Making rainbow connections

RNZ News

30-05-2025

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Tabea Squire
Photo:
Eustie Kamath
Once again, secondary school music students across the country are competing in Aotearoa's annual chamber music contest.
But for this, the competition's 60th incarnation, composer Tabea Squire has attempted to address a perennial issue: how do you put very different ensembles on an equal footing?
Squire's solution is a little like a set of Lego blocks - short musical phrases coded by colour (she calls them 'bricks') some of them pitched, some just rhythm - which competitors can arrange, repeat, mix and match as they like, to build their own piece.
It's called "Rainbow Construction" and the blocks she's set out in the user manual represent all the colours of said rainbow, along with ultraviolet, which is a family of options for rests. As in the sounds you can't hear - get it?
Speaking to RNZ Concert, Squire said the inspiration for the piece came from
Terry Riley's "In C"
which also invites players to mix and match musical ideas set out by the composer.
Squire says there's only one hard and fast rule: don't transpose the notes she's written in the bricks into different keys. Otherwise it's all over to the competing groups and the instruments they use, be they steel percussion bands or string quartets or anything in between, to decide how to build their piece.
And no, if it doesn't suit your ensemble, Squire says you don't have to attempt it.
Meanwhile Squire, who won the composition category of the
New Zealand Community Trust Chamber Music Contest
in 2006, continues to work on her fully-scored music for concerts, including one which the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra will play later this year.
And here's a video of another of her works, "I Dance, Unseen".
District rounds for this year's NZCT Chamber Music Contest began this week, with the
final in Auckland
in August.