In 1986 I completed a series of five instrumental and vocal pieces under the generic title Maninya. Two of the pieces (I and V), were later used in my violin concerto Maninyas. The title was extracted from the text of the first piece, Maninya I (1981), for voice and cello, in which randomly chosen phonetic units are grouped together to form rhythmic cells. As I proceeded with the series the ‘word’ maninya, meaningless at first, began to connote, for me at least, certain characteristics of the music I was writing: its chant-like quality, resulting from the subtly varied repetition of material within a narrow range of limitations; its static harmonic basis; the general liveliness of its tempi; and so on.

The evolution of this ‘maninya style’ may have been influenced by my sub-conscious absorption of a variety of non-western musics. African mbira music, for example, may be responsible to some extent for the characteristic terseness and angularity of the melodic shapes, while the manner in which these are woven together sometimes recalls the textures of Indonesian gamelan music. Some listeners have detected Japanese, Indian and Indonesian scales; others have considered the repetitive processes to be similar to those used to induce heightened awareness in much of the world’s functional religious music, e.g., Australian Aboriginal chant, Sufic ritual music etc.

Far more important an influence than any music, however, was the natural environment, a timeless continuum from which much of the structural material was distilled. I’ve found the ecstatic and mysterious sound-tapestry of the insect chorus in the heat of the Australian summer to be a particularly fertile source of inspiration, and this is manifest in the somewhat quirkish periodicity of some of my early music. Although its presence is more abstract in the maninya pieces, it remains the supreme generative force behind everything I write.

Maninya I, for voice and cello, was commissioned by Hartley Newnham, to whm it is dedicated, and who gave the first performance, with cellist Susan Blake, in Ballarat in July 1981. In 1985 I revised and extended the work at the request of the Viennese cellist Florian Kitt, for the duo consisting of himself and English singer Jane Manning.