Ecozoic Dances (2022)
(Clarinet Concerto No. 2)

The design and texture of the dance-like first movement, composed in a spirit of play, is pervaded by the theme of the natural environment and much influenced by the intersecting voices of living organisms: bird cries, insect and frog rhythms, swarms and drones as from a temperate Australian coastal forest.  Reducing the immeasurable complexity of an ecosystem to a basic skeleton which is then fleshed out with diverse cultural references has been my preoccupation for much of my composing life. Here, as it were, the bones are permitted to protrude revealing their natural origin, whilst cloaked in ritual and myth from the imagination of humankind. The movement opens and closes with a torrent of quasi-birdsong for solo clarinet to betoken the renewal cycles in nature.

The serene, almost trance-like second movement yields in the third to a perpetuum mobile - an imagined glimpse of the eternal dance performed within a flaming wheel by Nataraja, the Hindu deity charged with creating and regulating the universe in a supreme cosmic balancing act. Symbolically, the shrewdness of ancient wisdom intended this performance to keep the miscreant human ego firmly in check whilst choosing not to extinguish it altogether.

 The concerto was commissioned by the Omega Ensemble with the generous support of Kim Williams AM. It was premiered by David Rowden and the Omega Ensemble at City Recital Hall, Sydney, on Tuesday 20 June 2023.