Diana McIntosh
Luminairies, 1978
Commissioned by: Aurora Musicale with a grant from the Manitoba Arts Council
Premiered by: Aurora Musicale, Winnipeg, May 14, 1979
“McIntosh has called upon a full range of avant-garde flute techniques… placed into a sensible, impressionistic musical context, creating an individual, but genuinely poetic atmosphere.” Peter G. Davis, The New York Times, December 1979
“Fascinated by the aurora borealis (northern lights often seen on Manitoba winter nights), I decided to write a three-movement work inspired by three different manifestations of light. ‘Dawn’ has lines which move outward, becoming warmer and more brilliant like the sunrise. The impressionistic second movement, ‘Corona’, is a quiet interlude with a sense of suspension in space. The long lyrical flute lines have little variation in dynamic level like flat white light. By playing ‘into’ the piano, the performer produces distant echoes. ‘Northern Lights’, the third movement, expresses the eerie, shimmering, luminous atmosphere of the aurora borealis which is often referred to as the ‘merry dancers’. Unusual flute sounds and subtle pedal effects on the piano dominate the whole work.”

Diana McIntosh
Sound Assemblings, 1983/rev. 1986
Commissioned by:
Premiered by: Diana McIntosh, piano, London, UK, November 3, 1983
“Bertram Brookers’ painting, ‘Sounds Assembling,’ – which was intended to describe visually a musical composition – was the initial inspiration for “Sound Assemblings. Each of the three main sections of the music represents an assembling of sounds, rhythms, and patterns into repetitive, or ‘circular’, shapes which form the structure of Brookers’ painting. The electronic sounds, which were produced with a Synclavier II Digital Synthesizer, sometimes work in unity with the piano and sometimes are independent of it.”

Diana McIntosh
Nanuk, 1991
Commissioned by: Rivka Golani, with a grant from the Manitoba Arts Council
Premiered by:
“Nanuk (Inuit for White Bear) was written in 1991 for Rivka Golani through a grant from the Manitoba Arts Council. The work is scored for viola and piano (using both the keyboard and the interior of the instrument) and is intended to express the vast, lonely Arctic region of snow and ice. The music could be heard as a day in the life of a polar bear. It begins in eerie silence that [is meant to] suggest soundless footprints in the snow.”

Diana McIntosh