A Chaos of Delight by Eve de Castro-Robinson – free online New Zealand music

A Chaos of Delight by Eve de Castro-Robinson is a collection of solo and chamber works by de Castro-Robinson includes Split the Lark, Small Blue and Tumbling Strains, while performers include Andrew Uren, Dan Poynton and Mark Menzies.

The first in my Chaos of Delight series of pieces based on birdsong, Chaos of Delight I requires the bass clarinettiest to trill, click, screech, book and roll in a virtuosic display of avian sonorities, using the full range of the instrument, from the boom of the kakapo to the shriek of the morepork and the bleat of the bush falcon. All these can be heard amongst sounds which exploit the unique characteristics of the bass clarinet, such as its uncannily high register, slap tonguing and multiphonics.

The title is taken from a passage in A Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand by Falla, Gibson and Turbott: there are still many quiet places far from the madding crowd, where the mind can become, in Darwin’s phrase, ‘a chaos of delight’ at the abundance and variety of birds which pass before the eye or perplex the ear.

This album (and over 52,000 more) is available online for free from anywhere with your library card number and PIN.

For New Zealand Music Month we are featuring a daily dose of free online New Zealand music from Naxos Music Library and the Source.

• More free online New Zealand music
• Posts about New Zealand Music Month
• New Zealand Music Month events
• NZ Music Month  — official site

Introducing BWB Texts @ Your library

BWB Texts offer a new form of reading for New Zealanders.

Commissioned by Bridget Williams Books as short digital-first works, BWB Texts unlock diverse stories, insights and analysis from the best of our past, present and future New Zealand writing. And they are now available at your library through our Wheelers Platform

Print is dead? You wouldn’t read about it!

Regardless if it is in electronic or paper format, the written word is everything. We communicate our thoughts, feelings and discoveries by writing them down and showing them to others. The format may have changed but content is everything. If what you have written is important then it will outlive you by a millennium.

A perfect combination of thought and format are literary databases. They are electronic but their goal is to gather the written word together within a searchable container. They may be online but they exist due to our enduring fascination with the written word. Perfect examples of this would be:

• Literary Reference Center Plus: (New) From Austen to Zola and back again. Thousands of  plot summaries and author biographies and interviews. It also includes classic and contemporary poems, short stories and classic novels.
• LitFinder: Full text poems, short stories, essays, speeches, plays, novels and more. Look for the poem  Still I Rise by Maya Angelou if you need your spirits lifted!
• Poetry and Short Story Reference Center: Full text poems and short stories. Includes audio readings of poems.
• Novelist Plus: The place to go if you are hunting down ideas for books to read. Includes thematic book lists, recommended reads  and read-a-likes.

This is but a sample of our literary electronic resources in the Source. All you need to a gateway of thought and  feelings is your library card number and password/PIN.