N.Z.’s Own Music

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 567, 21 January 1929, Page 8

N.Z.’s Own Music

Expressing Race Temperament

Maori Influence Possible

WHEN will New Zealand musicians develop a national music? Is there a possibility of a Maori influence predominating when such a music is recognised as characteristic of the Dominion’s people? Experts do not doubt that the yearly increasing interest in Maori music may mean the rise of national individuality in tune.

JpARADOXICALLY enough, it was an Australian, Alfred Hill, who was responsible for such invaluable groundwork in bringing the distinctive melodies of the Maori before the public. It was in Australia, further, that a demand for Maori tunes became evident. Popularity became certain. Then New Zealanders realised what an asset they possessed in the songs of the natives. Hill did not blunder in his work of gathering songs from the lips of the Maoris. He did not make the mistake of changing them from the original.

So it is that the Maori songs which are being sold plentifully in music form and in gramophone records

retain much of their freshness. They are descriptive of New ZealancL

Hakas are not exactly songs. Hamer they are chants and speak truly of the days of tribal warfare, of rugged landscapes. The softly plaintive songs so abundant in all native tribes tell of the more romantic, natural life of the natives. They fit in with New Zealand’s beautiful scenery.

If New Zealand will eventually possess characteristic songs, moulded by the changing conditions of modern times, there seems reason to believe, and hope, that some of the distinctive touches of Maori music will be caught. Australia and New Zealand have scarcely had time to evolve music of their own. Rollicking bush songs, essentially colonial, used to speak of the days of hardy pioneers, but progress has quashed these.

And in this evolution of tune, even in Australia and New Zealand, as in older countries, the remarkable influence of negro music is a force to be considered. The tunes of the negro laid many of the foundations of American jazz, so obviously suited to the rude clamour of modern cities and to

the frantic haste in present-day communities. Most people refused to take the talk of negro influence on modern life seriously. Now, it is a fact. Negrro literature and art. sprung: from the heart of white-black Harlem, is now an undoubted factor. It seems that the impressionable negrro population in America was the first to be sensitive of the increasing: scurry of modern conditions, and so was the first to grive to the world music descriptive' of the new life. SIMPLE BRITONS The fact iWust be faced, just as injured English city people had to accept as the truth, not so many years ago, that the simple folk songs of English country people were typical of the bulk of English temperament, even if they lacked elegance. The folk songs of the Briton afford an excellent contrast to the passionate music of the Latins, the wildnese of Slavonic tunes, and the bizarre fantasies of the Orient. Now, England, swaying to the demand of modern clamorous conditions, has accepted American negro jazz with little protest. Responsible Londoners wriggle with ecstacy at the sound of an invading American chorus shouting the latest nonsense from the stage. Until he left for Honolulu on ethnological work, Dr. Peter Buck was busy with efforts to save ancient Maori music from oblivion. He did extensive service, which has yet to be appreciated. And yet Dr. Buck, while he realised the widening attempts to retain native tunes and to increase the interest of the younger generation of Maoris, was the first to emphasise that an immense field of melody was practically untapped. He would say that only the fringes of Maori music had been studied.

Maori music has the virtue of being untrammelled by foreign influences. It is pure Polynesian. Irremediable harm has been done in Hawaii, where the charm of real Hawaiian music has been exploited by jazz-crazed Americans. Even the modern Hawaiian is not above mutilating the music of his own race.

Negro duettists—platoons of them —have been feeding the public taste for years past with grotesque versions of Hawaiian tunes.

Samoa, which is the home of the hula dance and its music, and not Hawaii, is another untapped field of an earlier branch of Polynesian music. The scarcely known, yet remarkably appealing Fijian music, has a fascinating Melanesian influence. If the work of capturing Maori music is to be carried out on the scale it deserves, it should be under the direction of experts. Not all the work should be left to gramophone company agents from outside countries. No one in New Zealand is more qaulified for such a task than the Hon. Sir Apirana Ngata, whose research work is widely known. The Auckland Province possesses the most likely field. Special attention could be centred in operations in the Rotorua area, where natives are singing Maori ditties, in more or less modern fashion, to delighted American and English tourists.

If Polynesian melody is to be preserved for the demands of the New Zealand temperament of the future, it will have to be kept from exploitation. Luckily, the only Amerrican negro duettists that trouble New Zealand are on gramophone records. New Zealand has yet to say of a song: ••This is Neiv Zealand's own.”