Using intercultural-historical autoethnographic writing to research a composer’s story within an Australian-Asian compositional aesthetic

I have been composing music since I was about 12 years old. On moving to Sydney in 1969 for postgraduate music study at the University of Sydney, I met Australian composer and teacher Peter Sculthorpe who introduced me, the fellow students, to music of Asian countries. This, looking back, was the basis for what Roth (2005, p. 4) calls the ‘concrete realization of cultural-historical possibilities’ where actions of the individual autobiographer, in this chapter my place as composer within the history of an Australian compositional aesthetic influenced by Asian cultures, are realised through the action of writing. This chapter seeks to present and develop an autoethnographic approach to this intercultural meeting of an Australian non-Asian composer with Asian cultural influences which, in turn, intersects further with a historical context.