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Robert Burch  

Capriccio for Four Saxophones

Duration: 06' 00" Year: 1966
for saxophone quartet

John Rimmer  

Composition 2

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1968, r. 1969
for wind quintet and electronic sounds

Anthony Watson  

Concert Piece

Duration: 07' 00" Year: 1965
for violin and piano

David Farquhar  

Concerto for Wind Quintet

Duration: 17' 00" Year: 1966
for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn

David Griffiths  

Dormi Jesu

Duration: 03' 00" Year: 1969
for SATB choir

Gillian Whitehead  

Fantasia on Three Notes

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1966
for piano

  • Programme Note

    For the composer, Fantasia is a particularly significant work. It was her first ever commission. Numerous performances in Europe by Tessa Birnie – including a premiere broadcast on Radio Turkey! – led to subsequent performances by other pianists. Displaying a new technical confidence from her studies with Peter Maxwell Davies, the work’s single unified structure marks a turning point in Whitehead’s composing method. The title, refers not so much to free fantasy but to the imagination required to create music from minimal material; in this case – the opening three-note motive. The work is in three sections, corresponding to these notes, and fabric of the entire piece is generated from them. There are patterns that emerge within sections, as well as those spanning the entire piece, (trills and tempi changes included). Because of the inherent symmetry of the generated material, with layers building up both forwards and backwards, Whitehead’s original intention was to make a palindromic structure, but it became instead a through-composed work with coda. (Programme note by Emma Carle and Jack Body).

  • Availability

Ronald Tremain  

Five Epigrams for Twelve Solo Strings

Duration: 06' 00" Year: 1967
for string ensemble of any size

Jenny McLeod  

For Seven

Duration: 23' 00" Year: 1966
for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, marimba and vibraphone, piano

  • Programme Note

    Scored for flute, clarinet, vibraphone/marimba, piano, violin, viola and cello, this piece was written for performance by members of the Stockhausen’s ensemble, including parts designed specifically for Aloys Kontarsky, Siegfried Palm, and Cristoph Caskel, who, at the time, were the world’s leading performers of contemporary music. To the composer it seemed unlikely the work could ever be played in New Zealand, although it is noteworthy that Douglas Lilburn chose this as the first score to publish under his newly founded Waiteata editions imprint, such was his admiration for the composer’s achievement. However, with growing numbers of skilled and committed performers in New Zealand, ‘For Seven’ eventually received its New Zealand premiere in 1992, by the new music ensemble CadeNZa. Since then it has had several other fine performances here, and well as others in Europe. Recognition of the work’s status within our musical canon can be judged from the simultaneous CD publication of two different versions of the work, one by the UK-based ensemble Lontano conducted by Odaline de la Martinez, and another by Stroma. ‘For Seven’ was one of the first pieces to combine elements from the two major European schools of the time – the Eastern European cluster music, and the serialism of Boulez and Stockhausen. The piece consists of various lines of composed accelerandi and ritardandi, determined by a network of simple numerical ratios. These ratios also govern other aspects of the piece, such as the lengths of sections and the pitch intervals used. Combined with the highly structured ‘foreground’ material is more amorphous ‘background’ material (including some improvisatory elements), with frequent interaction between the two. Though the construction of the piece is complex, the result had a natural musicality and flow. McLeod has said that, although she was not conscious of it at the time of composition, she now hears clearly the influence of the sounds of the New Zealand bush. (Programme note: Mark Jones).

  • Availability

Ronald Tremain  

Four Medieval Lyrics

Duration: 24' 00" Year: 1965
for mezzo-soprano and string trio

  • Programme Note

    Four Medieval Lyrics is a song cycle of settings of 14th and 15th century religious and secular verse. The fusion of old and new, of medieval poetic imagery with 20th century musical language offers rich possibilities. Not only the scholar plunders the past, but the composer too, making that past accessible to our modern sensibility. This poetry is distant enough to be treated with a certain detachment and objectivity; at the same time the lyrics have a delicacy, a freshness a restraint which can still speak to us today.
    (from Words and Music an essay by Ronald Tremain, November 1988)

    The text settings of this work are interspersed with fantasia for the strings; these use both metered and unmetered notation.

  • Availability

Edwin Carr  

Four Pieces

Duration: 06' 00" Year: 1965
for oboe d'amore and piano