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Eric Biddington  

A Short Overture

Duration: 07' 00" Year: 1986
for chamber orchestra

Clare Maclean  

A West Irish Ballad

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1988
for unaccompanied choir

Eric Biddington  

Autumn Music

Duration: 07' 00" Year: 1987
for viola and piano

Anthony Ritchie  

Beginnings

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 1987
for orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    2(1pc)222; 2200; timp (4),2perc(bs-dr,s-dr, tamtam, xylo, glock, sus cym); strs
  • Programme Note

    ‘Beginnings’ was commissioned by Auckland Philharmonia. It was inspired by the birth of Ritchie’s son Tristan. It depicts the slowly mounting tension of the labour, through to the birth itself. There is a gradual growth in the music from small, delicate gestures into wild and pulsating ones towards the end. The child is represented by a ‘little Tristan waltz’ which eventually gets caught up in the musical frenzy. The waltz sequence imposes order on the music, which tends to be fragmentary and changeable. There are some echoes of Bartok and Debussy in this early work, and it presents a good challenge for a professional orchestra.

  • Availability

Matthew Davidson  

Between the Lines

Duration: 07' 45" Year: 1988
Analog tape piece

  • Programme Note

    This work uses, as its sound source, an array of human voices, all of which are deceased political and/or historical figures. It is not intended to be entirely comprehensible at a first hearing as I wished to convey, in part, our cultural over-stimulation in comparison to say, 100 years ago. Musically, it is shaped as a canon, and (taking my inspiration from a comment by Dylan Thomas to the effect that what originally attracted him to language was not its meaning but its sound) I have assembled increasingly fragmented parts of speeches into a confusing labyrinth which will hopefully stimulate harsh emotion. How’s that for a run-on sentence!

    Between the Lines was realized at the Electronic Music Studios at the University of Toronto, and re-mastered in Studio A of the Experimental Music Studios, University of Illinois, Urbana, United States.

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Jonathan Besser  

Blues for Dad

Duration: 07' 00" Year: 1986
blues for violin and piano

Gary Daverne  

Caprice

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1989
for six accordions

Clare Maclean  

Christ the King

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 1984
for SATB choir

John Rimmer  

Clouds over Pirongia

Duration: 06' 00" Year: 1984
for percussion quartet

Matthew Davidson  

Deux Plaisenteries

Duration: 05' 00" Year: 1988, r. 1993
for E flat alto saxophone and piano

  • Programme Note

    ‘Roll Jordan Roll’ (movement one) is a series of genre variations on the African-American spiritual of the same name. The melody was transcribed from a 78rpm recording of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and in turn, this appeared on the 1962 Folkways LP entitled An Introduction to Gospel Song. In my version, the listener will hear my own harmonization followed sequentially by pastiches of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lennie Tristano, Anton Webern, and Thelonious Monk, in turn.

    ‘Dangdut’ (movement two) is a direct transcription of an Indonesian street musician called Mas Sujud. He and the tune appeared on a 1982 Kiwi-Pacific Records Ltd./Hibiscus Records LP called Music for Sale (Indonesian street music recorded by Jack Body). In the original, the singer accompanies himself on a small drum, and in my version, the piano part was generated solely by the notes in the melody and rhythms played by the drum. The sax part plays the melody.

    This piece was recorded in 1991 by Taimur Sullivan (sax) and Allissa Eells (piano) with funding from the American (then Minnesota) Composers Forum.

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