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I am writing...
One Sound...
Excerpts from Selected Reviews (works composed since 2010)
I am writing in this book (2011) (back
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“Andrew Schultz's new work, I am writing in this book, adapts texts from The Pillow Book by 10th-century Japanese writer Sei Shonagon. In a pre-performance talk, Schultz said he started working on the texts in the 1990s but when Peter Greenaway's eponymous film was released he put them to one side to avoid confusion between his work and that striking reinterpretation.
Schultz has selected five texts, moving from golden lyricism and love to a stormy list of Sei Shonagon's dislikes before a quiet close.
The first song, A gift of paper, is a quietly radiant duet for soprano and mezzo-soprano in which Sei Shonagon states she will use the gift of some paper to write things she sees, hears and knows.
Schultz's setting shares some affinities of classic female vocal duets in exploring the golden sound of female voices a third apart. It is a world away from the ''flower duet'' of Delibes's Lakme but shares some affinity with it as an orientalist representation of the female.
The third song, Language of women, erupts into something of a tantrum. While the conception of the final two quiet numbers was imaginative…”
[Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 2011.]
One Sound – Quintet for flute and strings (2012) (back to top)
“By selecting the title One Sound for his quintet for flute and strings, Andrew Schultz was suggesting that a single sonority, as heard at the start of this piece, contains a galaxy of intervals and musical cells to be unfolded, explored and released.
Initially limiting itself to the most fundamental of these possibilities, the first section explored controlled, regular rhythms of clearly defined shape. When combined with harmony that sought, as it were, to derive itself from first principles, the effect was a bright pristine quality, rejoicing in contrapuntal discipline, particularly in the upper voices.
The second section moved to a warm chorale-like texture in lower strings, out of which leapt cadenza-like flourishes, sporadically at first before they proliferated in the final section with spectacular brilliance.
In keeping with the title, the overall shape was unified and whole, and the affirmative clarity of form and idea struck a new and intriguing tone.”
[Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 2012.]
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