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Philip Brownlee  

As if to catch the fleeting tail of time

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 2009
for guitar and ensemble

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Reuben Derrick  

Castle Hill April Fool

Duration: 05' 56" Year: 2012
a field recording featuring exploratory performance at Kura Tawhiti, Canterbury.

  • Instrumentation
    solo clarinet
  • Programme Note

    Kura Tawhiti, also named Castle Hill by early European travellers, is a conservation area located between the Torlesse and Craigeburn mountain ranges in the South Island. Its most distinctive geological feature is rampart-like limestone rock formations, making it a popular site for climbers. Because of its exposed alpine location weather conditions can be extreme.

    Kura Tawhiti, meaning ‘the treasure from a distant land’, has great historical significance for Ngāi Tahu, who are actively involved with the management of its conservation. Knowledge of trails, shelters, rock drawings and historical food cultivation sites is an intrinsic part of past and present tribal identity.

    Towards the northern end is an area facing several escarpments, the most distant is about 200m away from the recording location. In still weather these can generate multiple echoes of varying length, direction and timbre. Typical soundscape components are pulsating insects, transient birds, gusts of wind against grass and rocks and distant traffic on state highway 73.

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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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John Psathas  

Omnifenix

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 2000
for tenor saxophone, drumkit and orchestra

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Gillian Whitehead  

Puhake ki te rangi

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 2006
for string quartet and taonga puoro

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  • Programme Note

    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.

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Alex van den Broek  

Still Standing Silent

Duration: 50' 00" Year: 2009
for four musicians and a contemporary dancer

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  • Instrumentation
    for B flat clarinet, tenor saxophone, percussion, contrabass - there is improvisation within set structures mostly for the tenor saxophone and contrabass
  • Programme Note

    In my work as a composer I have found bringing together classical and jazz musicians to be a rich and unique way of working. I have experience in both fields and my compositional talent and interest lies genuinely across the two art forms.

    This piece has been specifically composed for these performers and their unique sets of skills. Each performer is of a very high calibre and each possesses something special and unique in their playing and approach to music making. Mike Kime and Reuben Derrick often have moments of freedom as they are both accomplished improvisers. Gretchen Dunsmore and Mark Le Roche are classically trained performers with excellent skills and intelligent ears and minds. I knew that each of them would bring something to the work that would be unique and exciting.

    More recently my creative interest in movement and form has expanded to contemporary dance and I wanted to involve and include another artistic discipline in this work. Collaborating with Julia Milsom has been an exciting new venture for me. The nature of the sounds within the piece are highly applicable to contemporary dance and have been interpreted and expressed with considerable talent and skill by Julia.

    Layers of sound in time is a theme I have developed extensively in the piece. The layers interact, evolve, contrast, compliment, and conflict with each other to create a depth of space and time between them.

    The work is an exploration of the timelessness that comes in moments of deep introspection through evocative sounds and movement.

    Alex van den Broek

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Mike Nock  

The Old Times

 Year: 2012
a duo written together with Laurenz Pike for piano and drum kit

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Philip Brownlee  

The stars like years

Duration: 16' 00" (can vary) Year: 2011
for clarinet quartet

Score Sample
  • Instrumentation
    for Eb clarinet, two Bb clarinet and a bass clarinet
  • Programme Note

    The title is quoted from Nigel Cox’s novel The Cowboy Dog. In the novel, there is a poetic contrast between the constant presence of the landscape, and an elongated sense of time and space, set against the smallness of the concerns of the human characters. The music contains a similar juxtaposition of small detail against a spacious backdrop, and a warping of the listener’s perception of musical time.

    The stars like years is dedicated to the New Zealand Clarinet Quartet, and I am especially grateful to the Quartet for their close involvement in the compositional process. There are varying degrees of notational freedom in the score, from very loose rhythmic specification, to sections which are improvised using sets of notated gestural materials. The music derives much of its energy from the tension between spontaneous performance and the written-out structural framework.

    The stars like years was commissioned for the New Zealand Clarinet Quartet, with funding from Creative New Zealand.

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Gillian Whitehead  

Voices of Tane

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1976
Seven piano pieces for children

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  • Programme Note

    ‘Voices of Tane’ (1976) was the first piece I wrote on my first return to New Zealand after nine years away. It was written for my sister, Joyce Whitehead, to play at the Registered Music Teachers’ Conference in Auckland that year. A series of seven short piano pieces, written with children in mind (although some of them are difficult for children to play), was written for my godson, Kit Boyes. There is little to say about the pieces themselves except that the last repeats the first, the third has to do with birdsong, the fifth with the wind, and the sixth consists of nine ideas that the pianist plays in whatever sequence she or he wishes.

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