Music of Meta Overman, The - Queen of Colour and Fantasy
By Jeanell Carrigan
Regular price
$50.00
Respected by fellow composers and performers, Dutch/Australian composer Meta Overman was one of the foremost contributors to musical cultural life in Australia in the middle of the twentieth century.
The music of Meta Overman is innovative, individual, sometimes humorous, expressing amazing creativity and powered by an urge to present strong visual imagery. Of particular interest to performers is the way that Overman suggests images in her music which are so tangible that they have an almost visual quality. Overman was also a composer who was very influenced by the work of others, and she adopted different styles throughout the many compositional periods in her life, colouring these with her own individual musical language. It is impossible to separate the person Meta Overman, with her strong spirituality and beliefs, and the composer Meta Overman: one was the result of the other. her output covers all genres including opera, ballet, and orchestral works. There are seventeen works or sets of works for piano solo, five for orchestra, six sets of songs, five choral works, eleven operas including one three-act opera, four ballets and twenty-four chamber
works, some of which are for two pianos.
Each chapter discusses Overman’s works composed during a particular period of her
life. Most will be discussed in terms of musical language, motific development and inspirational aspects and the important points for a performer. To compensate for any sparsity of verbal description will be the inclusion of QR codes which link to sound files – musical examples – of many works which have been recorded or filmed. These will give a performer’s interpretation of the works and enable the reader to ‘get the full picture’ for themselves.