AustLit

Composer.

Peter Stannard studied piano with Irene Fletcher (a pupil of Clara Schumann) from the age of twelve. He became head chorister at St Mark's Church, Darling Point, and attended Randwick High and Sydney Grammar School. A self-taught composer, he began writing music (including lyrics) in this teens and later, while undertaking an Arts degree at Sydney University, became involved in a number of student revues as composer, actor, and co-producer. Around this time, he met Peter Benjamin and Alan Burke, and the trio shortly afterwards wrote Lola Montez. After its enthusiastic premiere at the Union Theatre, Melbourne, in 1958, the musical was taken up by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and subsequently produced in both Brisbane and Sydney. It has been revived numerous times since 1958, by amateur and pro-am theatre companies around Australia. Selections from it were also featured in the 1988 Royal Command Performance at the Sydney Opera House.

In response to the success of Lola Montez, Stannard, Burke, and Benjamin were commissioned by ATN7 and Shell to write a family-orientated musical for television. That production, Pardon Miss Westcott, was broadcast on Christmas Eve 1959. Starring Wendy Blacklock, it was orchestrated by ATN-7's musical director, Tommy Tycho, along with Julian Lee. A third musical by the trio, based on Ruth Park's The Harp in the South, has never been performed.

Although he is considered one of Australia's leading musical composers, Stannard's working life has been largely spent in the advertising industry, a career that includes co-running his own company, Stannard Patten Samuelson. He also spent some time as a radio announcer with 2WL and worked as a producer for radio and television with the Lintas Agency and as a director with Goldberg Advertising. In 1982, he joined the Sing Tao Newspaper Group as their Advertising Consultant.

A prolific composer, Stannard has written songs for a number of Australia's top entertainers, including Diana Shearing, Jill Perryman, Gordon Chater, and Bernard King. Among his published works are Capriccietto for flute and piano (1998), and The Entheon Concertino (1999).