The Lilburn Lecture 2019

Transcript

BREATH OF THE BIRDS
The Revival of Taonga Puoro
2019 Lilburn Lecture
Gillian Whitehead
1 November 2019

It’s January, 1946. Around 150 emerging musicians and tutors from around the country gather at St Peters School, Cambridge, where the students perform a range of orchestral, chamber and choral music; there are also piano and composition groups. The heady, 10-day summer school will be held annually for around thirty years, providing an environment where many musicians bridge the gap between student and professional involvement in music.

At that first Cambridge summer school, Douglas Lilburn gives a talk, The search for tradition in which he pleads for the necessity for us in Aotearoa to have, quote, ‘a music of our own, a living tradition of music created in this country, a music that will satisfy those parts of our being that cannot be satisfied by the music of other nations.’ This idea came to him one night when he was travelling on the Limited, the overnight passenger train that ran between Auckland and Wellington. Hanging out the carriage door gazing at Ruapehu in full moonlight, he realized that, at that moment, the world in which Mozart lived was about as remote as the moon, and in no way related to any experience of his.

Later in the same talk, he talks about how our environment is shaping our characteristic rhythms of living. Everything about us, the patterns of our landscape and sea coasts, the changing of our seasons, and the flow of light and colour about us...all show patterns of movement or characteristic rhythms... We have an enormous potential of characteristic rhythm in this environment about us, provided we can become sufficiently aware of it to be able to make it articulate in sound.

And he talks about Maori music, saying My impressions...are that in its purer state as part of Polynesian culture, it’s about as foreign to our own cultural sources as say Javanese or Siberian folk music; that as we live here generation after generation, the circumstances that shape us may fuse some of this Polynesian quality into our own ethos; but...the attempts...to use it for the founding of a national music here have been based more on a wish to practice nineteenth-century theories....than on any ability to fuse a Polynesian culture with our own.

That was 1946. Twenty years later he had become involved in the new electronic medium, although he struggled with the new technology which did not come naturally to him, but in that medium he was eventually able very effectively to explore that characteristic rhythm he perceived, and indeed did make articulate in sound.

In another talk, A search for a Language, given at the University of Otago in 1969, he says I begin to enter into my own total heritage of sound, meaning all sounds, and not just the narrow segment of them, traditional, imported, that we’ve long regarded as being music.

Jack Body told me that one day, towards the end of his life, Douglas heard the music of Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns, and the sounds of taonga puoro, on Rattle’s CD Te Ku Te Whe, and said, in tears, ‘At last. This is the music I’ve been waiting all my life to hear’, or words to that effect.

I’d like to play a three-minute excerpt from Douglas’s ‘The Return’, an early electro-acoustic piece from 1965, inspired by Alistair Campbell’s haunting and mysterious poem of the same name. To me the poem and the music inhabit the same uneasy world evoked by the paintings of Bill Hammond.

MUSIC

I’ll give you a very quick history of taonga puoro, which translates as treasures of sound, or tools of sound or singing treasures. In pre-European times they were not musical instruments as we tend to regard them today, but were made for practical use. Made of wood, stone, shell, gourd, pounamu, harakeke or bone, they were blown as flutes or trumpets, or were shaken, beaten or swung. They are the children of the atua, the gods. The instruments of wood are the descendants of Tane, those of shell are of Tangaroa, swung instruments of Tawhirimatea. Hineputehue is the goddess of gourd instruments, and Hineraukatauri of flute music.The taonga had specific functions. Some were for signaling. Some were trumpets for war. Some were to assist communication with the atua. Some were used to attract birds for food, or for healing, for accompanying sacred chants, or purely for entertainment, accompanying singing and dancing. Some were public, some were intimate. Some were tapu, elaborately carved, while others were found objects - tapped stones or fashioned out of leaves.

Some taonga produced a single pitch, or in the case of trumpets a pitch and its harmonics, but most others had small ranges, usually no more than a minor third, similar to the vocal range of the chants and waiata, and indeed, also to the range of birds. They held a whole world of sound and meaning within them and today they bring us something of the sound world of our past. When the missionaries arrived here in the early nineteenth century, they understood the spiritual significance of the sounds of the taonga to Maori, and ordered them destroyed; they were replaced with western flutes and bugles.

The old playing traditions were lost, fragmented, with Te Rangi Hiroa - Sir Peter Buck - declaring in the nineteen twenties that their voices were forever mute. This may well have been because the ethnologists and western musicians couldn’t make the instruments sound in a way meaningful to them, as the playing techniques and concepts of music were so very different.

From the 1970s there was a renaissance and resurgence of things Maori - awareness of the effects of colonization, and of the two differing versions, Maori and pakeha, of the treaty, the beginning of the reclamation of the language, beaten out of school children to enforce spoken English, the recognition of techniques and development in the world of traditional crafts, the emergence of writers and painters drawing on their rediscovered traditions, and so on. And this was true of the taonga puoro as well.

Three men came together at a hui devoted to taonga puoro in 1984. Richard Nunns was a school teacher, an improvising musician who played flute and trumpet and was fascinated by the taonga puoro, Hirini Melbourne, a musician - singer, composer, fluent speaker and holder of knowledge of his Tuhoe and Ngati Kahungunu heritage, and Brian Flintoff, a master carver. The three of them with their complementary skills became the nucleus of a group of makers and players, Haumanu, which translates as ‘the breath of birds’.

Richard and Hirini travelled to marae up and down the country, taking the voices of the instruments back to the people and picking up fragments of information from the memories of kaumatua. Of course, so much knowledge has been lost since the missionaries declared the taonga the work of the devil. But the time that elapsed between the attempted destruction of maoritanga in the nineteenth century and the revival in the late twentieth was much shorter than that of the First Nations in the Americas, so the recovery, though fragmentary, with many gaps, has been more complete than elsewhere.

I first came across this new sound world in the nineties, on the occasion of the opening of Victoria University’s new music building when Richard Nunns dedicated two koauau that had been gifted to the school to mark the occasion, and shortly after that I heard Hirini and Richard present a workshop at a Sing Aotearoa festival in Ohakune. I was very moved by hearing these sounds. I had some knowledge of the taonga as, 30 years earlier, when a masters student at Sydney university, I had studied ethnomusicology with Peter Sculthorpe, who had little knowledge of academic ethnomusicology but a great enthusiasm for the sounds of gamelan and Noh. I used this time to investigate, with far more enthusiasm than academic rigour, the instruments of Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Aotearoa. At this time, in the 60s there was precious little recorded music available, and, of course, I knew the instruments of Maori were forever mute because Te Rangi Hiroa had said so.

Anyway, Richard and Hirini‘s presentation touched me very deeply, and some time shortly after that in the early 1990s there was a Composing Women’s Festival in Melbourne. I was teaching in Sydney at this time, and I joined a group of New Zealand women who had come to Melbourne for the occasion - among others Elizabeth Kerr, Helen Fisher, Eve de Castro Robinson, Jenny McLeod, Keri Kaa and Tungia Baker - and one evening, Tungia told me a story she had written, about a waka, a kowhai tree who lived in the hills and their mutual friend tui, who carried messages between them. Then one day there was a big storm, which changed everything. Actually, Tungia’s original story involved a tsunami rather than a storm, but as the story was on one level for children, she decided to change it to something rather less terrifying.

After Tungia told me the story, I woke in the middle of the night and thought - that’s a story in the tradition of the old teaching stories, and it could be told using a cello as the voice of Waka. The canoe, like a cello, is hollow, and made of wood, and the imaginative skill of New Zealand improvising pianist Judy Bailey, who was also at that festival, could suggest the flowers and foliage of Kowhai, and Richard’s taonga could comment on events as Tungia told the story. It had never occurred to me to use the taonga in composition till that point. But Tungia was happy to see it happen and somehow, it all came together on cd rather than in performance, as ‘Ipu’. In this excerpt, at the height of the storm, Waka is swept up into the hills by the wave and sees with dismay Kowhai being carried down as the water retreats. This is followed by calm, and a lament.

MUSIC

I’ve been wondering when taonga puoro and western concepts of music were first combined. In 1980, at the time of the protests over plans to build an aluminium smelter at Aramoana at the mouth of Dunedin harbour, Chris Cree Brown was Mozart Fellow, and there was a group exhibition in the Hocken library by a number of leading activists - the like of Cilla McQueen, Ralph Hotere and Marilyn Webb. The late Maarire Goodall was a Kai Tahu kaumatua who at the time was Director of the National Cancer Research Laboratory, and he borrowed a koauau from the Dunedin museum and lent it to Chris, saying ‘this must stay in good hands, as otherwise I will become ill’. Chris devised a piece in which the haunting sounds of the koauau and the rippling water at Aramoana were recorded on tape, and about 15 objects made of aluminium – watering cans, saucepans and so on - were struck with beaters by visitors to the exhibition.

Subsequently, Chris was confronted by an angry young Maori guy, who said he had no right to use the Koauau in this way. Although Chris had been given permission and encouragement by Maarire, he says ‘chastened, I have been very reticent to use any ethnic instruments since, especially anything within Maoridom’. And unfortunately, the tape disintegrated long ago, before Chris got around to digitizing it. An unfortunate experience, but not an uncommon one. But this may have been the first use of taonga puoro in a modern setting, and should be recognized as such.

I saw our piece ‘Ipu’ primarily as storytelling, and a couple of years later I was writing an opera with a text by Christine Johnston to celebrate Dunedin’s sesquicentenary. Our opera, called ‘Outrageous Fortune’, had one plot line, based on fact, which conflated two stories, one involving Maori finding gold on a rock in a flooded river, and another where Maori rescued Chinese miners terrorized by claim-jumpers by performing a haka and scaring them off. I translated some of the text into te reo Maori and we introduced Richard playing taonga puoro and Tungia Baker as a kaikaranga alongside the operatic Maori singers - Deborah Wai Kapohe, Te Oti Rakena and Robert Wiremu - to amplify and enhance the Maori aspects of the libretto.

Shortly after that, Richard asked me if I’d write a piece for Alexa Still to play with him at the Atlanta flute convention. One day in Nelson, he had shown me a fern growing at the base of a tree and said ‘this is the hair of Hineraukatauri. I’d like you to write a piece about her’. So for the first time, I had to think of how to write for flute and taonga puoro as equal partners in a piece of chamber music. Actually, in retrospect, I don’t know that I did think about it very much - it was a piece I wrote in Sydney to a very tight deadline. I just had to sit down and do it.

But there are a lot of things to consider, such as notation versus improvisation, the small ranges of the instruments which can play microtones and are not tempered to western scales, the individuality and variation of pitch and quality of taonga of the same name, the different playing styles of the performers, the very quiet sounds of some instruments, the fact that some taonga are often reluctant to speak, and so on. And there are a lot of taonga to choose from. Initially there weren’t so many, and the first pieces I wrote used only the instruments Hirini and Richard had featured on their cd. But as time went on there was more research into the taonga and more information was gathered, and other voices came back into being.

For instance, I remember Richard being very excited when he received a pumotomoto from Brian Flintoff, and was wondering how it would speak when he tried to play it. Hirini had met a kaumatua from Waikaremoana who had described the form and purpose of the instrument. It is a long vertical flute, with a notch at the top and a single hole near the lower end, and a very quiet, breathy voice. Hirini later took the instrument back to play to the kaumatua, who said the sound was right, but altered one or two details in the construction.

The pumotomoto was traditionally played into the fontanelle of a baby, to impart waiata and tribal knowledge into the child’s subconscious. Richard played it several times over the belly of a young woman who was hapu, and after the child was born, whenever she heard the sound of the instrument she immediately settled down and listened intently.

Another example of the emergence of a new taonga - when we were recording ‘Ipu’ in Nelson, Tungia Baker gave Richard a rattle she had made out of dried harakeke and muka, muka being the fibre remaining after a flax leaf had been scraped. She had replicated a rattle she had seen in the Otaki museum; another sound came back into the modern world.

At the end of this session, Bridget Douglas and Alistair Fraser will play ‘Hineraukatauri’, the piece Richard wanted for the Atlanta Flute Convention, but I’ll talk about it now. In short, Hineraukatauri is the goddess of music and entertainment. She is also the case moth that you often see hanging from shrubs. The female case moth lives her whole life in the case, and attracts males by singing in a pure quiet tone; the males come, impregnate her, die, and remain in the case to feed her young. The casemoth is also a favourite food of the Kokako, who, by feeding on her, attains his wonderful voice by amplifying her pure quiet sound. Hineraukatauri, the goddess of flute music, is embodied in the putorino, which is shaped like a casemoth. The instrument is unique to Aotearoa, and can be played with a loud trumpet, kokiri or male voice, and a quiet flute, waiata or female voice. The differences between the ranges of the different voices depends on the bore of the instrument. And often there is a third, or spirit voice.

The main instruments of this piece are putorino. Two of Alistair’s instruments are of nikau, one of akeake. When I wrote the piece for Richard initially, his were made of albatross bone, matai and maire wood. Because of the different tone qualities of the materials, the realizations of the piece are subtly varied. There are other taonga - a karanga manu or bird-caller which opens the piece in a duet with piccolo, tapped resonant sticks which accompany a flute solo reminiscent of dramatic story-telling. A purerehua, which translates as an attractive or attracting sound, suggests the moth attracted to Hineraukatauri. By the nature of the taonga puoro, the music for them is basically going to be fairly slow, so any faster-moving sound has to be carried in the western instruments. And one basic function of the sections written for western instruments, apart from the music itself, is to move from one tonal centre that will support a specific taonga to another.

In ‘Hineraukatauri’ and subsequent pieces, I tried to evoke a pre-European contact world, something without reference to common European practice. Frequently I use low sustained 5ths, and parallel harmonies. I came to that really by observing the importance of the third overtone, which sounds at the fifth, in some Maori music. I remember hearing Ngati Rangi men chanting, where the fifth was almost as dominant as the basic pitch, dancing above it, a sound to marvel at. I’ve found it also in some wind instruments - hearing and accidentally transcribing the same phrase at two separate times a fifth apart. And in my writing, I extended that idea to include the fifth harmonic as well, which adds a major third above the basic tone.

Richard is an improvising musician - he doesn’t like working from a score, and performs better when not reading one, so his part is basically a list of instruments, maybe an indication of mood, and he works off eye-contact with the other musicians. And I often encourage the other instrumentalists to improvise as well, so that, though the structure doesn’t change some of the detail varies from performance to performance. I started writing like this many years ago when I realized that I wanted to relieve intense concentrated material with something much freer, both for the performer’s and the listener’s sake. In these partly improvised pieces, my aim is to achieve a performance where the listener isn’t aware of what is improvised and what is notated.

Around 2003 there were a couple of memorable wananga at Ohinemutu and Whakarewarewa organized by Ngawara Gordon, who brought together instrument makers and players with a few classical musicians. One event during that Ohinemutu wananga I’ll never forget was a trip before dawn to the top of Tarawera, where 30 plus musicians performing a 40-minute improvisation on taonga puoro to the memory of Hirini Melbourne as the sun rose.

Ngawara and Richard wanted a piece for Richard and the visiting Canadian bassoonist, George Zuckerman, to perform during the wananga. I wanted to draw on a local story and worked with Aroha Yates-Smith on the story of her tupuna, Hine te Kakara, who was either the wife or daughter of Ihenga, an early explorer of the lakes region. When Ihenga returned from a hunting trip, he found the murdered body of Hinetekakara in lake Rotorua at Muruika, where a settlement was named for her - Ohinemutu, meaning the end of the woman. Ihenga walked there by the lake and sang an angry lament.

This excerpt is a later version that adds flute and cello to the mix. It comes from the opening, where Aroha summons the spirit of her ancestor from the lake.

MUSIC

Writing this piece was a true collaboration. After talking with Aroha I devised the shape of the piece, chose the taonga, and wrote the bassoon part for George to learn, then in rehearsal George and Richard worked on the improvised sections while Arohanui listened. Shortly before the performance Aroha added her chants which gave much greater depth to the piece. So, my piece encloses her chants which deal with different sections of the life of Hinetekakara and Ihenga. The performance, in the wharenui at Ohinemutu, about 100 metres from where Hinetekakara was killed and Ihenga sang his lament, was electrifying.

There were other pieces involving taonga puoro -three I wrote for the New Zealand String Quartet. The first was ‘Hineputehue’, who is the atua of peace; the gourd is her attribute, as it serves as a vessel to hold food or water. I decided to use stringed instruments with the gourds, as with both gourds and violins it’s the air vibrating in an enclosed space crafted from plant material that produces the sound. I also used a ku - a bow which uses the mouth as a resonating chamber while the taut string made from supplejack is tapped rhythmically. This piece, was followed a few years later by ‘Puhake ki te Rangi’, spouting to the skies, which is based on instruments made of whalebone, with other instruments like the karanga manu, the bird caller, representing the sounds a whale would hear from land, and the toroa or albatross which the whale would surely encounter at sea.

When I first started working with Richard, people would often ask how I felt about writing music that would have a short life, as, particularly after Hirini’s death, we weren’t sure whether the revival would continue or diminish and disappear. I wasn’t that fazed - to have even once the possibility and privilege of writing for these new sounds that connected to my heritage was enough. Richard no longer performs because of ill-health, but 20 years on, there are a number of highly skilled players - Horomona Horo, Alistair Fraser, Rob Thorne, James Webster, Ariana Tikao, to name a few - with their individual backgrounds, sets of instruments and playing techniques, who work across a variety of genres, and perform nationally and abroad. And a growing number of composers who are working together with them, discovering new ways to work together. It’s very exciting.

For me, working with the taonga has influenced my writing. Every few years a composer’s style of writing changes. I began writing in Auckland music described as somewhere between Schoenberg and Bartok. In Britain, I worked with serial processes, until I found my own way of controlling material through devising structures based on mensuration canons evolved from their renaissance predecessors, which spanned a piece, leading to a complicated-looking framework of fixed pitches. But that was just a framework - the skill comes in joining and entwining and elaborating and scoring these points of sound. Then I began introducing elements of free rhythm or controlled improvisation at key points in the structure, so that the structure would always be the same, but the detail always varied. Teaching at the Conservatorium in Sydney brought me back to in-depth analysis of the music of the Renaissance, of Debussy and Mozart as well as the leading twentieth century icons and, after a brush with breast cancer, my writing moved away from the strictures I’d put on it in the seventies and eighties.

Jenny McLeod’s Chromatic Maps suggested new paths as well. When I started working with the taonga puoro my style changed again, after my attempts to find a way of writing something that would suggest sounds of pre-European Aotearoa. I tend to use melodies with a very limited range, parallel harmonies, bringing something of my codifying of that pre- European sound world into my other work.

Then there’s subject matter. I suppose now it’s mainly story-telling in some form or other – we have so many stories still to tell. The pieces I wrote with Fleur Adcock told the stories of women – ‘Hotspur’, in which Henry Percy and the battle of Otterburn was seen through the eyes of his wife, and ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine’ - were both written while I was living in Europe. The other three, written when I was back on this side of the world focused on Katherine Mansfield, Robin Hyde and Alice, who was Fleur’s great-aunt.

That focus followed into the taonga puoro pieces. Following ‘Hineraukatauri’, two other pieces told of atua wahine – ‘Hineteiwaiwa’, the atua of pregnancy and birth, harvesting and weaving, and ‘Hineputehue’, the atua of peace. The latter was also a response to George Bush’s sabre-rattling State of the Union address in the aftermath of 9/11, while ‘Puhake ki te Rangi’ was a response to Japan breaking the moratorium on whaling a decade ago.

Personally, I find it hard to use the taonga puoro as abstract sound, although others do it very effectively - so far I’ve needed to use the instruments in some way associated with their original use. They need to have plenty of spiritual space around them to sound - they are slow and sometimes reluctant to speak, have their unique, often fragile voices, and need to be seen as equal partners shaping the direction of the piece. They are a sonic link to the past of our country. They must not be colonised or regimented by western music.

Working with the taonga and te reo Maori - has taken me to some wonderful places and given me - and I hope others - some amazing experiences. I have learnt so much and met so many wonderful people on this journey. The last piece I wrote before Richard retired was 10 years ago. But since then, the wonderful and dedicated new wave of players have revived some of the pieces I devised for Richard, and now I’m writing again for the taonga and the next generation of players.

I talked earlier about Douglas Lilburn’s search for a unique tradition that springs from Aotearoa, which he certainly established in his electroacoustic music, and heard as his ideal at the end of his life in the sounds of the taonga puoro. But composing using the taonga is just one of the many strands that go to make up the musical fabric of Aotearoa. It’s not possible to say what New Zealand music is, although some foreigners think it has to do with our perception of space, but I believe our sounds really are different from the sounds of Germany, of New York, of Britain, of Australia, of China. We are lucky in this country to have a collegial and supportive composing community, and this is in part because of Douglas’s support of us forty years ago. There are no towering dictatorial figures who decree that music should be like this or like that and long may it remain so.

In his poem ‘Themes’, Denis Glover asks the question, What shall we sing? Sings Harry. And goes on to address satirically the themes of truthful men, of lovers, of leaders, of poets and of soldiers. Then asks again:

What shall we sing? Sings Harry.
Sing all things sweet or harsh upon
These islands in the Pacific sun,
The mountains whitened endlessly
And the white horses of the winter sea.
Sings Harry.