Finalist in the 2022 New York Festivals Radio Awards.

In 1959, Douglas Lilburn moves into the Magpie House at 22 Ascot Terrace. It’s slightly over ‘teacup throwing’ distance from the cottage of his longtime friend—and onetime lover—Rita Angus and offers privacy and a generous living room in which to entertain guests. His musical output at the time draws mixed opinions, and eventually, his experiments with portable tape recorders lead him to discover the machines that are destined to fascinate and terrify him for the rest of his career.

Douglas Lilburn was a very private man, and in this episode, we invade a little of that privacy. With the help of those who knew him well, we peek into the living room where he held court with aspiring young composers, and into the music room where he had a crisis of confidence. We march up the hill to the University for a squiz at the machines he became obsessed with, and we look over his shoulder as he writes letters to his dear, lifelong friends Rita Angus and Douglas McDiarmid.

Host: Kirsten Johnstone

Guests: Chris Cochran, Philip Norman, Jill Trevelyan, Jenny McLeod, Margaret Neilsen, Ross Harris, Noel Sanders, Bruce Greenfield

For the show website including information about the music in this podcast, please follow this link.

This series is supported with funding from Creative New Zealand.

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Podcast Series: The Magpie House

Off a bustling Wellington city thoroughfare, there's a quaint, narrow lane called Ascot Street, where sits a modernist house whose tar-black weatherboard and stark white trim inspired the name ‘the Magpie House’. Out back, lies an overgrown jungle of a garden where New Zealand’s ‘father of classical music composition’ Douglas Lilburn, who lived in that house for over forty years, liked to spend time growing vegetables and listening to the calls of the Tūī. 

In this four-part series, host Kirsten Johnstone delves into the colourful legacy of the Magpie House and its inhabitants, weaving their intriguing—and often surprising—stories into a Forrest-Gump-esque saga of war, music, cold-war espionage, persecution, and the search for identity and a place to call home.

© Centre for New Zealand Music Trust

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