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Dorothy Ker  

and the rain...

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1991
for double SATB choir

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Anthony Ritchie  

as long as time

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1991
for unaccompanied SSAATBB

  • Programme Note

    This work was commissioned by The Southern Consort of Voices in 1991, with funding from Creative NZ. It sets three NZ poems to music, with a fourth song being wordless: Timepiece to a poem by Cilla McQueen; Before the Fall to a poem by Rachel McAlpine; I lie, I watch the ceiling (wordless); and We could just disappear to a poem by Sam Hunt.

    In 2001 Auckland choir Viva Voce recorded this work on their CD entitled Snapshots – A Cappella Choral Favourites. Conductor John Rosser writes of the work – “Anthony has a wonderful knack of writing for voice. Timepiece portrays a woman struggling to break free of suburban neurosis and the tyranny of time. Before the Fall alludes to lost childhood innocence, and We Could just Disappear depicts the future as an endless tunnel of the mind.”

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David Griffiths  

Lie Deep, My Love

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 1996
a cycle of three settings of poems by James K. Baxter for SATB choir and soloists

  • Programme Note

    Lie Deep My Love was finished in 1996 and written especially for the New Zealand National Youth Choir who have since performed them frequently. The first song, Lie Deep My Love, depicts the grief and longing for a departed love; the second, Earth does at length, the inevitability of our mortality; and in the third, Blow, wind of fruitfulness, the spirit of the wind is implored to stir life into all creation again.

    Use is made of low bass tessitura, solo voices and canons to create specific colours and textures in the vocal writing and to help characterise those images of New Zealand Baxter was so fond of depicting.

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Christopher Marshall  

New Zealand Advent Triptych

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1995
for SATB choir with soprano and bass soloists

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  • Programme Note

    A cycle of three Advent anthems with a text by S.E. Murray for ‘a cappella’ SATB choir. No. 2 contains solos for high soprano and bass. Commissioned by Prof. Peter Godfrey and the Kapiti Chorale in 1995, the work was first performed by Southern Consort of Voices in May 1996. By turns tender, meditative, and exhilarating with fresh, piquant harmonies.

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David Hamilton  

Rakiura

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1993
for SSAATTBB choir with alto solo

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  • Programme Note

    “Rakiura is the Maori name for Stewart Island – the Land of the Glowing Sky. The island lies to the far south of New Zealand. It is separated from the mainland of the South Island by Foveaux Strait. It is rugged, remote, bushclad, and very beautiful.” (from the ’Author’s note’ by Eileen Philipp in the published play script Rakiura).

    “Rakiura” is the name of a play by Eileen Philipp. It retells, in the style of a Japanese Noh play, the true story of a Japanese woman found living in a cave on Stewart Island in the late 1970’s. The woman had no coherent reason for being there, simply that she had had an obsessive need to travel far from Japan. Eventually convicted as an overstayer, she was escorted back to Japan by relatives. The play incorporates many of the stylized features of Noh drama including a chorus which comments on the action. My setting of parts of the text in no way tries to re-tell the narrative. Instead, I selected parts of the text which speak mainly of the landscape. In doing so, I have taken several liberties: the selected texts are presented here as though a single entity, whereas they come from various places in the play. Also, I have allocated the texts to choir or the alto solo according to structural or musical needs, rather than trying to retain the solo/chorus divisions of the original.

    The music oscillates between E minor and G minor harmonic centres. It is often quite static although there are two major climax points. Structurally the work is something of an arch, with the opening musical ideas returning at the end.

    Rakiura was commissioned by the Auckland Dorian Choir (conductor, Karen Grylls) with funding provided by the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged.

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Anthony Ritchie  

The Rose Family

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1995
for a cappella choir in up to 7 parts with soprano soloist

  • Programme Note

    The Rose Family was commissioned by Viva Voce of Auckland and composed in 1995. The theme of roses and some of the texts were chosen by Viva Voce’s conductor, John Rosser.

    The eight songs deal in a fairly light way with a variety of aspects of that most romantic of flowers, from love and happiness through to suffering, pain and death. Edmund Waller’s Go, lovely rose is a characteristic idealisation of a young woman and is romantic in style. In Herrick’s To the Rose, the rose is used to entrap a lover and force her to submit, and the music reflects this cruelty. Dorothy Parker suggests roses are all very well but she would have preferred a new car from her lover. The final song is an arrangement of James Oppenheim’s suffragette song Bread and Roses, and recalls the the sweated labour of women from the past.

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Kit Powell  

Whale

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1993
for SATB choir and tape

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