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Briar Prastiti  

Crunch Time

Duration: 03' 50" Year: 2011
for solo saxophone and fixed media

Michael Norris  

De corporis fabrica

 Year: 2012
for amplified solo clarinet and video

  • Programme Note

    De humani corporis fabrica, a 16th-century anatomy textbook by Andreas Vesalius, was an important step in the Renaissance advancement of medical and anatomical knowledge. Divided into seven chapters, the book groups the myriad elements of the body into seven broad categories. This work for solo clarinet, divided into seven movements, responds to these categories through gestures, energy profiles and structural processes that take their cue from Vesalius’s taxonomy:

    Book I: The bones and the ligaments that interconnect them
    Book II: The ligaments and muscles, instruments of voluntary and deliberate motion
    Book III: The series of veins and arteries throughout the body
    Book IV: The nerves
    Book V: The organs of nutrition and generation
    Book VI: The heart and organs serving the heart
    Book VII: The brain and organs of sense

    Quite apart from the intertextual references, however, the extreme demands of the music heighten the role of the performer’s own body as a site for the literal embodiment of the physiological processes described in the text.

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Alex Taylor  

deepwalker

Duration: 09' 30" Year: 2011
work for vocalising clarinetist

  • Instrumentation
    solo clarinet
  • Programme Note

    In many ways this is a companion piece to an earlier work, Vivid for solo trumpet, which also sets a powerful, sexually charged poem by Will Christie. But where Vivid is very often overtly violent and forceful in its gestures, deepwalker is mostly much subtler, almost passive-aggressive in outlook. The opening lines of the poem – “the day is a drum that connects these vocal loops with grey traffic circles bridge after bridge” – are mirrored in the cyclical, sometimes elliptical form of the work, loops and circles that play between registers of the clarinet. Sexual tension and aggression bubble away in the background, periodically rupturing the musical surface with piercing, angular outbursts, sometimes in parallel with the rather tender, fluid lines of the low register, and with the spoken text itself. This violent interplay creates a kind of disordered internal conversation, a bizarre hermetic character opening and shutting her windows; a clarinet of many voices.

    Warning: contains coarse language

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Philip Brownlee  

The stars like years

Duration: 16' 00" (can vary) Year: 2011
for clarinet quartet

  • Instrumentation
    for Eb clarinet, two Bb clarinet and a bass clarinet
  • Programme Note

    The title is quoted from Nigel Cox’s novel The Cowboy Dog. In the novel, there is a poetic contrast between the constant presence of the landscape, and an elongated sense of time and space, set against the smallness of the concerns of the human characters. The music contains a similar juxtaposition of small detail against a spacious backdrop, and a warping of the listener’s perception of musical time.

    The stars like years is dedicated to the New Zealand Clarinet Quartet, and I am especially grateful to the Quartet for their close involvement in the compositional process. There are varying degrees of notational freedom in the score, from very loose rhythmic specification, to sections which are improvised using sets of notated gestural materials. The music derives much of its energy from the tension between spontaneous performance and the written-out structural framework.

    The stars like years was commissioned for the New Zealand Clarinet Quartet, with funding from Creative New Zealand.

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Claire Scholes  

The Wyrd Sisters

Duration: 07' 30" Year: 2010
for clarinet trio

Michael Williams  

When We Fell

 Year: 2011
for flute with digital effects and backing track

  • Programme Note

    Having heard Adrianna Lis in concert, I was excited by the prospect of writing for her and was thrilled to contribute a piece for her CD Dialogue/Rozmowa produced by Atoll Records. We discovered in subsequent conversations that we shared a common interest in WWII history and decided there and then that this should be the central idea. The horrors of WWII remain very much part of the Polish collective memory. Like many of her countrymen Adrianna does not wish for the events of WWII, and in particular the treatment of the Polish people, to be forgotten or diluted by time, thereby diminishing the significance. When we Fell is a reflection of this idea. A fall from grace; a fall from humanity; a falling away from oneself. I have tried to imbue in this piece a sense of nostalgia, a hint of the military and in parts childlike innocence that in a strange way highlights the dismay at the loss of humility. The folk-like melody that runs through is an adaptation of the Polish song To Ostatnia Niedziela composed by Jerzy Petersburski (1936) – a nostalgic tango describing the final meeting of former loves who are parting, which had the dubious honor of often being poled while Jewish prisoners were led to their deaths in the gas chambers. The vocal track is recording of some of the text from this song but toward the end a passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra is quoted in Polish.

    Michael Williams

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