This short piece was written as a twenty-first birthday present for clarinettist Esther Smaill. The melodic fragment heard at the outset soon skitters over its own unstable surface, mutates into fanfare-like repetitions, is spliced with momentary cantabile inserts, is interrupted by slow motion signposts, and blows itself out in a final burst of energy.
This short piece was written as a twenty-first birthday present for clarinetist Esther Smaill. The melodic fragment heard at the outset soon skitters over its own unstable surface, mutates into fanfare-like repetitions, is spliced with momentary cantabile inserts, is interrupted by slow motion signposts, and blows itself out in a final burst of energy.
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.
The sound of the saxophone has been processed by computer to create a dark and exaggerated sound world. The live saxophone spars with this new environment, sometimes aligning itself with, and sometimes divorcing itself from the electronic backdrop. Throughout, however, the instrument has only been reacting to a reflection of itself.
The tape part of this work was composed in the University of Auckland EMS and is comprised of computer modifications of a single saxophone gesture. This work won first prize in The University of Auckland Composition Prize Competition in l991 and received a “Mentione d’Onore” in the 16th Concorso Internationale “Luigi Russolo”, Varese, Italy in 1994. It has been frequently performed in New Zealand, Australia, USA and Europe.