Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

In 1997, poet and performance artist Michele Morgan wrote a series of short poems to accompany photographs of various geographical places in the Australian landscape for an exhibition in Sydney. Each poem was inspired by, and written especially for, a particular photograph in that exhibition.

Michele was a good friend of mine, and I liked her wonderfully evocative poems so much that, with her permission, I selected five to set to music as a song cycle.

My aim was to honour her poetry by creating evocative songs that might offer a vision of timeless beauty, and thus echo the landscapes that inspired the words.

These songs are meant to be simple and beautiful miniatures, representing brief moments of repose in an otherwise hectic and often busy world. I have incorporated several thematic links between various songs in order to create a sense of unity across the cycle.

Originally composed in 1998 for voice and guitar, I revisited this song cycle in 2023 and created a version for voice and piano. In doing so, I have made small changes to three of the songs, while two songs have largely been rewritten in order to make them more suitable for piano accompaniment.

Work Details

Year: 1998, this version: 2023

Instrumentation: Voice, piano.

Duration: 14 min.

Contents note: I. Awinya, Fraser Island -- II. On the Woralie Track -- III. Wathumba, Fraser Island -- IV. Rocks, Cape Leenwin -- V. Forest at Namadgi.