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It is a credit to his tenacity, the lure of music and the power of coincidence that Professor Larry Sitsky has emerged as one of Australia’s most prolific and respected composers.
His gift and passion for music were clear from childhood (he could identify his favourite pieces among his father’s collection of 78s long before he could read their labels), but his parents — the very people who introduced him to music and first nurtured his prodigious talent — were the greatest obstacle to pursuing a career in music.
“It is ironic that the biggest rows and battles were not outside, they were at home,” he recalls.
Fearing the instability of a career in music, his parents wanted their son to pursue a safer career — his father had been forced to abandon his own education to provide for his family. Professor Sitsky (above) spent a “miserable” year as an engineering student, trained as a radio operator, worked as a chemists’ assistant and even considered running away to sea.
Mentor to a generation
Thankfully, he eventually persuaded his parents to allow him to study music at the Conservatorium in Sydney and went on to write some of Australia’s greatest musical works. He has become mentor to a new generation of composers and is currently head of composition at the ANU School of Music.
Born in the Chinese city of Tianjin to Russian Jewish parents, Professor Sitsky and his family survived Japanese occupation during World War Two, but fled to Australia in 1951 when life under Mao became too “tricky” for foreigners. They could just as easily have gone elsewhere.
“Some people in our circumstances went back to Russia, some to Hong Kong, or the Philippines or South America. All those things would have created difference circumstances and you can’t help wondering if it would have been possible.
“We have this curious notion that we are in control of our lives, but things change.
“I would have finished up being a musician because it was so strong that no matter what went wrong I kept battling to get it back.
“It wasn’t comfortable, but it eventually fell in place. I consider myself very lucky that it worked out and I have spent my life doing what I love — and found out in the course of it that I also love teaching.”
The first few months in Australia were a struggle for the teenage prodigy with no piano in his family’s Bondi flat — which, more than 50 years on, Professor Sitsky still owns.
With music relegated to a hobby in place of something “sensible”, Professor Sitsky trained as a radio operator, hoping for a career on the high seas, but there were alarming results when he swapped the black dots of musical scores for dots and dashes of Morse code.
“It was scary because the Morse wouldn’t stop. All the words I saw — billboards and signs — would twitter in my head as dots and dashes,” he recalls.
“I stopped at that point because I thought the next thing would be being committed.”
Without Morse to go with his other radio qualifications, his plans to run away to sea were scuppered and his application to join the crew of a vessel bound for the Antarctic was rejected, so his focus returned to music.
The complete musician
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Mr Cotter built a up a deeper knowledge of his friend through writing Sitsky: conversations with the composer
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A new book, Sitsky: conversations with the composer by his friend, colleague and former student Jim Cotter, gives a strong sense of Professor Sitsky being a renaissance man; as at ease talking about Sartre or Newton as he is discussing the technicalities of his profession. In his teaching, Professor Sitsky advocates the idea of the “complete musician” and laments the current trend towards overspecialisation, which is breeding composers who may not even play music let alone read classical literature or philosophy.
“This is something that worries me. It is relatively new and I don’t like it. It causes all sorts of problems and there are all sorts of hazards in having composers who don’t play,” he says.
“If this trend doesn’t stop we are going to have illiterate virtuosi.
“For a composer especially it’s to me outlandish not be widely read and educated in the real sense of the word. Music can’t come from a vacuum.
“It is not a good idea not to read poetry or literature.”
Despite having recently celebrated his 70th birthday, Professor Sitsky’s furious pace of composition and research shows no sign of slowing and he predicts his latest book, a review of Australian piano music in the 20th century, will “raise some eyebrows”.
However, Professor Sitsky believes Australians can be proud of much of their musical heritage.
“What was heartening is that there was always a strong thread of interesting and adventurous composition.”
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