Sub Navigation

Search Music:

Search for music by typing a word or phrase in the box below or by selecting one or more categories from the list on the side.

Or search for products by selecting an option below, and typing a word or phrase in the box above

  • Scores
  • CDs and DVDs
  • Downloads
  • Education Resources

Michael Bell  

A NZ Journal: Songs for Solo Voices

Duration: 45' 00" Year: 2009
12 poems by NZ poets, 3 poems for each voice: S, A, T & B

Jonathan Besser  

African Legacy

Duration: 03' 00" Year: 2004
for acoustic guitar, keyboard, percussion, bass guitar, drums, taonga puoro (Maori instruments) with Maori and English vocals

Anthony Ritchie  

Bele Doette

Duration: 05' 00" Year: 2005
for soprano and oboe

  • Programme Note

    Bele Doette (‘Lovely Doette’) is based on an anonymous 12th century Chanson de Toile. The vocal line follows the original song-line closely for two of the eight stanzas and refrains.

    Doette is at a window, reading, when she receives the news that her friend Doon has been killed in a jousting contest. The refrain reads “See now what grief I have”, and at the end she vows to become a nun in the church of St Paul. The original transcription of the song is published in the Anthology of Medieval Music, edited by Richard Hoppin (1978). Pitches are notated in the transcription but no rhythm. Therefore, rhythm is freely interpreted while the original melismas and word setting are maintained. The refrain is expanded beyond the original. The oboe has a dual role. First, it freely develops motifs based on the song-lines by a process using magic squares. These motifs are used in the introduction and interludes between stanzas and refrains. Second, the oboe has a dialogue with the soprano that involves imitation and decoration, particularly in the refrains.

    Bele Doette was commissioned by Pepe Becker, and written for her and oboist, Robert Orr. It has been composed as part of Ritchie’s research at the University of Otago.

  • Availability

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.

  • Availability

Jonathan Besser  

Celebrating Differences

Duration: 02' 00" Year: 2004
for acoustic guitar, keyboard, percussion, bass guitar, drums, taonga puoro (Maori instruments) with Maori and English vocals

Cheryl Camm  

Chalky Chivvers' Challenge

Duration: 01' 00" Year: 2007
for voice and piano (one performer)

Jonathan Besser  

Colonial Parade

Duration: 02' 00" Year: 2004
for acoustic guitar, keyboard, percussion, bass guitar, drums, taonga puoro (Maori instruments) with Maori and English vocals

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.

  • Availability

Hirini Melbourne  

E Taku Kuru Pounamu

Duration: 03' 00" Year: 2003
For female voice and taonga puoro

Jordan Reyne  

Echoes I

Duration: 02' 00" Year: 2000
for voice and electronica