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alla marcia – adv. As a musical direction: in the style of a march. Also as adj., n. (Source: Oxford English Dictionary.)
Marcia Brady – A character from the 1969-1974 American television series The Brady Bunch. (Source: Wikipedia.)

General instructions/suggestions include:
- Gather a dozen or so wind and brass players. Have them memorise this music.
- The players should walk one by one from off-stage to on-stage.
- If possible, have them do a complete circuit across the stage, off the other side, through the backstage area, then back onto the stage through the original entry point.
- I encourage the use of surprising points of entry, e.g. balconies, strange doors, trapdoors, zip lines, time machines.
- Optional: incorporate the theme tune to The Brady Bunch in Bb major.

• Ellis: Alla Marcia Brady; computer set 

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• Ellis: Alla Marcia Brady; computer set 

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burlesques mécaniques is a rather extroverted collection of grotesque miniatures whose characters are not people or animals but dances. These dances have been mechanised, electrified, and often obscured by their own rhythmic impulse. Old forms and formulaic tropes are given new identities, freed from the confines of metric stability and the expectation that they be “danceable”. The essentially mechanical, artificial aspect of music (and of art in general?) is embodied in the piano, here a brittle, seedy protagonist whose string limbs hover and flail about it. Conflicting rhythms dominate the surface, oscillating between insistent repetition and mad, angular flourishes. The generally jerky, muscular rhythmic material is periodically frozen throughout the work, most strikingly in the ninth movement (chain). Here a string of rich, impressionistic chords briefly reveals an alternative, interior world which is then rudely dismissed in an almost haphazard finale.

• Taylor: burlesques mécaniques; computer set 

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• Taylor: burlesques mécaniques; computer set 

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This work was written as part of a series of composer workshops organised by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, for works for organ and orchestra. The Auckland Town Hall organ had been restored and refurbished, returning it to its original splendour as a magnificent concert organ. Six composers were invited to write works for organ and symphony orchestra during 2012, for performance in 2013.

For this work I proposed a work that would contrast percussive sounds with the sound of the organ.

The title appealed to me through its various meanings and associations. Firstly as “a mythological, fire-breathing monster, commonly represented with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail”. Surely if anything could be said to be a musical embodiment of a “fire-breathing monster” it would be the pipe organ! A second definition suggests a ‘chimera’ might be seen as a “grotesque monster having disparate parts”, and also as a “vain or idle fancy”. These last two definitions perhaps relating to the disparate nature of sounds available on the instrument, and the somewhat free-form of the work.

Musically the work contrasts a syncopated one-bar rhythmic idea with more flowing melodic material presented by both the orchestra and the organ. In the final bars the two powerful forces battle for supremacy with the organ having the last word!
I was delighted to be paired with organist John Wells for this project, a musician and fellow composer who I admire greatly (and whose daughters I had taught!). His advice and support were very much appreciated.

-David Hamilton

• David Hamilton: Chimera - hire set 

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• David Hamilton: Chimera - hardcopy score 

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• David Hamilton: Chimera - downloadable PDF 

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Compass is a reflection of the choices that shape our life and the lives of others. These choices shape our identity, our state, and the world we share. Like many of my works, Compass is strongly influence by landscape and seascape.

• Hunt: Compass (hire set); computer set 

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• Hunt: Compass; computer set 

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• Hunt: Compass; computer set 

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• Hunt: Compass; computer set 

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This short work grew out of the middle movement. Originally composed for violin and strings, “Memorial” was first performed in a version for oboe and strings by the chamber orchestra of St Mary’s College, Auckland. It was suggested I might like to expand this into a larger work for oboe and strings, given there was a fine young oboe player in the school.

The completed concertino consists of a traditional three movement form: fast-slow-fast. The first movement has elements of Baroque period writing in it, including a short fugal section based on the opening melody. The second movement, “Memorial”, is a slow and poignant movement written at a time when New Zealand was experiencing a number of tragedies – the Pike River mining tragedy and the Christchurch earthquakes. The final movement, “Hoe-Down”, is a complete contrast, being a purely fun and rhythmic piece of writing suggesting the music of the old time western USA.

• Hamilton: Concertino for Oboe and Strings; computer set 

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• Hamilton: Concertino for Oboe and Strings; computer set 

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The concerto, in one movement, begins in darkness but soon ascends into lighter worlds as the tempo increases. The personality of the cello – romantic, nostalgic, cheeky, irreverent and even wild imbues the work with a wide range of moods and characterisation.

• Harris: Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra; computer set 

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• Harris: Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra; computer set 

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This piece arose out of collaboration with multi instrumentalist, Adam Page. The fixed media track was composed as a “virtual ensemble” to accompany a soloist. The title “Crunch Time” is representative of the manic and stressful character of the piece.

• Briar Prastiti: Crunch Time - downloadable PDF & backing track 

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• Briar Prastiti: Crunch Time - hardcopy score & CD 

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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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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

• Taylor: deepwalker; computer set 

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• Taylor: deepwalker; computer set 

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• Alex Taylor: deepwalker; audio 

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• Alex Taylor: deepwalker 

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Earthquake: 22.2.11 began as a project after the September 2010 earthquakes struck Christchurch and surrounding districts. I was interested in capturing the peculiar sonic properties of the earthquakes – the unnatural preparatory calm, the low pitched boom, the change in air pressure, the accelerating rhythms, the creaks, the rattles, the cracks, the climactic shuddering of the building one was in, the decay of sound, and the silence before the cacophonous response of voices, alarms, telephones, sirens, police cars, ambulances, fire trucks and helicopters.

I successfully applied for Creative New Zealand funding to compose such a work for the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and set to work late in 2010.

The earthquakes hadn’t finished though. On February 22, 2011, in New Zealand’s worst natural disaster since the 1931 Napier earthquake, a 7.2 earthquake centred on Christchurch killed 185 people and caused inestimable damage to the city’s buildings and infrastructure. Composing a dispassionate response was no longer appropriate; indeed, composing anything at all about the event seemed wrong, almost exploitative, in the face of the human tragedy.

I stumbled upon Gary McCormick’s poem Earthquake 22.2.11 shortly after he wrote it as a white-hot response to the devastation. I empathised with his anger and his railing at the randomness of the event. Even so, it took almost a year before I felt ready to set Gary’s poem to music. The catalyst was a further round of earthquakes beginning on 23 December 2011, in which further damage, including the destruction of our previous home, a beautiful Victorian dwelling I had helped restore in the 1990s, occurred to the city. Something like 10 quakes of magnitude 5 or more occurred while I was composing the score.

• Norman: Earthquake: 22.2.11; computer set 

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• Norman: Earthquake: 22.2.11; computer set 

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• Philip Norman: Earthquake (demo); audio 

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