Contents: Space Squaw, What's That Thing?, All the Things That Art
Composer notes
Burwood Park for solo flute was composed in 2008 for Brisbane-based flautist, Janet McKay, for a concert at the Queensland Art Gallery in South Bank.
This piece is named after a park situated in a Western Sydney suburb. Programmatically, Burwood Park consists of five sections depicting the sounds of nature and people we come across as we walk through the park: birds and the wind in the trees, children singing and playing, chess players getting stressed and agitated, screaming and shouting at each other and Tai Chi dancing.
Burwood Park begins in a slow, mysterious and improvisatory style. A quirky, rhythmic, birdcall motif emerges, gradually transforming into a scene of angry chess players. This is a very loud, fast, exciting and virtuosic passage which showcases the technical ability of the flautist. The final section is based on a pentatonic scale to imitate the Asian music typical of Tai Chi. A tranquil and meditative atmosphere should be conveyed to represent the Tai Chi dancers in the park; their slow dance movements moving along to the peaceful music. Whistle tone and singing techniques produce a range of soft harmonic effects to end the work.
Burwood Park features a range of extended techniques including bend, vibrato, flutter- tonguing, tongue-ram, air and key click articulation, jet whistle, whistle tone, singing, colour trill and multiphonic effects. All fingerings for the multiphonics and colour trills and other contemporary playing techniques are clearly shown on the score.
The duration of Burwood Park is 6 minutes.
Contents: Leaping Turtles, Toy Waltz, Crunchy Footsteps, Butterflies Dancing, Figurine, Through My Window, First Climb, Cool Shoes, Clock And Tickle, Proof, Juggling Popcorn, Two Faces, Daisy Chain, Dragon-fly, Only One Cloud in the Sky, Summertime in Venice
The Australian recorder player Jo Dudley commissioned this brief, virtuosic solo.
Ulpirra is an Aboriginal word meaning pipe or flute. It has been performed and recorded on many different treble instruments apart from the recorder: piccolo, flute, oboe, B-flat and E-flat clarinets, a special version for bass clarinet with handclapping accompaniment in Enyato IV, and soprano or alto saxophone.
Being short and snappy it is especially useful as an encore piece for recitals.
This piece evokes the sound world of the shakuhachi, a Japanese end-blown bamboo flute. Despite the simplicity of its construction, the shakuhachi can produce a stunning array of tone colours, pitch slides and special effects. This piece incorporates some of these uncommon sounds, while exploiting the technical agility of the western flute. Besides the portamento slide and quarter tone key trills notated on the score, the performer is encouraged to add a short burst of breathy tone quality on notes marked sfp, This can be achieved by using a harder articulation or a less focussed embouchure. The equivalent technique on the shakuhachi is called mura-iki, which means “breath sea sound”.
The piece also features the floating sense of time found in the traditional shakuhachi honkyoku solo pieces. These pieces do not have a beat as such, and the music moves always with the rhythm of the performer’s breath. Great importance is placed on the silences between phrases, each inhalation being as important to the overall shape of the music as the notes themselves. The lack of barlines in the piece reflects this, with dotted barlines appearing only where they indicate a distinct change in mood or place of structural importance. While the rhythms have been notated quite precisely in the score, it is expected that the performer will push and pull the underlying tempo in a manner that gives a sense of a constant ebb and flow to the music. To a certain degree, this can follow the dynamic shape of the phrase, ie moving forward with crescendos and slowing down in the decrescendos, while some additional written indications have been included on the score.
The title mujō refers to the Japanese aesthetic concept of transience, or impermanence. The acknowledgement that all things are in a constant state of flux, including our lives, is a common theme in many forms of Japanese art. In the honkyoku pieces it brings an acceptance that each piece can differ from day to day according to any number of factors, such as the player’s condition or the acoustic of the performance venue. It is hoped that this piece will continue to evolve as a player learns and performs it, therefore embodying the principle of mujō in itself.
