INTERVIEWS AND REVIEWS

William Dart review: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra at Holy Trinity Cathedral
NZ HERALD
NOV 2, 2024
“A tuba cozily nestling against a drum kit on stage on Thursday night suggested that new sounds might well be afoot.
Auckland Philharmonia’s Colours of Brass had percussionists playing their part, too, with two tabour-like drums underlining the ceremonial grandeur of the opening William Byrd march.
Huw Dann, the...”

#4792, Kinds of Kings feat. ~Nois, Live In-Studio
WNYC - NEW SOUNDS
OCT 25, 2024
“Hear works by the collective of US-based composers, Kinds of Kings. The collective was founded in 2017 to create an inclusive community dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices and creating contemporary works. You’ll hear recent compositions from its three founding members: Shelley Washington, Maria Kaoutzani, and Gemma Peacocke, all performed live in-studio by saxophone quartet, ~Nois.
Gemma Peacocke was born in New Zealand but she now calls Brooklyn home. Gemma’s piece, Hazel, was written for ~Nois and premiered at the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival in 2022.
Between the music, you’ll hear interviews with collective members Shelley Washington and Gemma Peacocke as well as ~Nois’s Julian Velasco.”

Brass to shine at Parnell concert
AUCKLAND PHILHARMONIA
OCT 23, 2024
“It’s a real honour to be performing the world premiere of New Zealand Composer Gemma Peacocke’s new work, Don't You Trust Me?, commissioned by our orchestra. I was really impressed by the colourful, evocative soundscapes Gemma created when the orchestra performed her piece, White Horses, so to have such a talented composer write a premiere for us is a really special. I'm excited to hear it myself!”

Princeton Symphony Opens Season with U.S. Premiere of Gemma Peacocke’s “Manta,” Inspired by Maori Mythology
SYMPHONY FROM THE LEAGUE OF AMERICAN ORCHESTRAS
SEP 17, 2024
“In Wednesday’s (9/11) Princeton Info (New Jersey), Emma Ferschweiler writes, “New Zealand-born composer Gemma Peacocke’s … ‘Manta’ will be debuted at the Princeton Symphony Orchestra’s season-opening concert. The orchestra performs Peacocke’s ‘Manta,’ along with Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major and Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, on … September 14 and 15 [at] Princeton University. Peacocke had a bit of an unexpected journey getting here, starting as an industrial design major at Victoria University of Wellington. However, the love of music soon called her, and she graduated with a music and English literature degree…. Peacocke applied to master’s programs in the U.S. and got into New York University … Peacocke would eventually work on her own compositions [which feature] the uniquely Peacocke style of using interdisciplinary collaborations along with carrying a sociopolitical message…. Peacocke uses various creative outlets, from dancers to visual artists, to write compositions for chamber ensembles, soloists, and orchestras. She has been commissioned by ensembles and orchestras all over the world … Classical music is not a platform that typically gives a voice to marginalized groups, but Peacocke focuses a lot of her work on the experience of those groups, especially women and refugees…. ‘Manta’ is inspired by the mythology surrounding stingrays in Maori culture.”

My Great Listen - Gemma Peacocke - Phil News
GEMMA PEACOCKE
SEP 11, 2024
“Composer Gemma Peacocke shares three pieces of music that changed her life.
Anna Meredith - Nautilus
Nautilus is one of the most gloriously fierce and fun orchestral pieces I’ve ever heard. This aggressive, bassheavy synthpop piece is by Anna Meredith, a Scottish composer and producer who wrote it when she was first starting to use electronics in her instrumental music. Its rising bassline comprises a series of 12/8 bars followed by a 15/8 bar; the offkilter time signatures lend Nautilus a slightly unhinged vibe. Various arrangements of Nautilus have been used in Lady Gaga’s film Five Foot Two and on the Eighth Grade soundtrack, and a full orchestral version was released this year by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dalia Stasevska.”

Princeton Symphony Orchestra season is full of meaningful connections for Rossen Milano
COURTNEY SMITH
SEP 5, 2024
“The season-opening “Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto” program, Sept. 14-15, will begin with Gemma Peacocke’s Manta (2023). Peacocke, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, was inspired by the manta rays from the seas around her native New Zealand. The work is scored for orchestra and youth chamber string orchestra, so young musicians from the Youth Orchestra of Central Jersey, PSO partners since 2020, will play alongside symphony musicians.”

Gemma Peacocke: a composer comfortable in her own skin
RNZ
SEP 19, 2023
“New Zealand composer Gemma Peacocke (currently resident in Princeton, New Jersey) was back in the country recently to take part in the CANZ Composer Workshop in Christchurch as a mentor. Earlier this year, her work ‘White Horses’ had its South Island premiere, performed by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra.
And there’s the first performance of another work coming up in October. Gemma was selected for the 2023 SOUNZ Commission for Orchestra and Sistema Youth Orchestra, and her work will be performed by Arohanui Strings and Orchestra Wellington in the orchestra’s Pharoah concert.”

A taste of acid-sweet harmonies
WILLIAM DART, NEW ZEALAND HERALD
OCT 3, 2022
“The concert had opened with the premiere of White Horses by New Zealand composer Gemma Peacocke.
Inspired by a 1937 incident in which a woman plunged from an aeroplane into a choppy Cook Strait, Peacocke used a finessed orchestral palette to lay out an almost cinematic experience.
A mood of tragic inevitability was caught and sustained, from sinister low-register churnings to cascading swoops and cries.
Drums thundered ominously between unsettlingly eerie sonorities in a score that well merits further programming.”

Nevermore Festival takes first flight with joyful ~Nois
Landon Hegedus, CHICAGO CLASSICAL REVIEW
may 20, 2022
“Peacocke’s Hazel offered a spot of sunlit warmth to close the program. There’s nothing particularly revelatory about the piece’s harmony, which employs popish chord progressions to pleasing effect, but one can’t help but admire the terrific sense of architecture and pacing in Peacocke’s writing. Hazel unfurled with cinematic color and drama, and barring some intonation issues, this soaring, resplendent music sang in ~Nois’ capable hands."

Touching song cycle takes an emotional toll
JOSHUA DAFFERN, CBR CITY NEWS
MAY 2, 2022
“GEMMA Peacocke’s song cycle “Waves & Lines”, a look into the lives of Afghan women through a stunning and captivating web of deeply personal poetry, was intensely performed at the Canberra International Music Festival.
Iranian-born musician Gelareh Pour, who here assumed the role of soprano voice, alongside Kaylie Melville (percussion), Hamish Gullick (bass) and Jacob Abela (piano) of Melbourne-based chamber group Rubiks Collective, brought the performance to life.”

Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's ‘Symphonie fantastique’ electrifies
JANELLE GELFAND, CINCINNATI BUSINESS COURIER
MAr 27, 2022
“Nine Mothers” [...] opened with a flourish for cello that soared high into the stratosphere. It soon became a glimmering palette colored by treble piano and marimba. This movement was calm, atmospheric and lyrical, anchored by lush piano chords. The orchestra took up the sounds and motives intermittently and seamlessly. The calm section segued to a driving counterpoint for mallet instruments and drums between Duvall at the front of the stage and the orchestra’s percussion section in the back.”

Lavena: in your hands
Thomas may, Gramophone
JUNE 9, 2021
“An enigmatic soundscape shivers into being in Gemma Peacocke’s Amygdala for solo cello and fixed electronics. The cellist wends her way, tentatively, towards acoustic clarity, playing richly expressive double-stops as if coming up for air. Vaguely rising currents suggest an attempted ascent towards liberation from a persistently unsettling memory; the enveloping fog keeps pulling her back. From the start, Lavena’s debut album casts the young cellist not just as an intrepidly curious adventurer but as a deeply mindful musician.”

In Your Hands (Lavena)
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
may 13, 2021
"The disc opens with Amygdala, an arresting new work for cello and electronics by Gemma Peacocke. Referring to the part of the brain responsible for the experience of emotion, the piece thrums and shivers with a rare beauty and features a commanding performance from Lavena. Other highlights include Jessie Montgomery’s surging and intricate Duo for Violin and Cello (with the excellent William Herzog on violin) and the album’s title work in manus tuas by Caroline Shaw. This glorious piece is based on a motet by Thomas Tallis, and reframes slivers of the original score as a slow meditation for solo cello ‘to capture the sensation of a single moment of hearing the motet’."

songs of love and suicide
miyuki jokiranta, Earshot, Australian broadcasting corporation
3 October, 2020
"Traditionally, in rural Afghanistan landays are performed by women who’d be at risk of punishment if the poems were attributed to them. They're made up of two-lines. Every poem has 22 syllables, 9 in the first line and 13 in the second.
They’re oral. They’re improvised. And they're part of a powerful folk culture. When spoken aloud, they lilt from word to word in a way that belies the sharpness of their content. They speak of war, love, death, beauty, grief, separation and homeland. They describe life when reading and writing are not an option.
But for the women who give voice to these ideas, there's a price to pay."

Composer experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic from around the globe
SOUNZ
8 april, 2020
"Many composers from Aotearoa New Zealand live abroad, and we’re checking in to ask how the COVID-19 Pandemic is affecting them in their country of residence. Keep an eye on this space as more composers share their experiences.
The composers currently featured include Maria Grenfell, Fritha Jameson, Gao Ping, Mark Smythe, Miriama Young, Nigel Keay, Kit Powell, Richard Bolley, Neville Hall, Gemma Peacocke, Annea Lockwood, Lyell Cresswell, Juliet Palmer, Celeste Oram, Jeroen Speak."

CATCHING UP WITH GEMMA PEACOCKE
DAVID MORRISS, RADIO NEW ZEALAND CONCERT
23 JULY, 2020
"Gemma Peacocke is a New Zealand-born, but usually United States-based, composer who’s recently come back home. Gemma has studied in New York with Bang on a Can founder Julia Wolfe, at IRCAM in Paris, and is a doctoral student in composition at Princeton University.
Her music combines acoustic instruments and voices with electronics. Her work often has a sociopolitical focus, a lot of it focusing on the marginalisation of women."

RPO celebrating Susan B. Anthony, 19th Amendment in new showS
Fox Rochester
29 January, 2020
Rochester, N.Y. (WHAM) – The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) Music Director is back from the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles and already getting ready for new shows here in Rochester.
Four new shows will be celebrating Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment.
Stare, as well as Mark Mobley, playwright, and Gemma Peacocke, composer, shared more on the shows on Good Day Rochester.

Compelling gifts in small packages make for rewarding MusicNOW night
lawrence a johnson, chicago classical review
december 3, 2019
"Shudder was the first work Gemma Peacocke composed after coming to the United States from her native New Zealand. The single-movement work for string quartet was inspired by sleep myoclonus, the sudden twitches one can have when falling asleep. Beginning in hushed mysterious fashion with discordant textures, tremolos pass from player to player suggesting the title’s involuntary physical jerks. A more rhythmic section accelerates the tempo, leading to a furioso climax, and a slow, quiet fadeout, ending as it began. Shudder maintains a compelling atmosphere of unsettling tension in its brief span, and Peacocke’s quartet is crafted with impressive skill and string writing facility. Exploring a wide range of dynamics, violinists Yu and Dodge, violist Danny Lai and cellist Cook made the strongest possible case for Peacocke’s music."

Sculptress
Julie McErlain, limelight
december 9, 2019
"Gemma Peacocke, composer of Quiver, chose the title for its significant double meaning – “to tremble with fear or emotion, or a case for arrows” – tension and resolution. Hamish Gullick (double bass) entered as the musical protagonist, at first announcing a strong driving masculine sonority with solo jazz riffs, which built with short, sharp accents as tom-tom and piano added insistency from a driving pulse, until long sustained bass notes diminished the emotion. Both inside strings and outer frame of the piano became a percussion instrument, adding almost a metallic effect to the variety of colourful changing dynamic levels. With the increasing tempo and repetition of strongly accented drum rhythms and changes of metres, a threatening and primitive tribal atmosphere took control. This exciting jazz influenced work highlighted both the exceptional skills of the Rubiks soloists, and their brilliant and focussed teamwork, as precise timing was paramount in this exciting work."

SONGS FROM A SECRET WORLD
elizabeth kerr, the listener
may 12, 2019
"Afghan women's folk poems have been given new life by a Kiwi composer.
New Zealand composer Gemma Peacocke, based at Princeton University, launched her song cycle Waves & Lines in New York on International Women's Day in March. For the remarkable composition, Peacocke has taken eight landays – folk poems from the secret world of Afghan women under the Taliban – from a collection of translations, I Am the Beggar of the World, by US poet Eliza Griswold. Landays are passed on through oral tradition, their creators often illiterate. These short, intimate verses brim with yearning, love, rage, resignation, and irony."

Peacocke sulauttaa tyylejä luontevasti
Aki Yli-Salomäki, YLE Klassinen (Finnish Broadcasting Company)
April 16, 2019
"Uusiseelantilainen säveltäjä Gemma Peacocke on omintakeinen tekijä, joka on luonut erilaisista tyylillisistä elementeistä luontevan synteesin. Lopputulos ei ole crossoveria tai edes jälki-crossoveria, vaan aito erilaisten tyylillisten elementtien sulautuminen. Sellaista voi syntyä niiden toimesta, jotka ovat aidosti kykeneviä herkistymään ja innoittumaan aikamme moninaisuuden ja alati hämärtyvien genrerajojen edessä."

Review: New Philip Glass commission presents a rhythmic perspective
Joshua Kosman, San francisco chronicle
April 4, 2019
"Most exciting, perhaps, was “Death Wish,” a piece for marimbas by the New Zealand-born composer Gemma Peacocke, in which repetitive rhythmic figures and minor-key harmonies grow increasingly off-kilter until seemingly anodyne material becomes urgent and a little menacing. Midway through, Peacocke conjures up a fierce but loving parody of Khachaturian’s “Saber Dance” that demonstrates exactly why that music is so irresistible."

Art Pop Song Cycles
JOHN SCHAEFER, NEW SOUNDS
MARCH 7, 2019
"New Zealand-born Princeton-based composer Gemma Peacocke – wrote songs inspired by and using Afghan women’s folk poems called landays from the collection translated by Eliza Griswold, I Am the Beggar of the World. Peacocke set these texts – ranging from a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms. The song cycle, scored for voice and piano, percussion, bass, and electronics, features the use of fixed electronics and projections which hint at “the distance, anonymity and strange intimacy of phone calls, text messages, and radio broadcasts in which the poems are shared.” (Gemma Peacocke’s Bandcamp)"

Gemma Peacocke’s Waves and Lines Amplifies Stories of Afghan Women
Hannah Rosa schiller, i care if you listen
MARCH 1, 2019
"The evocation of place is central in Gemma Peacocke’s Waves and Lines (New Amsterdam Records). Her newest album, a multimedia song cycle for soprano, electronics, and chamber ensemble, sets two-line folk poems (landays) written by women in contemporary Afghanistan. The landays, translated by Eliza Griswold, reflect on life in Afghanistan and the impact that nearly two decades of war with the United States have had on the nation."