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David Hamilton  

A Child Comes Forth

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 2006
for SSA choir with percussion and harp

  • Programme Note

    This work was written at the request of conductor Elise Bradley for her highly regarded choir Key Cygnetures at Westlake Girls High School (Auckland).

    It was intended for a ‘mid-winter Christmas’ concert which was to also feature Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. I therefore felt happy to turn to Christmas texts with some of the more traditional Christmas references (snow etc).

    The first text is from the fifteenth century and is a general text mentioning Mary, the manger, the wise men, and the gifts they brought, and ends with call to delight in the Christ child. The second text, by G.K. Chesterton contains images of snow and night, and ends with the line that gives the work its overall title. The third text is a variant of the carol ‘I saw three ships come sailing in’ and may refer either to the medieval myth that Joseph and Mary travelled to England, or obliquely to purported journeys of the relics of the wise men. The fourth text is a lullaby by nineteenth century poet John Addington Symonds. Again the wise men and their gifts are mentioned along with the shepherds. The final text is another anonymous one, and is simply a brief and energetic welcome to ’heaven’s King’.

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Ashley Heenan  

A Maori Suite

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1966
for soprano, mezzo, choir and orchestra

Kit Powell  

A Shout - for the Life and Work of William Cumming

Duration: 10' 00"
for women's chorus, soprano soloist and piano

  • Programme Note

    For the life and work of William Cumming

    The dark is light enough
    listening for that shout of green

    *William Cumming (1933-2002): designer, teacher and experimental painter. The ideas of ‘taking a line for a walk’ and ‘devotion to the small’ expressed in the first song-text are from Paul Klee, whose pictures William admired greatly.

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Anthony Ritchie  

as long as time

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1991
for unaccompanied SSAATBB

  • Programme Note

    This work was commissioned by The Southern Consort of Voices in 1991, with funding from Creative NZ. It sets three NZ poems to music, with a fourth song being wordless: Timepiece to a poem by Cilla McQueen; Before the Fall to a poem by Rachel McAlpine; I lie, I watch the ceiling (wordless); and We could just disappear to a poem by Sam Hunt.

    In 2001 Auckland choir Viva Voce recorded this work on their CD entitled Snapshots – A Cappella Choral Favourites. Conductor John Rosser writes of the work – “Anthony has a wonderful knack of writing for voice. Timepiece portrays a woman struggling to break free of suburban neurosis and the tyranny of time. Before the Fall alludes to lost childhood innocence, and We Could just Disappear depicts the future as an endless tunnel of the mind.”

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Edwin Carr  

Auckland '71

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1971
ode for male speaker, SATB chorus and orchestra

John Ritchie  

Canary Wine

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1974
cycle for SSAA women's chorus

Jack Body  

Carol to St. Stephen

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1975
for soprano, alto and tenor soloists and SATB choir

Jenny McLeod  

Childhood

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1981
ten short songs for unaccompanied SATB choir

Clare Maclean  

Et Misericordia

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1986
for unaccompanied choir

Jack Body  

Five Lullabies

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1989
for SATB choir or vocal ensemble

  • Programme Note

    Risky, perhaps, to create a set of ‘Lullabies’, if one wants to avoid sending an audience to sleep! But a lullaby might not always be soporific, if we consider the state of mind of the singer, who may be singing as much for themselves, projecting onto the child their own anxieties, frustrations, aspirations, hopes.

    The musical language tries to suggest a folk-like simplicity; the invented languages likewise hinting at distant regions, no. I African perhaps, II Turkish, III Latinate, IV Pacific. In the final movement, the word ‘Calumbaya’ is borrowed from the name of a Filipino friend’s barrio, a name so euphonious as to be irresistible.

    Invariably, mature age is a time for surrendering to seductive nostalgia and sentimentality, the very things one had previously studiously avoided. But the challenge is to find true beauty in the banal, and mystery in common cliché, something I attempted in my several settings of old songs, remembering my dear, departed paternal grandmother, and also my hale and hearty 100 year-old father, whose musical tastes extend little further than old style tunes like these.

    Five Lullabies was composed in 1989 as a tribute to Peter Godfrey on his retirement, and was first performed in its entirety by the Tudor Consort. Musically, they were partly inspired by my discovery of the wonderful vocal polyphonies of some of China’s minority cultures, sometimes characterised by the so-called ‘dissonant’ interval of a 2nd being held to resonate as a consonant.

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