Studies in Words and Music
These studies explore various relationships that can exist between music and texts. Some were composed in the 1980s using analogue technologies.
Apart from exploring song genre formats, and the rhetorical device the ellipsis (where the listener is required to create or imagine the relationship between a title with corresponding music), one particular interest, was developing a mini music-documentary form (Me and Wolfgang and Ephemeral moments like these). These mini documentary pieces were based on the interview format or personal narrative.
Self narrative using a four track tape recorder, the 2nd movement from Mozart's Sonata K280 , 2 overdubbed pianos, and the Tcherepnin synthesiser.
Me and Wolfgang (1981)
documentary Interview format with poet John Jenkins about transience
Ephemeral moments like these (1980)
The memory Pieces are composed for piano, DX7 synthesizer, voice and recordings of found sounds. The work explores various approaches to time and memory.
Schubert's Lament
to be uploaded
Czerny (original version)
to be uploaded
You must remember this (original version)
to be uploaded
This is an opera study iusing intertextuality in which Verdi's slave chorus from Nabucco, is mixed with an original country/gospel song. The theme for both texts concerns liberation.
Water/Va Pensiero (2005)
Frozen (2002)
Another study in intertextuality with the repurposing of the Frost aria of Purcell's ''What power thou art" from his opera King Arthur. 'Frozen' was written for the revised production Tales of Love (2002).
An ironic melodrama based on a fictitious day in the life of a nuclear family
Early Articles