INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Te Ao Hou, June 1964, Page 36

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Most readers of ‘Te Ao Hou’ will know that there are two kinds of Maori music. The kind with which most people are familiar, known as action song, dates only from about the first decades of the present century. In its present form it is little more than a Maorified form of Western popular music. The other kind of Maori music has a long tradition dating back to the beginnings of the Maori people. Even today it remains associated with the old values and institutions of Maoridom. It exhibits, in consequence, great tenacity of style. It is with the older form of music that this article is concerned. Since, so far as the writer is aware, there is no generally accepted name which incorporates the whole of the older song tradition, it will be called here ‘Maori chant’. This term is used as inclusive of waiata, patere, pao, and all the other forms discussed. It is used in preference to the term ‘Maori song’ which could also include action song. Until now, scholarly attention to Maori chant has mostly been directed towards the words. Sir Apirana Ngata for example, in the Prefaces to both parts 1 and 2 of ‘Nga Moteatea’, deals with the chants exclusively from a literary point of view. This did not mean that the importance of the

music had been overlooked. In the Preface to part 1, Ngata expressly pointed out that ‘there can be no proper rendering of Maori songs without capturing the air’. Only since the advent of the tape recorder, however, has it been possible either to record a sufficient number of melodies for study or to undertake the much more difficult task of devising a notation that could handle the material.