Sounds of a new land

By WILLIAM DART

The term "icon" is rather bandied about these days, but if anyone deserves to be so called, it is composer Gillian Whitehead.

After a solid European career in the 1970s, followed by two decades of distinguished work in Sydney (with occasional visits across the Tasman), Whitehead "retired", returned home, settled in Dunedin and promptly became one of our busiest composers.

She has been acknowledged with various honours, including two SOUNZ Contemporary Awards, the first for her opera Outrageous Fortune in 1999 and the second, two years later, for the improbable ordered dance, written during her residency with the Auckland Philharmonia.

The turning point came when she was chosen as one of the inaugural Arts Foundation Laureates in 2000.

"It was such a confirming thing," Whitehead muses, "and it could have been this which made me feel that New Zealand really is where I belong, just like when Alice says that this country has to be her choice."

Alice comes into our conversation a lot. It's the title of Whitehead's latest work and, tonight and tomorrow, this major Auckland Philharmonia commission will receive its first performances.

The original Alice Adcock, who inspired the piece, was a survivor.

She came to this country with TB. She was very young but managed to cope on the ship and then went into service, which she didn't like very much but which was the only way to survive.

Such quintessential settler experiences inspired Fleur Adcock to fashion a text for the composer, some of which is taken from her great-aunt's letters.

"Superficial, cheerful letters," Whitehead explains, "letters that may not be revealing all that is going on. We don't know how much she is hiding. And, as things get harder for Alice, the music intensifies."

In many Whitehead works, the land or environment has its part to play. In 1980, the bleak landscapes of northern England informed Hotspur, her first Adcock collaboration.

Now, in Alice, we'll hear "storms, wind, something that might relate to birdsong and the tapped stones that finish the piece. People would have been much more aware of climatic things than we are today because there was nothing to block them out, no radio, no television; what you heard was the sound of the elements".

These are fruitful days for Whitehead. Her new Quintet was premiered last week and she's still waiting to hear how her music for Briar Grace Smith's Potiki's Memory of Stone fares when the play opens in Christchurch on Saturday.

As she puts it, "you might know what your conscious mind has done but you don't know what your unconscious mind has done until you've heard the music live".

Alice is in reliable hands with soloist Helen Medlyn, conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the Auckland Philharmonia.

Whitehead has been impressed by "just how well Miguel works with singers" and the work was written expressly for Medlyn when the composer caught a rehearsal of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and thought, "Gosh, I'd like to write for that voice".

Although Whitehead has been responsible for some of the most rigorously difficult music to come from a New Zealand pen, her current style is open and welcoming.

To some extent it is the result of her exposure to the elemental qualities of Maori music, but it is also a case of "that's the way the world is", she explains, with a laugh.

"I started to simplify about the time that Michael Finnissey and others started to get more complex. Having built up my technique, I can spend the rest of my life using it or simplifying it for myself.

"You learn the language when you're young, but you've got the rest of your life to modify this language and say what you want to with it."

Performance

* Who: Auckland Philharmonia

* Where: Auckland Town Hall

* When: Tonight and tomorrow night at 8