Bird Spirit Dreaming: Australian Music for Soprano Saxophone and Piano

DAVID HOWIE
David studied piano under Sonya Hanke and Gordon Watson as an undergraduate, and then specialized in Accompaniment, studying with David Miller in Sydney at the Conservatorium of Music and Paul Hamburger in London, at the Royal Academy of Music. He was Head of Keyboard Studies at Kings College in Somerset, England for four years before returning to Australia where he has lectured in accompaniment as a member of the Ensemble Unit since 1992 at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He has performed throughout England, Europe, America and Australia, has given numerous live broadcasts and studio recordings for the B.B.C, Radio Luxembourg, A.B.C. television and radio and 2MBS FM. Claude Delangle, Stanley Drucker, Kyle Horsch, Gordon Hunt, Peter Jenkins, Annalisa Kerrigan, Nick Parnell, Kamahl, Dominica Matthews, Otis Murphy, Richard Sherman, David Wakeham, Mark Walton and Asmira Woodward –Page, are some of the many wonderful artists from Australia and internationally that he has had the pleasure to perform with over the years. He is President of the Accompanists’ Guild of NSW.

MICHAEL DUKE
Born in Melbourne Australia, Michael Duke completed his Doctorate degree in Music Performance from Indiana University studying under the tutelage of renowned classical saxophonists Eugene Rousseau, Jean-Yves Fourmeau and Arno Bornkamp. He has performed with many of Australia’s premiere orchestras including the Sydney Symphony, Opera Australia, Queensland Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, Orchestra Victoria, the Australian Philharmonic and Pops Orchestra, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. On the national and world stages he has been invited to perform at numerous international conferences, music institutions and festivals as both lecturer and performer in such countries as the USA, UK, Denmark, Hong Kong and China. In 2016 Duke performed as concerto soloist in the world premiere of Lyle Chan’s award winning “My Dear Benjamin” Serenade for tenor, saxophone and orchestra with the Queensland Symphony. In 2010 Duke was a featured artist at the prestigious International Society for Contemporary Music World New Music Days conference in Sydney, Australia where he presented two concerts of new music for saxophone. In the USA Duke has taught on the faculty of Simpson College in Iowa (2002-2005) and Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts (2007-2008). Beginning in July 2008, Duke commenced his appointment as the first ever full-time classical saxophone lecturer in Australia at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney University where he currently holds the title of Associate Professor saxophone. He is a Yamaha Australia performing artist.

Evgeny Sorkin is a Russian-born violinist and teacher based in Australia. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory, the Australian National Academy of Music and the Sydney Conservatorium, where he completed a Doctor of Musical Arts. His work includes international solo and chamber performances, the Brevis Trio and teaching at the Sydney Conservatorium.

HD Duo
Michael Duke, Soprano Saxophone
David Howie, Piano
First performing together in 2008, Duke and Howie have made the impetus for their duo the presentation of exciting and innovative chamber music. Of particular interest and drive for the duo has been their close collaboration with some of Australia’s most prominent and respected composers commissioning, recording and performing these new works written specifically for them. Leading composers that have written for HD Duo include: Anne Boyd, Michael Smetanin, Matthew Hindson, Brenton Broadstock, Miriama Young, Matthew Orlovich, Lyle Chan, Katy Abbott, Mark Zadro, Andrew Batterham, Tim Dargaville, Catherine Likhuta, Gerard Brophy and Paul Sarcich.
Meeting as colleagues at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the Duo has toured across the major cities of Australia as well as appearing in concert throughout the world in countries such as Thailand, USA, Singapore, England, Scotland, France, Malta, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Canada, Croatia, Mexico and French Polynesian New Caledonia. Some highlights have included: performances at multiple World Saxophone Congress’ (2009, 2012, 2015, 2018), their UK debut in concert at “Australia House” in London (2012), the Australasian Saxophone and Clarinet Conference (2013) and recital concerts at the Festival de Mexico in Mexico City (2014).

Julian Smiles is an Australian cellist and teacher whose career spans orchestral leadership, solo performance and chamber music. He became Principal Cello of the Australian Chamber Orchestra at nineteen and has been closely associated with the Australia Ensemble and the Goldner String Quartet. He also teaches at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Kevin Man is an Australian percussionist trained at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He has held orchestral positions with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and Opera Australia and has performed with many leading Australian ensembles. His activities also encompass Japanese instrumental traditions, including his long association with Taikoz, and percussion teaching. He contributes percussion to Bird Spirit Dreaming.

Brenton Broadstock is an Australian composer, born in Melbourne in 1952. He taught composition at the University of Melbourne for many years and has written symphonies, concertos, chamber music, choral works and solo pieces. His music often reflects humanitarian concerns and personal experience. He received the Don Banks Music Award in 1999 and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2014.

Lyle Chan is an Australian composer whose work embraces orchestral, vocal and chamber music. He spent more than a decade as Artists and Repertoire Manager at ABC Classics and co-founded the Extended Play new music festival in Sydney. His orchestral song cycle My Dear Benjamin received Australia’s Art Music Award for Orchestral Work of the Year. The Perfumed Calyx was commissioned by HD Duo for Bird Spirit Dreaming.

Matthew Hindson is an Australian composer, born in 1968, whose music has been performed by major orchestras and dance companies in Australia and internationally. His catalogue includes orchestral, ballet, chamber and solo music, often drawing energy and rhythmic character from contemporary musical cultures. He has taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2006 for services to composition and music education.

Matthew Orlovich
He studied music composition at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Associate Prof. Eric Gross and Prof. Peter Sculthorpe and graduated with the Degrees of Bachelor of Music (1st Class Hons and University Medal) and PhD.
During the ’90’s, He was awarded several prizes for my compositions, including High Commendation in the 1991 2MBS-FM Young Composer’s Award, the Jean Bogan Memorial Prize in 1994 and the ABC Orchestral Composers’ Award in 1995.
He completed his first commissioned score in 1996 – an a cappella choral setting entitled The Listening Land for The Australian Voices in Brisbane – and since then, He has completed several dozen commissions for performing artists in Australia and overseas.

Peter (Joshua) Sculthorpe
(b Launceston, Tasmania, 29 April 1929). Australian composer. Of all Australian composers since Grainger, he is seen by the Australian musical public as the most nationally representative. He studied at the University of Melbourne (BMus) and later at Wadham College, Oxford (1958–60), where his teachers included Rubbra and Wellesz. In 1963 his music was performed at a conference of composers held in Tasmania. Although his works were not the most daring of those presented – he had by this time explored and largely rejected serial techniques – they exhibited a clarity and polish that identified him as a persuasive intermediary between the new wave of Australian composers and a generally conservative public. After the conference, he was offered a lectureship at the University of Sydney.

Ross Edwards
(b Sydney, 23 Dec 1943). Australian composer. After attending the NSW Conservatorium, Sydney, he enrolled at the University of Sydney, studied composition with Meale and worked as assistant to Sculthorpe, and then studied with Maxwell Davies and Veress at the University of Adelaide. His music was heard at the ISCM festivals at Stockholm (1966) and Basel (1970), and he moved to Britain for further studies with Davies in 1970. This was followed by a period living in a farmhouse in Yorkshire, and he returned to Australia in 1972. From 1973 he taught at the University of Sydney (taking the DMus in 1991), but he has chiefly been a freelance composer, filling commissions for the ABC orchestras, the major Australian contemporary ensembles and occasionally ensembles such as the Fires of London. He was Australia Council Don Banks fellow (1989–90), then an Australia Council creative arts fellow (1990–93 and 1995–7)

Edwards at first wrote music using the acerbic, atonal techniques favoured by his teachers in the late 1960s; these early works are for solo or chamber groups, such as the Monos series for solo instruments (1970–72). But in isolation in Yorkshire during 1971 he crafted a more independent and distinctive language, seeking its sources in nature or in techniques beyond the constraints of European serialism, and aimed at more effective communication with the listener. His language came to espouse two principal styles. The first is characterized by a mood of serenity and meditation, at times influenced by the static patterns of certain Asian musics, as in Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist (1973) and The Hermit of the Green Light (1979). The second is a more vibrant, rhythmically energetic mood, often drawing its materials from coastal NSW, as he became interested in the arrangement into abstract patterns of natural elements such as the sounds of insects. The Tower of Remoteness (1978) and Yarrageh (1989) are examples, as are, best known, the Maninyas series (1981–8), which began with a set of nonsense syllables and appealing melodic fragments, from which he produced works of great gaiety and rhythmic buoyancy. ‘I've evolved a highly subjective method of topographical symbolism’, he has written. ‘The art of composition has come to represent a ritualistic search for the life force underlying our sterile, material society’. His orchestral works, including the widely played Piano Concerto (1982), the Maninyas Violin Concerto (1988) and the Symphony ‘Da pacem Domine’ (1990–91) have gained him wide attention. Austere and compelling, his has become one of the most convincing voices of Australian music.