1. YESTERYEARS for Orchestra - mp3 excerpt 1:33
The character and essence of this piece is intended to evoke my own personal feelings of nostalgia, and also to hint at mainstream popular styles and jazz idioms which reflect my past experiences as a performing musician. The infrastructure is therefore designed whereby the basic rhythmic and melodic cells that are initially presented, occur in various guises and provide the genesis for the entire work. These combined elements are the embodiment of the aforementioned sentiments, and represent tangible expressions of emotion associated with yesteryears.
2. KONTRAPUNKT for Saxophone Quartet - mp3 excerpt 1:16
The title `Kontrapunkt’ represents a personal aesthetic preference and is not intended to suggest a post-modernist association to the art of counterpoint. The piece is essentially through-composed in which a large majority of the contrapuntal textures are employed as a means of creating a tapestry of harmony without the application of stringent rules and procedures. The overall structure is realized through a framework of four main sections that do not appear as clear individual divisions, but which are designed to depict changes of character within the temporal flow of the composition.
3. OUT~TAKES for Amplified String Quartet and Tape - mp3 excerpt 1:29
The idea for this piece evolved from a recent hearing of a chance recording of a conversation whereby a religious discussion ensues between two people. As this conversation became quite animated, I began to notice the rhythmic and melodic contours of their voice inflections which were punctuated by their distinctive accents, and I was immediately fascinated by the thought of transcribing some of these voice samples and integrating them within a string quartet environment. Using these samples as a primary source, much of the material was generated by employing minimalist techniques such as repetition, additive and subtractive rhythms as well as metric modulation. Therefore, the focus tends to gravitate somewhat more towards rhythm than melodic and harmonic development, although the samples themselves carry humorous undertones and contribute immensely to the character of the piece.
4. OPPOSITES ATTRACT for Two Pianos - mp3 excerpt 1:39
The whole-tone scale is entirely uniform in its structure in that it consists of a succession of six whole steps which in consequence conduce to a lack of any key centre. Essentially, the scale is its own inversion and has another resultant whole-tone scale as its complement. The archetypical feature of this composition is the deployment of the whole-tone scale in conjunction with its complement to formulate all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. This technique which is known as interlocking whole-tone scales is used in this work to generate a large majority of the thematic material.
5. KAEMELEON (a soundscape) - mp3 excerpt 1:19
The principle strategy of this composition is to demonstrate the propagation of transitional sound colours and timbres within an electro-acoustic environment. This concept was inspired by the faculty which the chameleon (a native lizard of Africa) possesses – i.e. the unique ability to change its skin colour as a camouflage response to temperature, light and mood. The design of this piece therefore encompasses recorded samples of sounds collected from different settings, which have been sculptured to create a modulating soundscape of waveforms. The array of these samples emanate from recordings containing environmental, urban, instrumental and studio produced sounds. These recordings include wildlife sounds from Kinglake National Park, traffic noise from my residential street, samples of musical instruments and my own voice. Each of the recorded samples were spliced, manipulated and processed using digital techniques as a means of creating additional secondary source samples of sound, all of which have been assembled and selectively combined with their primary source samples.
6. TREQUENZA for Solo Bass Trombone - mp3 excerpt 0:48
In the autumn of 2001, I had the privilege of attending a composition seminar held at the University of Melbourne by visiting UK trombonist and conductor Barrie Webb, during which I heard a live performance of Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza V” for solo trombone. I was inspired by the array of sounds and effects emanating from the instrument and fascinated by Berio’s application of extended techniques which incorporated the voice, and decided to compose my bass trombone piece “Trequenza” as a homage to the great Italian master.
7. KING HENRY IV for Brass Quintet - mp3 excerpt 0:57
Inspired by Shakespeare’s The History of HENRY IV, this piece explores elements of mensuration canon form and was constructed from a simple theme composed in the Phrygian church mode comprising 14 measures of 3/8 time. Typically, this motive was combined with its inversion, retrograde as well as its retrograde inversion in various transpositions to generate the majority of the counterpoint and accompanying harmony. A subsidiary theme is introduced towards the latter part of the piece as a type of fanfare and provides a contrasting sonority before the return of the main theme.
