Music
Search this list of all my publicly available works using the search box, or the category and year lists. Information about each work includes where to buy, borrow or listen to it.
Quintet
For oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano
Quintet was commissioned by Chamber Music New Zealand, with funding from Creative New Zealand, for the Brisbane-based Southern Cross Soloists. They gave the first performance as part of a national tour at the Regent on Broadway in Palmerston North on 10 July 2003.
About the work
Because of the limitations of range of the instruments (only the piano has extremes of range), their different tuning systems and the fact that only the clarinet among the wind instruments has possibilities of extended techniques, this piece explores more ‘classical’ ideas than some of the other pieces I wrote around this time.
Quintet is in a single movement with several sections. The work uses a set of 6 notes as its basic idea: sounded together they have a restless quality, but the structure of the set provides both diversity and connection between the sound worlds of the piece.
At the outset, a variety of ideas and textures are presented, not unlike moment form, but not using the extremities of 20th century moment form. A second section, over a piano pedal, initiates an exchange between the bassoon and other instruments. This leads to a rapid scherzo-like section, with a monodic trio. It is closely followed by a slow movement, based on a close-range melody that is a tribute to Hirini Melbourne, who died during the writing of this section. The oboe cadenza which follows is the structural centre of the quartet, and is followed by a reworking in reverse of the material already presented. The ending leaves the piece unresolved.
Score and recording
Buy or borrow the score from SOUNZ.
Quintet was recorded as part of SOUNZ’s Resound project.
Arapātiki
A landscape prelude for piano
Arapātiki was commissioned by Stephen De Pledge with funding from Creative New Zealand. It is one of 12 landscape preludes by New Zealand composers that he commissioned and premiered at the New Zealand Festival in 2008.
About the work
Arapātiki translates as ‘the path of the flounder’ and is the old name of the sandflats in front of my house at Harwood, on the Otago Peninsula.
The piece has to do with the advance and retreat of the tide across the flats, where many species of sea and water birds spend much of their day — an ever-varying waterscape. The opening flourish is based on the sound of the korimako or bellbird.
Kenneth Young recorded an introduction to all the landscape preludes for SOUNZ’s Resound project.
Landscape Preludes: introduction — RNZ
Stephen de Pledge talks about the project to SOUNZ.
The Landscape Preludes — Youtube
Scores and recordings
Buy or borrow the score and CDs from SOUNZ.
Arapātiki has been released on 3 CDs, each recording by a different pianist.
Hear and watch Stephen de Pledge give the premiere of the work in 2008.
Potiki’s memory of stone
Incidental music for taonga pūoro
Play by Briar Grace-Smith
The first performance of Potiki’s memory of stone was given at the Court Theatre in Christchurch in July 2003. The incidental music uses taonga pūoro played by Richard Nunns and realised by Steve Garden.
About the work
Briar Grace’s play is about a young greenstone carver, Potiki who knows there is a dark secret surrounding his childhood. On the South Island’s west coast, 2 Māori carvers, Tam and Manaaki, went searching for a sacred greenstone boulder 20 years previously. They took Potiki, Manaaki’s little son with them. Something terrible happened that day to wreak havoc on all involved. To uncover the truth behind this greenstone trail Potiki must piece together a series of memories.
Get the manuscript
Playmarket provides information about the play and performance rights.
Postcards from Harwood
Settings of 5 haiku for voice and piano
Texts by the Otago Peninsula Writing Group
Postcards from Harwood was written to celebrate my friend and colleague, John Elmsly’s 50th birthday and is dedicated to him.
The first performance was given by Glenese Blake (soprano) and Richard Liu (piano) on 28 July 28 2002 in a Karlheinz concert in the Music Theatre at the University of Auckland.
About the work
The piece sets 5 haiku — all evocations of aspects of the Otago peninsula — written by members of the Otago Peninsula Writing Group: Kay Sinclair (1 and 4), Joyce Whitehead (2) and the composer (3 and 5).
Score
Buy or borrow the score from SOUNZ.
Alice
Monodrama for mezzo-soprano and full orchestra
Text: Fleur Adcock
Alice was written as part of my residency with the Auckland Philharmonia in 2001. The first performance was given in July 2003 by the Auckland Philharmonia conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya with Helen Medlyn (mezzo-soprano).
About the work
Alice is 8 sections which often merge into one another.
- In a letter to her father, Alice describes shipboard life.
- In New Zealand, she compares her past life and hopes for the future.
- A dialogue between father and daughter, expressed through their letters.
- In Makarora, Alice discovers she is pregnant.
- Alice hears of her father’s death.
- In England, she learns of her husband’s death.
- Back in Makarora, Alice is turned away by her sisters-in-law.
- Turning her back on the South Island, Alice looks forward to her new life with her brother’s family in the north.
My approach
While writing this piece, I was drawn again and again into the thought that, although this is a true story, set in a particular place at a certain time, it has the resonances of a universal myth, known to all of us who live here. Our forebears, or we ourselves, have crossed the seas to begin a new life, with unforeseen and unimaginable difficulties and felicities, whether 10 years, a century or a millennium or so ago.
The music of Alice is text-driven, ranging between a language at times extremely simple, as was the basic musical language of the settlers, and at times quite complex, evoking a storm at sea, or the unease of the settlers in a new environment, or Alice’s reaction to the problems which beset her. The piece is held together by various referential motifs. The initial idea, which perhaps suggests the instability of the sea, is also present in the bell-like sounds marking Charles’ death, music associated with a storm at sea is later associated with mental stress, while music suggestive of the movement of shipboard lice later underlies Alice’s traumatic encounter with her sisters-in-law.
Instrumentation
Alice is scored for: 3*34*3*; 3310; harp, timpani, 3 percussion, strings and mezzo-soprano.
About Alice Adcock
Fleur Adcock writes: ‘In 1909 Alice Adcock, a lively and adventurous young woman from Manchester, was on her way to New Zealand. She was 23, and had recently developed TB, for which there was then no cure. Somehow she persuaded her widowed father to let her travel alone to the other side of the world in case a healthy climate would save her life. (It worked – she lived for another 50 years). The family kept her entertaining letter describing shipboard life, and a few postcards from her have also survived, but most of what we know about her time in New Zealand comes from her father’s letters to her, of which he kept copies, or from family tradition.
On her arrival in New Zealand, Alice went into service, travelling widely, much to the consternation of her father. As housekeeper (and the only woman) on a farm in Makarora (a remote settlement on Lake Wanaka) she became pregnant to an unknown man, but was “rescued” by marriage to a local farmer, Charles Pipson, shortly before the birth of her daughter. In 1911, her beloved father died; in 1912, Alice and Charles had a son and the following year, pregnant again, Alice took her children back to England to visit her family.
Tragically, while she was away, her husband died suddenly of typhoid fever. Alice hurried back to Makarora to claim her inheritance, but left the 2 babies with her brother Sam and his wife (who were shortly to emigrate to New Zealand) and took only her eldest child, the illegitimate one, with her. This outraged her sisters-in-law, who saw it as an insult to their dead brother; they sent her away from the farm empty-handed. Once again she had to take a housekeeping job, this time in the North Island. In 1914, Alice and her brother’s family met up again, and Alice began a new life.’
Scores and recordings
Buy or borrow the full score and CD from SOUNZ.
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra has released a recording of Alice.
RNZ Concert recorded the Auckland Philharmonia’s premiere performance in 2003.
Award
Alice won the 2003 SOUNZ Contemporary Award.
Tom’s Serenade for Ann Morris
For oboe, violin, viola and cello
At an Auckland Philharmonia fund-raising auction in 2000, one of the orchestra’s most generous sponsors, Dr Tom Morris, bid a substantial sum for a short ensemble piece to be written by the composer-in-residence.
Dr Morris chose the instruments and title. The world premiere was given in November 2001 at the orchestra’s 21st birthday celebrations by the Ensemble Philharmonia in the Auckland Town Hall, where it was played as a surprise for Ann Morris, whose birthday it also was.
About the work
Serenade for Ann Morris spans 4 sections in one movement, of which the second is for strings alone, and the third is an oboe cadenza.
Score and recordings
Buy or borrow the score and parts from SOUNZ.
Tom’s Serenade for Ann Morris — SOUNZ
A recording, released by Rattle CDs, can be bought from SOUNZ and all good record stores.
A recording was also released on a SOUNZfine promotional CD.