Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Rosalind Carlson  
© Rosalind Carlson

Flexi-Fingers is a music publisher distributing sheet music and CDs of pieces by Rosalind Carlson, OAM. Carlson was born in Wahroonga, Sydney in 1937. She has been an active part of the Australian music community as a composer, conductor, and music educator.

Carlson says: "My inspiration to compose music is derived from nature. My aim is to describe in sound an interpretation of my natural environment. I am fortunate to live in a rural area which stimulates this aim. So my musical output is derived from Australia itself. It is my observations of this wonderful country, with its vast contrasts, that awakens and stimulates my music. It is this Australian sound that I am endeavouring to capture. My works are suitable for performance."

Featured titles

Australian Bird Suite

For solo flute. AMEB grade 3

Here the native Australian birds that live and breed on her land have inspired Carlson's work. Musical motifs represent the different birds. Each motif for each movement is published at the beginning of each movement. These motifs are suggestive of the various idiosyncrasies and characteristics of the birds being described musically.

Waterfall in Spring

For flute and piano. ANZCA grade 7

This is a sensitive, expressive and subtle work which is haunting and is considered to be recognisably "Australian" in sound.

Australian Bushfire

For violin and piano. AMEB A.Mus. A.

In composing "Australian Bushfire" Rosalind Carlson takes you into her past background with vivid childhood memories of many bushfires which passed by her home in Wahroonga.

She writes: "This music is somewhat volatile, for I am tracing the course of the bushfire from its inception in the distance to its devastating damage as it passes in fury. Then the crying of the land once the fire passes, and the future renewal of the bush that will follow in time, with the regrowth of new shoots.

As a child our family lived in the bush. Each summer I witnessed bushfires at close range. It was one of the most dramatic happenings in my young life. The smell of the fire would first alert us. Because we lived on a high ridge with a panoramic view over the local valleys we could see the smoke travelling in the gullies towards our home in Wahroonga."