Juliet Palmer was one of the more inquisitive spirits to emerge from Auckland University's Music Department at the end of the 1980's. I remember my astonishment at one Sunday concert where one of her compositions combined her own clarinet playing with Emily Dickinson texts and projected slides of medical drawings (The Heart Has Narrow Banks).

Palmer left us in 1990, to take up an internship with American composer Meredith Monk, involving a stint as stage manager for Monk's opera Atlas. When I caught up with her, Palmer was a few days away from presenting her PhD at Princeton. Soon she will be back in New Zealand for two Auckland premieres: the Auckland Philharmonia launches its concerts on May 5/6 wwith her fanfare Secret Arnold and, on May 9, 175 East will premiere a new trio, Trellis.

In the meantime, New Zealand musicians have kept her name on our concert programmes. In 1995, Egg & Tongue was one of the tastier items of the New Zealand String Quartet's Hot Young Things tour.
 

Sexual politics lie under the surface in the new trio: "The main musical material come from an Earth Wind and Fire song called 'Can't Hide Love'. It's a very cool number, with rhythmic passages and then these creepy lyrical verses with this guy saying, 'You can't hide your love from me', even though I don't think the woman he's talking to is particularly interested in him. I liked the sliminess contrasting with this punchy rhythmic thing. I grabbed that rhythmic idea and subjected it to lots of rigorous compositional processes, spewed out vast amounts of material and then tried to shape ithat into somthing to make sense."

Does she consider herself a highly politicised composer? "Well, music can't be divorced from the rest of your life, or else it gets pretty sterile. It's not a tactic for me to be provocative - it comes out of what you're thinking about and what you're engaged it."
 

She sums up Secret Arnold as "my end of the century remix of Schoenberg, Randy and Portishead". Randy is Clive "Randy" Chin, the veteran Jamaican dubster and an unexpected link between Arnold Schoenberg and the Bristol group. Inspiration came from dub mixes from the early 70s: "I really got into them because they're very sparse and quirky. They'll take something that's already quite well known, do a remix and adjust the level of each track in a totally whacky way."

For Palmer, this is a fascinating area: "A producer and a studio person become a composer essentially - people who have no official musical skills, but who can create compelling music."

Secret Arnold  shares the programme with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and works by Franck and Dvorak, which "all seems like light and fantastic stuff". The recent all-male production of Swan Lake alerted Palmer to Tachaikovsky's "cut-and-paste texture, whcih is very interesting", just as a recent piano recital reminded here that Scarlatti sonatas are "wild, harmonically all over the place, with this disjunct narrative. I get mad at myself that it takes that for me to listen to it again."
 

But even New York has its limitations: "It's seen as the hub of activity and new ideas - once you're there, then you get spun out into the global circuit. But there's a  lot of hype to the place. It has a certain energy, but it can actually feel a bit provincial in a strange way. When you're in New York, there's the sense that nothing else exists, which, for me, is very provincial."

In Wellington she will meet with the New Zealand String Quartet before she starts a full-scale work for them [Snap], and the score will be written back in North America. 

In the meantime, even if you don't live in Auckland, you can sample Juliet Palmer's musical mix when Concert FM broadcasts the Auckland Philharmonia's concert, live, on May 6.