Search Music:

Felicity Williams  

A Cat and Mouse Love Story

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1991
a dance drama for assorted classroom instruments

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.

• Availability

  • Farquhar: Short Suite from Ring Round the Moon; computer-set 

    Score and parts | Hardcopy - computer set
    
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  • Farquhar: A Short Suite from Ring Round the Moon; computer-set 

    Parts - written | Hardcopy - computer set
    

  • Farquhar: Short Suite from Ring Round the Moon; computer set 

    Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
    
    $20.00
    • • Quantity:
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  • SOUNZ Orchestral 1993 

    DAT
    
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  • New Zealand Composers  Year: 1995 

    CD
    
    $30.00
    • • Quantity:
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Juliet Palmer  

Cocktail

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1999
a site-specific collaboration for two percussionists and seven dancers

• Availability

  • Palmer: Cocktail; computer-set 

    Parts - written | Pdf - computer set
    

Bruce Crossman  

Daragang Magayon Cantata

Duration: 17' 00" Year: 2001
for mezzo-soprano, piano and (optional) dancer/chanter

• Programme Note

  The rich overtone resonances from low, rubber-stopped notes on the piano create sensuous single sound moments in the music. These Filipino gong music inspired resonances combine with slow European chorale-like gestures throughout to provide breath moments within an increasingly combative musical texture. The melodic-line derived from Bontok war-chant, usually the prerogative of men, finds full cry in erotic “sea ripples”, which in turn generates long-lyric lines expressive of the poem’s princess meditation on war. Even the chorale-like breath segments work in shortening gasps leading to transfigured Kulintang (Filipino percussion) segments whose dance-like momentum undergird the “metal timbre” climax of work. The text is drawn from Merlinda Bobis’ epic poem Cantata of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon – a revisionist re-telling of the Philippines ancient myth associated with the active volcano Mount Mayon. It charts the play of ambivalence and conviction of a beautiful maiden on the eve of battle and is interpreted by the composer as a metaphor of volcanic, erotically-fuelled anger against social injustice, not just in war but in cultural colonisation.

• Availability

  • Crossman: Daragang Magayon Cantata; computer  

    Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
    
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  • Daragang Magayon Cantata - Bruce Crossman / Merlinda Bobis 

    Video
    
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  • Bruce Crossman: Selected Works (1996-2001) 

    CD
    
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  • Bruce Crossman: Intercultural Sounds 

    CD
    
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  • Bruce Crossman: Selected Works (1996-2001) Vol. 2 

    CD
    
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  • Double Resonances - Bruce Crossman  Year: 2008 

    CD
    

Susan Frykberg  

Desires

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 1990
for tape, singer and 2 actors

Dorothea Franchi  

Do-Wack-A-Do

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1968
orchestral suite from the original music for ballet of the same name

• Availability

  • Dorothea Franchi: Do-Wack-A-Do; audio 

    Media on Demand | Embedded
    

  • New Zealand Composers: Franchi, Axtens, Bowater, Freed, Lockwood 

    CD
    
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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.

Cheryl Camm  

Elements

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1989
for tape with dancers

Felicity Williams  

Hemi Dances

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1988
dance drama for voice, assorted classroom percussion, piano and synthesiser

Philip Norman  

House of Awa

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1984
piano music for dance-theatre piece