Sub Navigation

Search Music:

Search for music by typing a word or phrase in the box below or by selecting one or more categories from the list on the side.

Reset

Or search for products by selecting an option below, and typing a word or phrase in the box above

  • Scores
  • CDs and DVDs
  • Downloads
  • Education Resources

Michael Norris  

14 Islands

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2005
for flute/bass flute, percussion, and prepared harp

Score Sample
Audio Sample
Add to Wishlist

Full information

John Psathas  

4BY4

Duration: 08' 30" Year: 2012
for percussion quartet

  • Instrumentation
    China Cymbal / Conga (x2) / Crash Cymbal / Floor Tom (x2) / Hi-Hats (x3) / Kick Bass Drum (x4) / Snare Drum (x2) / Splash Cymbal / Tambourine (Headless) / Tom (x6)
  • Programme Note

    I’ve admired John Psathas’ music for years, for its incredible sense of energy, its ability to defy categorization, and its cultural pluralism. With 4BY4 (his first non-pitched percussion piece), John delivers on all counts … and then some. If David Weckl, Christopher Lamb, Steven Schick and Giovanni Hidalgo – all percussion virtuosi from widely different genres – were to have a jam session, I can’t help but think that it would sound something like 4BY4.

    Each of the four players plays a drumset-like set-up; one player has two snare drums a hi-hat, a tambourine, and a cymbal, another has two congas and a hihat, and the remaining two have tom-based set-ups. However, what binds these four seemingly disparate voices is the kick drum, which all four drumsets have. At times, these four drums pound a relentless beat in unison, and at others they’re split into complex rhythmic counterpoint.

    It is this, in part, that makes 4BY4 such a great piece and a perfect fit for this album. John manages to take culturally different instruments, each with different playing techniques, and link them together with a common element – the kick drum. It is cultural pluralism at its best, with each voice maintaining its unique sound and identity, but seamlessly integrated into a common whole.
    - Omar Carmenates

  • Availability
Add to Wishlist

Full information

Alex Taylor  

[f]at[on]ality

Duration: 05' 00" Year: 2009, r. 2010
for piano

Score Sample
  • Programme Note

    The title itself is a play on the words “fatality” and “tonality”, the two words and concepts colliding to form “[f]at[on]ality”. Similarly, the music presents two contrasting musical languages that intersect and compete violently for dominance. The first of these is a tonal language, represented by various types of (major/minor etc.) chords derived from four constituent triads of a twelve-tone row. The first phrase presents this language in conflict with itself, collapsing two triads into a hexachord at the punctuation points of the phrase. These chords then begin to extricate and extrapolate themselves, – beginning in the right hand at the start of the second phrase – under which the twelve-tone row (presented in the accelerating and decelerating lines of the first phrase) is fragmented and rhythmically manipulated. This twelve-tone row represents the second musical language, that is, a quasi-serial atonal language that is subjected to transformation by inversion, retrograde, multiplication etc. While on one level the music is concerned with the intersection and interdependence of these languages, it is also concerned with the dramatic consequences of that collision. The dynamic and rhythmic frameworks are somewhat extreme, providing a constantly surging, climactic structure that, in the end, resolves ambivalently. The inspiration for the piece came from a poetic doodle, reprinted below:

    con.vent.shun

    wanting to dis / dys
    place / figure / function

    this fatal tonality
    tonal fatality
    total finality
    final totality

    this [f]at[on]al entity

    cacophonic / catatonic
    coughed up and codified

    maybe some kind of
    superficial facticity / deep fiction
    palimpsestic / incestuous

    stasis / stagnation
    repetitious f[l/r]agellation
    sheer f[l/r]agrance

    and you can’t get out

    or in

  • Availability
Add to Wishlist

Full information

Anthony Ritchie  

A Bugle will Do

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 1995
for full orchestra

Audio Sample
  • Instrumentation
    pc2233cb; 2331; timp.; 3 perc (triangle, tomtoms, bass drum, suspended cymbal, xylophone, tam tam, log drum); strs
  • Programme Note

    In 1995 I was approached by the NZSO to write an overture to commemorate the recent death of New Zealand’s most famous war hero, Sir Charles Upham. Upham was famous for having won the Victoria Cross twice for bravery during World War II. He was, however, extremely modest when it came to discussing his achievements. Some years before his death it was suggested to Upham that he have a state funeral; he simply replied, “A bugle will do”. This comment seemed like a good starting point for my piece.

    There are no bugles in the orchestra, but the opening section depicting the horrors of battle contains plenty of brass. Sub-titled Maleme and Ruweisat Ridge, the music is fast and furious, built from several motifs, and includes the opening rhythm for the most well known Maori haka (war dance), Kamate, kamate. The music builds to a climax, and the scene changes to a bleak Colditz Castle, where Upham was imprisoned during the war. While in prison he dreams of rural NZ, and the farm near Kaikoura called ‘Landsdowne’, where he eventually settled after the war. This brief pastoral section links into a coda celebrating the outbreak of peace. Motifs from earlier in the piece return but changed into brighter modes. ’

    A Bugle Will Do was first performed by the NZSO in 1996 under Andrew Sewell, and was subsequently performed in the USA.

  • Availability
Add to Wishlist

Full information

Philip Norman  

A Short Suite

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1994
for saxophone quartet

Add to Wishlist

Full information

John Psathas  

Abhisheka

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1996
for string quartet

Score Sample
Audio Sample
  • Programme Note

    “The sanskrit equivalent for initiation is abhisheka, meaning ‘sprinkle’, ‘pour’, ‘anointment’. And if there is pouring, there must be a vessel into which the pouring can fall. So at last we might really give up all these complications and just allow some space, just give in. This is the moment when abhisheka – sprinkling and pouring – really takes place, because we are open and are really giving up the whole attempt to do anything, giving up all the busyness and overcrowding. Finally we have been forced to really stop properly, which is quite a rare occurrence for us.”

    (Taken from Chogyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, from album Nederlands Blazers Ensemble: Zeibekiko, NBECD014).

    The composer writes: ”Drafted immediately after reading a book by the Buddhist guru Chögyam Trungpa, Abhisheka was my first-ever attempt at writing music with space in it. Until this piece, practically everything I had written was ultra-caffeinated, fast, full of notes, and murder on performers. But having been (albeit temporarily) inspired by the great truths and peace in Trungpa’s writing, I found myself navigating slower passages of musical time, as well as exploring the microcosm of inner space between the even intervals of our chromatic tuning system.”

    Abhisheka by John Psathas was chosen for the list of string quartets in 2000 for ‘IAMIC Sounds of the Year’. The composer has also prepared versions of Abhisheka for mixed chamber ensemble, this version performed by Manos Achalinotopoulos, Vangelis Karipis and Nederlands Blazers Ensemble at Paradiso, in Amsterdam in 2004, and for string orchestra (2008).

    Programme note from the New Zealand String Quartet’s 2012 New Zealand at Kings Place concert.

  • Availability
Add to Wishlist

Full information

Chris Watson  

about nothing...really

Duration: 07' 00" Year: 2010
for flute, B flat clarinet, guitar and cello

Score Sample
  • Programme Note

    NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION 2010: Stop writing dishonest programme notes.

    This work was conceived in the abstract and does not relate to human experience. It does not illustrate the composer’s state of mind, he having suddenly found himself awake in the middle of the night, unable to control his thoughts. While the experience of insomnia, especially when suffered over consecutive nights, can be physically and emotionally crippling, at times the abundance and insistence of multiple streams of unwanted thought (unruly Beta waves) can be, if not pleasurable, then certainly fascinating. This piece does not seek to illustrate this through music, nor does it sonically pose this question: why does the brain seize control of the consciousness and produce such a plethora of unwanted activity that sleep is made impossible and the host becomes miserable?

    At times, certain thoughts seem to somehow rise above the melee of insomniac thought and become quite focused and of seeming import, however inane these might seem in the cold light of day. This is not portrayed in the music by infrequent parings-down of texture and emergence of single, insistent motivic ideas. The music doesn’t describe how such thoughts soon get swallowed up as the jumble of thoughts returns and the victim adjusts position once again, glancing desperately at his or her clock radio and resolving hopelessly to try to make yet another attempt at deep breathing and sheep counting work.

    The composer could claim that the work is about these things, but that would be a lie; he no longer wishes to construct programme notes after the act of composition that conform to some conceivable extra-musical agenda.

    This version of this work is the first of a number of versions, with another swapping cello for viola and another as a solo guitar piece currently projected.

    The work was requested by Dylan Lardelli and is dedicated to this increasingly mythic musician.

  • Availability
Add to Wishlist

Full information

Lyell Cresswell  

Acquerello

Duration: 05' 00" Year: 1998
for solo piano

Add to Wishlist

Full information

John Rimmer  

Adieu KS

Duration: 03' 00" Year: 2008
for solo violin

Score Sample
  • Programme Note

    Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez have long been in my group of compositional heroes. Not that I have always understood or accepted what they were doing but rather because they opened new vistas of compositional processes.

    Stockhausen in particular offered composers new ideas about the way music is structured. His ‘moment’ forms made a deep impression and his early electronic music pieces Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte blazed new pathways. They are classics in the music of the twentieth century.

    Adieu KS for solo vioklin is my musical way of offering a deep sense of gratitude to Karlheinz Stockhausen. This short hommage nods in the directly of Stockhausen’s early Sonatina for violin and piano and utilises a sequence of pitches from this work. Fragments contrast with continuity, melody with violinistic sounds and movement with stasis.

  • Availability
Add to Wishlist

Full information

Gareth Farr  

Ahi

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 2003
for piano trio

  • Instrumentation
    for violin, cello and piano
  • Programme Note

    In January 1998 Gareth Farr was commissioned by the James Wallace Chariable Trust to write this Piano Trio for the Ogen Trio, a leading NZ ensemble. Taking its subtitle Ahi from the Maori word for “fire”, it received its debut performance in Auckland, NZ in March 1998 in the presence of the composer. The style of the work varies in each of the four movements: the flavour of a French lullaby predominates in the first; an intense and unrelenting second movement harbours overtones of a Russian military factory; whilst a Balinese pop-inspired fourth movement contains numerous gamelan-like effects. The brief third movement is merely a quiet interlude, with a melodic reference to the first movement. The composition stands in stark contrast to Farr’s previous works. He has experimented with stripping away the density characteristic of past compositions in favour of clearer textures, exploring classical form, and allowing a simplicity of line to come through and speak for itself.

  • Availability
Add to Wishlist

Full information