Larry Sitsky

Larry Sitsky was born in Tianjin (formerly Tientsin), China, of Russian-Jewish émigré parents. He showed perfect pitch early, identifying notes or chords played in another room. He studied piano from childhood, gave his first public concert at nine, and began writing music soon after. Forced to leave China under Mao, the family came to Australia in 1951 and settled in Sydney. He had already sat Cambridge University Overseas Matriculation before departure.

At his parents' insistence his first university studies were in engineering. That path failed, and "he convinced his parents to allow him to pursue his passion, music". A scholarship took him to the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music, where he studied piano—briefly with Alexander Sverjensky, mainly with Winifred Burston (a student of Ferruccio Busoni and Egon Petri)—and composition, graduating in 1955. In 1959 a further scholarship sent him to the San Francisco Conservatory for two years with Egon Petri.

Back in Australia he joined the staff of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, accepted sight unseen on Petri's recommendation. Australian training, American study and the Russian heritage of his early years in China together make him, as has often been said, a unique repository of piano technique and tradition, acknowledged internationally.

A Myer Foundation grant in 1965 supported research into Busoni, on whom he has written extensively. In 1966 he became Head of Keyboard Studies at the Canberra School of Music, later Head of Musicology and Head of Composition Studies. He is Emeritus Professor of the Australian National University in Canberra.

Sitsky has always performed as well as composed, and won performance awards as a student. He holds that composers should perform: "without this communion with a live audience, music-making all too easily becomes over-intellectualised, sterile and arid". As a pianist he champions twentieth-century repertoire.

As a composer he has regularly changed his musical language in order to "express himself in ways that are not familiar and 'easy'".

He attracted public notice when, among others, he criticised the Keating government for successive artistic fellowships to the pianist Geoffrey Tozer. He made clear that the objection was not personal—Tozer was a friend—but a matter of principle.