As a composer, a teacher, and later as a warm, generous and encouraging background presence, he presided in innumerable ways over the artistic growth of this country. His music, from the early works redolent of the influence of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, to the electroacoustic pieces of his later years, makes up a corpus of works that has been instrumental in establishing a genuinely vernacular voice in New Zealand classical music.

The youngest of seven children, Douglas Lilburn spent his early years on Drysdale, the family sheep station in the central North Island. After winning a prize offered by Percy Grainger for a new New Zealand orchestral piece, he enrolled in 1937 at the Royal College of Music in London, where his teachers included R.O. Morris and Vaughan Williams. On his return to New Zealand he taught composition at the Cambridge Summer Music Schools, and in 1947 joined the staff of the newly-established music faculty at Victoria University of Wellington. Here, until his retirement in 1981, he established a centre for composition, bringing to his own music and to his students the fruits of his investigations into international trends in contemporary composition. He established Wai-te-ata Press Music Editions in 1967, and in 1984 founded the Lilburn Trust, which continues to support and promote New Zealand Music.