Life

Buchanan was born in Christchurch

Christchurch

Christchurch is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the country's second-largest urban area after Auckland. It lies one third of the way down the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula which itself, since 2006, lies within the formal limits of...

, the second of six daughters in a musical family, and graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree from Canterbury University in 1967 and a teaching degree from Christchurch Teachers College in 1975.

After completing her education, Buchanan worked as a pianist, composer, music teacher and violinist with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra.

Buchanan has been active in music education. In 1976 she became New Zealand’s first composer-in-schools and has been a guest lecturer, adjudicator, musical director, advisor to teacher support services and an assessor with Creative New Zealand panels. In 1979 she served as president of the Composers’ Association of New Zealand and founded the Christchurch Music Workshops. In 1980 she co-founded the music publishing co-operative Nota Bene which provides a hire library of music for schools and community use. Buchanan also worked with the New Zealand Film Archive beginning in 1984.

Honors and awards

• Philip Neill Memorial Prize from the University of Otago in 1995 for Fragments and Letters
• CANZ Outstanding Achievement Award
• Vernon Griffiths Memorial Award for Outstanding Musical Leadership
• Suffrage Medal
• Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM), 2001

Works

Buchanan composes for school choirs, string quartets, dance and theatre companies and symphony orchestras, operas, incidental music and film and television scores. Selected works include:

• Clio Legacy, opera after Witi Ihimaera
  Witi Ihimaera
  Witi Tame Ihimaera-Smiler, DCNZM, QSM , generally known as Witi Ihimaera , is a New Zealand author, and is often regarded as one of the most prominent Māori writers alive.-Biography:...
  
  
• Woman at the Store, opera after Katherine Mansfield
  Katherine Mansfield
  Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...
  
  
• The Mansfield Stories, opera after Katherine Mansfield
• The Ancient of Days for voice and piano