Peter Sculthorpe

From Nourlangie

From Nourlangie, for soprano, viola, ‘cello & piano (1994) In 1989, I made my first visit to Kakadu National Park, in the north of Australia. Looking out across the great floodplains there, I could see abandoned sites of early white settlement, the Arafura Sea, Torres Strait and, in my imagination, the islands of Indonesia. The musics of these places, and of Kakadu itself, fused in my mind. My guitar concerto, Nourlangie (1989), taking its name from and enormous rock monolith in the park, is a result of this fusion. The music of the guitar work is made up of alternations and elaborations of two different motifs. The second motif, heard immediately after the first, is based upon a Torres Strait dance-song, and is later transformed into a long joyful melody. From Nourlangie, is a short work consisting of three statements of this transformed melody, preceded by a slow introduction. It might be added that much of the figuration in the piano part is characteristically Indonesian. I made the present version especially for Mary Wiegold and the Composers’ Ensemble. Peter Sculthorpe