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The music draws on images of the natural environment, and in particular New Zealand’s coastal landscape. One might imagine the sounds of wind and water, and birdsong, and the dim outlines of rugged coastlines and bush-covered hills. These shadows come in and out of focus, against the backdrop of the work’s technical explorations. Formally, there is an emphasis organisation at the sonic level, and particularly the way in which accumulations of timbres, densities and textures change over time. Each player is a soloist, while at the same time ever-changing instrumental groupings fuse into composite sound-masses. There is a constant tension between these shifting masses and the virtuosic individual lines which scatter around them.

• Brownlee: Landforms; facsimile 

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• Brownlee: Landforms; facsimile 

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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.

• Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi; computer-set 

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• Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi; computer set 

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• Gillian Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi; audio 

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• Gillian Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi 

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• Gillian Whitehead: Puhake ki te rangi  Year: 2007 

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• Buchanan: Seven Interpretation; computer set 

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• Buchanan: Seven Interpretation; computer set 

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• Buchanan: Seven Interpretations; facsimile 

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• Freed: Sounds and Winds of Wellington; facsimile 

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• Freed: Sounds and Winds of Wellington; facsimile 

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