Abstract:
This portfolio has been strongly shaped by the opportunities that arose throughout my Masters year. felsic mafic originated out of a call for scores in early 2012 by the SMP ensemble in Wellington. Bitter Hill was written as an entry into the NZSO Todd Corporation Young Composer Awards. I had originally intended to write a set of pieces for Cindy Tsao, a member of the Estrella piano quartet who then requested that I write a set for the quartet to add to their repertoire. The group have since performed the first movement of this in concert, and are including movements I and II on a recording of New Zealand music to be released this year. Late in the year, I was asked to write a piece for four members of the National Youth Orchestra. The folio has been influenced by landscape and geological phenomena, after having spent some time researching volcanism and moving to the foot of Mount Eden, the highest natural viewpoint in Auckland. The four pieces I composed specifically for the folio are all related in this respect. The exception to this is the National Youth Orchestra piece, which I constructed from a purely musical standpoint. I have also included my own basic photography of New Zealand landscape into some of the programme notes. I feel that this component of presentation is important to the work as a whole, and hope to integrate this skill into future projects, melding the two art forms into a synergistic unit. Visual stimuli are often influential on my work and also inform my compositional practice of organically generating musical material. I feel the need to present the audience with a full artistic package that relates to the inception of the piece. In my view, the piece is not complete without the presentation of this additional dimension.