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John Rimmer   Richard Nunns  

Cosmic Winds

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 2004
for traditional Maori instruments (taonga puoro) and tape

Gillian Whitehead  

Hinetekakara

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 2004
for voice, taonga puoro, and bassoon

  • Instrumentation
    Voice used for waiata; Taonga puoro includes: Putatara, Putorino Matai, Pumotomoto, Pupuharakeke, Pu Kaea, and Nguru Rakau Maire
  • Programme Note

    Hinetekakara is the ancestress of Aroha Yates-Smith, the kaikaranga (singer) who provided the idea and the text of this piece. Hinetekakara lived on the shores of Lake Rotorua with Ihenga, her husband or father, an eponymous ancestor of the Te Arawa people, when the land was still being settled after the arrival of the Te Arawa canoe from central Polynesia. The four cadenzas, for bassoon, alto flute, flute, cello and bassoon, and bassoon link improvised sections, in which all the instruments participate. The singer initially invokes, accompanied by putatara (conch shell trumpet), the spirit of Hinetekakara, then addresses rituals following the death of her future father-in-law (with putorino), and then the birth of her son (with pumotomoto, an instrument used to assist at child-birth). A voiceless improvisation on pupu harakeke (flax snail), an instrument presaging danger, is followed by Ihenga’s anguished lament as he finds the murdered body of Hinetekakara by the lake, by the place named for her, Ohinemutu, meaning the end of the woman. Finally, she is farewelled as her spirit returns to the afterworld.

  • Availability

Ryan Youens  

Moana Ataahua

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 2010
for orchestra with SATB choir

  • Instrumentation
    3 flutes, 3 clarinets, 2 alto saxophones, 2 tenor saxophones, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, euphonium, tuba, violoncello (optional), string bass, timpani, percussion I (high conga, low conga, medium tom, low tom), percussion II (high bongo, low bongo, high tom, medium tom), percussion III (tambourine, high woodblock, low woodblock), percussion IV (suspended cymbal, wind chimes, triangle) and percussion V - xylophone (medium sticks), with piano and SATB choir
  • Programme Note

    Based on the simple idea: “If Lake Taupo was a piece of music, what would it sound like?”

    This mass musical work, commissioned especially for the ERUPT Lake Taupo Festival 2010 through the SOUNZ Community Commission, takes its inspiration from the people and places of Taupo.

    Featuring lyrics submitted by local writers, Moana Ataahua is a spectacular mix of symphonic, choral and percussive elements that erupts into an exciting finale.

  • Availability

Gillian Whitehead  

Pao

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 1981
for mezzo-soprano, piano and clarinet

  • Programme Note

    ‘Pao’ is the name given by Maori to two-lined epigrammatic songs which comment on a wide range of subjects such as love, war, politics or religion; often topical, often improvised. Most of the songs set here were collected in 1864 from Maori prisoners captured during the the land wars in the Waikato area south of Auckland. The couplets are not connected in any way except for the central group, for unaccompanied voice, concerning Pikeri, a character famous at the time for his escapades evading the police; in this instance, enforced separation during a love affair is charted.

    The English translations of these pao are used with the kind permission of the late Margaret Orbell, and come from her Maori Poetry, an introductory anthology (Heinemann, 1978).

    Pao was commissioned by the Northumberland-based Syrinx Trio, with financial assistance from Northern Arts; the first performance was given by Syrinx in Newcastle in 1981.

  • Availability

Gillian Whitehead  

Puhake ki te rangi

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 2006
for string quartet and taonga puoro

  • Programme Note

    Puhake ki te rangi, which translates as spouting to the skies is a celebration of whales, and was written late in 2006 for the New Zealand String Quartet and Richard Nunns as a project undertaken while I was the CNZ/NZSM composer-in-residence, living in the Lilburn House in Wellington.


    Although one section is based on a transcription of whale song, there is no programme to the piece – no confrontation with humanity, for instance. The guiding principles were the extreme range of whale song, the changing patterns of their song, and the image, given to me by the late Tungia Baker, of a whale in Campbell Island waters allowing seal pups at play to slide down her flanks over and over again until, tiring of the game, she flipped them gently away.


    The taonga puoro (Maori instruments) used in this piece are all made from whale bone or the bone from the albatross, the whale’s avian counterpart. In the order they are played, the taonga are, the percussive tumutumu, made from the jaw of a pilot whale washed up on Farewell Spit, a karanga manu (bird caller) made from an orca tooth, two nguru (flutes) made from the teeth of sperm whales that stranded one in Tory channel and one at Paekakariki, two putorino koiwi toroa (instruments made here from albatross bones, which have two different voices, being played as flute or trumpet), made here from the wingbones of a wandering albatross from the sub-Antarctic islands and a young royal albatross from the Chatham Islands, a nguru made from the cochlea of a hump-backed whale and finally a putorino koiwi toroa, especially made for this piece from the rib of a right whale that beached at Cable Bay. Members of the Quartet play percussive instruments – whalebone tumutumu and tokere (castanets). All these instruments were made by Brian Flintoff.


    In the score, the taonga puoro sections are improvised; mostly the quartet parts are notated, but sometimes the players are required to improvise.

  • Availability

Gillian Whitehead  

The Journey of Matuku Moana

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1992
for solo cello