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Robbie Ellis  

Cause I Couldn't Find a Tenor

Duration: 08' 00"
for five-part male barbershop

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  • Programme Note

    There is a real cultural difference between the homeland of the Western classical tradition – that is, continental Europe – and New Zealand. This cultural difference is in the willingness to sing, and more to the point, to sing high. Put simply, New Zealand blokes don’t like doing it, and finding willing tenors to
    realise Bach’s or Mozart’s expectations has been a long-standing bane of choir directors, musical directors of shows, and composers. As a composer, I would sometimes like to smack up the head certain men I know who will happily belt out the soaring heights of a Guns’n’Roses vocal line on the karaoke machine after a beer or six, but baulk at singing the D above Middle C in a proper “composition”. This song is dedicated to you, you pricks.

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Jack Body  

Love Sonnets of Michelangelo

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

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  • 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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