Longing is a lied for soprano and divisi string orchestra including a solo string quartet. The text was drawn from one of the Chinese poets who provided th...

Folk Song Suite for Strings is an arrangements of three folksongs. A Long Time Ago is a halyard shanty, My Man's Gone is a song from the Depression era...

This Symphony is dedicated to the memory of my wife, Raydia, who died in 2001, and is based on material from my song-cycle, In Despite of Death, a work that ...

Suite No. 1 for String Orchestra is dedicated to Alex Lindsay, founder and conductor of the Alex Lindsay String Orchestra. It was completed in April 1956 a...

The basis of this work is the chorale which concludes JS Bach's cantata No. 99 Was Gott tut, das is wohlgetan ('What God does, is done well'). The idea for...

This work was written for the Taharoto Orchestra - a group consisting of students from both Westlake Girls and Westlake Boys High Schools conducted by Liz Ca...

My visit to Ireland in 1994 exposed me to the traditional music, and I came away from vague thoughts of using some of the more rhythmic music in an extended ...

This work is based on the harpsichord piece La Piemontaise by Louis Couperin.

'Puanga’ is the star known to astronomers as Rigel and appears in the north eastern horizon in late May or early June. It is the brightest star in the conste...

If there are affiliations between this violin concerto and Robert Schumann’s (the former's premiere was programmed alongside the latter), perhaps the closest...

The marking, in July 1999, of the 30th anniversary of the first moon landing finally provided a focus for my thoughts about this piece. Although each movemen...

In 1985 Epsom Girls Grammar and Auckland Grammar Schools presented a double bill of two New Zealand plays. Under the overall title of Family Benefits, the ...

This work was the winner of the Wellington Youth Orchestra Composition Competition in 1981.

An orchestral work which grew out of an earlier version for chamber orchestra, which in turn evolved from part of the wind octet Kaleidoscope. Overall it i...

This piece is essentially an extended fanfare. It opens with a single note gradually fanning out to a chord in the brass, and this idea returns at the climax...

The title of this work may seem unexpected as there is no Concerto Grosso No. 1 in my list of works! However I've always considered my 1985 work for string...

This short concerto was written for the Taharoto Orchestra, a group consisting of students from Westlake Girls and Westlake Boys High Schools conducted by Li...

This short piece was one of a series of pieces commissioned over many years for the Junior School at Diocesan School for Girls, Auckland. Each year a group o...

When discussing the idea of a concert band work with conductor Barry Wasson, he indicated he would be keen to showcase two of the best players: an oboist and...

Prelude and three short sections depicting the Auckland landscape.

This work was written as part of a series of composer workshops organised by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, for works for organ and orchestra. The Auck...

As a young music student I was intrigued by the Baroque musical form of fugue, so much so that I include a paper on the subject in my Master's degree. Unfort...

On 19 November 2010 a large explosion occurred in the Pike River mine on the west coast of New Zealand's South island. Although hopes that there were survivo...

This orchestral work is based on the novel The Scarecrow by the great New Zealand comic novelist Ronald Hugh Morrieson. The world of small town New Zealan...

A piano concerto in three movements. The work is based on the Maori creation legends. Each movement depicts a stage in this mythology – the coming of exist...

A heartrending, exquisite sculpture of Christ on the Cross stands on a headstone in the graveyard of St. Gabriel's Church at Pawarenga in Northland, New Zeal...

In Northland, New Zealand, in the Port Albert Public Cemetery, among the graves of three generations of his pioneering forbears, is a plaque commemorating t...

Written in commemoration of the many children who have been the victims of war, this work was stimulated by the horrors of the conflict in Bosnia. It is an ...

A full-length symphony for large orchestra in three movements. It takes its title from the sequence of three sonnets The Islands by the New Zealand poet C...

T.S. Eliot's fecund poem The Waste Land has as many meanings as it has readers. Like many of those readers the poem has preyed on my mind since my first co...

Gumboot Waltz pays tribute to an iconic Kiwiana, with a few beats added to this traditional dance to accommodate the clumsiness of the heavy-duty footwear....