Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

The Dreaming Land is a sonata for cello and piano, exploring emotional connections to the physical world. The piece presents a sonic journey across a fictional landscape. The listener is offered the chance to travel with the protagonists through an idealised world. The Dreaming Land of the title alludes to the vast terrain of the Australian continent as the piece traverses ideas of time and place in three movements.

1) Voices of the Ancients
The players appear amidst a timeless landscape, floating in memory. They gradually reveal interjecting voices from the past as the movement transforms into a slow hymn from eternity, dissipating into the echoes of the past.

2) The Chanting Walker…
The solo cello personifies a lone traveler walking steadily across a flat landscape, trudging slowly through time. The low bass punctuations in the piano ground the traveler on the earth as the walker chants in time with each footstep, while wandering across the land.

3) Ethereal Furies
The narrator and companion are forced into a battle with the land and the elements, as they dance across the limitless earth, navigating the furious expanse of time, life and the eternal.

Work Details

Year: 2018

Instrumentation: Cello, piano.

Duration: 13 min.

Difficulty: Advanced — Some aleatoric notation

Commission note: Commissioned by Cathy Brown-Watt for performance by Musica Viva Australia.. Commissioned by Cathy Brown-Watt for performance by Musica Viva Australia. Commissioned for the 2019 Australian tour of Natalie Clein and Katya Apekisheva.

First performance: 23 Feb 19. City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney