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Jenny McLeod  

Childhood

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

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Clare Maclean  

Et Misericordia

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

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Jack Body  

Five Lullabies

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

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  • 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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Anthony Ritchie  

Songs Just For You

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1988
for 1-3 part female choir and piano

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David Farquhar  

Waiata Maori

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1985
for SATB choir

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David Hamilton  

Well done, Mister Bach

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1985, r. 2008
for string orchestra with percussion and optional SATB choir

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  • Programme Note

    The basis of this work is the chorale which concludes JS Bach’s cantata No. 99 Was Gott tut, das is wohlgetan (“What God does, is done well”). The idea for the work grew out of the piece composed jointly by the composers at the 1985 Cambridge Summer Music School – a piece using the same chorale. My contribution had been the final section, based on the concluding seven crotchet beats of the original chorale, and it is these ideas which reappear most clearly in this work (particularly in the last section). The complete chorale is only presented at the end of the work, although elements of it are heard throughout.

    Well Done, Mister Bach falls into four main sections: fast, fast, slow, fast, and derives its stylistic features from the minimalist ‘school’ of composition – a piece built from small musical motives repeated many times and often only gradually changing or developing. The harmonic material is all derived from the original Bach, with the work being essentially a ‘stretched’ statement of the chorale. Subsequent works of mine to use this include One More Time, Mister Couperin (1986).

    The scoring features the leaders of each section as a concertante group, and throughout, the remaining strings (except double basses) are divided into two parts each. In addition to the string orchestra is a small percussion section.

    I would like to thank my fellow composers from Cambridge, for although I have not quoted anyone else’s musical ideas directly, something of the spirit of our work (entitled Bach Has Eight Friends to Tea) survives. It is also fitting that the work was composed in 1985 – the tercentenary of the birth of Bach.

    The piece was commissioned by, and is dedicated to, the Auckland Youth Orchestra and their conductor at the time, Michael McLellan.

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