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Jenny McLeod  

18 Easy Pieces

Duration: 17' 00" Year: 1996
easy pieces for 1-4 players (or more)

Ronald Dellow  

8 Songs From The I Ching

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1998
a cycle for high voice and oboe

Felicity Williams  

A Cat and Mouse Love Story

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

Maria Grenfell  

A Pinch of Time...

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1991
five songs for baritone (or medium voice) and piano

Denise Hulford  

A prayer for the twenty-first century woman

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1999
for bass clarinet, bassoon and 2 violoncellos

David Hamilton  

A Shakespeare Garland

Duration: 17' 00" Year: 1999
for SAATB choir, guitar and piano

  • Programme Note

    Every now and then the deputy musical directors of Auckland Choral Society are invited to jointly conduct a concert. In 1999 this took the form of a ’subscriber’s bonus’ concert, containing works requiring minimal accompaniment forces. Early discussions lead us in the direction of a Shakespeare-themed concert. In addition to conducting some American settings of Shakespeare, I decided to write a new cycle using Shakespearean texts. Given the nature of the intended concert, I wanted to write a work which was immediately approachable and contained an element of fun. My original intention was to compose a cycle based on references to flowers in Shakespeare’s writings, as I had a copy of a book which detailed them. However, it soon became apparent that many references were part of texts which were not suitable for a musical setting : some were conversational and others merely a passing mention of a flower. I broadened my scope a little and fashioned a sequence of seven texts which all refer in some way to things botanical and/or seasonal. The first text is from ‘As You Like It’ and sets the well-known ‘it was a lover and his lass’ in a jazzy idiom. A complete contrast of mood is presented in ‘Come, buy’ from ‘The Winter’s Tale’, where the words detail a variety of items which might be purchased to charm a lady. The third piece is a short setting of ‘Hark, hark the lark’ from ‘Cymberline’. Unlike Schubert’s well-known setting, this lark is rather boisterous and rowdy! The music owes more than a little to mid-twentieth century film music, perhaps a film involving a frenetic chase sequence! The centerpiece of the cycle is a setting of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (sonnet 18). Here the women’s voices are heard on their own, with the 2nd altos given a rare chance to take the limelight. The fifth piece is a reflective setting of ‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows’ from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Initially unison voices present the melody, breaking into harmony only for the second half of the song. Throwing caution to the wind, the sixth piece is a madcap, cartoonish setting of ‘When daisies pied’ from ’Love’s Labour’s Lost’. Where better to end the cycle than with the ‘flower-power’ era of the 1960’s and a swinging version of ‘Under the greenwood tree’ from ‘As You Like It’, using just about every harmonic cliche of the music of that time. ‘A Shakespeare Garland’ was written for, and is dedicated to, Auckland Choral Society who gave the first performance.

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Neville Hall  

a splinter of silence in the belly of time

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1994
for string quartet and clarinet

Felicity Williams  

A Story, A Story

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1990
A puppet show with music

Craig Utting  

Adrift

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1999
for four cellos

John Young  

Allting Runt Omkring

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1998
8-channel electroacoustic

  • Instrumentation
    8 -channel electroacoustic
  • Programme Note

    This work was composed on the 8-channel digital sound system at EMS Stockholm while I was a visiting composer there in 1998. The piece grew out of my encounters with the Stockholm soundscape, which surprised me with its clarity and vitality – both above and below the ground… the chimes of church clocks audible across very large distances…the tunnelbana (subway) with its caverns hewn out of granite, where even quiet shuffles of feet are etched with clarity… skaters on the open air ice rink… footsteps on granite stairs and creaking floors. Along with these I integrated a number of field recordings made in my own country… a fairground, with ghost train and house of mirrors… wind gently resonating a flagpole… I found many of these sounds so captivating that I realised I was carrying impressions of them in my head, and frequently imagining the presence of one sound ‘inside’ another as I was hearing them (both in and out of the studio). ‘Allting Runt Omkring’ attempts to project some of that sensation by creating a new context in which field recordings from the natural world are integrated and transformed. All sound sources in the work are environmental in origin. I work exclusively with my own field recordings, since for me it is important to have a connection with the original context of my sound sources. In this piece the context in which sounds are heard and shaped was an important stimulus, while the tape medium allows me to forge new contextual relationships for the sound. For example, in Stockholm there are a large number of churches and public buildings in the main city area, especially Gamla Stan (the old town), but also across to the islands of Kungsholmen and Soder. At quarter hour intervals the clocks of Stockholm chime, and from a single vantage point one can hear an astonishing depth in the soundscape. The Stockholm tunnelbana also has a great acoustical presence and range of sounds, and in this piece I have tried to fuse sounds of ‘above’ and ‘below’ ground (for instance by linking the bell resonances to the tunnelbana, or by taking the noise of trains to the ice rink).

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