Obituary: William Hoffmann, music journalist

Vale Bill Hoffmann

by Helen Musa

August 22, 2011

Photo by Richard Briggs

One of the founding members of the Canberra Critics’ Circle, W.L. Hoffmann, OAM, died peacefully in his sleep at Ginninderra Gardens on Sunday August 21.

I had visited Bill the day before, but he was in a deep sleep from which he did not wake. He was 91.

Bill was, for a long time, Australia’s most senior music critic, travelling all over the country for The Canberra Times and filing reviews for nearly half a century. In his early days in Canberra, to which he came from Adelaide, he was the ACT Supervisor of Instrumental Music and director of the Canberra City Band, which he re-formed in 1947, after it had disbanded because of unemployment and lack of players in 1937. He was to run it for 30 years until 1976. 

Bill was the Canberra School of Music’s original executive officer and recorded its formative years in his 1990 book The Canberra School of Music: the first 25 years, 1965-1990. 

But it was for his Canberra Times critiques that he was best-known. Rain, hail or shine, Bill would always be there to review. He covered the first performances of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra and the production of the (then) Australian Opera when it visited Canberra. He was, in the words of Canberra journalist Robert Macklin, “a man of almost magisterial forbearance” in his capacity to tolerate and review a wide variety of music, classical and popular. He also wrote about musical comedy for many years, a form that he and his wife Marge particularly enjoyed.

Until technological advances meant that Canberra Times reviewers began to file copy from home, Bill filed his reviews at the paper’s offices on several days a week and was a well-known figure in the editorial department. Sub-editors respected his ability to write “clean copy” which they rarely needed to edit. 

Bill would never have given up reviewing but for his faulty knees. Lucid until the end, he told fellow Critics’ Circle member Bill Stephens and me when we visited him several months ago: “I didn’t have an operation because I never thought I’d go on so long.”

Originally published in Canberra Critics Circle blog, August 22, 2011