There is a sense of renewal in Canberra. Spring has made a (still tentative) return, along with the birds and the foliage, the pollen and the antihistamines, the barbies and the busloads of visitors for the annual Floriade festival on the northern banks of Lake Burley Griffin.

Barely a kilometre away, there is renewal of another kind, on the campus of the Australian National University. For several years, the ANU School of Music has been the centre of one of the most vigorous and fractious storms in the half-century history of tertiary music in this city. The Canberra School of Music opened in tiny quarters in Manuka in 1965. Its foundation director was Ernest Llewellyn, concertmaster of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the golden years of Eugene Goossens. Llewellyn wanted to build a world-class music performance institution based on the Juilliard model. The school moved into a new Le Corbusier-inspired building on the ANU campus in 1976 and was absorbed into the ANU in 1992.

^{Sonja Lifschitz, Mike Cheng-Yu Lee and Paul McMahon (Deputy Head of School and Performance Convenor). Photograph © Vincent Plush}

In retrospect, it must now be said that...