Description
The titles are all drawn either from specific poems or from specific passages within those poems. The references are as follows: 7) Dances and Devilment and Sunlit Airs is also a quotation from John Shaw Neilson. It's from the poem The Lover Dies in Poetry. Like Wild Cherries and Honeycomb, it's in C major, but, unlike that piece it is a study in constantly-evolving ideas, dashing quixotically from one to another. 8) Boy with Flute (after the poem O Player of the Flute by John Shaw Neilson), one of Neilson's many poems evoking Australian natural features, is a recitative-like study in D major suggesting the quasi-vernacular style of a flute player improvising, surrounded by the rustling and murmuring sounds of a rural environment. 9) Unearthing the Earth (after the poem The Great Circle by Alan Gould) is a contemplation of continental drift by the ancient continents Laurasia, Pangaea and Gondwanaland, depicting the movement of massive oceanic plates and volcanic magma in huge fistfuls of chords over all 7 octave registers of the piano, in A-flat minor. 10) Harmonice Mundi (after the poem by David Malouf) refers to my vocal setting of Malouf's poem, in which Malouf depicts the harmonicity of the world fancifully as a tuning fork striking the note 'A'. This piano study is complementary to my vocal setting of the poem: an imaginary tuning fork on the tonality most remote from 'A', viz its tritone E-flat, plus E-flat's 'open fifth' sonority E-flat/B-flat. 11) Naming the Stars (after the poem by Judith Wright) describes looking up at the Australian night sky and the Southern Cross constellation from an Australian back garden on a quiet Australian evening. It's a contemplative adagio in E major. 12) The Ancient Kingdom of Fire is a quotation from the poem The Two Fires by Judith Wright, a poem which compares the vision of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus of the making of the world by fire with the modern nuclear fire and its capacity to reduce the world to ashes. The poem is an apotheosis of violent imagery (of fire, rock and water) in A minor.
