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Jack Body   Wayan Gde Yudane  

A House in Bali

 Year: 2009
for string quartet, gamelan, narrator and sheng (or oboe)

Dorothy Freed  

A Nursery Tale (Goldilocks and the Five Bears)

Duration: 04' 00" Year: 1975
for brass quintet and narrator

Juliet Palmer  

Blood Shower

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1998, r. 1999
music theatre for percussion duo

Alex Taylor  

deepwalker

Duration: 09' 30" Year: 2011
work for vocalising clarinetist

  • Instrumentation
    solo clarinet
  • Programme Note

    In many ways this is a companion piece to an earlier work, Vivid for solo trumpet, which also sets a powerful, sexually charged poem by Will Christie. But where Vivid is very often overtly violent and forceful in its gestures, deepwalker is mostly much subtler, almost passive-aggressive in outlook. The opening lines of the poem – “the day is a drum that connects these vocal loops with grey traffic circles bridge after bridge” – are mirrored in the cyclical, sometimes elliptical form of the work, loops and circles that play between registers of the clarinet. Sexual tension and aggression bubble away in the background, periodically rupturing the musical surface with piercing, angular outbursts, sometimes in parallel with the rather tender, fluid lines of the low register, and with the spoken text itself. This violent interplay creates a kind of disordered internal conversation, a bizarre hermetic character opening and shutting her windows; a clarinet of many voices.

    Warning: contains coarse language

  • Availability

Kit Powell  

Father's Telescope

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1989
a playful music theatre piece for singer, speaker and tape about power and submission

Michelle Scullion  

Foreign Bodies

Duration: 57' 00" Year: 1995
a dance musical

Jonathan Crehan  

Honesty

Duration: 03' 30" Year: 2007
for spoken/rap voice, bass clarinet and piano

Juliet Palmer  

How it Happened

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 2010
for narrator and ensemble

  • Instrumentation
    for bass clarinet in Bb, alto flute
    percussion — kick-drum, snare drum, low tom-tom, low woodblock, high woodblock, medium cowbell (muted), hi-hat, high ride cymbal, medium splash cymbal, thin metal sheet, cabasa, rainstick, tibetan bowl (F if possible), vibraphone, marimba;
    narrator — amplified with microphone and/or paper megaphone and power megaphone;
    piano (nylon fishing line rosined), violin and violoncello
  • Programme Note

    “In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water.”
    “But where did all the water come from?”

    Throughout Thomas King’s novel the character of the trickster Coyote reappears, hopelessly bamboozled, trying to learn what really happened when the world began. Who knows the Real Story? Coyote would like to think he does, but then there’s Coyote’s Dream – “gets loose and runs around. Makes a lot of noise”. Coyote’s Dream has his own idea about things: “I’m in charge of the world”. By the end of the piece, you’ll be wondering where all that water came from…

  • Availability

Douglas Lilburn  

Incidental Music to Shakespeare's Othello

 Year: 1944
for violin, piano and narrator

  • Programme Note

    Lilburn wrote these seven musical interludes in quasi-Elizabethan style; nonetheless one can still clearly detect his own compositional voice. The most extended music is that for the Willow Song, which in Shakespeare’s Othello is sung by Desdemona to her maid Emilia on the eve of the heroine’s death. Lilburn knew well how to handle the style of the melancholy vocal lament, translating the repeated ‘willow, willow…’ refrains of the original song into repeated skips of a falling third, and using the violin’s mid-low register. Broken chord accompaniment in the piano imitates the sound of a strummed lute. Lilburn Willow Song was heard together with the premier of two settings of R.A.K. Mason’s poems, Song Thinking of Her Dead, and O Fons Bandusiae in a 3YA broadcast on 29 November 1946. It was first performed two years earlier, though, as part of a production of Othello given by the Canterbury University College Drama Society, directed by Ngaio Marsh.

    Lilburn Collaborated with Ngaio Marsh in five Shakespeare production sin the early 1940s; Othello was the second. Just as Marsh regarded his musical input highly, so Lilburn considered her to be an outstanding producer: "She had more understanding of Shakespeare than anyone else I have ever met’, he observed, ‘and an exquisite ear for the music and cadences of his verse’. The first two Shakespearian productions by this able team, of Hamlet and Othello, were a great success, so much so that the Drama Society toured with them to Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland.

  • Availability

Gillian Whitehead  

Ipu

Duration: 42' 00" Year: 1997
for narrator, taonga puoro (Maori instruments), jazz piano and cello