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Jack Body  

After Bach

 Year: 2001
for eight violins, eight violas, and four cellos

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Jack Body  

After Bach

 Year: 2001
for gamelan, 4 solo violas and massed violas

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Gareth Farr  

Anniversary Antics

 Year: 2002
for 16 solo strings

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Samuel Gray  

Ethnic Conflict for String Ensemble

Duration: 09' 30" Year: 2010
for 13 string players

  • Instrumentation
    for 13 string players (4,4,2,2,1) or for full string orchestra

    Extra chairs or stools: these need to be knocked over loudly, so they must be placed away from the musicians in such a way that they will not fall onto the musicians; 2-4 very cheap old violins and/or violas that can be smashed and destroyed (optional);

    Players' voices: the instrumentalists must be of both genders, as both male and females are required to scream and yell
  • Programme Note

    This work begins with two authentic folk melodies from two (European) ethnic groups that, most recently in 2008, were engaged in armed violence. The similarity of the melodies, and the fact that layman cannot tell the two melodies apart, highlights the fact that ethnic hatred requires group-internal discourses to be nourished and exacerbated.

    Violence between two or more groups of people that see each other as ‘the others’, continues to shape the lives of millions of people globally.
    Composer Samuel Gray has first-hand experience of ethnic violence as an independent volunteer in Kosovo. While Gray realises that is impossible to represent the suffering and terror of war and its emotional and societal aftermath in music and does not wish to belittle such experiences through this work, he believes that in order for contemporary classical music to continue play a role in modern society, it needs to not ignore the problems that modern society has to deal with.

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Ronald Tremain  

Five Epigrams for Twelve Solo Strings

Duration: 06' 00" Year: 1967
for string ensemble of any size

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Jack Body  

Flurry

Duration: 02' 00" Year: 2002
for three string quartets

Audio Sample
  • Programme Note

    This work was commissioned by the 2002 New Zealand International Festival of Arts as an “encore” for the three string quartets who had participated in a triple-bill concert. In a kind of energetic flurry, each quartet plays its own version of a simple 4-note motive. Three other motives also appear as “cultural tags”: Singapore being pentatonic, New Zealand as somewhat self-effacing, and Mexico reminiscent of the South American protest song “The People United Shall Never be Defeated”.

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Jack Body  

Four Haiku

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1967
for prepared piano and 21 solo strings

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John Rimmer  

Gossamer

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 1984
for 12 solo strings

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Neville Hall  

Whispered by the perfumed breath of silence

Duration: 09' 00" Year: 1999
for solo violin and 12 string instruments

Score Sample
  • Instrumentation
    for solo violin and 8 violins, 2 violas and 2 cellos
  • Programme Note

    The mode of perception invoked during aesthetic experience seems to be quite different from that of quotidian experience. We perceive more intensely and in more detail. We are less concerned with the object as being representative of a class of objects and focus more on its specificity, becoming hypersensitive to its form. Certainly, we also look for “meaning”, but in a much more speculative, open fashion. Aesthetic objects often evoke meaning in an intransitive sense – the aesthetic object is allowed to “mean” without necessarily “meaning something”.

    In response to these thoughts about the nature of the aesthetic experience I have tried to focus on the finest possible gradations of difference in the sounds I have employed in this work. In particular, the performers must articulate microscopic differences in timbre, dynamics, pitch and speed of repetition, bringing these distinctions to the foreground as the basic material of the composition.

    The function of the solo violin, supported by a quartet of violins, is no more significant than that of the remaining ensemble. Together they articulate one unified structure; they simply take different paths through this structure, converging at a point near the end of the piece. When the two paths converge we finally hear the material from which the whole piece is derived. In retrospect, we may become aware of the development of this material, which has been rendered somewhat covert by its non-linear presentation.

    A significant factor in the shaping of the whole piece is the title. A recording of the title was subjected to a spectral analysis and the resulting information was used to shape, in a selective and fragmented way, the behaviour of the instrumental parts over time. I avoided directly translating the harmonic makeup of the spectral analysis to the piece, focusing instead on transferring the small shifts and changes in individual partials into microscopic changes in pitch and timbre. The result is that the microrhythmic and macrorhythmic characteristics, as well as the overall compression and expansion of the spectral field are identical in both the finished piece and the spectral analysis of the title.

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