Commissioned for Claire Edwardes by Julian Burnside AO QC
First performance by Claire Edwardes (vibraphone), home Zoom concert, 26 April 2020
First live performance by Claire Edwardes (vibraphone), Bowral Autumn Music Festival, St Jude’s Church, Bowral, NSW, 26 March 2021
Program note
My title for this piece has a double meaning. In the first instance, ‘Hook’ relates to the idea of a memorable musical cell or motif, a recurrent melodic fragment that serves as a point of orientation in a piece of music and, in a pop song at least, is the bit that gets stuck in your head. In the case of my vibraphone solo, the hook is the jagged descending figure heard immediately after the slow opening.
This same motif also turns up in Peter Pan, the opera I wrote for Gondwana Choirs with librettist, Sue Smith. Here the motif is always associated with Captain Hook, and particularly with the fight scenes between Hook’s pirates and the Lost Boys. You might say, then, that Hook is based on Hook’s hook.
Hook was commissioned for Claire Edwardes by Julian Burnside AO QC.
Reviews
Andrew Ford’s new work, Hook, is the most demanding and, ultimately, most satisfying work on the program, at once playful and menacing, as every good fairytale should be.
Harriet Cunningham, Sydney Morning Herald