Ross Edwards

White Cockatoo Spirit Dance for Solo Violin

One of Australia's best-known composers, Ross Edwards' distinctive sound world combines shapes and patterns from nature with a variety of musical resources which reflect and celebrate Australia's cultural diversity. White Cockatoo Spirit Dance has all the characteristics of a maninya, or dance-chant. Ross Edwards coined the word maninya to denote the chant-like quality of one strand of his music, a unique and highly characteristic form which results from thesubtly varied repetition of material over a static harmonic basis in a lively tempo. Vibrant, captivating, life-affirming and virtuosic, White Cockatoo Spirit Dance is a spontaneous melodic outpouring. It also exists as a viola solo from which it has been adapted for violin by the composer.