DOUGLAS, CLIVE MARTIN (1903-1977), musician, conductor and composer, was
born on 27 July 1903 at Rushworth, Victoria, only child of Rolland
Edward Ellerman Douglas, police constable, and his wife Annie Amelia
Ellen, née Martin, both Victorian born. Rolland died in the course of
duty in 1906. Clive's early childhood was unsettled: he lived for some
time with his grandparents at Ballarat and Geelong, and later with his
mother and stepfather. Educated at Rushworth State and Coburg High
schools, in 1918 he joined the State Savings Bank of Victoria with which
he worked for the next eighteen years. He married a 19-year-old typist
Isabel Knox on 11 September 1926 with Presbyterian forms at Scots
Church, Melbourne; they were to be divorced on 11 September 1935.
Douglas's earliest musical education came from his mother, a pianist.
He studied violin with Franz Schieblich, and later theory and
orchestration with Alberto Zelman. As a young man he was active in
theatre and community orchestras as violinist and conductor. His first
compositional exercises (dating from 1927) led in 1929 to his entry on
an Ormond exhibition to the University Conservatorium of Music (Mus.B.,
1934) where he studied composition with A. E. H. Nickson. Works from
this period, Symphony in D and a symphonic poem, The Hound of
Heaven, won special prizes in a competition sponsored by the
Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1933, and his opera, Ashmadai,
won first prize in 1935. Through its performance, Douglas met the
soprano Marjorie Eloise Ellis whom he married on 15 August 1936 at the
Methodist Church, Malvern.
That year Douglas began his professional association with the A.B.C.
as conductor of its new Tasmanian orchestra. He developed a deep and
lasting interest in Aboriginal folklore and in the Australian landscape
which informed his Bush Legend (1938, subsequently reworked as
Kaditcha and submitted for a Mus.D., University of Melbourne, 1958),
the ballet scene, Corroboree (1939), and the tone poem,
Carwoola (1939). In 1941-47 he was conductor of the A.B.C.'s
Brisbane orchestra, was active with the Army Education Service and
completed the opera, Eleanor (inspired by the Battle of Britain),
in various performances of which his wife sang the principal role. Other
appointments included associate-conductorships of the Sydney Symphony
Orchestra (1947-53) under (Sir) Eugene Goossens and of the Melbourne
Symphony Orchestra (1953-66). Douglas produced scores for documentary
films in these years, as well as concert music, and taught at the
university conservatorium, Melbourne, in 1959-68.
His extensive travel as staff conductor on country tours inspired
works in which he sought to capture the quality of the landscape and to
find a musical idiom 'so entirely Australian that no other influence can
be felt'. Wongadilla, Namatjira and Sturt 1829,
among other compositions, reflected this interest. Douglas's
incorporation of melodic materials derived from Aboriginal song was
another distinctive feature of his output. These two characteristic
elements led some writers to associate his work with Jindyworobakism,
but nowhere did Douglas suggest any such connexion, and the application
of this term to music is problematical.
Douglas's style was colouristically tonal, although influenced by
modalism, exoticism and a slightly dissonant harmonic palette. His music
is structured by means of conventional thematic and contrapuntal
devices, and occasionally possesses an episodic character. He was little
interested in the more progressive musical developments of his time,
although he experimented with a modified serialism in such works as the
Divertimento No.2 for Orchestra and Three Frescoes. In the
late 1960s, after retiring from the A.B.C., Douglas visited Europe where
he promoted Australian music and absorbed current influences. In his
later life his music received only moderate attention at home and
abroad, and, with the emergence of new generations of progressive
Australian composers, it has been substantially eclipsed, yet Douglas
was one of the country's most consistent and committed composers in a
period when a creative musical life was struggling to assert itself.
Throughout his career Douglas continued to win awards, including
first prize in the Commonwealth Jubilee Competition (1951) and in the
A.B.C.-Australasian Performing Right Association competition (1955). In
1963 he was elected a life fellow of the International Institute of Arts
and Letters. He died on 29 April 1977 at East Brighton, Melbourne, and
was cremated. His wife, their daughter and the daughter of his first
marriage survived him. Two portraits are held by the family.
Source: Australian Dictionary of Biography
