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Judith Exley  

A Song of Marigolds

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1990
for soprano and gamelan orchestra

  • Programme Note

    The poem is a reflection of the transient nature of love and life. The gamelan, being an intergral part of a traditional which sees life as cyclic, maybe offers a balance. I have endeavoured to express this polarity by using traditional materials in non-traditional ways.

    Judith Exley

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Gillian Whitehead  

"Aria" from Outrageous Fortune

 Year: 1998
for soprano, taonga puoro, flute, bassoon, cello and piano

Jonathan Besser  

Bird Without Wings

Duration: 14' 00"
For female voice and ensemble

Juliet Palmer  

bone-flower

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1996
for chamber quintet

Helen Fisher  

Bone of Contention

Duration: 1h 20' 00" Year: 1993
a dance work for mezzo-soprano and ensemble

Gillian Whitehead  

Camelot

 Year: 2008
for mezzo-soprano, piano and bassoon

  • Programme Note

    Camlot, a collaboration between Glenn Colquhoun and Gillian Whitehead, is a response to a visit by ten artists on the Breaksea Girl, skippered by Lance Shaw and Ruth Dalley, to Dusky and Doubtful Sounds in Fiordland, and particularly to a trip up Camelot, the river that flows into Gaer Arm in Doubtful Sound. Glenn’s poems, cryptic and spare, relate to old Chinese poetic forms, and the cycle traces the poet’s travelling up the river, and, changed by what he learns, his return to the open water. The titles of the poems draw on imagery very apparent
    on this journey.

    One thing that was made very apparent on that journey was the extent of the degradation of the environment, because of the depredations of deer, goats, rats, possums and other pests, which have made the forest a silent place, where biodiversity is acutely threatened.

    The first performance of Camelot took place in St Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin on 8th October, 2008, during the Otago Festival of the Arts. The performers were Janet Roddick (voice), Emma Sayers (piano) and Ben Hoadley (bassoon).

    Both the performances and the journey to the sounds were devised as a fund-raiser by the Caselberg Trust, which is raising money to purchase the Broad Bay house of Anna and John Caselberg, for use by resident artists.

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Anthony Ritchie  

Children and Adults

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1992
four songs for mezzo soprano, viola and piano

Brigid Ursula Bisley  

Come Back Safely

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 1995, r. 1999
for soprano, string quintet and percussion

Dorothy Freed  

Deserted Beach

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1993
for soprano and string quintet

Chris Watson  

Don't Mess with Texas

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 2003
setting of sixteen haiku for soprano and ensemble

  • Instrumentation
    soprano voice, flute, alto saxophone, B flat trumpet, 2 percussion, harp, guitar/banjo, piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass.
  • Programme Note

    In the middle of 2002, Tim Cummings, an American who had been living in New Zealand for some years, returned home and, with his friend Ringo, embarked on a road-trip from Florida to Los Angeles. Along the way he e-mailed his friends a series of haiku poems (sixteen in total) that related his coast-to-coast experiences of a land that, although his own, he had come to feel like a stranger in. From the lethargy and obesity of Florida’s residents, to the disturbing cruelty of an animal park tour guide in Louisiana, to the beautiful but oppressive landscape of the desert, the depraved glitz of Las Vegas and the polluted haze hanging above Los Angeles, Tim’s haiku, though necessarily brief, said much about the country from which Western popular culture draws so much.

    I began the task of setting Tim’s words to music as momentum was gathering for the American-lead war on Iraq. Don’t Mess With Texas is a view – admittedly through a distant lens – of an essentially insular people, whose outward gestures, driven by self-interest and an unconscious belief in the superiority of their culture, often take on menacing forms. The many style quotations should not be interpreted as hammy representations of American stereotypes portrayed with music, but rather should reflect the sometimes dangerous consequences of unbridled patriotism and of ignorance of matters global. That said, Don’t Mess With Texas deals not only with America’s human population and alluded to socio-political-environmental matters, but with the beauty of its natural interior, where a redemptive musical language is able to emerge from the urban chaos.

    Don’t Mess With Texas is dedicated to Tim Cummings, the sort of open-eyed American the world needs more of. The work was premiered by *gate*seven in May 2003, conductor Ewan Clark, soprano soloist Madeleine Pierard.

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