Written for the Roger Woodward Ensemble, Anne Boyd’s As it Leaves the Bell was premiered as part of the Sydney Opera House inaugural celebrations in 1973. Scored for piano, two harps and four percussion, this beguiling 15-minute work takes its title from Buson’s Haiku: “Coolness / The voice of the bell / As it leaves the bell.”

The bells heard in different forms grow into one uninterrupted movement, with the sounds of four tam-tams underpinning the flowering of the other voices.

‘A slow and static celebration of the sonorous potential of the potential of the pentatonic scale… a piece of indescribable beauty.’
Show Business (Michael Hannan), 25 October 1973