Login

Enter your username and password

Forgotten your username or password?

Your Shopping Cart

There are no items in your shopping cart.

Work

Cambewarra (unaccompanied piano)

by David Lumsdaine (1980)

Audio Sample

Performance by Mark Knoop from the CD Complete music for solo piano

Selected products featuring this work — Display all products (2 more)

Complete music for solo piano

$23.00

Add to cart

CD

Complete music for solo piano / David Lumsdaine ; Mark Knoop, piano.

Library shelf no. CD 1949 [Available for loan]

Cambewarra

$POA

This item may be available to purchase from the Australian Music Centre.
Please contact our Sales Department to confirm pricing and availability.

Score

Cambewarra : for solo piano / David Lumsdaine.

Library shelf no. Q 786.2/LUM 1 [Available for loan]

Display all products featuring this work (2 more)  

Work Overview

Cambewarra, Aboriginal for smoky mountain, looks eastward across the coastal plain to the Pacific Ocean; north and south runs the escarpment of the Great Dividing Range; at its foot to the west are the rich pastures of Kangaroo Valley, cleared by settlers in the middle of the nineteenth century. The original rain forest lives on in the gullies and sheer slopes of the mountain and remains the home of a rich variety of plants and creatures. The piano piece takes its name from this place where it was conceived on the morning of 31/12/78.

The three movements are related to one another like the same landscape at different hours. Each begins with a brief toccata-like figure which outlines the harmonic centre, and together they form an extended Aubade:
1. the turn of night
2. first light
3. sunrise.

The musical material of this piece owes a great deal to the birds which inhabit Cambewarra. Anybody who knows the birdsongs of South Eastern Australia is bound to recognise my debt, but I trust they will also hear the piece as a composed structure which transcends the mere pictorial or the anecdotal. It is the whole experience of those morning hours on the mountain-side which became a metaphor for the musical structure. There is, of course, a marvellous model for the transformation of a whole environment into a musical structure -Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux.

The work was commissioned by Peter Lawson, who gave the first performance at the Royal Northern School of Music, Manchester, in January 1981.

Work Details

Year: 1980

Instrumentation: Piano.

Duration: 21 min.

Difficulty: Advanced — Professional.

Subjects

User reviews

Be the first to share your thoughts, opinions and insights about this work.

To post a comment please login.