Program notes

Dominion, opus 112 (2020)

A solemn and lyrical work for choir and orchestra written in 2020 for the 2021 Vietnam War commemoration project sponsored by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.  This work divides the strings and uses the blended sonorities of voices, horns, harp and trumpets to achieve a warm and luminous sound world. The scoring omits the woodwind, percussion and the low brass; the choral parts are blended, slow-moving and chorale-like. Dominion recalls the battle at Long Tan with a text adapted from the first stanza of Dylan Thomas, ‘And death shall have no dominion.’ Dominion was commissioned by Flowers of War and the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, for the Vietnam Requiem.

© Andrew Schultz, 2020.