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Christopher Blake  

Angel at Ahipara

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 1999
for string orchestra

  • Programme Note

    In the isolated settlement of Ahipara in the far north of the North Island of New Zealand a tiny white church sits on a hillock looking out to a range of low brooding hills. In the cemetery below, an angel stands on a pedestal at the head of a grave. One day in 1992 renowned New Zealand photographer Robin Morrison came to the church and captured the essence of the angel’s vigil in a memorable and famous image.

    In late 1997 the composer Chris Blake travelled to Ahipara and stook in the same place and experiences the same image. The outcome was a short work for string orchestra which captures the hope and desolation of the angel and the memory of the soul over which she stands guard. The work was created for conductor Andrew Sewell and is based, at his suggestion, on a passage from an earlier work We All Fall Down for obliggato cello and orchestra.

    This work is one of a series of four, making up The Northland Panels. They were written and premiered as separate works.

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Ross Carey  

Commentary on "La Lugubre Gondola" by Franz Liszt

Duration: 03' 00" Year: 1999
for solo piano

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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

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  • 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

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  • 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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David Hamilton  

In a Glorious Garden Green

 Year: 1999
for SSA choir, percussion and piano

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Graham Parsons  

Instructions For How to Get Ahead of Yourself While the Light Still Shines

 Year: 1999
for SATB with optional piano accompaniment

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Philip Brownlee  

Mists and Voices

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 1999
electroacoustic

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  • Programme Note

    This piece is dedicated to my grandmother, Phyllis Collier, whose voice and stories form its core. She talks about her experience of the Second World War from the distance of New Zealand, and her relationship to her older brother, David. We become aware that this is a retelling, a memory, which has been reconstructed many times (and once more by the composer in the studio). It has the obliqueness, the fragmentary quality of distant remembering; the meaning is carried as much by what is not said as by what is. The ambiguous relationship between the sonic and the semantic strata underlines this, as do the shifts between real and imaginary environments. The self conscious artifacts of the recording and editing process – background noise and tape hiss – remind us that this is a construct. Still it is one that touches on one person’s particular experience, and ultimately it is the person, more than the story, that is brought into focus.

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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

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  • 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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