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Alex Taylor  

Attention:

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 2010
for actor and orchestra

Score Sample
  • Instrumentation
    2022; 4331; timp; 2 perc; strings
  • Programme Note

    On May 25 2010, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill, also known as “Three Strikes” legislation, sponsored by David Garrett, the ACT Party, and the Sensible Sentencing Trust, and supported by the National Party, under Prime Minister John Key. The law imposes mandatory maximum sentences on offenders who commit three “Strike” offences, removing judicial discretion. An almost identical bill was passed in California in 1994. California’s crime rate remains 11% above the national average, its prison population has increased to nearly 200,000, and its recidivism rate is the highest in the United States.

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Chris Adams  

River Lavalle

Duration: 1h 00' 00" Year: 2011
A Chamber Opera (six singers, eight instrumentalists incl sound effects operator) presented as a 1940s style radio play detective story with an underlying environmental theme.

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Robbie Ellis  

The Lover's Knot

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 2010
for orchestra and actor

Score Sample
  • Instrumentation
    2 fl, 2 ob (2nd doubling c.a.), 2 cl, bsn, cbsn 4 hn, 3 tpt, 2 tbn, b.tbn, tba timp, 2 perc (Triangle, Mark Tree, Large Metal Oil Barrel, Clash Cymbals, Wooden Floor, Sleigh Bells, Suspended Cymbal, Snare Drum, Bass Drum) harp, strings
  • Programme Note

    Walter Bolton was the last man executed for murder in New Zealand, hanged at Mt Eden Prison on 18 February 1957. He was convicted of poisoning his wife Beatrice with arsenic on their Whanganui farm.

    The story of his trial, questionable guilt and subsequent execution continues to raise many questions. Is it right to take a person’s life in exchange for another? What if society’s judgement was wrong? Would our society have made the same judgement today?

    But even more compelling than these moral questions is why a man like Walter Bolton would have been driven to murder in the first place. The prosecution contended that he had deliberately put sheep dip in her food; however arsenic was also found in the farm’s water supply – probably because it had leeched in from the normal daily use of that same sheep dip. The clincher for the jury’s guilty verdict was Walter’s admission that he had been having an affair with his sister-in-law, Florence – salacious but ultimately only circumstantial evidence. The decision to execute him was rushed: the trial took place shortly before Christmas 1956 and the judge and jury would have felt pressed to make it home to their families. Up until his death, Walter continued to maintain his innocence. Florence, a spinster, committed suicide soon after his execution and was rumoured to have left a note admitting to the killing.

    This combination of our script and music is a fictionalised interpretation of these historical circumstances. We have put Walter Bolton in his Mt Eden Prison cell in the early dawn hours before his execution. His mind wanders to his deceased wife Beatrice, his lover Florence, and the grotesque pantomime of the judicial system as he saw it. In The Lover’s Knot, he awaits the hangman’s noose.

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Michael Norris  

TIMEDANCE

Duration: 38' 00" Year: 2012
Live score for dance-film, in collaboration with choreographer/filmmaker Daniel Belton.

Score Sample
  • Instrumentation
    two violins, cello and piano
  • Programme Note

    Time is cut open. Time is dismantled. It is this gateway that we open and close to really observe movement, and to glimpse Spirit. In this work it is the reunion of separated or broken parts that finds fluidity and wholeness. The compass of the dance is given full articulation in this state – we can appreciate the elegance and the mastery of the human form in space.

    Time Dance is in one sense a study of the dancer in action. Sinews of time – this is the algebra. It is not only examining but also restoring – reuniting from fragments of time – these pieces of time are coalescing to make the dance. When the figure pauses, the cascading echoes created through dance catch up with it. These are the monuments. When we catch up with ourselves we create a harmonic in space time. It is another way of celebrating being human. In the work we observe the relationship and sense of belonging to our home planet, Earth. This is geological, and thalassic – like a great cloak of emotion, the geometric grids and moving point maps are energetic prints containing our stories, our journeys, our pain, fear, beauty, love and joys. They are rippling beyond time, across time with the emotional frequencies that make up what it is to be human. This is also a dance. Time will quiver. I want to magnify silence and distort stillness. The geometry is a field of consciousness. Ultimately our physical bodies are the products of wave actions. The shadow is going into a wave space – and that alters the way we see everything.

    Source: http://www.michaelnorris.info

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Simon Eastwood  

(un)seen

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 2011
for alto flute/piccolo, cello and percussion (2 woodblocks and a cowbell)

  • Programme Note

    seen was written as music for dance in collaboration with choreographer Justyna Janiszewska. It explores the boundary between what is seen and unseen, know and unknown, heard and unheard. The music for this piece is built upon ideas influenced by gamelan music, mainly the idea of building a rhythmic texture up from the one rhythmic line layered on to of itself at different speeds. Each section explores a different aspect of the relationship between these different layers. However, this rhythmic framework itself is never fully exposed, and so itself remains unheard while it exerts an influence on the piece from a distance.

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