Mallets and Melody - A Soundscape of Song with Percussion

At 7.30 pm, Saturday, 1 April, 2023, the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit will resound with a unique combination of orchestral percussionists and choristers with the additional sound of the taonga puoro. It promises to be a truly engaging concert with Music Director, Christine Archer-Lockwood having uncovered a variety of songs that mix singing with percussion. Several of the pieces have a reflective spiritual theme.

Three of the pieces are written by New Zealanders with one, Laden Earth, 2020, by Pepe Becker having its premiere. This piece is a vocal tribute to Papatuanuku, Mother Earth, and is a rueful reminder of our role in helping her to keep humankind safe. Pepe's rhythms throughout the piece demand close attention by the singers with timely interactions with the percussionists acting as a metaphor for the theme, capturing both the sense of time and space and importance of interactions. Other Aotearoa/New Zealand pieces by Anthony Ritchie and Gareth Farr tell of the rhythms of carving and the exhortation of planted seeds to grow within Nature's own rhythms.

Prodigious English choral composer, Bob Chilcott, visited Uganda and, after being presented with a traditional drum, was enthralled by the huge respect and care given in making it. He enlisted the late noted Barbadian poet, Kamau Brathwaite to write four poems that revealed the process of Ugandan drum making. In so doing Brathwaite revealed the spiritual connection between the drum makers and the forces that shape the sources from the forest and formalise the drum making process. Chilcott then put the poems to music with a very unique percussion accompaniment to create a sound picture of the Ugandan tradition of drum making.

Dan Forrest was commissioned to create a piece for percussion and choir and set his creation among the stars. Forrest notes our individual connection to what we see before evoking through percussion and voice the sense of wonder at the existence of the cosmos.

The late Dominick Argento, foremost US opera composer, translated a lengthy poem by Roman poet, Catullus, and used his opera composition skills to pen eight very lyrical songs expressly for percussion and choir. As if in an operatic tragedy, Catullus was involved in a tempestuous relationship that lasted years but where he was very much at the mercy of the whims of his lover. The pieces are aptly titled - I Hate and I Love.

Because of its nature, marrying a full array of orchestral percussion to voices, this promises to be a singularly dramatic concert not to be missed.

Supported by the Earle Trust.