CSM 30: Perihelion - works by Davidson, Kay, Hair, Isaacs and Smetanin
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1885/733714858
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Item Open Access Mark Isaacs: Songs Of The Universal (1995): Songs Of The Universal: From Imperfection's Murkiest Cloud(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1995) Composer: Mark Isaacs; Grafton-Greene, Michael"This piece was inspired by Walt Whitman's 1874 poem, 'Song of the Universal' (given below), and is in many ways a dialogue with the poem. The piece is in five movements. The first four proceed from each other without a break. Each movement is annotated with a segment of the poem: the first movement with the poem's opening lines and the last movement with the poem's closing line. The musical soundworld explored by the piece is, as one would imagine, a mystical and introspective vista. The current trend in contemporary music seems to be to let the evocation of the mystical take its musical shape in the form of a continuously diatonic harmonic language, drawing from the antecedents of Western pre-Baroque ecclesiastical musical forms (for example plainchant) and non-Western religious/ mystical musical forms (again mostly diatonic). This piece, however, has its antecedents in the rich stream of highly chromaticised Western mystery music explored in the early part of this century by such composers as Scriabin, Delius and Charles Ives amongst others." -- Mark IsaacsItem Open Access Mark Isaacs: Songs Of The Universal (1995): Songs Of The Universal: And All The World A Dream(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1995) Composer: Mark Isaacs; Grafton-Greene, Michael"This piece was inspired by Walt Whitman's 1874 poem, 'Song of the Universal' (given below), and is in many ways a dialogue with the poem. The piece is in five movements. The first four proceed from each other without a break. Each movement is annotated with a segment of the poem: the first movement with the poem's opening lines and the last movement with the poem's closing line. The musical soundworld explored by the piece is, as one would imagine, a mystical and introspective vista. The current trend in contemporary music seems to be to let the evocation of the mystical take its musical shape in the form of a continuously diatonic harmonic language, drawing from the antecedents of Western pre-Baroque ecclesiastical musical forms (for example plainchant) and non-Western religious/ mystical musical forms (again mostly diatonic). This piece, however, has its antecedents in the rich stream of highly chromaticised Western mystery music explored in the early part of this century by such composers as Scriabin, Delius and Charles Ives amongst others." -- Mark IsaacsItem Open Access Mark Isaacs: Songs Of The Universal (1995): Songs Of The Universal: Soothing Each Lull(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1995) Composer: Mark Isaacs; Grafton-Greene, Michael"This piece was inspired by Walt Whitman's 1874 poem, 'Song of the Universal' (given below), and is in many ways a dialogue with the poem. The piece is in five movements. The first four proceed from each other without a break. Each movement is annotated with a segment of the poem: the first movement with the poem's opening lines and the last movement with the poem's closing line. The musical soundworld explored by the piece is, as one would imagine, a mystical and introspective vista. The current trend in contemporary music seems to be to let the evocation of the mystical take its musical shape in the form of a continuously diatonic harmonic language, drawing from the antecedents of Western pre-Baroque ecclesiastical musical forms (for example plainchant) and non-Western religious/ mystical musical forms (again mostly diatonic). This piece, however, has its antecedents in the rich stream of highly chromaticised Western mystery music explored in the early part of this century by such composers as Scriabin, Delius and Charles Ives amongst others." -- Mark IsaacsItem Open Access Mark Isaacs: Songs Of The Universal (1995): Songs Of The Universal: Over The Mountains(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1995) Composer: Mark Isaacs; Grafton-Greene, Michael"This piece was inspired by Walt Whitman's 1874 poem, 'Song of the Universal' (given below), and is in many ways a dialogue with the poem. The piece is in five movements. The first four proceed from each other without a break. Each movement is annotated with a segment of the poem: the first movement with the poem's opening lines and the last movement with the poem's closing line. The musical soundworld explored by the piece is, as one would imagine, a mystical and introspective vista. The current trend in contemporary music seems to be to let the evocation of the mystical take its musical shape in the form of a continuously diatonic harmonic language, drawing from the antecedents of Western pre-Baroque ecclesiastical musical forms (for example plainchant) and non-Western religious/ mystical musical forms (again mostly diatonic). This piece, however, has its antecedents in the rich stream of highly chromaticised Western mystery music explored in the early part of this century by such composers as Scriabin, Delius and Charles Ives amongst others." -- Mark IsaacsItem Open Access Graham Hair: Weather Report Studies (1993) No. 1 Black Market(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1993) Composer: Graham Hair; Grafton-Greene, Michael"In addition to my 'modernistic' pieces, I've written a whole raft of transcriptions, arrangements, paraphrases and 'cover versions' of various kinds of popular music in recent years. The purpose is practical as well as aesthetic: to extend the repertoire of the two 'all-girl' vocal groups I currently direct (Voiceworks in Sydney and Scottish Voices in Glasgow), as well as to explore the interesting question of the reciprocal influence of paraphrase (in all its musical senses) and original composition. Some of these are arrangements in the more or less traditional sense (preserving most of the original melodic and harmonic substance), but in this little 'encore piece' for Perihelion, elements of tonal acentricity, chromaticism, dissonance and discontinuity interpenetrate the pentatonicism of Joe Zawinul's original Black Market theme (as played by his jazz-rock band, Weather Report, in 1976), which wafts in and out." -- Graham HairItem Open Access Mark Isaacs: Songs Of The Universal (1995): Come Said The Muse(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1995) Composer: Mark Isaacs; Grafton-Greene, Michael"This piece was inspired by Walt Whitman's 1874 poem, 'Song of the Universal' (given below), and is in many ways a dialogue with the poem. The piece is in five movements. The first four proceed from each other without a break. Each movement is annotated with a segment of the poem: the first movement with the poem's opening lines and the last movement with the poem's closing line. The musical soundworld explored by the piece is, as one would imagine, a mystical and introspective vista. The current trend in contemporary music seems to be to let the evocation of the mystical take its musical shape in the form of a continuously diatonic harmonic language, drawing from the antecedents of Western pre-Baroque ecclesiastical musical forms (for example plainchant) and non-Western religious/ mystical musical forms (again mostly diatonic). This piece, however, has its antecedents in the rich stream of highly chromaticised Western mystery music explored in the early part of this century by such composers as Scriabin, Delius and Charles Ives amongst others." -- Mark IsaacsItem Open Access Michael Smetanin: Sharp (1992)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1992) Composer: Michael Smetanin; Grafton-Greene, Michael"Sharp is one of my pieces that was composed using a cellular automaton, which is a system something like a number game played out on a grid, to generate musical material. The fundamental automaton used for Sharp is the same as the one used to compose a slightly earlier piece, Strange Attractions, the first piece I composed with an automaton. The difference between the two pieces is that for Sharp I overlaid two other automatons to increase the musical possibilities that could be rendered at any point and/or the complexity of information. The title of the piece refers to the way the music becomes focused or sharpens onto various musical ideas throughout. The reverse process also occurs from time to time." -- Michael SmetaninItem Open Access Anthology of Austraian Music on Disc: CSM: 30 Perihelion Works by Davidson, Kay, Hair, Isaacs and Smetanin(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Crisp, DeborahItem Open Access Robert Davidson: Trio (II) (1993)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1993) Composer: Robert Davidson; Grafton-Greene, Michael"My Trio was composed shortly after returning from seven months of travel, focusing on musical study in South India and spending time in Europe and the USA. Perhaps as a result of the stimulus of this period, I found myself approaching the composition with a sense of openness, changing from my usual concern for the unity which results from reduced material. While the amount of material is reduced, it stems from a wide range of sources, which are playfully combined. Hymns from my Methodist upbringing, Bach counterpoint, Sibelius harmony, Beatle tunes, rhythms of Kerala and countless other musics went into forming, in varying degrees, my musical intuition as it was in 1993.1 attempted to allow this intuition full rein, believing that music is most successful when it accurately reflects its composer and his or her background. Rational structures serve to organise the intuitive material of the three movements. The first and third movements are simple ground bass canons. I am attracted to this form by its neat combination of repetition and variation, simultaneously defying and satisfying expectations, and by the way the instruments copy each other and reach beyond their individual concerns. In the second movement a process of ever diminishing time intervals articulates a handful of stretched out chords, which accompany free pattern-melodies, swapped between the instruments in conversational fashion. Surrounding the first and second movements, and in the postlude, is music of quiet simplicity. Here there is less concern for rational structure than for communication of emotion, though not without a certain distance." -- Robert DavidsonItem Open Access Robert Davidson: Trio (III) (1993)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1993) Composer: Robert Davidson; Grafton-Greene, Michael"My Trio was composed shortly after returning from seven months of travel, focusing on musical study in South India and spending time in Europe and the USA. Perhaps as a result of the stimulus of this period, I found myself approaching the composition with a sense of openness, changing from my usual concern for the unity which results from reduced material. While the amount of material is reduced, it stems from a wide range of sources, which are playfully combined. Hymns from my Methodist upbringing, Bach counterpoint, Sibelius harmony, Beatle tunes, rhythms of Kerala and countless other musics went into forming, in varying degrees, my musical intuition as it was in 1993.1 attempted to allow this intuition full rein, believing that music is most successful when it accurately reflects its composer and his or her background. Rational structures serve to organise the intuitive material of the three movements. The first and third movements are simple ground bass canons. I am attracted to this form by its neat combination of repetition and variation, simultaneously defying and satisfying expectations, and by the way the instruments copy each other and reach beyond their individual concerns. In the second movement a process of ever diminishing time intervals articulates a handful of stretched out chords, which accompany free pattern-melodies, swapped between the instruments in conversational fashion. Surrounding the first and second movements, and in the postlude, is music of quiet simplicity. Here there is less concern for rational structure than for communication of emotion, though not without a certain distance." -- Robert DavidsonItem Open Access Robert Davidson: Trio (IV) (1993)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1993) Composer: Robert Davidson; Grafton-Greene, Michael"My Trio was composed shortly after returning from seven months of travel, focusing on musical study in South India and spending time in Europe and the USA. Perhaps as a result of the stimulus of this period, I found myself approaching the composition with a sense of openness, changing from my usual concern for the unity which results from reduced material. While the amount of material is reduced, it stems from a wide range of sources, which are playfully combined. Hymns from my Methodist upbringing, Bach counterpoint, Sibelius harmony, Beatle tunes, rhythms of Kerala and countless other musics went into forming, in varying degrees, my musical intuition as it was in 1993.1 attempted to allow this intuition full rein, believing that music is most successful when it accurately reflects its composer and his or her background. Rational structures serve to organise the intuitive material of the three movements. The first and third movements are simple ground bass canons. I am attracted to this form by its neat combination of repetition and variation, simultaneously defying and satisfying expectations, and by the way the instruments copy each other and reach beyond their individual concerns. In the second movement a process of ever diminishing time intervals articulates a handful of stretched out chords, which accompany free pattern-melodies, swapped between the instruments in conversational fashion. Surrounding the first and second movements, and in the postlude, is music of quiet simplicity. Here there is less concern for rational structure than for communication of emotion, though not without a certain distance." -- Robert DavidsonItem Open Access Robert Davidson: Trio (I) (1993)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1993) Composer: Robert Davidson; Grafton-Greene, Michael"My Trio was composed shortly after returning from seven months of travel, focusing on musical study in South India and spending time in Europe and the USA. Perhaps as a result of the stimulus of this period, I found myself approaching the composition with a sense of openness, changing from my usual concern for the unity which results from reduced material. While the amount of material is reduced, it stems from a wide range of sources, which are playfully combined. Hymns from my Methodist upbringing, Bach counterpoint, Sibelius harmony, Beatle tunes, rhythms of Kerala and countless other musics went into forming, in varying degrees, my musical intuition as it was in 1993.1 attempted to allow this intuition full rein, believing that music is most successful when it accurately reflects its composer and his or her background. Rational structures serve to organise the intuitive material of the three movements. The first and third movements are simple ground bass canons. I am attracted to this form by its neat combination of repetition and variation, simultaneously defying and satisfying expectations, and by the way the instruments copy each other and reach beyond their individual concerns. In the second movement a process of ever diminishing time intervals articulates a handful of stretched out chords, which accompany free pattern-melodies, swapped between the instruments in conversational fashion. Surrounding the first and second movements, and in the postlude, is music of quiet simplicity. Here there is less concern for rational structure than for communication of emotion, though not without a certain distance." -- Robert DavidsonItem Open Access Don Kay: Evocations (1985)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1985) Composer: Don Kay; Grafton-Greene, Michael"This work seeks to convey suggestions of memories- sometimes vague, sometimes intertwined as in a half sleep and sometimes slightly more substantial, perhaps of visual images or associated emotions. The pervading mood is one of fleeting reminiscence and delicacy. Techniques include long held sounds, brief, but often repeated and seemingly unrelated ideas interrupting each other, and their occasional drawing together to allude to moments of greater substance." -- Don Kay