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Kit Powell  

Chinese Songs

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 1988
for high soprano and tape

  • Programme Note

    First performed in a concert of the Swiss Computer Music Center with soloist Franziska Staeheli. Later performances in Bern (with a short lecture about it by me) and in Schaffhausen. Bruno Spoerri also played the tape abroad, in a demonstration of our work here.

    Preparation for the work involved analysis of several Chinese instruments; Ch’in (a zither), gong and wood block. The wave analysis was done with a computer program and my imitations were realized on the Computer Music Center’s DMX. There are two sets of texts: from the Tao Te Ching (Lao Tse) and from the I Ching. The Lao Tse texts were chosen by me and set with traditional notation. The I Ching texts were chosen by chance (with the computer) and set with a computer generated graphic notation. Proportions within the piece were also made with a computer program using chance and units of Golden Section. (More details in the introduction to the score).

    This piece could be performed with two singers: one singing the Tao texts, the other singing the I Ching texts.

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Gillian Whitehead  

Hinetekakara

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 2004
for voice, taonga puoro, and bassoon

  • Instrumentation
    Voice used for waiata; Taonga puoro includes: Putatara, Putorino Matai, Pumotomoto, Pupuharakeke, Pu Kaea, and Nguru Rakau Maire
  • Programme Note

    Hinetekakara is the ancestress of Aroha Yates-Smith, the kaikaranga (singer) who provided the idea and the text of this piece. Hinetekakara lived on the shores of Lake Rotorua with Ihenga, her husband or father, an eponymous ancestor of the Te Arawa people, when the land was still being settled after the arrival of the Te Arawa canoe from central Polynesia. The four cadenzas, for bassoon, alto flute, flute, cello and bassoon, and bassoon link improvised sections, in which all the instruments participate. The singer initially invokes, accompanied by putatara (conch shell trumpet), the spirit of Hinetekakara, then addresses rituals following the death of her future father-in-law (with putorino), and then the birth of her son (with pumotomoto, an instrument used to assist at child-birth). A voiceless improvisation on pupu harakeke (flax snail), an instrument presaging danger, is followed by Ihenga’s anguished lament as he finds the murdered body of Hinetekakara by the lake, by the place named for her, Ohinemutu, meaning the end of the woman. Finally, she is farewelled as her spirit returns to the afterworld.

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