This piece was commissioned for the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra’s 2022 Matariki Celebration concert. It reflects on a memory of an intense personal experience, which distinctly paralleled one of the processes involved in Matariki; specifically the act of acknowledging those lost in the year ending, before the celebration of a new year can begin. This was a midnight, New Year’s Eve drive through the Crown Range, reflecting on a significant familial loss. The mountains were beautiful under a full moon, and the swells in the piece evoke shifts in moonlight suddenly illuminating huge mountains that then return to shadow. These bursts of sound and light also parallel the swells and waves of grief.
The piece seeks to represent the jumbled mix of contradictions and tensions we all are. It attempts to balance this with constant clashing major and minor seconds, and simple and compound subdivisions (neither of which can ever be truly considered as the ‘right’ note or metre), as well as perpetual slow dynamic swells of light and dark. Ultimately, no solution is offered, instead leaving the audience to the ongoing process of ‘sitting’ with loss at a time when we often attempt to move forward.
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra/Hamish McKeich
2024 NZ Composer Sessions, recorded in Wellington's Michael Fowler Centre, 4 October, 2024 by RNZ Concert in partnership with the NZSO and SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music.
David Houston, producer & engineer
Marc Chesterman, assistant engineer
