The title Ōtaki Song refers both to the place where I composed most of the music, and the overwhelming synesthetic relationship between the music and the coast. Saturated gold vermilion sunsets like fire bleed into the cool magenta of the evening. Green clay-like water murmurs and numerous chimes populate the twilight chorus.

The colors are tactile where surface and weight become integral parameters for composing. The weight of the bow on the string, changes of speed in the airflow, or subtle differences in embouchure all have significant synesthetic/coloristic meaning. 

Ōtaki Song collages different smaller pieces, independently written, around the bass flute. Each instrumental part has been developed separately in close collaboration with performers. The result is a rich collision of musical lines that all have a developed sense of identity. All the sounds are anchored by the bass flute, however. The ensemble is enmeshed with the flute – constantly responding, and further saturating the colors of the solo line. The piece is in fact a collection of songs, collaged in time and space, and anchored by the cantus firmus of the bass flute.
 


Ōtaki Song

Negative Capability

Performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Song - Triple Concerto for Bass Flute, Clarinet, Piano and Orchestra

Wellington composer Micah Thompson has created a beautiful, vibrant new work for Stroma, Prosaic Notes from an Unwritten Journal, written in memory of Jenny McLeod. Based around the difficulty of translating culturally embedded ideas from one language into another, in this work the composer reflects on attempts to communicate what music ‘means’, where most of the meaning is (beautifully) lost in translation. 

Prosaic Notes from an Unwritten Journal

In writing this personal work for orchestra I have been explicitly inspired by the stop motion cinematography of Wes Anderson. Particularly the technique of boiling used in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (2018) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) where each minute alteration made to the puppets by hand, in each shot, will slightly alter the fur. The result, after thousands of shots have been taken and combined in stop motion is a wonderfully strange dance as the smallest bits of fur shimmer and twirl. Though this is typically avoided in stop motion cinema Anderson embraces it which results in a fantastically quirky visual movement. The material in the orchestra works like this: in a shimmering dance of transformation, always reforming and moulding itself in a kind-of musical stop motion not dissimilar to the murmurations of starlings.

Forgo The Parable, Seek The Light

Little bit of research I have been undertaking in collaboration with Samantha McSweeney and Sean Quinn on a selection of very fragile soft multiphonic dyads.

Selection of close Interval flute multiphonic dyads (1 - 7)

Three Melodies (Preliminary version)

'Song' for Flute, Clarinet, and Orchestra

Performed by Samantha McSweeney, Ben Vanleuven and the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra conducted by Hamish Hamish Mckeich, 26/09/2020. 

Dedicated to Madi Freeman - with love and affection.

Song (preliminary version)

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move. 

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye, 
A widening deepening greenness, 
Brilliantly, concentratedly, 
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed. 

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) 'The Thought Fox' from The Hawk in the Rain. (Faber & Faber 2012, 90, the anniversary edition, first published in 1957)

The Thought Fox

White

Micah Thompson is a composer, teacher, and distance runner.

Micah Thompson - Composer

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