Brisbane: Spring of 1987
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 2023
- Duration
- 6'
- Publisher
- Mormolyke Press (free PDF for study and for performances without an admission charge). Please follow the rules on the composer's website.
Purchase or download
About this piece
Melissa Dunphy grew up in Brisbane, Australia, and in late spring 1987, when she was seven, her mother had her first major episode of bipolar disorder [1]. The Bardin-Niskala Duo commissioned this piece, which answers Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with Dunphy's own memory of that season [2]. Her mother, a refugee from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, played her Cantonese nursery rhymes on cassette, and those tunes enter later in the work [1]. Dunphy describes an "almost foreboding calm" broken by the call of the butcherbird, an Australian bird that used to sing through her neighborhood [2], and that call is the cello's first entry [3]. The nursery rhymes arrive in a 6/8 Allegretto marked "playfully", grow "manic", and give way to a quiet Adagio [3]. An-Lin Bardin and Naomi Niskala play it in Hawaiʻi Public Radio's film from the Atherton Performing Arts Studio [1]. For downloading, please follow the rules outlined on the composer's website.
Technical overview
Slow opening in 3/4, rubato at quarter note = c.66, then Adagio moderato at c.69 with one bar of 5/4 and a 6/8 Allegretto at dotted quarter = 108. It starts in tenor clef and then stays in bass clef with many ledger lines, climbing to high A and B flat on the A string, including a high note held over four bars. The 6/8 has slurred pairs, a pizzicato passage, and a line of natural harmonics in first position with the sounding pitches printed above; the Maestoso sets duplets against 6/8. Triplets, grace notes and dynamics from ppp to ff, with no double stops.
Technical focus
- Collaboration with Piano
- Grace Notes
- Hairpin Dynamics
- Harmonics
- Hooked Bowings
- Legato
- Meter Changes
- Pizzicato
- Shifting
- String Crossings
- Tempo Changes
- Tenor Clef
- Triplets
- Vibrato