Technology Overcomes Tyranny Of Distance

Technology Overcomes Tyranny Of Distance

The latest communication technologies will help to overcome the tyranny of distance as composer Claire Cowan and the Hutt Valley Concert Orchestra collaborate over the next few months in the 2007 SOUNZ Community Commission.

While Claire is Auckland-based it will not be just the 700km distance that will separate their activities. The young composer is planning a trip to New York later this year to further her professional studies and intends to begin developing ideas for the SOUNZ Community Commission while there.

"We will keep in contact via the internet," Brent Stewart, conductor of the Hutt Valley Concert Orchestra explains. "With high-speed broadband, score-writing software Sibelius and multimedia sharing sites such as Youtube and Myspace, we will be able to keep working out musical ideas despite being in different cities. Claire will send files over, we can try them out in rehearsal and video the results, then post these to an internet site where she can hear them."

The SOUNZ Community Commission is a project administered by SOUNZ the Centre for New Zealand Music. Through the generosity of an overseas patron, $1500 is made available to allow a community organisation and a professional composer to work together towards the creation and performance of a new musical work. The Hutt Valley Concert Orchestra celebrates its 50th Birthday in 2008, and they thought a specially commissioned work would be a fitting project for the community group which began as a Continuing Education Night Class at Naenae College.

" We submitted a proposal for a piece that would use two conductors and a 'divided' orchestra," Brent continues. "In performance, I will conduct one group while Stuart Douglas, my immediate predecessor as musical director, will simultaneously conduct the other. The orchestra members are really excited by the prospect of having a work written especially for them and have already suggested ways of how the two groups could be formed - some of them quite intriguing!"

Claire gained a Bmus with 1st Class Honours from Auckland University studying composition with Eve de Castro-Robinson and John Elmsly. She is also a cellist and artist and has written music for film and dance. She has already won numerous prizes for her compositions, was the Composer in Residence with the NZSO's National Youth Orchestra in 2006 and has recently been named as one of the inaugural ART source programme recipients, an award for creative entrepreneurs in Manukau.

Past recipients of the SOUNZ Community Commission have included Jonathan Besser and the Gisborne Milennium Parade Committee, Rachel Clement and the Southern Lakes Festival of Colour, and Ross Carey and the Homai Campus for Blind and Vision Impaired. On December 1, 2007, the Manukau City Symphony Orchestra will perform Robin Toan’s Fanfare, the work resulting from the 2006 SOUNZ Community Commission

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