White Rock Pier

Composer's Notes

Our family moved to White Rock in 2022 (it seems so much longer than that - in a good way!) and we were very happy to move closer to the water after years in the snow hardened prairies. I tell people that I was born on a beach - this is literally true as the Brighton Community Hospital (in Melbourne) where I was born, was built on the beach. We were also very lucky to move to an apartment building just up the hill from the beach, and we can see the pier if we go to the top floor.

I am in love with this area, but I am particularly in love with the sounds of White Rock. As I am writing this note, the door to the balcony is open (it suddenly got unseasonably warm today) and I can hear lots of seagulls, some geese, the finches and a quite noisy Jay - probably demanding that I refill the bird feeder as I have forgotten to do this whilst my wife is away. My autistic love of trains is fed with the regular sound of the large freight trains that pass down the beach a few times a day, and will often stop here at home and count the wheels as they cross the tracks (Did I mention I was Autistic?).

White Rock is full of sounds. It is an acoustic playground and these sounds have been pushing me to write more and more music about this place I now call home.

White Rock Pier is an anomaly in my recent output. For the last 20 or 30 years I have been writing music that is slow, and full of reflective space. There are narratives woven into the pieces, but the narratives are mine. I want the listener to create their own narrative, if they want, within the acoustical space I create. I love people trying to guess what the "story" is for me - most of the time they are wrong, but I love to hear what they think the story is for them.

This piece has a narrative. A strong narrative. It encourages the listener to imagine that they are walking down either West Beach or East Beach and then walking along the pier. There are references to the wind at the start from the Clarinets and Flutes with their low unmeasured trills, and rather obvious seagull calls from the solo 'celli. There are short reptitive notes from the brass and horns that bring to mind the water hitting the pylons on the pier, and later the strings play intertwining short motives that are like the waves crossing the bar. At the end, the sea is calm with the waves slowly disappearing, and perhaps the listeners' gaze is drawn to the islands in the distance.