Robin Maconie

Robin Maconie is a composer, author and music scholar. After completing a Master of Arts in music and English literature at Victoria University, he studied in Europe under composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. While in Cologne, Maconie studied composition for film and radio. In the 1960s he began to compose for the screen, including an avant-garde soundtrack for John O’Shea’s road movie Runaway, and compositions for  experimental, short films Epstein and The Sound of Seeing. Maconie also composed music for several radio plays. He has published numerous books on music analysis and the works of Stockhausen.

There were obvious economic advantages in composing for a small ensemble . . . And remember, this was a time when beatnik poets, smoky nightclubs, and intimate jazz represented the new reality, a late night aesthetic of breathy singers and saxophones, close miking, and an essentially mono sound of glowing voices offset against a dead black hinterground of all presence and no reverb. We both knew, Tony [Williams] and I, the kind of sound that would work for a movie score with a very small selection of instruments. Robin Maconie on his score for 1964 feature Runaway, in his essay, Composing Runaway, NZSA Bulletin of New Zealand Studies, Issue 2, 2010