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| ISBN-13: | 9781775582229 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
To Tatau Waka
In Search Of Maori Music (1958â"1979)
By Mervyn McLean
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2004 Mervyn McLeanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-222-9
CHAPTER 1
GETTING STARTED
IN 1934, WHEN I WAS 4 YEARS OLD, my parents bought a portable HMV gramophone, along with a stack of 10-inch, 78 rpm records of popular songs of the 1920s and earlier such as 'Shine on harvest moon', 'There oughta be a moonlight saving time', and 'Tiptoe thru the tulips'. I used to play these for hours, conscientiously changing the needle every two sides, and throwing the used ones down the sound box, where hundreds of them accumulated, to re-emerge many years later when the machine was overhauled for sale. Among the records were a number of early Parlophone and Columbia recordings of the Rotorua Maori Choir, with soloists such as Ana Hato and Deane Waretini, singing popular Maori songs of the day. They were special favourites of mine, and I played them over and over, astonishing my parents one day when they found me singing along, perfectly in tune they later told me, 'words and all'. My ability with the words can be taken with a grain of salt, as my parents did not speak Maori, but these songs did acquaint me with the sound of the Maori language and I suppose got it into my head. Nothing came of it, however, for a long time. It was not until my university days, more than 20 years later, that my interest in Maori music was to be rekindled, and I began what proved to be a life's work.
The songs recorded in the 1920s by Hato and Waretini have become almost legendary. Most New Zealanders are familiar with at least some of them, such as 'Pokarekare ana' and 'Po atarau' (Now is the Hour), or the 'good night kiwi song' from the days when TV closed down at 10.00 pm, 'Hine e hine'. Others such as 'Tahi nei taru kino' and the waltz song 'E pari ra', frequently performed as a final song by Maori concert parties, have become almost as well known. With their Maori words and appealing European tunes they have become, indeed, icons of New Zealand, known, recognised and appreciated even overseas.
Beginning at about the time of World War I, a burgeoning tradition of 'action song' (waiata kori or waiata-a-ringa) also emerged, again with Maori words and European tunes, but with actions added. In its beginnings it was associated with composers such as Sir Apirana Ngata. In the 1940s, scores of such songs were composed by a now famous East Coast woman named Tuini Ngawai, achieving instant and enduring popularity with their engaging combination of topical Maori texts and borrowed European 'pop' tunes. And today the tradition continues with new songs composed every year by Maori clubs and culture groups for performance at intertribal competitions.
Also representative of New Zealand is the famous 'Ka mate' haka (CD 3), known to millions around the world as a result of its long-standing association with All Blacks rugby matches. Fifty years ago, however, hardly anyone who was not Maori was aware of the full range of non-European older types of Maori music. Besides haka, these include other rhythmically recited forms such as karakia (incantations), patere (songs composed mostly by slandered women), whakaaraara pa (watch songs), and hari kai (food-bearing songs). Sung forms include waiata (love songs and laments), pao (epigrammatic songs sung mostly for entertainment), and oriori (songs of instruction to young people). Known collectively in English since the days of Governor Sir George Grey as 'Maori chant', these are still sung at Maori meetings much as they were hundreds of years ago, long before Europeans set foot on New Zealand. Ignorance of this tradition was especially the case in the South Island of New Zealand, where I was brought up, and where few Maori people lived. The vibrant marae (meeting ground) communities of the North Island, where songs of this kind are performed at tangihanga (funerals) and on other occasions, were unknown to us.
During childhood I had noticed that one or two of my friends at school had brown faces, but attached no significance to it. At Bluff and Greenhills near Invercargill, I had cousins of Maori descent whom I saw socially from time to time, and from whom my parents had bought the gramophone that kept me amused when I was 4 years old. But for a long time I did not register that my cousins were in any way different from me. My first experience of an acknowledged 'Maori' was probably my violin teacher, Hoani Halbert, from whom I took lessons between the ages of 14 and 17. He was a brilliant virtuoso violinist who contributed significantly to my musical upbringing, but again without reference to anything Maori.
At High School my main interest was science, and particularly chemistry, until I reached the lower sixth form, when I became overwhelmingly interested in classical music, and decided to make music instead of science my career, devoting the next year and a half to passing music exams in preparation for university. The early interest in science, however, was by no means wasted. The methods I later devised for studying the Maori music system amounted to what the ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam was later to call 'sciencing about music'.
I am often asked how I came to be interested in the older traditional forms of Maori music, and the answer, essentially, is by accident.
In 1957, I had completed the first year of a Master of Arts degree in History and Literature of Music at the University of Otago, successfully passing papers in four subject areas: history of music 1600 — 1750; baroque musical instruments; history of music criticism; and what was then called 'folk and primitive music'. I had to find a topic for a thesis to be written the following year, chosen from one of these four subject areas. All except the last required access to overseas materials. One of the lecturers in the Music Department was Mary Martin, who was about to retire the following year. A year earlier, at a Stage 3 seminar held at her residence she had played excerpts from 78 rpm gramophone records of waiata that had just been released by the Maori Purposes Fund Board. The other students were not greatly interested. I was fascinated. Here was a form of music, with its own rules, utterly different from anything I had heard before. What were these rules, I wondered. Could they be worked out by analysis of the music? For my thesis topic I determined to make a beginning at finding out.
Next came a stroke of luck. A colleague of the newly appointed Professor of Music, Peter Platt (who was to be my supervisor), was Associate Professor (later Professor) Angus Ross (OBE, MC and bar) of the History Department. He had been an army officer during World War II, when he became acquainted with Arapeta Awatere, a lieutenant-colonel of 28 Maori Battalion. Ross offered to write to Awatere, seeking his advice and support for a field trip I wanted to make to the North Island in order to study Maori music at first hand.
Preparations for the field work took an inordinate amount of time. University authorisation was required; grant applications had to be made and approved before anything could be done; and I had to pass a 'reading knowledge' test in German, having tried but failed to obtain permission to learn Maori instead, which I thought would be more useful. To top it all off, my father had smashed his car in a motor accident and spent some time in hospital as a result, emerging with instructions that he was not to drive until fully recovered. He had planned a tour of the North Island after Christmas 1957, and I now became a reluctant recruit to drive the car for it. My father, characteristically, had prepared a detailed itinerary for the trip, so it was known exactly where we would be at any given date. Angus Ross who, it turned out, was also taking a North Island holiday, caught up with me at the Paihia motor camp in the Bay of Islands, finding me in the front seat of my father's car, learning German from a Linguaphone course I had dubbed on to tape. He had excellent news for me. Awatere had replied favourably, saying he had been hoping for years that someone would turn up who was capable of writing down waiata tunes in music notation, which until then was believed to be impossible. Ross had indicated that I was such a person. With extraordinary generosity, Awatere offered to provide free board and lodging for as long as required in his own home, and personally take me to Maori meetings where traditional music was performed. Angus was highly optimistic about the prospects, motivating me in flattering terms about the future: 'Mervyn McLean, MA,' he said. 'Mervyn McLean, PhD! Sir Mervyn!' The last was well off the mark, but with his prediction of an ultimate PhD, Angus probably did plant a fertile seed, even if it did take a long time to germinate.
The offer from Awatere was a godsend. Awatere was descended from both Ng ati Porou (East Coast) and Nguti Hine hapu of Ngapuhi (Northland). As I later found out, he was himself a renowned exponent of haka, was a licensed Maori interpreter with outstanding command of both Maori and English, was held almost in awe by Maori communities, and was employed as senior welfare officer in the Department of Maori Affairs, stationed at Rotorua. He had responsibility for the whole of the Bay of Plenty, and frequently visited Maori communities there in the course of his work. Without his assistance, I would not have had the resources to survive in the field. I had obtained a small subsistence grant of just £100, barely enough for petrol money. I had already bought and paid for my own tape recorder, a German-made bottom-track Grundig, Model 700L.
I also had the huge advantage of possessing my own motor vehicle. This not only provided me with independent transport but also enabled me to record in places where there was no mains power supply. By means of a DC to AC vibrator (paid for by the University Grants Committee), a power cable, and an ammeter which I wired to the instrument panel of the car, I was able to run the tape recorder from my car battery, adjusting the engine idling speed to keep the battery charged.
The car was a gift from my mother. For two years previously I had ridden a motor bike until, after a few spills in conditions such as ice, loose gravel, oil slicks, and once running off the road, my mother became concerned for my safety. She then revealed that out of her housekeeping allowance she had saved enough money to buy me a new car, besides matching the gift by providing one also for my sister. It was another act of extreme generosity without which I could never have contemplated the trip. The other circumstance that helped to make the work possible was the invention of the tape recorder around 1948. I had heard about this while still at high school, and the concept intrigued me. I knew it was now possible to make field recordings in situ. The first domestic tape recorders appeared on the market around 1952, and a then state-of-the-art semi-professional machine, a Ferrograph, had been used shortly afterwards by Wiremu (Bill) Ngata, who was commissioned by the Maori Purposes Fund Board to record waiata, which he did mostly in his home area of Ngati Porou in the East Coast. By 1956, the Board had issued the gramophone records of selected waiata from this collection that had triggered my own interest. My Grundig recorder had its faults, but it was capable of results as good as the Ferrograph. I was fully equipped for my trip.
Even today, Europeans remain largely unaware of the richness and extent of the indigenous Maori song heritage. For many, their only acquaintance with it is to hear a waiata burbling in the background of a television documentary to indicate that something Maori is going on. It is a surprise to nearly everyone, both Pakeha and Maori, to learn that literally thousands of Maori song texts have been preserved in written form, both published and unpublished. Governor Grey, for example, published a collection of texts as early as 1851. And, during the Waikato wars of the 1860s, when Maori prisoners from Rangiriri were confined on a hulk in Auckland Harbour, one of the guards, John McGregor, collected and later published a large number of songs written down by the captives. Scholarly journals and tribal histories are full of numerous others, and there are large manuscript collections in New Zealand repositories such as the Alexander Turnbull Library and Auckland City Library.
Among the public at large, however, such songs are a mostly hidden tradition. Although some songs (necessarily bereft of music) were given prominence in The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985), and extensive anthologies of texts with English translations have been published (most recently by Margaret Orbell), this form of literature remains largely unnoticed and unappreciated. In part, as will be seen, this can be laid at the door of the Maori people themselves. Most of the songs are tribally owned and jealously guarded, contributing, ironically, to their near demise in many areas and total extinction in some. By the 1950s, the singing tradition was fast dying out, and this was a matter of huge concern to Maori elders. Of the thousands of songs in print, only a tiny fraction were still being sung, and both these and others whose words had never been written down were disappearing at an alarming rate. Whenever knowledgeable singers died, some of their songs went with them. Moreover, although many song texts had been preserved, the tunes were lost for ever whenever a song ceased to be sung. This I saw as the greater problem because however poetic a song text might be, it was only half a song, and without a tune there could be no song. My tape recorder provided a means of salvaging what remained of both texts and music. Maoridom is fortunate that among the custodians of the singing tradition were some who took advantage of this opportunity when it was offered to them, and agreed to record their songs. What follows is not a complete account of my experiences with Maori singers, but it does reveal some of the highlights.
When I began my field work in 1958, I had no idea of what might lie ahead. It was not at all usual for a European to venture among the more remote Maori communities, and it was also long before the introduction of urban institutions, such as marae complexes in Auckland and Wellington, and the Nga Hau E Wha (The Four Winds) National Marae in Christchurch, that have since done so much to familiarise people with Maori values and culture. Even as late as the 1960s, marae life was almost exclusively rural, and many Europeans besides myself were unaware of it.
It is also true that outside of the Maori areas, New Zealand then was very different from the country we live in today. Much that we took for granted then no longer exists, and will be unfamiliar to some readers. It was a time when the railways still had branch lines and steam locomotives. Coming from the South Island, where there was a splendid concrete highway south of Christchurch, I was surprised to find that much of the main road in the North Island was not even sealed. The economic reforms of today were far in the future. Radio was still supreme, and there was no television. Aunt Daisy delivered recipes from radio station 2ZB Wellington every weekday from 9.00 am. Joe Brown broadcast his Town Hall dance from 4ZB Dunedin every Saturday night. Coal stoves were still in use in many households. New Zealand still had a cradle-to-the-grave social welfare system. The shops closed on weekends. The pubs closed at 6.00 pm, and the 'six o'clock swill' ensued. Draft beer to take home was dispensed from pub bottle stores in 'peters' or 'half gees'. Miles, yards and feet, and stones, pounds and ounces were still familiar weights and measures. The 'quarter-acre Pavlova paradise' had not yet been abandoned. There was full employment and not much crime. 'Milkbar cowboys' cruised Dunedin's main streets on Friday and Saturday nights, and were thought to be a problem. The 'sexual revolution' had not yet begun, and 'working wives' were rare. No one was very rich (except perhaps for farmers), and fewer people than today were very poor. The official attitude to Maori/Pakeha relations was one of social 'integration': no longer outright assimilation, but looking forward, nevertheless, to a time when New Zealanders would be neither white nor brown, but somewhere in between. Pluralism was eschewed. Maori wasn't an official language. Multiculturalism, much less biculturalism, wasn't even a word. In Maoridom itself, the phrase: 'Tatou, tatou' (We are all one people) was approvingly received. There was both good and bad in this. It was bad that specifically Maori values were both less recognised and less encouraged than they should have been. It was good that by and large a Pakeha had a better chance of being accepted in Maoridom than is the case today. I was fortunate to have begun my activities when I did.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from To Tatau Waka by Mervyn McLean. Copyright © 2004 Mervyn McLean. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Getting started,Rotorua (May–July 1958),
Between times (1958–1962),
Getting on, and getting about,
First 1962–64 field trip (August–October 1962),
Second 1962–64 field trip (February–April 1963),
Third 1962–64 field trip (August–December 1963),
Final 1962–64 field trip (February–May 1964),
PhD thesis,
Overseas again (1965–68),
The later years (1969–79),
An appeal to Maori readers,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgements,
Photo credits,
Glossary of song types,
Index of place names,
Map of Tribal Distribution,
Index of personal names,
CD contents,
What People are Saying About This
A splendid effort by a distinguished ethnomusicologist who has devoted his life to research on the musical cultures of Polynesia. (B. Nettl, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, on Weavers of Song)