Requiem for Bird is my attempt in using colouristic and textural orchestration to create sounds (or rather, my own imagined soundscape) of a tragedy in nat...

Panah takes as its starting point the sound of several European church bells, and musically develops the different partials within these sounds, heard as f...

This piece was originally written for piano in 1945 and arranged for small orchestra by the composer in 2005.

A fantasy for small orchestra, based on two ...

Soundscape for symphony orchestra was conceived in 1972 when the composer was a teacher at Barton Court School in Canterbury. As house mistress of a house ...

The poem Ode to a Nightingale was written in 1819 by John Keats (1795-1821) and published in 1820. Keats' friend Charles Brown relates that a nightingale h...

To understand the music fully, one should read Paul Gallico's story The Snow Goose. In his preface, the author wrote that he wished he had been a composer ...

Jubilee March was written in 1977 for the Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II and scored for brass band. This orchestral arrangement was made by the composer for...

When starting to think about this piece for the Westlake Symphony Orchestra (students of Westlake Girls’ and Boys’ High Schools) I decided to look for ‘local...

This fanfare for orchestra was written in November 1998 in preparation for the millennial celebrations. It is based on a song I wrote in 1979, setting the 14...

This short sequence of dances originally formed a little interlude in the middle of the second act of my opera, A Unicorn for Christmas. This act takes pla...

Toccata for Orchestra is a virtuoso showcase overture that encompasses dark sinister elements which undergo vast transformations. Its dark opening theme ch...

This symphony has three movements. All three start with the same pulse (crotchet=60), and the third movement also ends at this tempo. Both the rhythmic confl...

The first movement of this symphony opens quietly with a number of ideas in which the melodic interval of a fifth has some prominence. A faster section follo...

This work for symphony orchestra was commissioned by the Wellington Youth Orchestra in 1963 and received its first performance in 1966 by the London School o...

This concerto takes as its musical material an analysis of some fragments from disco songs, the most extreme colours of which are then isolated, extrapolated...

This short, simple work celebrates the region and the people of Golden Bay, Nelson, by taking the local geographical feature, Pupu Springs, as a structural s...

This piece is a collection of impressions revolving around the mood of winter in its many aspects. It has an overall form that is not necessarily sequential:...

The traditional philosophy of Zen is more than keeping the mind sharp and making it aware of the environment that is surrounding it. It involves strict relig...

The Auckland Symphony Orchestra commissioned this work in 1983 for John Russell, principal trombonist with the orchestra. It was premiered that year and ha...

A lively short work which was commissioned, premiered and recorded by Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.

The Charm Offensive takes as its text a testimony from J.S. Underwood, recanting evidence she gave that the African-American William Offett raped her (a whit...

"The Mountain" existed as a duo piano work first. It was commissioned by the legendary composer/pianist Frederic Rzewski and his long time collaborator, pian...

The Nor’ West Arch is a meteorological phenomenon that occurs above Canterbury, New Zealand. It is characterised by a clear blue sky with an arch of very hi...

An object that is translucent will allow light to pass through but not other details beyond basic form and shape. Thus when looking at a translucent object t...

Composed over 9 days in 2003, the idea of writing a piece of music with such a title developed while writing, over a ten year period, an opera based on the l...

Somnium is Latin for “dream”, and it is this idea that characterises the work. Somnium journeys through the first moments of sleep, the drift into an unpre...

This piece was inspired by and written for my three small boys. They spiral around like fireworks out of control, with seemingly endless energy and limitless...

'surge' is a fanfare for orchestra in three sections, in which repetitive rhythms and ostinati pulsate throughout the piece, as forces within the orchestra p...

I often use programmatic subjects in writing music, and when I began thinking about what this piece would be, one subject kept returning to me: the idea of s...

Based on themes by Henry Purcell and Princess Te Rangi Pai, and incorporating elements of The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34, written by Benja...

This is the final piece from a set of three works inspired by the following scripture:

_For the revelation awaits an appointed time, it speaks of the end ...