Search Music:

• 'Whetu-Rere' - The Sea Lion and the Comet  Year: 2007 

  Video
  

This song cycle for soprano and piano has texts by the composer in Maori and English.

“Awa Herea memorably evokes the physical appearance of symbolic significance of these braided rivers… cosmic weather-driven energy.” (Covell, Sydney Morning Herald).

“Its pace was shrewdly varied and the music encompassed a range of styles – from sung declamation to florid lyricism – without incongruity.” (Jack, Independent).

“The cycle displays all the characteristics of her [Gillian Whitehead’s] mature work. The vocal line is at once exultant and contemplative, the piano writing incisive or lulling; the formal shaping novel yet accessible. It is a memorable piece, filled with the energetic spirit of the natural world and finding through that spirit its own serenity.”

• Whitehead: Awa Herea; computer-set 

  Full score | Pdf - computer set
  

• Whitehead: Awa Herea; computer-set 

  Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $22.50
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Whitehead: Awa Herea; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  • Borrow

• NZIAF: Gillian Whitehead Portrait; part 2 

  CD
  

• Waikohu: Mere Boynton and Friends 

  CD
  
  $30.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Tracey Chadwell's Songbook  Year: 1995 

  CD
  
  • Borrow

• Ears Wide Open Taringa Areare Education Resource CD  Year: 2000 

  CD
  
  • Borrow

In 1990 I attended the launch of Cilla McQueen’s new book Berlin Diary. This diary made a big impression on me, initially because it brought back memories of my own trip to Europe. I also liked the brilliant mixing of poetic and prosaic styles, and the vivid descriptions of people and places. Something else that impressed me was the strong contrast between the inhuman political situation in Berlin (the wall was still up) and the natural, peaceful beauty of Dunedin, New Zealand (Cilla’s and my own home town). A few months later the Aramoana tragedy (where a deranged gunman killed 13 people – Aramoana is a remote seaside township at the end of the Otago peninsula) changed that around. Cilla’s beautiful, almost ecstatic centrepiece in the dairy “O Aramoana” now took on a terrible subtext, and it seemed as if the inhumanity of Berlin had come to the remote beach community. A year later, the Berlin wall finally came down, and the unification of East and West Germany became a reality.

When Judy Bellingham approached me in 1991 to write a song cycle for her, I immediately wanted to set extracts from the Berlin Diary, to capture these layers of dramatic historical irony along with the essence of a marvellous text. In reality I was able to only set a fraction of the diary to music, and hence the title of my work – Berlin Fragments (which I would also like to think suggests the breaking of the Berlin wall into bits). After talking to Cilla about the work, I decided to make “O Aramoana” the heart of the work, around which somewhat shorter texts are clustered. Sections are often linked by a recurrent chord in the bottom of the piano (the dyad E-F), which I have imagined as a tombstone in musical terms. Framing the work are brief sections which convey the flight to and from Berlin (the “green below” being an unmistakable reference to a return to New Zealand).

The 23 minutes of this song cycle run continuously.

• Ritchie A.: Berlin Fragments; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  $15.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Bellingham, Dennis, Rawson: NZ vocal music  Year: 2006 

  CD
  
  $30.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

Commissioned for the opening of the new National Library building in 1987, this work was the centre piece in a concert of New Zealand music which inaugurated the Library’s auditorium. Harris chose Alistair Campbell’s poetry as he has always enjoyed its vernacular quality. Included in the ensemble are some of Harris’ favourite instruments: soprano saxophone, bass clarinet and flugelhorn. Harris views this work almost as a kind of unstaged melodrama. As with his To the Memory of I.S. Totzka (2000), Dreams Yellow Lions was written in a period between work on his operas and acts as a substitute for the larger compositional form. Short instrumental interludes link the songs through various emotional states. “It’s all about memories and I always imagine an old man thinking about his younger days, dreaming away, getting old and becoming sick”.

• Harris: Dreams, Yellow Lions; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  $12.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Harris: Dreams, Yellow Lions; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  • Borrow

• Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music Vol. 4 - Composer Portrait: Ross Harris  Year: 1987 

  CD
  
  $15.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

This work could also be performed as Duo for Soprano and Cello.

• Duet for Soprano and Cello; facsimile 

  Full score | Pdf - facsimile
  

• Besser: Duet for Soprano and Cello; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  $18.50
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Jonathan Besser: Duet for Soprano and Cello 

  CD
  
  $7.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Jonathan Besser: Duet for Soprano and Cello 

  Digital sound file - MP3
  

Written in McLeod’s second year of study at Victoria University, this piece shows influences of Benjamin Britten and David Farquhar. The text is a poem by W. S. Broughton, the older brother of one of her childhood friends. She was drawn to the poem because it expressed the disillusionment with religion she herself was experiencing at the time.

Being a student work, Epithalamia has been somewhat neglected by performers, and has only recently been ‘rediscovered’. The youthful composer’s impressive self-confidence, both in the expressive use of the voice and in the effective piano writing is obvious. (Programme note: Mark Jones).

• McLeod: Epithalamia; computer-set 

  Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $10.50
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• McLeod: Epithalamia; computer 

  Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  • Borrow

• Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music Vol. 5 - Composer Portrait: Jenny McLeod 

  CD
  
  $15.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

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.

• Tremain: Four Mediaeval Lyrics; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  $13.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Music by Ronald Tremain  Year: 1967 

  Vinyl (LP or EP)
  

• de Castro-Robinson: Len Songs; facsimile 

  Full score | Pdf - facsimile
  

• de Castro-Robinson: Len Songs; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  $13.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Premieres 2004, Volume 4 

  CD
  
  • Borrow

• de Castro-Robinson: Len Songs  Year: 2004 

  CD
  
  • Borrow

• Lockwood: Night and Fog; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  • Borrow

• Thomas Buckner - Full Spectrum Voice  Year: 1991 

  CD
  
  • Borrow

Undoubtedly, this is one of Whitehead’s more unusual collaborations. The work, intended for five dancers and organ, with soprano added at the composer’s request, was to have been performed in five cathedrals around Britain during the summer of 1982. Due to the cancellation of the dance component however, the work received performance in only one of the cathedrals – Carlisle – but was later presented with a solo dancer, Bronwyn Judge, at the 1987 Sonic Circus in Wellington. The singer on that occasion was Glenys Taylor and the organist Douglas Mews. The composer initially delayed beginning work on the piece, since her sister was expecting a baby, and a Requiem did not seem an appropriate preoccupation. The successful birth was however followed by two close-family deaths and it was these which provided the composer with the emotional impetus to proceed with the composition. (Programme note by Emma Carle and Jack Body).

• Whitehead: Requiem; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  • Borrow

• Whitehead: Requiem; computer-set  Year: 2001 

  Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $12.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music Vol. 3 - Composer Portrait: Gillian Whitehead  Year: 2000 

  CD
  
  $15.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow