Login

Enter your username and password

Forgotten your username or password?

Your Shopping Cart

There are no items in your shopping cart.

  • Home
  • Parts: Dinner dances
Dinner dances

Sheet Music: Performance Parts

Dinner dances : for string orchestra / by Tim Dargaville.

by Tim Dargaville (2009)

  • Sales Availability: This item is available from our hire library.
    Please contact our Hire Department to enquire about pricing and obtain this item.
  • Library Availability: This item is not available from the Australian Music Centre Library
  • Instrumentation: 8 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, double bass.

  • Audio Sample

    Performance by Tim Dargaville, Michelle Ruffolo, Christine Marnane, Andrew Jakopanec, Rosanne Hunt, Ivan Rosa from the CD Invisible dances and other works


    (this sample is of the quintet version of this work)

Hire Only

This item is available from our hire library.
Please contact our Hire Department to enquire about pricing and obtain this item.

Product details

In 2004 I was commissioned by the Melbourne Theatre Company to provide music for the production of "Dinner" by English playwright Moira Buffini. The play, essentially a very black comedy of manners, is set around a large dinner table containing several courses of disgustingly inedible food. As the invited guests dissect each other in polite (and not so polite) conversation whilst trying to digest the primordial slime soup entrée and the frozen waste dessert, we learn that the storyline to "Dinner" has some very dark and disturbing twists. Humour is used to deliver some nasty existential punches, as we witness how the hosts despise each other, how a vegetarian guest is forced to kill and then eat her main course, and how the waiter reveals himself to be a hired assassin.

The music for this production of "Dinner" was conceived to be a series of short interludes interspersed between scenes, sometimes allowing for reflection, sometimes ramping up the drama. The six pieces, originally scored for string quintet, are intended to be strangely familiar, but with unexpected twists and turns, as if they were recorded background music being influenced by the action. In the version of "Dinner Dances" for string orchestra, I have taken the same material from the original quintet, and reorchestrated it, treating it spatially within the ensemble, exploring conversational patterns that are so much a part of the original play.

Published by: Australian Music Centre — 1 set of 7 performance parts (47p. -- A4 (portrait))

Difficulty: Medium

Contents note:

In 6 movements.

First performance by Arcko Symphonic Ensemble, Timothy Phillips at Pulling Strings (Richmond Uniting Church) on 30 May 2009

Typeset edition.

Related products

This work is also available in the following products:

Dinner dances
Score: Dinner dances : for string orchestra / by Tim Dargaville.

This work also exists as the following versions:
- Quintets: 2 Violins, viola, cello, double bass

 

- Browse other works for String orchestra

- Browse other works by Tim Dargaville

Analysis & Media

- Resonate Article: Arcko Symphonic Project - Pulling Strings

User reviews

Be the first to share your thoughts, opinions and insights about this item.

To post a comment please login