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David Farquhar  

A Short Suite from "Ring Round the Moon"

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1975
for full orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    2222; 4230; timp, perc; strs.
  • Programme Note

    This music was originally commissioned by Richard Campion for the New Zealand Players’ production of Ring Round the Moon by Jean Ahhouil, translated by Christopher Fry. In the second act there is a ball taking place offstage and demanding a large number of dances which are specified in the text.

    The music was first recorded on acetate discs by a ad hoc orchestra led by Alex Lindsay; these small recordings were then played through speakers for the production, sounding very loud to the cast but filtering out more gently to the audience. At the end of the long national tour, the cast knew the music very well and suggested to me that I should do something with it.

    The result, some years later, 1957, was a suite of nine dances first performed by the Alex Lindsay Orchestra. This rapidly became my most performed piece and was commercially recorded by the Alex Lindsay Orchestra in the 1960s, a recording still available today from Kiwi Pacific Reords.

    Ashley Heenen, through the NZ APRA Committee, commissioned an arrangement for full orchestra for the NZ Youth Orchestra to take on a tour of Europe and China in 1975. This version was shortened to six dances by leaving out the first three numbers. The music has also been used for a ballet, The Wintergarden, choreographed by Arthur Turnbull for the Royal New Zealand Ballet Company – this version included a tenth dance not in the 1957 Suite. Since 1975 two further version have been commissioned: Waltz Suite (1989), for string orchestra (five dances) for the Nova Strings, and an arrangement of the original Dance Suite (1992) for violin and piano (nine dances) for Isador Saslav.

  • Availability

Lachlan McKenzie  

Alice in Wonderland - a ballet suite

Duration: 21' 00" Year: 2003
a ballet suite for orchestra

Matthew Davidson  

Aliens disguised as Elvis...

 Year: 1990
theatre piece for seven performers

  • Programme Note

    The full title of this work is Aliens disguised as Elvis kidnapped my grandmother’s appendix in a previous life after having been sucked through a black hole singularity on a Sunday afternoon picnic in the park with Aunt Jemima Puddleduck while discussing the simultaneity of states of sub-atomic particles, K. 666.31. The work is also known as The Enigma of Arrival, the purpose of this piece is to portray the epic struggle of Life and Death on a microcosmic and macrocosmic scale.

  • Availability

Gillian Whitehead  

Angels born at the speed of light

Duration: 1h 00' 00"
for narrator, dancer and improvising trio (flute/saxophone, percussion, piano)

William Dart  

Away with the Fairies

Duration: 50' 00" Year: 1983
a divertissement for diva

Helen Fisher  

Bone of Contention

Duration: 1h 20' 00" Year: 1993
a dance work for mezzo-soprano and ensemble

Juliet Palmer  

Cypress

Duration: 35' 00" Year: 2002
for double bass and bass clarinet

Search image for Cypress

Eric Biddington  

Dance Sketches

 Year: 1992
An entertainment for dancers and chamber ensemble

David Farquhar  

Fives

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1971
for 5 dancers and 5 instruments

Jack Body  

Love Sonnets of Michelangelo

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1982
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, voice, and a dancer

  • Programme Note

    The Love Sonnets of Michelangelo I wrote for Michael Parmenter, with whom I worked on a programme entitled Between Two Fires (also included was a dance-theatre work I created collaboratively with Michael, using his voice as well as his body, with imagery extracted from the diaries of Franz Kafka.) At the time I was focused on different styles of melody, having just completed my Five Melodies for Piano. Inspired by the lovely voices of some of the then current students in our School of Music, I felt that women’s voices gave the expressive quality I wanted, as well as providing a useful ‘cover’ for the overtly homo-erotic tenor of the texts. The original production used film, shot by my good friend Bayley Watson, showed the dancer’s prostrate figure, swathed in bandages. As the performance unfolded the cloth was gradually cut and pealed back by hands belonging to an old man whose face we never saw, the intended metaphor being of the sculptor cutting away marble to reveal the male form that he sensed already existed within the stone.

    The work has since had other performances that have discarded the theatrical elements, most successfully when each setting is prefaced by a reading of the poem in translation.

    These settings of some of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s most personal sonnets articulate the anguish of love and desire, as well as the despair of old age. The musical style combines the theatricality of Italian bel canto with the direct expressivity of folksong.

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