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David Farquhar  

A Short Suite from "Ring Round the Moon"

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1975
for full orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    2222; 4230; timp, perc; strs.
  • Programme Note

    This music was originally commissioned by Richard Campion for the New Zealand Players’ production of Ring Round the Moon by Jean Ahhouil, translated by Christopher Fry. In the second act there is a ball taking place offstage and demanding a large number of dances which are specified in the text.

    The music was first recorded on acetate discs by a ad hoc orchestra led by Alex Lindsay; these small recordings were then played through speakers for the production, sounding very loud to the cast but filtering out more gently to the audience. At the end of the long national tour, the cast knew the music very well and suggested to me that I should do something with it.

    The result, some years later, 1957, was a suite of nine dances first performed by the Alex Lindsay Orchestra. This rapidly became my most performed piece and was commercially recorded by the Alex Lindsay Orchestra in the 1960s, a recording still available today from Kiwi Pacific Reords.

    Ashley Heenen, through the NZ APRA Committee, commissioned an arrangement for full orchestra for the NZ Youth Orchestra to take on a tour of Europe and China in 1975. This version was shortened to six dances by leaving out the first three numbers. The music has also been used for a ballet, The Wintergarden, choreographed by Arthur Turnbull for the Royal New Zealand Ballet Company – this version included a tenth dance not in the 1957 Suite. Since 1975 two further version have been commissioned: Waltz Suite (1989), for string orchestra (five dances) for the Nova Strings, and an arrangement of the original Dance Suite (1992) for violin and piano (nine dances) for Isador Saslav.

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Thomas Goss  

Eagle's Children

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 2000
music for a choreographic poem by Anandha Ray and Charles Anderson

  • Instrumentation
    for singers and chamber orchestra - flute, clarinet, 2 bassoons, 5 percussionists, acoustic guitar, double bass; Native American singers
  • Programme Note

    Original programme note from the premiere:

    For co-choreographer Anandha Ray, this dance is a very personal introspection. Ms. Ray dedicates this dance to Dan Meeks, the seventh son of a seventh son, medicine man for his tribe, her late great-grandfather. Though her family’s American Indian heritage was kept secret to avoid the severe prejudices of the South, Ms. Ray was privileged to learn from him a few of the traditions for planting and using sacred tobacco as a healing tool. The dance was inspired in honor of this ancestry. Anandha Ray and Charles Anderson, with widely varying backgrounds and styles of dance, collaborated with Thomas Goss in each section of the choreographic process to co-create the sections and movements of the dance and music. Loran Watkins’ costume design augments the abstract representation of Ray’s memories of her American Indian culture intertwined with her family’s need to hide this heritage. The lyrics in Goss’s score were adapted and translated by Native American healer Fred Jack Miles Manitoumahwhingon from a traditional Chippewa Indian prayer for times of journey, whether physical or spiritual.

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Edwin Carr  

Promenade

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1985
ballet suite for orchestra

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Noel Sanders  

Sacred to the Memory of Death

Duration: 17' 00" Year: 1974
for amplified clarinet, 2 cor anglais, 2 horns, 4 percussion, 3 dancers

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Matthew Suttor  

Sarrasine

Duration: 16' 38" Year: 1999
a dramatic monologue with music on tape for live performer

  • Instrumentation
    music on tape, for a live performer and optional interactive control of sound files, and projected imagery mixed in realtime. Equipment required for performance includes two Macintosh G3 computers, a Silicon Graphics workstation, MIDI interfaces, a video camera and a video projector.
  • Programme Note

    Sarrasine takes a pragmatic approach to so-called real-time interactive music technology. The environments I am using to perform this work, BigEye (video to MIDI) and Image/ine (real-time control of video processing), were developed at the Studios for Electronic Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam.

    These programs produce no sound themselves but offer a myriad of control possibilities and in doing so ask the question: what is a musical instrument? A computer keyboard, a mouse, a video camera?

    Matthew Suttor’s multimedia theater piece, “Sarrasine”, is comprised of eight sections, and is based on Balzac’s “Sarrasine”. Balzac’s work takes place in the 1830’s at a party in Paris as two lovers discuss the tale of Sarrasine, a frightful old man, believed to be over 100 years old, who is seated in a corner. Though the narrative of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” is difficult to discern from a first listening, the major themes of Suttor’s work are conveyed through a pleasantly overwhelming barrage of sound and video, enhanced and enriched by the live performance of Suttor. This collage of richly variegated of sounds and images, collected from across centuries, challenges the audience to weigh the world of Balzac’s latent tale with Suttor’s “Sarrasine”.

    In the beginning of “Sarrasine”, the text projected onto a large video screen directly behind Suttor invites the audience to, “Imagine you are sitting in an opera house. Somewhere in France. Nowhere fancy. Provincial even. In 1999.” And later, Balzac’s texts recounts, “Sarrasine left for Italy in 1758.” Henceforth the audience is invited to dispel the notion of chronological time and geographical place, and imagine a landscape which fuses past and present worlds as the work draws upon references across centuries.

    The sonic world of the opera is a blend of the recorded speech of the Suttor’s voice reading from Balzac’s text, recorded and processed mbira, harpsichord, flutes, and other electro-acoustic samples. Despite their possibly disparate features and implications, Suttor combines these sounds, and successfully forges a unique sonic world which at once suggests the Eighteenth century of Balzac’s piece as well as our own time.

    Though Suttor remained mute throughout the performance, allowing the recorded music and text to speak for him, his reserved, yet precise, performance maintained a delicate balance such that he could step in and out of the pre-recorded video world. The video often contained images of paintings from the earlier time periods, including one recurring image of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” Suttor at one point assumed the pose of Venus, and their striking resemblance was as provocative as amusing. At another moment, Suttor stood such that a portion of the video was projected onto his body as well as onto the screen. In the most complete union of the video and live performance, the screen contained live video footage of Suttor writing and drawing as prerecorded video images were superimposed on the screen.

    As the audience watched Suttor literally step in and out of the video, and listened to his pre-recorded music and voice tell the story of Sarrasine, the audience was compelled to draw parallels and conclusions regarding the juxtaposition of the two distinct yet delightfully mergeable worlds of Balzac’s and Suttor’s Sarrasine.

    Report written by David Birchfield, Producer of the Movement and Sound Concerts

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Gillian Whitehead  

the wind was in their wings

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 1990
for string quartet

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