The hills are alive

Christopher Marshall has composed a piece for the City Choir Dunedin. Photo supplied.

Christopher Marshall's style of music hasn't changed over the three and a-half decades he's been composing - he's got better at it, he says - but audiences have changed and musical taste has swung in his favour.

The former Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago has composed For What Can be More Beautiful? for the City Choir Dunedin's (formerly City of Dunedin Choir) concert on Saturday. The concert, titled ''Nature's Bounty'', celebrates both the choir's 150th anniversary and that of the Dunedin Botanic Garden, and Marshall will be visiting from Orlando, Florida, where he is now based, for the premiere. For him, melody is paramount and always has been, and he is influenced by 19th-century Romanticism as well as Maori and Polynesian music, he says.

''When I was at university and for most of my career in New Zealand, melody was not `in'. I adore Brahms and people like that, and though my music could not possibly have been written at that time, the influences are there for all to see and I'm not ashamed of that. I think audiences relate to the fact that there are tunes they can hum and recall afterwards and also Romantic harmonies they can relate to.''

All his works have received multiple performances, which he finds very satisfying.

It's one of the advantages of living in the US, with a population base of 300 million, and being available to travel to talk to audiences when his work is performed, he says.

Born in France and brought up in New Zealand, he lived in Samoa for a few years teaching English as a second language while also composing. One of his early works, Minoi minoi, a Samoan song that he set for choir in the early 1990s and has since sold 70,000-80,000 copies, started to get his name known, he said.

After the Mozart Fellowship, which he held in 1994 and 1995, he received a Fulbright Award, which took him to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, as composer in residence for 18 months. He composed works for the various ensembles, chamber groups and orchestras there.

Back in New Zealand for eight years working as a full-time freelance composer, he won the audience prize in the inaugural Lilburn Prize in 2000 for his Hikurangi Sunrise.

By chance, a visiting British conductor, Timothy Reynish, heard it playing on the radio and when he returned to the UK he contacted Marshall and commissioned a piece for wind ensemble, Aue!, which has had many performances. A later piece, also commissioned by Reynish, L'homme armé: Variations for Wind Ensemble has since had some 60 performances around the world and contributed greatly to his reputation, Marshall says.

It was at one of these performances that he met people who invited him to Orlando and since 2006 he has been based there as composer in residence and adjunct professor of composition at the University of Central Florida. He finds tutoring advanced composition students enormously rewarding, he said.

Another highlight in his career was the premiere of Tihei, Mauri Ora! in the Kennedy Centre, Washington, in the presence of the New Zealand ambassador. A setting of ancient Maori texts that he had permission from the tribes to use, for male voices and clarinet, it had originally been commissioned for the National Male Choir of New Zealand, who decided it was too hard for them to perform.

Depressed at the response, Marshall sent it to Frank Albinger, a choral conductor he knew, and asked if it really was unplayable. Not only did Albinger reply that it was playable, but he premiered it and it received a standing ovation.

''That was one of the most memorable nights of my career,'' Marshall said.

When commissioned by musical director David Burchell to write a piece for the Dunedin choir's 150th anniversary and that of the botanic garden, he immediately thought of the biblical Song of Solomon, especially the parts about gardens and plant images. It was an opportunity he'd been waiting for for many years.

Then he had problems finding a text for the second movement of the piece. It had to have New Zealand content to receive Creative New Zealand funding, and he wanted it to be specific to Dunedin. Although there were many lovely New Zealand poems about gardens, they just didn't get on well together, he said.

''In desperation, I wrote to the Hocken Library and said I needed something with a garden theme and somehow tied to Dunedin. Within a week they had got back to me with this wonderful diary that dated from the same time as the opening of the botanical gardens by a Dunedin seed merchant called William Reid.

''He speaks in the most romantic and wonderful terms about how great it is and all the reasons one should grow fruit trees, but at the same time it rings so true.

''He says people who grow fruit trees in their garden save a lot of money because they harvest their own fruit, but also spiritual and physical wellbeing is greatly enhanced by the fruit trees.

''In a way, William Reid was ahead of his time, because now we know on a scientific basis the psychological benefit of living in a place with a garden and also the physical benefits of eating fresh, organically grown fruit and vegetables.''

In consultation with Burchell, Marshall scored the work for an unusual orchestra, with one of each instrument - all the usual woodwinds, including piccolo, cor anglais and bass clarinet, a horn, a trumpet, a string quintet of two violins, a viola and a cello, a piano and an organ, and several percussion instruments such as marimbas and xylophones.

He is looking forward to his week-long visit to Dunedin and reconnecting with his parents and brother from the North Island, who are coming for the premiere.

''I regard Otago University as my alma mater, even though it's not, because I got a much warmer response at the university than I had anywhere else in New Zealand. Dunedin is an important place to me, so there's a feeling of coming home in many ways about this performance.''

25 years on
Music composed for the choir's 125th anniversary by the late Jack Speirs, an associate professor at the University of Otago, is also part of the programme for the City Choir Dunedin's 150th anniversary concert on Saturday.

The music, Cantico del Sole, composed by Speirs in 1988, is a setting for a hymn of praise to nature by the Catholic saint Francis of Assisi.

Prof Speirs, who studied in Edinburgh before moving to Dunedin and working in the university's music department, was also, at various times, musical director of Schola Cantorum, Dunedin, principal conductor of the Dunedin Sinfonia and musical director of the Southern Consort of Voices.

Cantico del Sole will be sung by the choir with soprano soloist Grace Park, a fourth-year performance student at the University of Otago, and orchestral accompaniment, conductor David Burchell said.

''It is a very atmospheric work with echoes of monastic sounds, plainsong, and the sounds of nature in the orchestra,'' he said.

''It is trying to conjure up St Francis' world as a backdrop to the text.''

Several members of the choir had suggested, since he had arrived in Dunedin, that they must perform the piece again, so it must have made quite an impression, the conductor said.

''This seems to be a good occasion to bring it out.''

See it, hear it
''Nature's Bounty'' a concert launching the City Choir Dunedin's 150th anniversary, is at Knox Church on Saturday at 7.30pm. It will feature Christopher Marshall's newly commissioned work For What Can be More beautiful?; Jack Speirs' Cantico del Sole, based on words by St Francis of Assisi, which marked the choir's 125th anniversary; and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, a popular Victorian choral work performed at least three times by the choir in the early 20th century. The choir and Southern Sinfonia will be conducted by David Burchell and soloists are soprano Grace Park and tenor Matthew Wilson.

The audience will have the opportunity to meet the composer at an after-concert supper.

Get involved
City Choir Dunedin is looking for more singers for a performance of the Verdi Requiem at the Dunedin Town Hall on June 27. For more information, visit www.citychoirdunedin.org.nz.