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Douglas Lilburn  

Dance Sequence for Expo '70

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 1970
for tape (sounds of NZ birdsong)

Jack Body  

Love Sonnets of Michelangelo

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1982
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, voice, and a dancer

  • Programme Note

    The Love Sonnets of Michelangelo I wrote for Michael Parmenter, with whom I worked on a programme entitled Between Two Fires (also included was a dance-theatre work I created collaboratively with Michael, using his voice as well as his body, with imagery extracted from the diaries of Franz Kafka.) At the time I was focused on different styles of melody, having just completed my Five Melodies for Piano. Inspired by the lovely voices of some of the then current students in our School of Music, I felt that women’s voices gave the expressive quality I wanted, as well as providing a useful ‘cover’ for the overtly homo-erotic tenor of the texts. The original production used film, shot by my good friend Bayley Watson, showed the dancer’s prostrate figure, swathed in bandages. As the performance unfolded the cloth was gradually cut and pealed back by hands belonging to an old man whose face we never saw, the intended metaphor being of the sculptor cutting away marble to reveal the male form that he sensed already existed within the stone.

    The work has since had other performances that have discarded the theatrical elements, most successfully when each setting is prefaced by a reading of the poem in translation.

    These settings of some of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s most personal sonnets articulate the anguish of love and desire, as well as the despair of old age. The musical style combines the theatricality of Italian bel canto with the direct expressivity of folksong.

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Juliet Palmer  

Three Poems from the Bulin File

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1990
for clarinet, tape, video and slides

  • Instrumentation
    electroacoustic tape, proj video, mobile video, slides, with music theatre elements
  • Programme Note

    Gu Cheng, the exiled Chinese poet whose poetry and person form the basis of 3 Poems, lived on a small island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. The video images are of Gu Cheng and his poet wife Xie Ye on Waiheke Island, animations of Gu Cheng’s disturbingly whimsical drawings and the poem’s Chinese text. The tape uses diverse sounds and music – cooking oil, a Russian folksong sung in Chinese by the couple and – potatoes!

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