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Alex Taylor  

Attention:

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 2010
for actor and orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    2022; 4331; timp; 2 perc; strings
  • Programme Note

    On May 25 2010, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill, also known as “Three Strikes” legislation, sponsored by David Garrett, the ACT Party, and the Sensible Sentencing Trust, and supported by the National Party, under Prime Minister John Key. The law imposes mandatory maximum sentences on offenders who commit three “Strike” offences, removing judicial discretion. An almost identical bill was passed in California in 1994. California’s crime rate remains 11% above the national average, its prison population has increased to nearly 200,000, and its recidivism rate is the highest in the United States.

  • Availability

Juliet Palmer  

Blood Shower

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

Douglas Lilburn  

Canzona 3

Duration: 02' 00" Year: 1950, r. 1980
for string orchestra

Douglas Lilburn  

Canzona 4

Duration: 02' 00" Year: 1950, r. 1980
for string orchestra

Claire Scholes  

Epicene Women

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 2007
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone, bass, plastorgans and plastic cups

  • Programme Note

    I became inspired to write this piece by a rather disparate selection of influences: the Golden Years permanent exhibit at the Te Papa Tongarewa museum in Wellington, Giacometti’s Women of Venice sculptures, and a photocopy of an old poster from the early 1900s.

    I had been aware of Giacometti’s striking sculptures of emaciated figures, but hadn’t seen them in the flesh until the beginning of this year at an exhibition in Christchurch. I was particularly enamoured with Women of Venice, an apparently loosely arranged group of stationary female figures all facing straight ahead in a mesmerising and somewhat disarming display of trance-like fixed focus. I imagined a similar group of performers stationed about the stage like petrified soldiers risen from a swamp, who then come to life at random and begin to channel voices from their pasts. This idea of channelling voices was also inspired by the Golden Years exhibit, where museum patrons are lead into an old junk shop that has closed down for the day, only to find items in the shop seemingly coming to life in a display of a potted history of New Zealand.

    I then came across a copy of Henry Wright’s infamous poster from the early 1900s cautioning women to abandon exercising any political assertions whatsoever. The poster read:

    Notice to EPICENE WOMEN
    Electioneering Women are requested not to call here

    They are recommended to go home, to look after their children, cook their husbands’ dinners, empty the slops, and generally attend to the domestic affairs for which nature intended them.

    By taking this advice they will gain the respect of all right-minded people – an end not to be attained by unsexing themselves and meddling in masculine concerns of which they are profoundly ignorant.

    Henry Wright,
    103 Mein Street,
    Wellington

    I found the poster amusing in its ridiculousness, and played with the words so as to make nonsense of them, or to blatantly give them a feminist angle. Here is an example of one of the tweaked versions:

    Notice to Sloppy Children
    Affairs of sloppy husbands are requested not to attend Wellington.

    They are recommended to unsex their meddling masculine nature and generally concern themselves in their profoundly ignorant nature.

    By taking this advice they will slop their children’s dinners by unsexing themselves – an end not to be attained by cooking their children or Henry Wright.

    I also used John Cage’s method of ‘reading though’ the text using a mesostic with the words “EPICENE WOMEN”, as he did with James Joyce’s Finnegan’s “Wake” in his Roaratorio: an Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake (but using the name JAMES JOYCE).

    Despite my amusement, I was struck by the use of the word “epicene” in the poster. It implied that women who involved themselves in politics must not really be women, renouncing their sexuality so as to cause infinite trouble with all the devilish potency of a coven of Lady Macbeths. Similar attitudes still exist today, particularly amongst women, and there is still an apparent suspicion of ‘tomboys’ as well as a tug of war between traditionalism and feminism within individuals. It is this ironic fact that interests me the most – that, despite the extraordinary amounts of courage and hard work from women of the past to be seen as equals with men, many women today unwittingly foster oppression by adhering to gender steriotypes.

    In this piece I’ve played with aspects of bitchiness, misogyny, sadness, political fieriness, the natural unaffectedness of growing up rurally, the silliness yet appeal of TV commercials, the comfort of crackly old radio songs, and the determination and single-mindedness of women intent on having their voices heard. I’ve also been interested in the potential for double meanings by setting the texts in certain ways, an example being Helen Clarke’s statement about the struggles of her early parliamentary days being sung by the baritone voice. I consider this a rejection of the notion that all people must tidily fit into the category of male or female and therefore must at all times show undeniable evidence either way.

    Claire Scholes

  • Availability

Dorothy Buchanan  

Mary Magdalene and the Birds

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1989
a song cycle for mezzo and clarinet

Philip Dadson  

MAYA

Duration: 06' 00" Year: 1999
a counter-millennial fanfare for orchestra

Philip Dadson  

Peace Rites

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 2007
for mixed chamber sextet comprised of winds and strings

David Farquhar  

Ring Round the Moon: Dance Suite

Duration: 19' 00" Year: 1953, r. 1957
for small orchestra

Anthony Ritchie  

The God Boy

Duration: 1h 30' 00" Year: 2004
An opera in two acts based on the novel 'The God Boy' by Ian Cross