Rerenga

Composed between 2015 and 2022, this collection of orchestral and ensemble works is unified by a concern for colour and gesture, timbre and texture. It reflects the influence of textural and spectral composition, the modernist impulse to organise and express inherited materials in new ways, and the ascendancy of electronic music. The music reaches outward, distinctively, to a global cultural context, beyond Aotearoa yet rooted here.

These aspects of Michael's style are woven throughout the title track, Rerenga. Taonga pūoro, orchestra and electronics become soundscapes, redolent of land surfacing in a shimmering sea under a vast sky. Sonority here becomes a musical means to grasp identity, with a violence suggestive of geophysics and a fraught bicultural history. This is music as a palimpsest, its abstraction initiating journeys of imagination, which, like this country's future, reflect the entanglement of tangata and whenua, Māori and Pākehā.

Such mixes are hard to imagine from any other composer, in Aotearoa or elsewhere, given the creative convergences involved: broad and sensitive cultural awareness, technical and compositional mastery, boldness of imagination and deftness of taste, energised with urgent expression and grounded in community and collaboration.

Assoc. Prof. Dugal McKinnon, June 2025