I started my second cruise ship contract as a sketch and improv music director for Second City with a resolution: I would compose and notate a brand new mini...

The lyrics to these songs come from a poetry collection by the Auckland poet, playwright and paediatrician Renee Liang. Renee, a second-generation Chinese Ne...

Ha! Hoo! Oh... hey! Omm...

In 2010, I co-wrote The Lover's Knot with playwright Renee Liang as part of the 2010–2011 Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra Composer Workshops, which led to a ...

ELLIS, Robbie (1984–): The Piano Tuner's Performance Appraisal. File under (N) Novelty; (P) Piano Music; (S) Serialism.

Banda is a genre that sprang to life in the late nineteenth century when Mexican music collided with the polka of German immigrants. Traditional bandas are c...

Huff is both the act of exhaling, and the sound of air moving through a wind instrument. The piece starts as a saxophonist would: after the instrument comes ...

I wrote this at a gig called "Song Sale". I used to run the gig monthly when I lived in Dunedin. Now other people run it monthly cause I don’t live in Dune...

Starting in a field close to Melbourne's Western Ring Road, a llama lives a placid and slightly bored existence. Absent-mindedly picking at a chain-link fenc...

Promise & Promiscuity is a one-woman theatre play set in the world of Jane Austen’s novels. Written by Auckland entertainer Penny Ashton to debut at th...

Austen Found: The Undiscovered Musicals of Jane Austen is an improvised show for four or five actors plus a pianoforte player – a story in the style of Jan...

In September 2007 at the University of Auckland, I attended the launch of Spectrum 4, a book of short stories. These stories were the end-product of 24 wri...

Written for the 2004 Douglas Lilburn Trust Composition Prize competition, Fanfare of the Earth dates from my second year of undergrad at the University of ...

Flat White is a song about being a New Zealander in the United States.

There is a real cultural difference between the homeland of the Western classical tradition – that is, continental Europe – and New Zealand. This cultural di...

The onomatopoeic word "flttttt” has its origins in the ancient Meidup language of Miunkelsneimistan, and it denotes an impaired yet frustrating fly. I first ...

Glowing Radioactive Elements started life as a semi-improvised piece with four movements. Radium is an element which glows pale blue, Plutonium glows deep ...

It is easy to overlook things that seem insignificant in life and forget the need to stop and pay attention to details. We can miss the joy and importance of...

This composition is based on the quote: 'Within every elderly person there's a younger person wondering what happened.' In it I have drawn on sound-scape, e...

Invisible Waves, inspired by the Orewa Beach in Auckland, imitates the evening sea waves, sound of the seagulls accompany the sunset. The melodic material ...

This is a short, tonal, romantic and somewhat wistful piece very much in the style and musical language of English composers of the 1940s and 50s.

Life Cycle is a collection of four miniatures, each evoking a stage of an organism’s existence: infancy, transition, stasis, rebirth.

Co-Composed with Little Bushman Band

Co-Composed with Little Bushman Band

Tautalatala is universally used to teach the Samoan Language throughout the Globe, especially in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Cover of the original published score, from the Commonwealth National Library collection.

Early in 2010 I wrote Me he korokoro tui for a choral festival. The text of that work made reference to singing and the tui. A native bird of New Zealand. ...

The genesis of this piece was the second movement, originally written in 2019 as a short piece in tribute to New Zealand composer John Rimmer on his 80th bir...