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This work for brass quintet and narrator was written for the NZ Brass Quintet to perform in schools.

• Freed: A Nursery Tale; facsimile 

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• Freed: A Nursery Tale; facsimile 

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• Freed: The Circle and A Nursery Tale 

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This work for clarinet quintet in three movements was written following time spent in the north of Scotland, during which I visited the remote and desolate places that my family left behind when they emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand in the 19th Century. Although the music is not intended to be strictly descriptive, the image underpinning the work is that of an infinite shore that stretches from the line of steep cliffs at Badbea overlooking the North Sea, around the world to the rocky southern shores of Aotearoa New Zealand. The work draws on the tonal colour and extremes of pitch that are possible in the clarinet, and the extraordinary platform of sound of the string quartet.

• Webster: An Infinite Shore; computer set 

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• Webster: An Infinite Shore; computer set 

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• 5 Works by M Louise Webster 

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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.

• Rimmer: De Aestibus Rerum; facsimile 

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• Rimmer: De Aestibus Rerum; facsimile 

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• Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music Vol. 10 - John Rimmer: Chamber Music  Year: 2008 

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Hineputehue translates literally as the woman of the sound of the gourd, and she is the Maori goddess of peace. The work was written in 2001, at the time of President Bush’s State of the Union address shortly before the invasion of Afghanistan, and suggests the fragility rather than the celebration of peace, particularly in a pre-European environment.

A number of instruments used in Hineputehue are made of gourds – the gourd, which carried food and water, is a symbol of peace. These include the poi awiowhio, a very quiet bird lure which is swung around the head, the tiny koauau ponga ihu or noseflute which ends the piece, the hue puru hau, a large gourd which is blown across its top opening and the gourd rattles played by the quartet. Two other wind instruments frequently made from gourds, the nguru and the ororuarangi, are also used. Other instruments are the putatara or conch shell trumpet, traditionally used for signalling, the pu kaea or war trumpet, a nguru niho paraoa or flute made from a whale’s tooth, the pumotomoto, associated with birth, and tumutumu (tapped percussion).

There is a similarity between the stringed instruments of the quartet and the gourds, in that they are made from plant material, with sound emitted through sound holes. Another link is the ku, the only stringed instrument known to Maori, which is a small musical bow played like a jaws harp (jews harp) using the mouth as a resonating chamber. The idea of ororuarangi, which can be translated as spirit voice (or double stopping in a different context) has had some influence on this piece as in the parallel movement of the strings.

• Whitehead: Hineputehue; computer-set 

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• Whitehead: Hineputehue; computer set 

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• Whitehead: Hineputehue; computer set 

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• NZIAF: Gillian Whitehead Portrait; part 2 

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• Whitehead: Bright Silence  Year: 2002 

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• Gillian Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi  Year: 2007 

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The music draws on images of the natural environment, and in particular New Zealand’s coastal landscape. One might imagine the sounds of wind and water, and birdsong, and the dim outlines of rugged coastlines and bush-covered hills. These shadows come in and out of focus, against the backdrop of the work’s technical explorations. Formally, there is an emphasis organisation at the sonic level, and particularly the way in which accumulations of timbres, densities and textures change over time. Each player is a soloist, while at the same time ever-changing instrumental groupings fuse into composite sound-masses. There is a constant tension between these shifting masses and the virtuosic individual lines which scatter around them.

• Brownlee: Landforms; facsimile 

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• Brownlee: Landforms; facsimile 

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• Whitehead: Manutaki; facsimile 

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• Whitehead: Manutaki; computer set 

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• NZ Women Composers Vol. 3 

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• Australia Ensemble: Cafe Concertino 

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• NZ Women Composers Vol. 1 

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• Whitehead/McLeod  Year: 1972 

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One winter morning, a short walk from the marae at Waihi, on the southern shore of Lake Taupo, I stood on the shore to watch the sun rise. Behind me, a waterfall lead to a small stream that flowed into the lake, imposing its own patterns on those of the lake. The water was uniformly grey, but as the sun rose, for a moment the tops of the ripples were golden, with darker valleys between, before the whole area was flooded with light. So the ideas behind this trio have to do with the changing perspectives of patterns in water – in the bubbling of streams, the tumble of a waterfall, in the spiralling eddies where stream meets lake at sunrise.

In the opening movement, a group of short themes and ideas initially form a mosaic-like section, which recurs in developed and varied forms around more reflective passages. The second movement reverses the first, in that slow, sustained sections are interrupted by more energetic material, and the final movement draws all the previous ideas together.

• Whitehead: Piano Trio; computer-set 

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• Whitehead: Piano Trio; computer set 

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• Whitehead: Piano Trio; computer-set 

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• NZTrio: bright tide moving between  Year: 2008 

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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.

• Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi; computer-set 

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• Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi; computer set 

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• Gillian Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi; audio 

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• Gillian Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi 

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• Gillian Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi  Year: 2007 

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• Freed: Sounds and Winds of Wellington; facsimile 

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• Freed: Sounds and Winds of Wellington; facsimile 

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The rather elegiac mood of the poem is reflected in this setting for voice, violin and piano. The opening violin motif recurs later in the song as an ostinato, heard first in the piano, then the violin, reflecting the poem’s sentiment -

“I do not remember these things, they remember me
Not as child or woman
But as the last excuse to stay
Not wholly to die”.

• Carey: The Place; facsimile 

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