A research folio of music composition a folio of original music compositions that explores the integration and development of derived materials, including a painting, African rhythms, synesthesia, poetry and pre-recorded audio files

This folio contains four original compositions that were written between the years 2001 and early 2003, as part of a research-based composition course at Monash University. The pieces were written for solo and groups of instruments, such as chamber orchestra, string quartet, solo oboe and two trumpets and CD. Each of the four compositions was developed from derived materials of various kinds: the first piece, written for chamber orchestra, was developed in response to a narrative I derived from Vincent van Gogh’s The Night Cafe', the second piece, written for string quartet, integrated the rhythms of the Ewe people of Ghana with a twelve-tone row; a phenomenon known as synesthesia and particularly one of its forms (concerned with the visualisation of the alphabet letters in various colours) in combination with a poem, generated the pitch material for the work for solo oboe; the final piece in this folio written for two trumpets and CD was developed from pre-recorded audio files that were manipulated by two computer programs. In addition to the submitted scores and recording, a critical commentary is provided. The paper includes a survey of the derived materials and their sources, a detailed layout of the process by which some of the materials were derived, the process of integrating these materials into a music composition, and a detailed music analysis. Contents: v. 1. Critical commentary on the submitted folio of original music compositions-- v. 2 The night café -- v. 3 Nyayito dance -- v. 4 Synesthesia -- v. 5 Electric night café.