SOUNZ

Programme Note

Risky, perhaps, to create a set of ‘Lullabies’, if one wants to avoid sending an audience to sleep! But a lullaby might not always be soporific, if we consider the state of mind of the singer, who may be singing as much for themselves, projecting onto the child their own anxieties, frustrations, aspirations, hopes.

The musical language tries to suggest a folk-like simplicity; the invented languages likewise hinting at distant regions, no. I African perhaps, II Turkish, III Latinate, IV Pacific. In the final movement, the word ‘Calumbaya’ is borrowed from the name of a Filipino friend’s barrio, a name so euphonious as to be irresistible.

Invariably, mature age is a time for surrendering to seductive nostalgia and sentimentality, the very things one had previously studiously avoided. But the challenge is to find true beauty in the banal, and mystery in common cliché, something I attempted in my several settings of old songs, remembering my dear, departed paternal grandmother, and also my hale and hearty 100 year-old father, whose musical tastes extend little further than old style tunes like these.

Five Lullabies was composed in 1989 as a tribute to Peter Godfrey on his retirement, and was first performed in its entirety by the Tudor Consort. Musically, they were partly inspired by my discovery of the wonderful vocal polyphonies of some of China’s minority cultures, sometimes characterised by the so-called ‘dissonant’ interval of a 2nd being held to resonate as a consonant.
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- Baroque Voices: How Great is the Pleasure Year: 2001
  
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- Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music Vol. 6 - Composer Portrait: Jack Body Year: 2003
  
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- a bridge of dreams Year: 2011
  
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David Hamilton

Kaleidoscope Variations

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1987
for SSA voices (ad lib) and chamber orchestra

Instrumentation
2021;2200;2perc;strs.
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Kit Powell

Paper Pieces

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1986
7 short pieces on newspaper texts for SATB choir

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Annea Lockwood

Saouah!

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1987
for 16 voices, SATB and 4 unpitched gongs

Programme Note

Saouah! is a nightscape – sounds having the fleet and fluid disembodied quality of sounds overheard at night, snatches of human melody, clusters of close pitches with the hazy quality of sounds on the threshold of hearing. Separating the groups of singers allows me to play with sound as movement, to send syllables darting across the space, or circling and reversing direction.

Sound changes, not always predictably, as it travels across water, which interests me very much, and at first I planned to literally move the groups of singers around, to have them glide, silently changing position. But there seemed much to explore simply in designing paths for the sounds to travel from group to group, without complicating things with a choreography of boats.

Many of the words used in the text I invented for their sonic properties. The title derives from the onomatopoeic Samoan words which describes a speeding car’s swoosh – saoasaoa.

Annea Lockwood
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