COMpoSITION AND ARRANGEMENT
Holding both Master of Music and Master of Education degrees, Leon Gray's interest in composition started early, winning the national Roland Composition Competition when he was 15 with his ballad, No More Than History.
He went on to compose the score for the Harvest Moon Dance Company's season of Springtime Of Butterflies (1994), and was then commissioned to write Cantata For Spring (1995) by the Stratford Singers while he completed his studies in composition at the University of Auckland. During this time he wrote a number of student works, as well as the song cycle, To A Child (1997) and his two Sonata Ritmico (1998). Leon went on to write Chorale in C for Strings (2002) before staging his opera The Spanish Tragedy (2003). After more studies in education in Scotland, Leon returned to Taranaki and undertook a variety of private commissions, producing amongst other things String Suite No 1 (2007), the chamber opera With Roses (2008), the orchestral tone-poem To Have and To Hold (2008), the silent film score The Eltham Axemen's Carnival 1911 (2009), English Suite for piano (2010), Exhibition Suite (2010) and By Any Other Name (2011) - the music that plays four times a day for tourists viewing the glockenspiel in Stratford. |
More recently he has completed the choral work, Credo (2012), the song-cycle Accursed Be Love (2012), Baroque Suite No 1 (2012) for chamber ensemble, Sonata No 1 (2014), Arc en Ciel (2014), Sonata No 2 (2015), Tombola and Dice (2016) for piano, the cantata Catullus VIII (2016), Tombola and Dice for orchestra (2016), Suite No 1 (2016) for solo violin, Piano Romances 1 & 2 (2017/18) and the song-cycle, Marionette (2018).
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