Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

Composers’ Competition was a great night of music featuring eleven compositions from twelve composers representing all sectors of the School of Music. In the end, first prize was probably pretty much a foregone conclusion. I think my list of prizes is right, but it may have Justin and Jonathan round the wrong way.

• Paula-Therese King: Anna Bolena’s Mercurial Waters
• Johannes Contag: Flock of Starlings with Crows and Dog (equal 2nd prize)
• Blair Clarke: Green and Gold Keys
• Tabea Squire: He Matai: I – Patupaiarehe; II – The Conch (equal 3rd prize and performance prize)
• Carol Shortis: Perfume
• Amanda Creiglow: Experiments in Unity
• Christine White: Dark
• Karlo Margetic: Svitac (1st prize)
• Justin Firefly Clarke: Te Rakau o Nga Patupaiarehe (equal 2nd prize)
• Jonathan Crehan: Utopian Reverie (equal 3rd prize)
• Andrzej Nowicki and Richard Robertshawe: Concertino 5b (performance prize)

Hearing that a Theremin was going to make an appearance was an extra incentive – as if one were necessary! – to show up to Composers’ Competition. Seeing Paula King walk out in period dress before blindfolding herself was utterly surreal. I was less enthusiastic about the music itself, a duet between the Theremin and a pedal controlled fixed media part. While the concept – a depiction of the last thoughts of Anne Boleyn – was certainly a strong one, the fixed media let it down badly. What might have succeeded with a live string quartet, or even a recording of a string quartet, was never going to work with MIDI sounds. Perhaps King was attempting to make a contrast between the ‘innocence’ of Boleyn and the great farce that surrounded her. Perhaps the real issues with the work were firstly the restrictions that the fixed media part (particularly with MIDI sounds) imposed upon the Theremin part, locking it into essentially a tonal frame and defying the instrument’s possibilities for experimental work and secondly the absence of timbral variation that the medium also required.

Johannes Contag‘s work made little pretence of being anything other than what it said on the box. Written for a wind ensemble of three flutes, four clarinets (the starlings), two saxophones (crows) and a bassoon (dog), the piece used cellular construction to build up from a quiet beginning featuring a single flute to a frenetic and rhythmically dense texture, before the intervention of the dog/bassoon. Starlings is amiable and unassuming, a pleasant but unchallenging thing to experience. Blair Clarke’s work was the competition’s only concession to jazz, which must have sorely disappointed composer-in-residence John Rae. Even the programme note acknowledged that it wasn’t really a composition as such – he describes it as a series of exercises. As a result, there were several short sections, each focussing on one type of sound, but never really doing anything with them.

Tabea promised me that she entering a harp piece when we talked about the Competition earlier in the year, so it was a little disappointing to discover that she had, in fact, entered a piece for viola and piano, He Matai. The first part – Patupaiarehe – of her composition is quite barren – featuring a ditonic phrase that alternates between the two instruments. The Conch turns the dial up; the instruments hurtle along with great energy, programmatically representing New Zealand’s historical conflict. Overall it is a highly listenable work, drawing influence from some of the less abstract corners of 20th century classical.

Perfume, for bass clarinet, temple block, marimba, vibraphone and unpitched percussion is a series of nine miniatures that explores many of the possibilities of Shortis’ instrumentation. Separated by interludes from the temple block, each miniature explores a single technique for each instrument to represent various fragrances. The bass clarinettist, who provides almost all of the work’s melodic interest, deals with keyslaps and ‘plucking’, while around him the percussionists deal in subtle rhythmic effects. Perfume is a marvellously subtle composition, radiating with sensuality; the various timbres of the temple bowl combine with beautifully crafted bass clarinet lines to create an attractive exoticism that accurately portrays the subject matter.

Amanda Creiglow’s piece was first performed at a Composers’ Workshop,, where it seemed a little underdone, but the performance was much improved this time around. Written for the unusual combination of four violas, it explores the interaction of subtly different timbres through collisions and unifications of pitch and rhythm. The choice to approach the piece more from an aural than musical angle limits it somewhat, but there are certainly moments of beauty anyhow. Dark was the only fixed media item in the concert and a very impressive advertisement for the sonic arts major. The work uses the sounds of various machines in a chocolate factory awash in a sea of feedback. White subverts her sound-sources by playing down onsets, letting the sounds fall back into granular textures; Dark is certainly more chocolate than factory.

Karlo Margetic’s Svitac, inspired by childhood memories of glow-worms,  features a virtuoso clarinet part accompanied by upright piano. Svitac opens with microtonal fluctuations in a breathy, barely pitched note, creating a curious, flickering atmosphere. The quietness of the opening allows keystrokes to feature extensively. As the clarinet works toward the upper registers both cit and the piano grow stronger; the piano appears to function not as a duet partner as such, but as part of the inner workings of the clarinet. Karlo is a stunning composer, and this is an amazing piece of music.

The slightly bizarre coincidence of having two works in the same concert about patupaiarehe doesn’t diminish the strength of either work, although it is interesting that the two pieces work in very similar ways. Like Tabea’s piece, Te Rakau o Nga Patupaiarehe consists of two sections, the first quite barren, full of harmonics that enshroud a solo violoncello line, the second much faster, formed from contrapuntal lines and motivic interjections that accelerate and intensify toward a high energy state. While I could do without the first part, which is inventive in moments but very hard for the performers to render accurately, the second part might as well be Osvaldo Golijov in (I think) 13/8.

Jonathan Crehan used a prepared piano in a completely non-ironic way, which in itself made his piece somewhat of a rarity. Bone shattering piano combined with violin scrapings to create a disturbing sound-world in places, but these effects were not used consistently enough, coming in only to break up an otherwise fairly directionless piece of music. At these jarring moments Crehan had something rather interesting, but they never seemed to lead anywhere. A recording of Andrzej Nowicki and Richard Robertshawe’s Concertino 5b can be found at the SMP website, but is no match for the real thing in naked aggression and tongue-in-cheek performance. Robertshawe processes Nowicki’s clarinet bangs and shrieks into some quite incredible noises, all while dressed in a labcoat (and Nowicki in some horrible blue pyjamas).

Not that anybody listens to me, this is how I would have awarded prizes:

• Performance Prizes: Anna Bolena’s Mercurial Waters and Concertino 5b
• Third Prizes: Perfume and I – Patupaiarehe; II – The Conch
• Second Prizes: Te Rakau o Nga Patupaiarehe and Dark
• First Prize: Svitac