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Gao Ping  

dance fury - homage to Astor Piazzolla

Duration: 07' 00" Year: 1999
for piano

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Philip Brownlee  

Harakeke

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1999
for solo flute

Score Sample
  • Programme Note

    The flax plant, and a cluster of related images, stand behind this piece. While not directly pictorial, it suggests flickering, swaying movement, and a fascination with dry, rustling sounds. These sounds and movements are not self-sustaining, but set in motion by the agency of air, of wind and, in this case, of human breath. These activating forces suggest echoes of the environments in which the plant grows. On another level of human agency, the place of flax as a raw material for intricately woven objects also intersects with the music. The piece is concerned with the relationship between the flute as an acoustical system and the human gestures by which its sounds are produced. The flute’s capacity for timbral modification, for the simultaneous manipulation of multiple aspects of the sound production, would seem to invite a sonically directed musical form. This approach encourages the instrument into unstable behaviours, as different, and sometimes conflicting performance gestures are superimposed, or placed in quick succession. I am deeply grateful to Bridget Douglas for her close collaboration in the making of the piece.

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Gillian Whitehead  

Hineraukatauri

 Year: 1999
duo for piccolo/flute/alto flute, and Maori flutes

Video Sample
  • Instrumentation
    piccolo, C flute, alto flute. Taonga puoro: tumu tumu, karanga manu, putorino toroa, putorino maine, putorino nui, purerehua, pakunu. Taonga puoro parts mostly improvised.
  • Programme Note

    In the tradition of the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, Hine Raukatauri is the goddess of music and dance. She is embodied in the form of the female case-moth, who hangs in the bushes and sings in a pure, high voice to attract the male moths to her. Her hair is found as a fern, the hanging spleenwort, and her voice is heard in the sound of the putorino, an instrument known only in Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand). The putorino is an instrument that can be played in various ways – as a flute, as a trumpet and as a means of enhancing or altering the human voice.

    Hineraukatauri is written for two performers, one playing conventional flutes (piccolo, C and alto flutes), and the other for taonga puoro (instruments). The score features three different putorino, which, like all taonga puoro, (and also the songs and chants) have a small pitch range, rarely exceeding a fourth, which varies from instrument to instrument. Three putorino are used in this piece – one made of albatross bone and two of wood, and both the flute and trumpet voices are used. Other instruments used are a karanga manu (bird-caller), a purerehua (swung bull-roarer) and tumutumu (tapped instruments.)

    The flute player’s part is notated, but the music for the taonga puoro is improvised; there are areas when the flute player is encouraged to improvise with the taonga.

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Lyell Cresswell  

Of Whirlwind Underground

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1999
for mixed chamber quintet

Audio Sample
  • Instrumentation
    E flat clarinet, bass clarinet, bass trombone, cello and double bass
  • Programme Note

    The sound is of whirlwind underground
    Earthquake, and fire, and mountains cloven;
    The shape is awful like the sound,
    Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven.

    Thus Panthea, an ocean nymph, describes the appearance of the Phantasm of Jupiter, or the ‘Tremendous Image’, summoned in anguish by Prometheus in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

    Prometheus is seen here as a symbol of those who challenge tyranny for the sake of mankind. By stealing fire from Olympus to give to humans, Prometheus incurred the wrath of Jupiter. He was chained to a rock where, each day, an eagle tore out his liver, and each night it grew whole again. He cursed Jupiter and was hounded by the Furies.

    Maui stole fire from his grandmother Mahuika to give to humans and changed himself into an eagle to escape the flames.

    It is the energy of the curses, the hounding, the wrath of Jupiter, the flight of the eagle, the gift of fire, as well as the compassion of Prometheus and Maui that I have sought to reflect in the music.

    Of Whirlwind Underground is in one continuous movement comprising eighteen merging sections incorporating various combinations of instruments and solo breaks. The quintet grows from two musical ideas, one rhythmic, first stated by the double bass at the very beginning; and the other melodic, introduced straight after by the Eb clarinet. These ideas are juxtaposed, combined, protracted, contracted and variously transformed throughout the piece, while other accompanying and punctuating particles develop and take on greater significance as the music progresses.

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James Gardner  

some other plots for Babel

Duration: 17' 00" Year: 1999, r. 2000
violin concerto for ensemble

Score Sample
Audio Sample
  • Instrumentation
    flute (piccolo and alto flute), E flat clarinet (A clarinet, bass clarinet), bass clarinet; horn, bass trombone; percussion (1 player: friction drum/lion's roar, vibraphone, low tom-tom, bass drum, percussion cluster, piccolo snare drum); violin 1, violin 2, cello, double bass
  • Programme Note

    “The “Tower of Babel” does not figure merely the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalising, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, construction, system and architectonics."
    Jacques Derrida

    “Babel is the sign that every utterance or every text is riven by faults and fissures…rushing away into the vacuum formed by its own notes”
    Gary Shapiro

    The two quotes above were found after I had already started work on this piece, and decided on a title, but their relevance to the actual composition of the work gained exponentially as the première approached. The piece as it now exists is incomplete as far as my original plans are concerned, but I hope it isn’t entirely incoherent. In any case as I’m the only one to know what those original plans were, who’s to know? And isn’t this the case with virtually any work? So perhaps I should have kept quiet instead of fessing up…

    Back to the music. In keeping with Breughel’s two paintings of the Tower of Babel, in which builders are shown “hewing architectural rationality from the ancient rock” the piece opens deliberately with what one critic pejoratively referred to as the “frantic agglomeration” of some of the music played at a 175 East concert in 2000. The texture does clear however, and the piece proceeds through a number of phases of ensemble independence and unity. And if you really think I’m going to give away the plot…

    some other plots for Babel was commissioned by Mark Menzies with funding from Creative New Zealand, and is dedicated to the extraordinary performers at the premiere and to Glenda Keam, all of whom, through their enthusiasm, commitment and encouragement, brought the piece to life.

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Philip Brownlee  

Tendril and Nebula

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1999
for B flat clarinet, bass clarinet, bass trombone, percussion, cello and contrabass

Score Sample
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  • Programme Note

    The title suggests a mixed metaphor, the organic alongside the astronomical. Although the words arrived late in the process, they go some way towards describing the forces at work. Propelled by small-scale rhythmic articulation, strands reach out towards points, tracing delicate spirals through space. Alongside these sit diffuse clouds of material, out of which new constellations take shape. There is above all a concern with the intimate connection between the gestures of performance and their sonic result. The instruments act as filters which shape raw sound in a manner reminiscent of the procedures of the electroacoustic studio. There is a constant tension between organic direction and quite arbitrary frameworks, a mesh of non-congruent processes operating on different structural levels. In front of this, the intricate detail of the audible surface attempts to impose perceptual order on the precariously balanced network of forces.

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Nigel Keay  

Viola Concerto

Duration: 24' 00" Year: 1999, r. 2000
for solo viola and orchestra

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Dorothy Ker  

Water Mountain

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1999
for violin, B flat clarinet and cello

Score Sample
Audio Sample
  • Programme Note

    In contrast to the singular, organic process of solo for cello this piece plays with the idea of juxtaposing contrasting fragments of material. It was stimulated by a book of dream symbols, in the form of simple gouache paintings, originating in the Rajasthan Gujarat area of Western India in the early 19th century. The book is one of any number of dream lexicons to be found in ancient eastern cultures that guided the interpretation of dreams using mythological and cultural symbols pertaining to fortune and destiny.

    Although the Rajasthan Gujarat lexicon informs aspects of the aesthetic of the piece, it is not intended that the music function as an illustration of the visual images themselves. Rather: whereas the pictures seek to make concrete the ephemeral matter of the dream, the music embodies an attempt both to restore the subjective nature of the dreamscape and to reconstruct the grammar of its articulation in time – concentrated, disjunct and fleeting. This occurs perhaps in the way that one might attempt to reconstruct a paragraph in an archaic language from its written symbols, without having access to their original source or context, guided only by intuitions based on experience of one’s own language – in this case the ‘language’ of the dream. The title of the piece is borrowed from one of the images of the Rajasthan Gujarat lexicon.

    Water Mountain was composed for Apartment House 1999. It has been performed in Reading, New Zealand (175E ensemble 2002), Seoul (ACL festival 2003) and Brighton (Soundwaves festival, 2007) and broadcast by Radio NZ.

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