Brigid Burke - Lands Collide (2002)
The concept of the composition is to make the sounds and visuals grow in and out of each other with depth and constant movement with combinations of definition and confusion but as a whole to create unity. Throughout Lands Collide old maps and landscape that have been untainted by man, Javanese flutes and gongs, organic drawings also largely influenced me The sounds and visuals are unique, like the wind, full of rich sonorities just waiting to be transformed or left alone. The aim was to try and convey moments, portraying a simplistic, gutteral, earthy yet sophisticated sound field and landscape as one can feel frequency changes with these sound and viual worlds through extreme contraction, expansion, panning and pitch modification. Lands Collide can also be described as an exploration of sounds at different dynamic and room placements and been embedded into different scenes by means of subtle dynamic curves both visually and aurally.

Brigid Burke is a clarinettist, composer, educator and visual artist. She has performed internationally in solo and chamber recitals. Recent performances include Cybersonica International Festival of Digital Music and Sound at the ICA, London, MAXIS 2002 Festival/Symposium of Audio & Art in England, on the River Hull Hull Time Based Arts, Hull, England, Seoul International Computer Music Festival 2001 and she performed at other festivals in Bulgaria, Slovenia and Frankfurt. Brigid has received 11 art awards and exhibited throughout Japan in the Japanese International Hand Printed & Shhin Kohanga competition from 1989-2002.


Steve Ingham - Port Kembla Videodelic (2001)
This work was composed for the Charisma duo (cello and bass clarinet) as an multimedia project exploring new techniques of audio/visual interaction.
Unlike other recent computer music works which generate sound from a still or moving image, Port Kembla Videodelic uses pre-recorded and live sound to alter various facets in the display of two-dimensional images. The work is in two parts, which run without a break; a quite, unmeasured section of about six minutes, and a concluding movement in which the live and pre-recorded elements are tightly synchronised.
Many thanks to Gregor Cullen for supplying the images of Port Kembla, and also to Eric Wenger for the development of the software.

Stephen Ingham has had a broad and varied career as a composer. Born in London in 1951, he studied with Bernard Rands (University of York), Donald Erb (University of Bloomington, Indiana) and later with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik, Freiburg.
Appointed Composer-in-Residence in the Northern Arts Region of the UK in 1980, he later lectured at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and directed its Hopkins Studio for Electroaccoustic Music. His works have been performed widely, and received various prizes and other distinctions. Since 1993, he has lived and worked in Australia. He is currently Associate Professor of Music in the Faculty of Creative Arts Wollongong.


Jon Drummond - A Book of Changes (2002)
The title “A Book of Changes” directly references the ancient Chinese mystical
divination text the "I Ching". Its sixty-four hexagrams derived form a pair of
trigrams which in turn are derived from four basic symbols create powerful
layers of meaning. The separate score, sound and graphic objects in “A Book of Changes” are performed in different but at the same time interrelated combinations to create new relationships and meanings. By displaying "graphic objects" the computer selects which parts of the score the Bass Clarinet and Cello will play. There are eight graphic objects that relate to eight different sections of the scores for the two instrumentalists. The computer determines a duration for the sections (objects) chosen, indicated on-screen by moving time lines. So while no two performances will ever be the same, it is not a random or aleatoric work, but rather a piece that has different moods or changing reflections.

Jon Drummond Composer, programmer, researcher, educator, and new media artist. He
has degrees in musical composition and computer science. Jon's creative work extensively explores the intersection of sound and technology producing works for a variety of media including electroacoustic, live electronics, multimedia, web and installation. Many of his compositions have been commissioned and performed by leading performers and ensembles around the country including Australysis, The Song Company, Symeron, Voiceworks and watt. His computer music and installation work as has been presented in numerous Australian and International festivals and galleries.
Jon is also extensively involved in researching new ways to interact with digital media.


Martin Wesley-Smith - Merry-Go-Round (2002)
Merry-Go-Round is about Afghanistan. The text at the beginning paraphrases a passage by John C. Griffiths in his book “Afghanistan – A History of Conflict” (Timat Publishing-Andre Deutsch, London, 2001) (p263). “Any outsider who sticks his finger in the Afghan pie finds it was a damn sight hotter than he thought and ruins the pie for the Afghans. Persia, Britain, Russia and now the United States have all found their goals unobtainable and the cost of seeking them unsustainable, but the greatest price has always been paid by the poor, bloodied people of Afghanistan.”
Photography is by Australian artist George Gittoes,; photography of model Holly Berri by Alice Wesley-Smith. Merry-Go-Round by Martin Wesley-Smith, was commissioned by Charisma with the assistance of the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, it arts funding and advisory body.

Martin Wesley-Smith taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Between 1974 and 2000, 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,(eg:Dodgson’s Dream and Songs for Snark Hunters) and the plight of the people of East Timor. The latter includes Welcome to the Hotel Turismo , X and the award-winning Quito). He now works full-time in rural New South Wales as a composer and duck farmer.


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.

The nine miniatures comprising the Musikalisches Blumengärtlein 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 “Parodiestücke” (parody pieces). He wrote thirty such works (most of them lost) between 1917 to 1930. The Musikalisches Blumengärtlein 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’); Prière 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 F major Viola sonata and 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.


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 is 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 Duet from the suite are based on the themes of desire, sublime love and exhilaration.


Hans Klaus Langer is a German composer . He was born in 1903 and died in 1987. His Drei Duette were published with the support of the Institute for East German music Bensberg. They are witty and humorous atonal pieces, with a light rhythmic drive and with many similarities to the Paul Hindemith duos Musikalisches Blumengärtlein Un Leyptziger Allerey.


Gerard Brophy has been commissioned and performed by some of the world's leading ensembles – and his music is regularly broadcast in Europe, Japan, the United States and Australia as well as appearing in the major subscription series of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra National de Lyon, the Pompidou Centre and the Dutch Proms.
He is currently working on Concerto in Blue for guitar and orchestra for Craig Ogden and the BBC Philharmonic, a work for the Apollo Saxophone Quartet and a piece for the great Senegalese percussion dynasty the N'diaye Rose family.

Pas de Deux was commissioned by Charisma and this is its premiere performance. It is a duo in three movements. It is an evocative work – a pastiche, which conjures up harmonies from Central Europe.


David Baker is a distinguished African – American jazz musician and composer, who has taught for many years at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. This slow movement is the middle movement of his Duo for cello and clarinet and its Bluesy melodies and harmonies are typical of his style. He has also written a sonata for clarinet and piano.