'Metamorphoses' was written while Vercoe was a Composition Teaching Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, U.S.A. His teachers included Ross Lee Finey, who had been a student of Alban Berg while Berg was writing his 'Violin Concerto'. Although 'Metamorphoses' is not a twelve-tone work, the pieces surrounding it (a clarinet sonata and a concerto for viola and computer-generated sounds) had been, bearing the trade marks of Berg in the sensitivity of organised pitches and their relation to one another.
This work explores pitch relations of smaller groups – the intervals of a third and fourth which turn in upon themselves to fully explore the space before moving on to another register. Melodies are thus self-reflective, and the metamorphoses lend the work a consistency via melodic rather than harmonic structures.
'Metamorphoses' was never programmed in a concert series, though it was given a reading by the Cincinnati Symphony. It was also taken on national tour in 1973 by the MIT Symphony Orchestra during the Nixon Watergate hearings.
Biography:
Barry Vercoe Photo: Supplied
BARRY LLOYD VERCOE, born Wellington 1937 and educated in Auckland, won Otago’s Philip Neill Memorial Prize for his composition 'A Program Suite' while a student of Ronald Tremain at Auckland School of Music. Then, awarded a Teaching Fellowship at Michigan USA, he traveled to study with US composer Ross Lee Finney, who had been a student of Alban Berg, while Berg was writing his 'Violin Concerto'.
Still in the US, Vercoe won a Ford-sponsored grant to work as a composer in Public Schools, and continued teaching at Oberlin Conservatory (Ohio), and the Yale School of Music. Since his NZ education included an additional degree in Mathematics, he worked for a time at Princeton University on issues of digital sound processing, and invented the Csound Music Synthesis language. Vercoe was then invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to establish that facility’s first computer music studio. Over the next ten years he ran a series of summer workshops, each culminating in a large concert for visiting composers.
During this period Vercoe wrote his 'Synapse for Viola and Computer', which is recognised as a classic in the field of collaborative performance. He was also a co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory, and has now graduated over 25 PhD students on topics relating to music composition and performance.
Recorded by RNZ Concert for the 2019 NZ Composer Sessions
Producer/Engineer: Graham Kennedy
