‘It sounds really stupid, but I didn’t realise you could study composition at university,” says Dr Louise Webster, who has a doctorate in composition from the University of Auckland.
She appreciates the irony, but in fairness to Webster, whose Proof Against Burning appears in Auckland Philharmonia’s Fantastique! programme on October 16, she was probably distracted by the medical degree she completed instead. She has had a stellar 40-something-year career as a child psychiatrist and paediatrician, and only recently reduced her workload at Starship Hospital.
Music, though, has always been there. Webster studied piano with Janetta McStay and Judith Clark, both legendary figures in the New Zealand piano world, and she taught the instrument herself all the way through medical school.
“I felt like I really wanted to do both [music and medicine]. I’ve said before to people that in some ways it was greed. I just couldn’t bear to give up either.”
Medicine – and Webster’s four children – eventually took precedence, so it was more than 20 years before she returned to university, in 2003, as a composition undergraduate. She was awarded her PhD in 2019. By delaying her composition studies, however, Webster got to learn with three of our best, in John Elmsly, Eve de Castro-Robinson and Leonie Holmes.
“I was very fortunate,” Webster says. “They are very good composers and I like their music, but they didn’t try to shape me into being a carbon copy of them. They were supportive of all the students, saying, ‘Follow your own sound world.’”
Webster finds it difficult to describe her own sound world.
“I couldn’t readily identify it. It’s a bit like other people looking at your kids and going, ‘This one looks really like you,’ or something like that. You don’t see it as a parent, but other people look and say they see family resemblances. So, I don’t always listen to a piece of mine and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ I tend to listen and think of everything that’s wrong with it.”
For all her self-criticism, Webster’s music has been well received. She twice won the Douglas Lilburn Trust Composition Prize, and her work has been commissioned by the likes of the Auckland Philharmonia, the Adam Chamber Music Festival and Stroma, while her This Memory of Earth was a standout piece on the New Zealand String Quartet’s excellent Notes From a Journey II album.
Does she ever wonder, “What if?” That maybe she should have pursued composition instead of medicine after all?
“I do have those moments,” she admits. “It is quite hard to think about that. But maybe it was something that was just waiting until I was middle aged.”
Auckland Philharmonia, Fantastique!, music by Louise Webster, Liszt and Berlioz, Auckland Town Hall, October 16, 7.30pm.
