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Review: Flute Perspectives: Australian Contemporary Flute (Derek Jones)

Australian flautist Derek Jones’ new album Flute Perspectives opens with Peter Sculthorpe’s Songs of Sea and Sky, an adaption of a traditional dance song from Saibai, an island in Torres Strait. Originally for clarinet and piano, the music juxtaposes distinctive melodies from the region with the music of the missionaries, whose melodies and forms seeped into those of the Torres Strait Islands in the 19th century. The tension between these ideas styles is most potent in the fourth movement, Mission Hymn. A simple hymn tune in the piano, played by Leigh Harrold, is both peaceful and anachronistic against bird-like chirping and fluttering in the flute part. Sculthorpe’s influence on Australian music was pervasive and reverberates through many of the works on this disc. A student of Sculthorpe, Barry Conyngham’s Flute alternates burbling, flourishes in the instrument’s low register with declamatory snatches of melody. Australian jazz musician Brian Brown, Sculthorpe’s contemporary, improvised the dance-like Lily’s Garden, playing through a midi channel into computer notation software. The work celebrates the birth of Lily Jones – Derek Jones’ daughter and Brown’s granddaughter. Jones’ own composition on the album, Stillness, first appeared on his self-published album Sun Down Moon Up and is also grounded……

June 15, 2016