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This work was written to celebrate the opening of the studio of Palmerston North artist, Annabel Neall. The French Overture seemed appropriate for an artist and the inclusion of the hymn is recognition of the Nealls’ further interests. As a French Overture it features the usual slow introduction featuring the dotted rhythm, followed by a more lively contrapuntal allegro.

• Graham Parsons: An Overture in the French Style - downloadable PDF 

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• Graham Parsons: An Overture in the French Style - hardcopy score & parts 

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––“Kisses, even to the air, are beautiful” (Drew Barrymore)

Of all the physical relationships between performers and instruments, that of flautist and flute most closely resembles that of the kiss. The shape of the embouchure itself, lips rounded in the shape of an “O”, ready to go to work, and the sometimes erotic, but always sonically evocative, use of the tongue in contemporary flute music thus became the initial inspirations for the composition of this work. The use of the “tongue ram” in the section “French Kiss”, for example, speaks for itself, whilst the lip pizzicatos and triple tongueing in “Vampire Kiss” are more abstract in suggesting the love bites of those creatures of the night with their sharp little canines. But, of course, kisses can also simply be fond, as in “Air Kiss” and “Peck,” or playful, as in “Butterfly Kiss” where I use fluttertongueing to mimic the tickling brush of eyelashes on a cheek. Kisses can also be completely chaste–even holy–as the quietly murmuring tremolos in “Kiss of Peace” suggest. Since many of my recent pieces employ symmetrical scales and symmetrically constructed background harmonies, I could not resist the impulse in the concluding section of the work to use those symmetries to create a musical parallel to that wonderfully symmetrical upside down kiss from the 2002 Spiderman movie in which Spiderman (inverted) and Mary Jane Watson (upright) share an iconic kiss in the rain. In the end, as the variety of kisses in my piece implies, the idea of the kiss reminds me of music in the kaleidoscopic flexibility of its meaning and how even the simplest of kisses or compositions might evoke the vastness of human experience. As Jimi Hendrix once said, one can even kiss the sky. For now I’ll just settle for kisses on the wind.

• Stephan Prock: Baci sul vento - hardcopy score 

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Banda is a genre that sprang to life in the late nineteenth century when Mexican music collided with the polka of German immigrants. Traditional bandas are centred around the sousaphone and the tambora (a bass drum with a hi-hat on top). Beyond these, you’ll find further wind, brass and percussion instruments depending on the regional style: clarinets, saxophones, alto horns, trumpets, trombones, tarolas (snare drums) and more.

A few months before writing this piece I’d seen a YouTube video of Chicago group Banda Sincera performing before a Mexican national team football match*. The atmosphere was party, the tempo was quick, the time was compound, the licks were virtuosic, and the pulse was always getting disrupted at the ends of sections. The band would pause, the tarolero and sousaphone dude would go off on a soloistic tangent, and then the band was back in for more of the same. They even stuck a conga-based cumbia in the middle! These guys were mental and I loved it.

When I started on a piece for Saxcess I established the reasonably serious beginnings of Huff, but I kept getting pulled down this raucous Mexican garden path. I put the serious to one side, started a new score, took a few days to get this “banda chiflada” (crazy band) out of my system, and resumed composing Huff when I was done. They’re two very different pieces, but ultimately cut from the same cloth.

• Banda Sincera playing Arriba Pichátaro here: http://youtu.be/Cm1dcT710d8

• Ellis: Banda Chiflada; computer set 

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• Ellis: Banda Chiflada; computer set 

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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.

• Norris: De corporis fabrica; computer set 

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• Norris: De corporis fabrica; computer set 

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Huff is both the act of exhaling, and the sound of air moving through a wind instrument. The piece starts as a saxophonist would: after the instrument comes out of its case and gets put together, the first thing the player does is blow warm air.

I wanted to write something that would work for both professional quartets such as Saxcess, and proficient school ensembles in both SATB and AATB formation. As a composition, it didn’t come together straight away: the 12/8 time signature sidetracked me into a maniacal type of Mexican banda music, which turned into a work called Banda Chiflada. That and Huff are very different in character, but they are still two pieces cut from the same compound time cloth.

• Ellis: Huff; computer set 

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• Ellis: Huff; computer set 

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• Hunt: Winter; computer set 

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• Hunt: Winter; computer set 

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