material.
As for the person: RIP. But that was not where my comment was about.
Sometimes one asks oneself if readers of SD first shelf their brains before looking at the website…. because it’s about music… so: all subjective anyway, so: let’s react and not think.
I’m thinking to myself why would you make the statement you did based upon listening to only the first movement of the piece? It isn’t a piece in itself but part of a much larger work. I’m thinking only someone who’d shelved their brain would do such a thing.
Isn’t not listening to the rest of the piece ‘shelf’ing [sic] one’s brain? The first four minutes of approx. forty minutes of runtime are indeed an arrangement, clearly acknowledged by the composer. There remain 36 minutes to consider.
Besides his great friend Tony Gilbert, David was for many of us a beacon of absolute and unswervable compositional integrity. His was a remarkably individual and technically assured voice and gave us so much in pieces such as ‘Aria…’, ‘Hagaromo’ and ‘Salvation Creek with Eagle’. Music that once heard, remains indelibly in the mind and inner ear. Wonderful colours and a luminous, numinous sense of space. Thank you for all that distilled magic, David.
This is an appalling obituary. Anyone with any intelligence would realise the importance of his work and the manner by which it has shaped future developments. His encouragement and teaching of those who came his way was thorough and kind.