Paul Hindemith Musikalisches Blumengartlein und Leyptziger Allerley
1. Untitled
2. Priere d'une vierge dans la Tonart mixolydique (A virgin's prayer in the mixolydian mode)
3. Untitled
4. Kanon zum Schiessen (Canon for shooting)
5. Broken melody
6. Marsch der Lowenreichswehr - Oberst W. gewidmet (March of the Lion King's artillery dedicated to Colonel W.)
7. Lied (song)
8. Die Gebetsmuhle im Schwarzwald, Charakterstuck (Prayer wheel in the Black Forest, character piece)
9. Ein Tanzlein (A little dance)

Stephen Ingham
10. Verfranzt
11. Frampton Elegy

Richard Vella
12. Tango From Tales of Love
13. Duet

Howard Skempton
14. Surface Tension number One
15. A Card for Lucy
16. Lullaby

Martin Wesley-Smith
17. White Knight and Beaver

Equally versatile as a performer, composer, pedagogue and theorist, Paul Hindemith was one of the 20th century's most seminal musical figures. His prolific output saw many changes in his compositional style. Following the rise of National Socialism during his professorship in Berlin he migrated to the US, where he taught at Yale. The charming group of pieces that open this CD are an example of Hindemith's early compositions, whose preservation is possibly due to the timely intervention of his wife. The composer consigned many of his early works to the fire and it was she who pulled them out of the flames.

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The nine miniatures comprising the Musikalisches Blumengartlein and Leyptziger Allerley were written in just three days at the end of January 1927, the year Hindemith began teaching at the Berlin Musikhochschule (College of Music). They belong to the pieces of his commonly referred to as "Parodiestucke" (parody pieces). He wrote thirty such works (most of them lost) between 1917 to 1930. The Musikalisches Blumengartlein weren't published until 1995 the Hindemith centenary year ending sixty-eight years of undeserved obscurity. The burlesque of the music is reflected in the playfulness of the titles: Kanon zum Schiessen ('Canon for shooting'); Priere d'une vierge dans la Tonart mixolydique ('Prayer to a virgin in the mixolydian mode'). Despite their light-heartedness, these delightful pieces display all the Hindemith trademarks of rhythmic sophistication, modal ambiguity and breadth of melodic line found in works such as the Kammermusik series of the same period. The growing popularity of these miniatures promises further exploration of this too-long-neglected side of Hindemith's musical personality.

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Stephen Ingham was born in London, and has composed extensively for a wide variety of musical resources, most notably in the electroacoustic domain. Since 1993 he has lived and worked in Australia, first in Melbourne more recently in NSW, where he is currently a professor in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong.

Verfranzt was composed in 1996. Langenscheidt's Dictionary defines the verb 'sich verfranzen' as "to wander off course" or "to get lost" but composer Franz S. (to whose music this piece alludes) rarely did this in his own music. Like those remarkable depictions of the webs spiders weave while under the influence of drugs, this piece takes FS's harmonies into new worlds of musical logic.

The Frampton Elegy (2001) is a personal tribute to the late jazz musician and composer Roger Frampton. One of Roger's own melodies is woven into the musical fabric towards the end, presented first by the cello and then by the bass clarinet, over a quietly rocking piano accompaniment.

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Richard Vella has written for an extensive range of musical genres such as film, stage, concert, vocal and music theatre. He is artistic director of Calculated Risks Opera Productions, a company that explores the relationships existing between performance, audience, musical and theatrical forms and location. He is currently adjunct professor in music at Queensland University of Technology.

Duet and Tango are part of a suite drawn from Vella's large-scale music theatre work Tales of Love (1990). Revised and restaged in Sydney in 2002, the work reinterprets love songs, combining them with instrumental musical commentaries that delve into various aspects of the love song. The two pieces chosen from the suite are based on the themes of desire, sublime love and exhilaration.

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As an original member of Cardew's Scratch Orchestra and champion of "experimental simplicity", Howard Skempton has enjoyed cult status in the U.K. He gained international recognition in the 1990s with recordings of his orchestral work, Lento and chamber miniatures. Most of Howard Skempton's works are short, occasional pieces, often gifts for friends.

The tender clarinet solo, A Card for Lucy (1984), was composed for the daughter of clarinettist Ian Mitchell. Lullaby (1983) is a simple melody framed and supported by Bach-like cello music. Surface Tension 1 & 2 were written in 1975 for the east-west fusion ensemble Dreamtiger, Surface Tension 2 exploring the different sonorities and timbral qualities of the three instruments through slow-moving spatially displaced chords in the piano and momentary off-the-beat entries by the clarinet and cello. Charisma has replaced the original flute part with clarinet, with the composer's permission.

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Between 1974 and 2000, Martin Wesley-Smith taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where he established and ran the Electronic Music Studio. In 1986 he set up the first computer music studio in China. His highly eclectic music ranges from children's songs to spectacular multimedia works, such as his much-acclaimed Wattamolla Red for multiple computer-controlled slide projectors and tape. Two themes dominate his output: the life, work and ideas of Lewis Carroll, and the plight of the people of East Timor. The latter includes Welcome to the Hotel Turismo and the award-winning Quito. He now works full-time in rural New South Wales as a composer and duck farmer.

In this version of White Knight & Beaver (1984), it's as if the Rev'rend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) is a cellist, showing a clarinet-playing Alice how one can play nursery rhymes backwards and upside-down on music-boxes (or, in this case, on a Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument). He begins with 'Polly Put the Kettle On' and 'Ride a Cock Horse' together, playing some of the snippets of melody that emerge and encouraging her to join in. Tiring of this, and after a rendition of 'Humpty Dumpty' backwards (surprisingly, a beautiful tune), he proceeds to demonstrate a musical representation of a thousand or so nucleotides of plasmid pBR322 of Eschericia coli, a bacterium in his stomach.