Don Banks

Life and career

Banks was born in South Melbourne, and initially studied at the University of Melbourne under Waldemar Seidel. He served in the armed forces from 1941 to 1946. In 1950 he moved to London where he studied with Mátyás Seiber. Further studies with Milton Babbitt, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Luigi Nono (at a summer school in 1956 at Hermann Scherchen's villa in Gravesano, Switzerland) convinced him of the merits of serialism, which he incorporated into his compositional technique. Through Seiber, he gained contacts in the film industry, where he became a frequent composer of music, mainly for cartoons, and the horror movies produced by Hammer Films. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he composed a number of works in the Third Stream style espoused by Gunther Schuller, mixing jazz and concert-music idioms, and began a series of works using electronic music materials.

In the 1950s he was the secretary to Edward Clark, head of the London Contemporary Music Centre.

He returned to Australia in 1972, as Head of Composition and Electronic Music Studies at the Canberra School of Music. He remained there till 1977, then had a series of educational positions. In 1978 he was appointed Head of the School of Composition Studies at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music.

Banks's best-known works include the Sonata da Camera for flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, viola, and cello (1961); a Horn Concerto (1965); a Trio for horn, violin, and piano (1962); and a Violin Concerto (1968).

He died at his home in the Sydney suburb of McMahons Point, after an eight-year battle with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. He left a widow, Valerie, and a son, Simon. The Don Banks Music Award, funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, is named after him

Filmography

Banks is credited for composing music in the following films: