| Helen Fisher | |||||||||||||||
| Helen Fisher (1942) is a freelance composer and teacher. Helen Fisher was born in Nelson, New Zealand and educated there and in Wellington before going to study in Christchurch at the University of Canterbury. She graduated in 1964 with a BA in English and taught English, Music and French in New Zealand and Canadian schools. Whilst also raising a family she studied music at Victoria University of Wellington, where her Woodwind Trio won first prize in the 1987 Composers' Competition. She graduated BMus (Hons) in composition in 1991. For 1990 and 1991 she was awarded the Arts Council residency of Composer-in-Schools, and now works full-time as a composer. Though Helen came to composition comparitively late in life, in less than a decade she had established herself as a distinctive voice in New Zealand music. Her earliest student works signalled the continuing direction for her music, the drawing-in of the traditions, language and musical sounds of the New Zealand Maori culture alongside the western musical traditions of her own heritage. Such a voyage could have been a perilous one, but Helen has undertaken it with such integrity and committment to collaboration with the guardians of that culture – the Maori artists themselves – that she has successfully produced an impressive body of beautifully-crafted, evocative and highly original music. She has received a steady flow of commissions to compose for a variety of vocal and instrumental ensembles and also for dance theatre. Her compositions have been performed in Europe, Asia, USA and Australia and regularly in New Zealand. In 1990 her work Pounamu was selected for performance in the 1990 Asian Music Festival in Japan. In 1993 she initiated the first New Zealand Composing Women's Festival, and she was a delegate at the 1994 Australian Composing Women's Festival in Melbourne. She has helped pioneer the study of relationships between Maori and Western musical styles, collaborating extensively with Maori performing artists. Her music tends to be expressively modal, sometimes atonal, in style; Maori culture, the New Zealand environment as well as her own Celtic heritage are important sources of inspiration for her. "Helen Fisher occupies a very special position in New Zealand music because of what she chooses as the sources of her musical language... In her vision of an integration of Maori traditions into a European musical language, she has chosen a very difficult path, but she is a composer willing to take risks... Perhaps, ultimately, what she is confronting are the most important and relevant issues in New Zealand music today" Jack Body, New Directions in New Zealand Music |
|||||||||||||||
| Recent News | |||||||||||||||
| May 1998 - Premiere of Taku Wana, a large-scale music drama focusing on New Zealand race relationships. The sell-out season in Nelson was acclaimed as a ground-breaking venture, “including some of the most effective juxtapositions of Western and Maori musics ever heard”. June 1999 - The edition of Te Tangi a te Matui and Wings of the Wind was a winner in the Newly-Published Flute Music Competition held by the National Flute Association (USA). September 1999 - The Wheel Turns, a song cycle to texts by the late Lauris Edmond, premiered at the Adam Concert Room, Victoria University of Wellington August 2000 - A joint composition with Ngapo Wehi for the New Zealand Youth Choir and Te Waka Huia is to be premiered at Youth Arts 2000 in Wellington. |
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
| Home | Composers | Publications | Information | Orders | © 1997 - 2003 PROMETHEAN EDITIONS LIMITED info@promethean-editions.com |
|||||||||||||||
