"Ao is a word that means many things," explains Wellington composer composer Tabea Squire, "It can mean 'bright', it can mean 'shining' and it can be 'The Long White Cloud' in the name Aotearoa."
"I wanted to write a New Zealand piece and it was difficult to know where to start. I thought about the name 'Aotearoa' and I looked into translations of it and there are actually a whole lot of possible translations: The Land of the Long White Cloud, The Land of Shining Brightness, The Land of Mists, The Land of Rainbows, or even just The Shining Land."
For Tabea, all these possible translations could be true of New Zealand. So when she began writing her orchestral work Ao she worked in many different elements. One element that became particularly important was shadows.
"One of the things I notice about being in New Zealand is that the sun here does seem to be more vivid and sharp than in other places. And the strange consequence of that is not that the light is brighter but when you are near the middle of the day the shadows appear darker."
Tabea describes certain sections of her orchestral work Ao as a "transcription of the appearance of complex shadows." And just as looking closely at this phenomenon can be quite a visual overload Tabea intentionally made these sections sound overwhelming. To create the effect of light and shadow Tabea played with saturation, even creating her own system of note generation to do so. She calls her system Non Octave Repeating Interval Sets, or NORIS for short.
"It's the basis from which most of the material is derived from."
Listen to Ao:
Ao was selected as one of 8 new works by New Zealand composers to be performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and conductor Hamish McKeich as part of the 2017 NZ Composer Sessions - a collaboration between the NZSO, SOUNZ and RNZ.
