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.
Angels born at the speed of light
For narrator, dancer and improvising trio
Text by Cilla McQueen
Funded by Creative New Zealand, this work was given its first performance at the Trust Bank Theatre, Dunedin in 1992. The choreographer was Bronwyn Judge and the performers were Judy Bailey (piano), Peter Adams (clarinet) and Russell Scoones (percussion).
About the work
Angels born at the speed of light is a collaboration between poet Cilla McQueen, Bronwyn Judge and myself. The dance, in and around a pool of water, involved 3 ages of women — as child, as woman (Bronwyn Judge) and kuia (Shona McTavish).
For some time, I had been interested in working with improvising musicians to provide a musical structure in which the narrative is always recognisable but the detail constantly changes.
I provided the framework and the basic material while the performers — in this instance narrator, piano, percussion and clarinet doubling saxophone — adapt the material and, within the framework, take it where they will.
Instrumentation
The trio is scored for clarinet/saxophone, with improvised parts for percussion and piano. The clarinet part can be played on flute, and a vibraphone is optional.
Score and recording
Buy or borrow the score from SOUNZ.
Angels born at the speed of light — SOUNZ
A recording of the premiere performance made by RNZ Concert may be available from Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision.
Moon, Tides and Shoreline
For string quartet
Moon Tides and Shoreline was commissioned by the New Zealand Music Federation (now Chamber Music New Zealand) with funding from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council for the New Zealand String Quartet. They gave the first performance in Napier on 28 September 1992.
About the work
Moon Tides and Shoreline was inspired by Paekakariki on the Kapiti Coast north of Wellington — ‘home’ during a 6-week residency at Victoria University in 1989.
The relationship between music and environment is particularly strong. The cello’s low repeated D, which opens the piece, is the fundamental pitch heard in the sea and the restless semi-quavers evoke the continuous movement of waves crashing on the Paekakariki shore.
My fascination with mediaeval philosophy and music, incorporating natural cycles, is reflected both in the title and in the compositional process, where magic squares were used to generate the background structure.
Scores and recordings
Hire the parts from Waiteata Music Press or buy the score they published in 1993.
Moon, Tides and Shoreline — publication
It was also released on a Waiteata Music Press CD of my works.
Composer portrait: Gillian Whitehead — CD
RNZ Concert recorded Moon, Tides and Shoreline in 2010.
Moon, Tides and Shoreline — audio
Reviews
‘This is a rich evocative piece that is never merely picturesque, as the title might suggest. It has a lyrical complexity reminiscent of Tippett … [it] achieves moments of great beauty.”
— Tim Bridgewater, The Dominion
‘The highlight for me was the premiere of Gillian Whitehead’s Moon Tides, and Shoreline. … Perhaps there are marine associations to be heard in the score, but, more importantly, one appreciates the work’s cool and eminently logical form. The various musical motifs are inventive in themselves and intriguingly handled.’
— William Dart, Music in New Zealand
Resurgences
For full orchestra
The first public performance of Resurgences was given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Young at the New Music New Zealand festival in Edinburgh in December 1998.
About the work
Resurgences was written during my 6-week residency at Victoria University of Wellington in 1989.
It is about living away from the sea and being drawn back to ideas of the sea, ideas that are very strong with all New Zealanders — looking out to distant horizons.
Instrumentation
Resurgences is scored for: 3 (3 doubling picc)333; 4331; timpani, 3 percussion, harp and strings.
Scores and recordings
Buy or borrow the score from SOUNZ.
A recording by the NZSO of Resurgences was released by Continuum.
Review
‘For Whitehead, the piece is very much in the New Zealand tradition, inspired by the geothermal activities around Rotorua, phenomena which she sees as related to the tidal elements that inform other works, including her 1990 string quartet, Moon, Tides and Shoreline.
A densely layered piece, Resurgences features the various sections of the orchestra (including a colourful contribution from percussion) used as both polyphonic voices within the whole work and within their own group of sonorities. Underpinning the score are complex mensural canons, although the listener is not aware of such structural niceties, as volatile shifts of texture and tempo give the score the primeval energy of an Antipodean Rite of Spring.
The landscape is never far from sight.’
— William Dart
Napier’s Bones
For 24 percussionists and improvising pianist
Napier’s Bones was commissioned by Judy Bailey and funded by the Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council. The first performance was given by Judy Bailey and the Sydney Percussion Ensemble conducted by Graeme Leak at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 1990.
About the work
I wrote Napier’s Bones to involve the improvising talents of Sydney-based pianist Judy Bailey, who, like me, grew up in Whangarei, New Zealand, and as a companion piece to Charles Wuorinen’s Percussion Symphony.
The title has many resonances, but the Napier referred to is Sir John Napier, the inventor of logarithms, and Napier’s bones in Africa were strips of ebony and ivory used for calculating, suggesting to me both rhythmic complexity and the layout of a keyboard.
The piano part is almost entirely improvised, although the pianist is given basic material to work with. There are various forms of interaction with the ensemble for the soloist — call and response, elaboration of harmonic patterns, decoration of percussion textures, improvised duets with percussion instruments, free solo improvisation. The details will vary greatly from performance to performance, although the shape of the piece, which encompasses many speeds, moods and textures in its single movement, remains constant.
Instrumentation
There is also a later version for 6 percussionists and improvising pianist.
Buy or borrow the score and parts from the Australian Music Centre.
Four short pieces
For piano
Four Short Pieces were commissioned for Allen’s Publishing for their Australian Bicentennial Anthology of piano music.
About the work
The pieces perhaps suggest nature images, but the only one that was a reaction to something specific is the last, which was suggested by watching and hearing a beck in spate (or flooded stream) on the west coast of Scotland.
There are 4 movements:
I.
II. Sensitively
III. With Energy
IV. Fiercely.
Score
Four short pieces were published in 1988 by Allens but the album is long out of print.
Bride of Fortune
Opera in 2 acts for soprano, tenor, 2 baritones, and 10 smaller roles doubling as chorus, accompanied by a 17-piece ensemble
Libretto by Anna Maria dell’Oso
Bride of Fortune was commissioned by West Australia Opera and the Perth Festival. It was first performed in a 4-night season at the Octagon Theatre during the 1991 Perth Festival. Performers included the WASO Ensemble and singers Merlyn Quaife (Grazia), Geoffrey Harris (Vito), and Emma Mathews in perhaps her first professional role as Grazia’s sister Fiorina.
About the work
Bride of Fortune is set in Calabria and Sicily in Italy, and Melbourne in Australia in the early 1950s. It’s a work about immigration from Europe to the New World after the war, about the importance of letters in a pre-computer age and about the difference between the different cultures.
The opera opens with the main character, Grazia, writing a letter in her Collingwood, Melbourne flat to her sister — her story is told in flashback.
In Calabria, Grazia is with her sisters preparing for her arranged marriage to Vito, who lives in Melbourne and whom she has never met. (This was common practice at that time, until Australian law put a stop to the practice around 1952.) The marriage takes place, with Vito represented by his photo. She has the ring to take to him, celebrations follow and, as she is leaving by ship from Naples, she argues with her brother Ennio about her land that she refuses to sell to him. On the ship she writes a letter to her husband-to-be, imagining their life together.
In Melbourne, things are very different from her expectations. Vito is crippled from an accident in the brewery where he works, and he is living in the shabby flat of a friend, Mario. Grazia takes a job in a textile factory, and Vito becomes jealous of Mario when he playfully flirts with Grazia. In Sicily, Vito’s mother-in-law has received a ticket so that his young daughter from his previous marriage can join him in Melbourne, and Grazia, unaware of this, comes across a box containing the child’s clothing.
Things unravel quickly from this point. Vito, fuelled with jealousy, challenges Mario, who refuses to fight him, Grazia loses her factory job, Ennio sells Grazia’s land, Vito gambles and loses Grazia’s pay, they argue, Vito hits Grazia and she runs out of the flat sobbing.
Some days later he receives a letter telling him his daughter, still in Sicily, has died of tuberculosis. He is very drunk when Grazia comes to collect her belongings with some friends from the factory. A letter from Fiorina has arrived — she has sold her own land and can pay for Grazia’s return to Italy. As the women rejoice, Vito, anguished, pulls out a knife and holds it to Grazia’s throat.
The flat is surrounded by police and a priest is begging Vito to give himself up. Vito shows Grazia a photo of his dead child. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks. ‘If I had told you, would you have come?’ The police burst in and seeing Vito threatening them with a knife, they shoot him. Grazia places the wedding ring on his finger as he dies.
Grazia is finishing her letter to Fiorina as another immigrant family are looking to rent the flat. Grazia is pregnant. She will stay in Australia to provide a better life for her child, and hopes Fiorina will come and join her. ‘Life is hard here, but we can live.’
Instrumentation
The score is written for 13 singers, who, except for the 2 main roles, cover many roles between them, both as soloists and ensemble singers.
The orchestration is: flute, oboe, clarinet and saxophone (1 player), horn, trumpet, trombone, timpani, 2 pianos, piano accordion and 2 violins, violas, cellos and double basses.
One musician could play percussion and piano, and a cast member could play the simple accordion part.
Production notes
Some use is made of recorded sound — for example, street sounds, crowd sounds, water, wind — and the Perth production also used slides in the shipboard scenes.
Score and recording
Buy or borrow the score from SOUNZ.
Review
A review of the Perth season by Noel Sanders was published in Music in New Zealand.
The Bride of Fortune: Gillian Whitehead at Perth — publication
A thesis by Anne Power about opera in Australia from 1988-1998 discusses this opera.