Introducing Nathaniel Otley - Composer 'this rising tide: these former wetlands'

I grew up in Ōtepoti going to so many of the orchestra’s concerts and if you’d told me at school that I’d one day have a work of my own premiered by the orchestra there is no way I would have believed you. I think the orchestra’s commitment to music from Aotearoa in recent years has gone from strength to strength, with some of the boldest and most interesting programming of any orchestra in the country and I hope my new work sits well both within this commitment, and alongside other recent premieres by local composers including Gillian Whitehead, Anthony Ritchie, Peter Adams, and Maddy Parkins-Craig.

“this rising tide, these former wetlands” is a work that came about from my interest in how the ecological world interacts with human communities in Aotearoa. Many local communities are currently being forced to improvise and adapt due to increasingly adverse weather events, sea level rise and erosion due to climate change.

Through this process we are becoming more and more aware of the ways in which we are fundamentally interconnected with and reliant on the natural world. My work for DSO is specifically focused on this phenomenon in the South Dunedin area and came about through both my own experiences walking home from school through floodwaters in 2015 as well as seeing how the community has responded to continued ecological pressures since.

My work is thus intensely personal, but within it I have tried to include a wide range of stories relating to the to flooding from the wider community. These find their way into the work in both implicit and explicit ways that combine to give the work what I think is a real vibrancy and vulnerability. Composing, for me, is a way to think about and process what is happening within the world, as well as an opportunity to formulate responses to it and imagine futures that have the potential to resonate with people.

Thus, from an audience perspective, my hope is that people can hear and feel the care and energy that has gone into producing this deeply personal work and I hope they will hear the work as both a reflection on the world in the present well as a searching for potential and opportunity for the future.