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This work was a ‘top secret’ commission, premiered at a well-kept surprise birthday party for Bruce (earlier a pupil of, as well as later married for some years to, the composer).

Aidan Lang head of NBR NZOpera was MC for the evening, which was generously hosted by Jack Richards and attended by some seventy of Bruce’s friends, family and professional colleagues. The piece was received with acclaim (no critics invited!)

This is third McLeod song cycle to be set to poems by Janet Frame. It is also the most difficult, the vocal part receiving little support from the fairly independent piano accompaniment. (Note: it is largely beyond the scope of amateur performers, though certain gifted adult students may be able to cope with some of the songs.)

For the occasion a limited edition of five copies only of the score was printed (presented to Medlyn, Barnes, Richards, Greenfield & McLeod) with a specially designed cover by Roger Joyce, well-known designer and partner of Margaret Medlyn.

• McLeod: From Garden to Grave; computer-set 

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• Jenny McLeod: From Garden to Grave - hardcopy score  Year: 2011 

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• Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music Vol. 12 - Jenny McLeod: Vocal & Choral Works  Year: 2011 

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Written during a month-long residency in November 2005 at the Visby International Centre for Composers, in Visby on the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland, this piece was inspired by the surroundings there- the history related to its importance in the Hanseatic League and prior to that the long Viking period; and in particular the old town with it’s beautifully preserved encircling medieval town wall.

The piece consists of seven descriptive historical episodes, and includes two poems to be narrated by the pianist in episodes 2 and 7- ‘Clouds’ and ‘Centuries’. The vocalisations are mainly sung, hummed and whistled sounds, along with the breaths of the third section indicating the onerous task of building the wall.

• Carey: Great Wall; facsimile 

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• Ross Carey: Great Wall; audio 

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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.

• Whitehead: Hinetekakara; computer set 

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• Whitehead: Hinetekakara; computer set 

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• Tuhonohono 

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Like my piano solo Where the river flows, Otari (2004) for solo harp is inspired by one of my favourite Wellington places, Otari Bush near my home, which is a peaceful soundworld of birdsong, pools of stillness, and ebb and flow of wind and stream. The chorale-like theme that emerges towards the end is based on my Te Puna Waiora (Spring of Living Water).

Overall, Otari is shaped by some words in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: " At the still point, there the dance is.."

This work is dedicated to Carolyn Mills, principal harpist for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, whose innovative and enthusiastic collaboration enabled me to explore some extended harp techniques as part of the composing process. In March 2005, Otari was premiered in United States and since then it has received several performances in New Zealand and the United States as well as at three international Harp Festivals – London, San Francisco and Adelaide.

• Fisher: Otari; computer-set 

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• Fisher: Otari; computer-set 

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• New Zealand Selection 2 

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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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In his 1974 collection ‘The lives of a Cell’, Lewis Thomas wrote a memorable essay devoted to the spectrum of sound made by all living creatures. He believes that as well as producing sounds in every possible way to send messages to their own kind, all creatures have the urge to make some kind of music. The rhythmic sounds emitted by all creatures might, Lewis suggests ‘be the recapitulation of something else – an earliest memory, a score for the transformation of inanimate random matter in chaos into the improbable ordered dance of living forms.’ It was this essay, together with my fascination in the rediscovery of the part of Auckland I knew as a young child, that have shaped this piece.

The basis of the piece is the twelve possible three-note groups which function to form molecular structures – harmonic, textural, gestural, melodic – some simple, some complex, often symmetrical. The piece could be regarded as part of a classical tradition, in that it focuses primarily on balance of pitch and orchestration rather than on gesture or programmatic elements, and places the instrumental writing well within the range of the instruments rather than exploiting their extremes.

The improbable ordered dance is in a single movement and begins with a ghostly chant-like melody over a drone; this recurs in different forms several times during the piece. A transition section based on transformed sounds of nocturnal birds leads to a metrically free ‘dawn chorus’. The following chorale-like passages and the rapid sections that follow are part of a restless upward-moving continuum which can never settle nor ever finish. The later sections of the piece recycle, combine and finally dissipate the earlier material.

• Whitehead: the improbable ordered dance; computer 

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• Gillian Whitehead: the improbable ordered dance; audio 

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• Premieres: Poynton, Ritchie, Whitehead 

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• Gillian Whitehead: Various Works 

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• Whitehead: Bright Silence 

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• Jenny McLeod: The Poet - downloadable PDF 

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• Jenny McLeod: The Poet: A Song Cycle - hardcopy score  Year: 2012 

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• Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music Vol. 12 - Jenny McLeod: Vocal & Choral Works  Year: 2011 

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