University of York Music Press

Fiona McArdle and Penelope Cashman will perform every star as part of Chamber Music Adelaide’s ‘On the Terrace’ Festival. It is taking place on 2 November in State Library of South Australia’s Mortlock Chamber with three performances through the afternoon. 

chambermusicadelaide.com.au/ontheterrace2025

Sadie writes ‘The text (translated by Bruce Wannell and Robert Maxwell, Persian Poems, 2013) is taken from a lyrical ghazal by the 13th century Persian writer Shaykh Muslih Al-din Sa'di. Sa'di believed that the ecstatic response created through listening to music was a legitimate form of religious praise and many of his poems explore the relationship between divine and human expressions of love, often within the context of the natural world. I was invited by Dot Dash Music to contribute the song to their project One Hundred Second Songs. It was premiered on 4 April 2020 by Anna Snow and Kate Ledger at the Late Music Festival at the Unitarian Chapel in York.’

 

The Oldest Song in the World for 2 solo violas has been selected as part of the Limelight Guide to Australian Composers created in collaboration between Cameron Lam and the Australian Art Music Playlist.

limelight-arts.com.au/australian-composers/h/

 

Sadie writes: This brief work for 2 virtuoso violists was written at the request of violist and Director of Cuatro Puntos, Kevin Bishop, as part of a concert programme entitled Near East in America. It weaves together two ancient Arabic sources, the ancient Syrian Hymn to Nikkal reputed to be the oldest notated song in the world dating from c. 1400 BCE and Lamma bada yatathana (When she begins to sway) which was written sometime in the 9th-10th centuries ACE. The lyrics of both songs celebrate women - the Hymn praises Nikkal, the Semitic goddess of fertility and orchards, and Lamma compares the beauty of a lover to the swaying branches of a tree. The Hymn is heard at the centre of the work, a transformed version that brings out the unusually diatonic and expressive harmony of the music (most probably played on a lyre or sammûm). By contrast, the melody of Lamma bada yatathana is highly rhythmic, with its 10/8 metre (samai thaqil) punctuated by the accompanying viola as drum, emphasising the ‘doom’ on beats 1, 6 and 7 and the ‘tek’ on beats 4 and 8. The work ends with increasingly virtuosic counterpoint, the melody thrown between the two instruments with abandon! The Oldest Song in the World is dedicated with admiration to Kevin Bishop and Steve Larson who gave the work its premiere on 16 February 2018 at the Lutheran Church of St. Marks, Glastonbury, Connecticut. They recorded the piece for Metier Divine Art on Jaipur to Cairo, released in 2019 (MSV 28589).