The Red Tree: From picture book to music

Shaun Tan's picture book, The Red Tree, has inspired a musical composition.  The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the work in Child's tale taps emotional scales by Clare Morgan.  Quoting from her article:

It is moving, terrifying, funny and uplifting - which is exactly what composer Michael Yezerski wants audiences to experience when the Australian Chamber Orchestra performs a new composition inspired by the book.


The work, made possible through a bequest from Barbara Blackman, will feature the orchestra and the Gondwana Voices children's choir and will be accompanied by projected images from the book.

But rather than acting merely as a backdrop, the images have provided inspiration for Yezerski and fellow composer Richard Tognetti, who have aimed for a symbiotic relationship between music and pictures.

"One of the things we want to stress is we're not actually scoring the book, like you would score a film or a play. What we've done with every image is we've interpreted it and it's our own response to the image, as composers," Yezerski says.

There's a 7-minute YouTube piece about this work:





or here's the link, if you can't access the above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTwMo8irNb0  (it's one of several video links from the ACO).