Music compositions

Abstract

Our dried voices is the result of being given the opportunity to write a work for performance by the orchestra of the NZ School of Music. TS Eliot's poem suite, The Hollow Men, provided the impetus for the work; the poems had long demanded a musical response from me, and having a literary reference behind the work provided an extra-musical means of communicating my intention to the orchestra . Both the sonic material and the structural concept of the piece were derived directly from Eliot's words . The endless sonic combinations of the orchestra, and its multitude of voices, were ideally suited to Eliot's images of dryness, deadness and whispering voices. Structurally, musical ideas are integrated into other material or alternatively disintegrate completely. Although I had toyed with that concept even before starting to seriously plan Our dried voices, the paradoxes set out in Eliot's poem; "shape without form, shade without colour/Paralysed force/gesture without motion" helped me to clarify the idea . The work pivots around waves of material that alternately emerge from or eclipse the material immediately preceding . Various musical gestures are butted against one another but ultimately fail to generate or maintain individual potency, instead being subsumed into the general clash of voices implied by the poem itself. Pitch is generated from a mode of limited transposition, which is transposed freely around pivot notes and chords. A feature of the work is the shift between material that hovers in a narrow range of pitches, and the chromatic saturation possible when the various transpositions of the mode are layered up in voice upon voice.