Lilburn was born in Whanganui and spent his early years on the family sheep farm in the upper Turakina River valley at Drysdale. He attended Waitaki Boys' High School from 1930 to 1933, before moving to Christchurch to study journalism and music at Canterbury University College . In 1936 his career in music was set when he was awarded the Grainger Prize for his tone poem Forest by Percy Grainger. In 1937 he began studying at the Royal College of Music in London. He was tutored in composition by Ralph Vaughan Williams and remained at the College until 1939. The two men remained close: in later years Lilburn would send Vaughan Williams gifts of New Zealand honey, knowing that the older man was fond of it.
Career
Lilburn returned to New Zealand in 1940 and served as guest conductor in Wellington for three months with the NBS String Orchestra. He shifted to Christchurch in 1941 and worked as a freelance composer and teacher until 1947. Between 1946 and 1949 and again in 1951, Lilburn was Composer-in-Residence at the Cambridge Summer Music Schools. During these years he was heavily involved in New Zealand arts activity, and became friends with other artists such as Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, Rita Angus, and Alistair Campbell. In 1947, Lilburn shifted to Wellington to take up a position at Victoria University as part-time lecturer in music. He became a full-time lecturer in 1949, senior lecturer in 1955, was appointed Associate Professor of Music in 1963 and Professor with a personal chair in music in 1970. Following visits to studios in Europe and Canada in 1963, Lilburn founded the electronic music studio at the university—the first in Australasia—in 1966 and was its director until 1979, a year before his retirement.
Lilburn was founder of Wai-te-ata Music Press in 1967 and the Lilburn Trust of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, 1984. His writings include A Search for Tradition, a talk given at the first Cambridge Summer School of Music in January 1946 and A Search for Language, a University of Otago Open Lecture, March 1969.
Legacy
Lilburn's former house, at 22 Ascot St, was purchased by the Lilburn Residence Trust, a charitable trust based in Wellington, on 5 August 2005. The Trust is currently offering use of the residence to the Creative New Zealand/Jack C. Richards Composer-in-Residence at the New Zealand School of Music. The Lilburn Trust funds the Student Composition and Performance Awards at five universities around New Zealand. The Trust is administered under the Alexander Turnbull Library Endowment Trust. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra has recorded most of Lilburn's major works, including the three symphonies composed from 1949 to 1961 and many of the other symphonic works. His A Song of Islands was given its American premiere on 17 November 2012, by the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by James Judd, the former music director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The Douglas Lilburn Auditorium forms part of the wider Christchurch Town Hall complex.
Personal life
Although he had an affair with the painter Rita Cook, who became pregnant but miscarried, his later life was characterised by intimate relationships with men.
