WENDY HISCOCKS’s music is imbued with her love of dance and by a natural melodic sense.  While tonally based, her music uses many different scales and modes, savouring the colour and character of the twelve notes of the octave and their varied combinations.  Nature and the written word are the two dominating influences on Wendy’s creativity.  Such sources can be found in a wide variety of mediums such as paintings by her favourite artists from Turner to Lloyd Rees, photographs, poetry and letters.  Her most recent compositions for solo piano, collectively called ‘Scenes from an Australian Childhood’, recall through music, the drama and magic of various natural phenomena and landscape unique to Australia.
 

Wendy Hiscocks is a composer of great finesse, well tuned to the fantasy-world of children, and her works for young pianists ‘Two Pieces for Cordelia’ and ‘Light’ are delightful, exquisite miniatures worthy to stand beside the classic children’s repertoire.  She understands and nurtures piano colour, something often neglected or even negated by new composers…For more advanced pianists there is a suite of four pieces ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and a searching piano trio called ‘Coral Fantasy’ — I found a lot to savour in this compelling music. 

Wendy Hiscocks’s ‘Coral Fantasy’, inspired by visits to coral reefs in Hawaii and Australia, inhabits a very different sound world.  It’s a delight.  In turn restful and turbulent, with brief obeisances to Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and frequent changes of tempo (and pleasingly varied tonal colourings to add interest to the listening experience), Hiscocks’s piece has an unpretentious charm and immediacy. 

[Hiscocks’s] attractive suite ‘Pastel & Oil’…launched the evening with imaginative flair…The outer pieces, ‘Morning Song’ and the final, lilting ‘Waltz’ drew rich sonorities from the bloc textures, with tonally orientated harmony offset by some colorful dissonance, and aptly ‘pastel shading’ in the delicate, high, melismatic lines for flute and clarinet.  Their playful dialogues of trills and skittish gestures in the second piece ‘Scherzo’, formed an engaging contrast with the ‘Nocturne’s’ eloquent rhetorical exchanges amongst the bassoon, oboe and horn.