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Gillian Whitehead  

Ahotu (O Matenga)

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1984
for chamber ensemble

  • Instrumentation
    flute, trumpet, cello, percussion, 2 keyboard (2 pianos, celesta, harpsichord)
  • Programme Note

    Ahotu is the sixth in a series of instrumental pieces based on the phases of the moon, and refers to the seventh day of the cycle. The entire thirty-day cycle has been used as one of the rhythmic generators of the piece, with vowels and consonants translated into durations to provide the apparently irrational rhythms, which are contrasted in a series of short ensemble or solo sections with either proportional or regular rhythms. The two longest sections are centrally placed. The first, featuring trombone and percussion, presents the language-based material in the percussion; the second, starting with the long piano solo, begins a mensural canon based on the proportional material. However, half-way through this canon, recapitulatory material begins, and subsequent appearances of the canon occur in continually shorter blocks, each transformed very differently. O Matenga, in the title of the piece, refers to the Maori custom, found also in many other civilisations, of providing sustenance for the spirit to the next world after death.

  • Availability

David Hamilton  

An Offering for Parihaka

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1988
for traditional Maori instruments (taonga puoru) and string orchestra

Gillian Whitehead  

Antiphons

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 1980
for brass nonet

Jenny McLeod  

Childhood

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1981
ten short songs for unaccompanied SATB choir

Anthony Ritchie  

Concertino for Piano and Strings

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1982

David Farquhar  

Concerto for Six

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1987
for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano

  • Programme Note

    The main theme of the first movement is built on a deliberately ‘square’ 4 note scale figure; this is interlaced with perfect 4th ‘wobbles’ and triplets and together they weave tonal games in a capricious journey.
    Four rich chords (all essentially triads with added semitones) which open out, bloom and close again are the flowers displayed in the tranquil second movement, and for the final a jaunty but restrained dance through various tonalities grows out of the subtle thematic combination of notes from both C and F sharp, normally the most distant keys.

    Notes taken from Ritual Auras, Atoll CD (ACD 842)

  • Availability

Eve de Castro-Robinson  

Countercurrents

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1989
for tenor saxophone

John Rimmer  

De Aestibus Rerum

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1983
for chamber quintet

  • Instrumentation
    clarinet, horn, violin, cello, piano
  • Programme Note

    De Aestibus Rerum was composed for the centenary of the University of Auckland in 1983, and received its first performance in November of that year. The title means ‘on the ebb and flow of things’ and the work is based on a number of distinctive rhythmic and timbral ideas which grow and recede. One hears fluidic patterns, clear octaves with coloured resonances, shimmerings and tremolos, bird-like calls and repeated notes which move frequently at different speeds. A feature of the work is the free open sounding passages marked ‘cadenzas’ for clarinet, violin, cello and horn. In two of these passages the instruments proceed independently of each other.

    This work received first prize in the chamber music category of the International Horn Society Competition in 1984 and the work was subsequently performed at the International Horn Symposium, Detmold, Germany, in September 1986 by the Virginia Tech Ensemble.

    De Aestibus Rerum was recorded by the Karlheinz Company in October 1984.

  • Availability

Kit Powell  

Devotion to the Small

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1988
a song cycle for soprano and five percussionists

John Elmsly  

Dialogue 1

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1988
for flute/alto flute and piano

  • Programme Note

    This specially commissioned work was first performed at the 1988 International Festival of the Arts in Wellington. The musical material is derived fromt he piano’s opening bar, and the resulting style combines the appealing simplicity of triadic harmonies with mathematical processes. There are three clear sections marked by the changes from flute to alto flute and back: outer sections exploiting the clarity and brilliance of the usual C flute, and a rich cantabile middle section for the larger (so deeper) alto flute where the piano provides a gentle accompaniment built on a a slowly contracting ostinato-like figure.

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