Search Music:

burlesques mécaniques is a rather extroverted collection of grotesque miniatures whose characters are not people or animals but dances. These dances have been mechanised, electrified, and often obscured by their own rhythmic impulse. Old forms and formulaic tropes are given new identities, freed from the confines of metric stability and the expectation that they be “danceable”. The essentially mechanical, artificial aspect of music (and of art in general?) is embodied in the piano, here a brittle, seedy protagonist whose string limbs hover and flail about it. Conflicting rhythms dominate the surface, oscillating between insistent repetition and mad, angular flourishes. The generally jerky, muscular rhythmic material is periodically frozen throughout the work, most strikingly in the ninth movement (chain). Here a string of rich, impressionistic chords briefly reveals an alternative, interior world which is then rudely dismissed in an almost haphazard finale.

• Taylor: burlesques mécaniques; computer set 

  Score and parts | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $30.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Taylor: burlesques mécaniques; computer set 

  Score and parts | Pdf - computer set
  
  $23.50
  • • Quantity:

• Adams, C.: Contemporary Triptych; computer set 

  Score and parts | Pdf - computer set
  
  $20.50
  • • Quantity:

• Adams, C.: Contemporary Triptych; computer set 

  Score and parts | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $25.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Chris Adams: Contemporary Triptych; video 

  Media on Demand | Embedded
  

‘eye-glitter out of black air 1’ is part of a cycle of pieces written for the players of the Slovene wind quintet Slowind. To date, the cycle includes solo pieces for all of the instruments of the standard wind quintet, two wind quintets and a piece for wind quintet and orchestra.

• Hall: eye-glitter out of black air 1; facsimile 

  Full score | Pdf - facsimile
  
  $23.00
  • • Quantity:

• Hall: eye-glitter out of black air 1; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  $27.50
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

‘eye-glitter out of black air 2’ is the second version of a wind quintet that forms part of a cycle of pieces written for the players of the Slovene wind quintet Slowind. To date, the cycle includes solo pieces for all of the instruments of the standard wind quintet, two wind quintets and a piece for wind quintet and orchestra.

• Hall: eye-glitter out of black air 2; facsimile 

  Full score | Pdf - facsimile
  
  $21.00
  • • Quantity:

• Hall: eye-glitter out of black air 2; facsimile 

  Full score | Hardcopy - facsimile
  
  $25.50
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

F.S.M. could stand for: Fabricated Sheet Metal; Fault Summary Message; Federated States of Micronesia; Female Seeking Male; Fiji School of Medicine; Financial Services Marketing; Finite-state machine; Fire Safety Manager; Flying Spaghetti Monster; Franciscan Sisters of Mary; Free Speech Movement; Frequency Shift Modulation; Full Screen Mode and at least 250 other possibilities.

Hallelujah is used to express praise or joy.

It is conceivable that the title of this piece has some relevance to the music. It is less likely that this programme note will help the audience to determine the relevance of the title or compositional intent of the composer.

• Adams, C.: F.S.M. Hallelujah!; computer set 

  Score and parts | Pdf - computer set
  
  $26.00
  • • Quantity:

• Adams, C.: F.S.M. Hallelujah!; computer set 

  Score and parts | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $31.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

This composition is based on a Chinese poem by Wang We (701-761), who was one of the most admired Tang Dynasty poets and painters. Many of his works take a Buddist perspective, and reflect his focus on Zen practice. He is able to combine love of nature with the philosophy of life. Su Shi (1037-1101), a Chinese litterateur and artist once said, “The quality of Wang Wei’s poems can be summed as, the poems each hold a painting within them. In observing Wang Wei’s paintings you can see that, within the painting there is poetry.”

• Lin: Infusing Zen; computer-set 

  Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
  

• Jeff Lin: Infusing Zen 

  CD
  

• Ritual Auras - Karlheinz Company  Year: 2011 

  CD
  
  $30.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

The subtitle of this work is “Variations on a theme of Jenny McLeod”. In late 2012 I had conducted several movements from Jenny McLeod’s “Sun Festival Carols” and was constantly haunted by the music of the seventh movement “Jade”. Something about the vitality of the music and its melodic and harmonic language got stuck in my head (what is often called an “ear-worm”!).

When I was asked if I had anything for a school chamber music group of 3 violins and cello, I thought writing a work based on Jenny’s music might finally exorcise the piece from my brain. To this group I asked if I could add a wind instrument to allow a five-part texture, hence the flute.

The work is a set of variations on the opening section of the “Jade” movement of “Sun Festival Carols”. It’s not a set of traditional variations, in that the harmonic skeleton is not retained through each variation. Rather, it is a set of pieces based on elements of the original music – melodic, rhythmic and harmonic.

The work opens with a fairly straight-forward instrumentation of the original music from bars 1 to 42. The first variation picks up on the opening soprano melody idea, and this is further examined in the 2nd variation. The third variation is a slow and solemn piece using a five beats-in-a-bar time signature, based on a tiny fragment of melody which is initially buried in the 3rd violin part. The lively 4th variation is for just the flute and 1st violin, and draws on melodic elements from the coda of the original piece. The 5th variation is an energetic re-working of harmonic elements using irregular time signatures. The 6th variation is fugal, again based on the opening soprano melody. The theme is treated in a variety of ways eventually being augmented to double its original duration and then to notes four times their original values. This variation leads without pause into the finale which is an instrumentation of the chorus section of the original work, concluding with a glance back at the opening music, A few bold unexpected chords round off the work.

“Jade Variations” was written at the suggestion of Jocelyn Beath for a group of students in New Plymouth.

• David Hamilton: Jade Variations - hardcopy score 

  Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $23.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

This work was written for the NZTrio while I was the inaugural University of Otago/James Wallace Artist in Residence at the Pah Homestead.

Twinkle twinkle little star
how I wonder what you are?
A little bit hound, a little bit fox,
a junkie for the ballot box?
Twinkle twinkle little star
who’d have thought you’d come this far.

[adapted from Sam Mahon’s A Knight’s Tale]

While Jekyll Rat is based on a prominent New Zealand politician, it unfortunately could be applicable to a number of political figures. It deals with my anger and frustration that a number of local body representatives and nationally elected politicians forget that they were elected to represent their constituents and instead become absorbed by the power and prestige of the position, or use their power and influence for personal gain.

Jekyll Rat has three movements. The first “Me ne frego” (translation: I don’t give a dam), starts with the statement of the principal theme but then over the course of the movement is gradually consumed by an insidiously growing chromatic semiquaver sequence in the strings. The second “Sycophant’s Dance,” moves between sections of slightly awkward and clumsy pomposity, teetering fragility and vicious rage. The final movement “Insanity represented by Mustard Yellow” is fast and frenetic until it finally ends with an almost elegiac reprisal of the principal theme.

• Chris Adams: Jekyll Rat - hardcopy score & parts 

  Score and parts | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $31.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Chris Adams: Jekyll Rat - downloadable PDF 

  Score and parts | Pdf - computer set
  
  $27.00
  • • Quantity:

When I think of a piano trio, I immediately think of a transparent interplay of lines. This has something to do with the fact that the instruments that make up the modern piano trio are not particularly homogeneous, unlike say, a string quartet. It’s as if somebody had strewn some line drawings of simple three dimensional objects on a photographer’s lightbox, all on top of one another, resulting in an unexpected and strangely beautiful assemblage.

• Margetic: Lightbox; computer set 

  Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $26.50
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow

• Margetic: Lightbox; computer set 

  Full score | Pdf - computer set
  
  $22.00
  • • Quantity:

A doorstep is the highest mountain.

• Hextall: Portal; computer-set 

  Full score | Pdf - computer set
  
  $15.00
  • • Quantity:

• Hextall: Portal; computer-set 

  Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
  
  $15.00
  • • Quantity:
  • Borrow