Kōrero ki te Ngāhere

"'Kōrero ki te Ngāhere" here means 'discourse with nature.' The work is inspired by the joy of being alone in the natural environment – 'waldeinsamkeit' in German, or what the Japanese call 'shinrin-yoku' (forest- bathing). It explores the aleatoric characteristics of that environment with a number of elements, to a greater or lesser degree, left to the individual performers discretion and musical instincts. Though iterations may be similar, they will never be identical. All 21 instruments are treated as separate voices that emerge independently, sometimes cohere, sometimes fracture or may seem to be in dialogue with other disparate voices across the orchestra. A range of sound production is explored, from more standard melodic fragments through to the sound of the breath, liminality – and silence. The work is built on arbitrarily chosen structures (based on a randomised procedure and the outline of Kapiti Island), intending to represent the fact that the start is not the beginning, nor the finish the end; this particular musical moment that we experience is merely a sliver of time in an ongoing soundworld.