• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Andrew Ford

Composer, Writer & Broadcaster

  • Home
  • News
    • General news
    • Events
    • Audio & Video
    • The Music Show
  • About
    • Biography
    • High-resolution photos
  • Compositions
    • Stage
      • Opera
      • Children’s opera
      • Music theatre
    • Orchestral
      • Symphony orchestra
      • Orchestra with voice
      • Orchestra with solo instrument
      • Chamber orchestra
      • String Orchestra
      • Wind and brass
    • Chamber music
      • Strings
      • Winds
      • Brass
      • Percussion
      • Mixed instrumentation
    • Instrumental (solo and duo)
      • Piano
      • Strings
      • Wind
      • Brass
      • Percussion
    • Vocal
      • Voice and instrument
      • Voice and ensemble
      • Orchestra with voice
    • Choral
    • Radiophonic
    • Music for children
    • Arrangements
  • Writings
    • The Song Remains the Same
    • The Memory of Music
    • Earth Dances
    • Try Whistling This
    • The Sound of Pictures
    • Talking to Kinky and Karlheinz
    • In Defence of Classical Music
    • Speaking in Tongues: the Songs of Van Morrison
    • Undue Noise
    • Illegal Harmonies: music in the modern age
    • Composer to Composer
  • Performances
  • Contact
  • Show Search
Hide Search
Home / Compositions / The Laughter of Mermaids

The Laughter of Mermaids (1991)

13 minutes
for vocal ensemble

Text: Maria Blakey

six solo voices: SSATBarB

Commissioned by the Song Company with financial assistance from the Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council

First performance by the Song Company conducted by Roland Peelman, Hope theatre, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, 16 March 1992

Buy Score (AMC) Purchase on CD

Reviews

[The Laughter of Mermaids has a] diverse set of musical gestures, pitching in at many different rhetorical levels-party babble, poetic speech, conversation, laughter and varying degrees of musical delivery. Although the composer, in his program note, mentioned a quotation from Purcell's masterpiece 'When I am laid in earth' as a unifying element, for me unity was achieved through a rather satisfying sense of understatement (sometimes violated) and an elliptical sense of progression. Capitalising on his imaginative feel for language and gesture, it seemed to me one of Ford's most successful works to date.

Peter McCallum, The Sydney Morning Herald

Instrumentation: Choral

Primary Sidebar

Latest News

Katie Yap - performing under a freeway bridge in a black and white video screenshot.

Katie Yap plays In My Solitude for solo viola

30 May, 2022

Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award to Andrew Ford

9 June, 2021

The Music Show turns 30

22 February, 2021

Follow Andrew

Newsletter

Get Andrew's quarterly newsletter sent to your inbox.

Subscribe

© 2023 Andrew Ford · Privacy & Copyright ·  Twitter ·  SoundCloud
Website built by Elated