The article presents reflections on some issues encountered when combining traditional Maori and Western concert music. These issues include tradition and repertoire versus innovation, control versus freedom, collaboration versus appropriation, and the overlapping roles of creator and performer. Focal to the article is "Hau," a Maori word meaning breath or wind. The author also presents a comparison of Western music with traditional Maori instrumental music

Lodge, Martin

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| 93CANZONA2007by MARTIN LODGEBackgroundOne often arrives at something qualitatively new by uniting two already known but separate domains. (György Ligeti)A few years ago I began to put into practice a growing interest in how the two main musical traditions of New Zealand might meet more directly and engage. Those two traditions are the Māori and the Western. As a classical composer, I’m particularly interested in the ‘clas-sical’ Māori tradition, as far as it is known, and the West-ern classical tradition. One of the pieces arising out of this artistic interest has been Hau (2005) for taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instruments) and cello. About HauThe concept of Hau is indicated by its title, which was sug-gested to me, and its significance explained, by Tom Roa, a colleague in the Māori Studies Department of Waikato University. Hau is a Māori word meaning ‘breath’ or ‘wind’, but can also mean ‘to strike’ or ‘to stroke’ (not too gently!). In these senses it can be related to the action of playing the cello, from tapping its body through to bowing the strings. All sounds are carried by hau, the air, or wind. But in the Māori language hau is also the base word for energy. The phrase e rere ana te hau means ‘energy flowing’; kua pau te hau means ‘no more energy’. The musical drama of this piece embodies the ideas suggested by the title.The work is in two sections but must be played continu-ously without a break. Pao, pao, pao refers to the tapping sounds which open the work, creating rhythm without pitch. This leads imperceptibly into the second section Tawhirimatea—voices of the winds. The central climax of the piece comes at the end of a cello and putatara (shell trumpet) section about three quarters of the way through the work. It is broken off by the sudden silence of both in-struments, followed by a pause. In contrast, the concluding section of the work may be thought of as a dialogue of the winds of the north, represented by the cello, and those of the south, represented by the taonga pūoro. The breaths of two worlds mingle quietly and harmoniously.Hau is dedicated to the memory of the great historian and man of letters, Michael King (1945-2004).IssuesThe general field of cross-cultural music is increasingly well traversed by scholars of late. Most of the central con-troversies are well debated, including:tradition and repertoire versus innovation –control versus freedom –who owns what? –collaboration versus appropriation –the overlapping roles of creator and performer. –Such questions are receiving attention in scholarly debate, but as a composer, I’ve already made my own decisions about them, to enable artistic practice to move forward.Although I had had a growing interest in traditional Māori music for some years, and wondered how the taonga pūoro, the traditional Māori instruments, could be engaged with Western instruments, it wasn’t until Richard Nunns urged me write some pieces for him that I actually took the plunge and began composing such works.Richard is an old friend and is now a Research Associate colleague with me at the University of Waikato. I was for-tunate to have as another colleague at Waikato University, the outstanding Māori musician Hirini Melbourne, who, until his premature death in 2003, was a leading figure in the revival of traditional Māori music as part of a group called Haumanu (literally, ‘the breath of birds’) along with Richard Nunns, Brian Flintoff and others. Personal friendships with Richard and Hirini, these two outstand-ing figures in the field of taonga pūoro revival, effectively unlocked the door to another world for me, and permitted passage into new musical regions.The vital element in embarking on writing Hau and pieces like it, repeatedly turned out to be people. In addi-tion to Richard and Hirini, my colleague and friend in the Waikato University Music Department, the cellist James Tennant, was an invaluable presence. James is not only a fine classical player, he is also comfortable as an impro-HauReflections on some issues encountered when combining traditional Māori and Western concert music94 | CANZONA2007viser. Beyond these performers and thinkers, I was also acutely aware of the pioneering artistic work done in this area by composer Gillian Whitehead. Her thoughtful and powerfully imaginative works continue to shine as bea-cons in every weather.So the impetus to actually put pen to paper and create a score came from working relationships with outstanding performers. This personal connection with the two musi-cal worlds has been essential. It would not have been pos-sible to compose simply out of an abstract wish to combine Māori and Western instruments. People are the key.DifferencesHau was the second piece I wrote involving Richard Nunns and James Tennant, so I knew that most of the procedures I had worked out for the first piece, Toru, were success-ful. But I had also become aware of the things one needs to consider in bringing together taonga pūoro and Western classical instruments. The principal differences between the two musics can be summarised in a table:Comparison of Western music with traditional Māori in-strumental musicMāori WesternInstruments individualised Instruments standardisedInstruments all hand crafted Instrument making largely industrialisedInstruments intended mainly for individual performanceInstruments usually de-signed to facilitate ensemble performanceInstruments strongly linked in all cases to language, song and social functionInstrument development reflects rise of purely in-strumental music since the BaroqueInstruments made entirely from natural materials—wood, stone, bone, leaves, etcInstruments made from a va-riety of materials, including natural, but also metals and synthetic compoundsInstruments evolved in an island culture isolated for at least 300 years prior to Tas-man’s visit in 1642Instruments the result of thousands of years of con-stant cultural interchange and refinementMusic bound almost entirely into social and ritual functionMusic as a stand-alone and distinct art form with a long standing philosophical basis of theory and speculation deriving from ancient Greek thinking (eg. Pythagoras), as well as social and ritual functionMusic and instruments retain cosmological genealogyMusic and instruments largely scientific in conceptMusic traditionally has no notation and the tradition is entirely aural, and musical creation improvisatory or ritualisedMusic powerfully shaped since the Middle Ages by the development of a viable nota-tion systemTuning and temperament in-dividual to each instrumentTuning and temperament in-creasingly standardised since the RenaissanceFlutes typically have pitch range of about a fourthFlutes (and all pitched instru-ments) have wide pitch ranges, usually over several octavesEssence of musical expression gained through microtonal inflectionEssence of musical expression involves use of scales within octavesSome of these differences are major. For a composer, probably the most important ones are the questions of improvisation versus notated score, the importance of scales in Western music versus the absence of comparable pitch structures in Māori instrumental music, and non-standardised tunings. What audiences most notice are the different and striking appearance and timbres of the Māori instruments—but these aspects are least likely to cause the composer a headache. In writing Toru and then Hau I was told at the outset by Richard Nunns that in playing the taonga pūoro he feels comfortable using only traditional playing techniques. There were to be no ‘extended techniques’ for the taonga pūoro. On the other hand, James Tennant is entirely com-fortable utilising extended cello techniques—provided they do not endanger the well-being of the cello itself! For the composer, this meant the Western instrument had to make a journey towards the sound world of the taonga pūoro, and this is why a sensitive and technically excellent player of the Western instrument is needed. My aim was to move beyond just celebrating the differences of the musi-cal worlds of Māori and Westerner, and to find commonali-ties and meeting points for engagement.The second practicality is to specify instrumentation. In Hau, the cello was straightforward, knowing, as I did, James’s confidence in exploring the instrument. For the taonga pūoro, there is a very wide range of mainly wind and percussion instruments to choose from. I decided to limit the number of instruments used, aiming to have the player move between them just often enough to provide a variety of sound and a sense of forward musical narrative, but not so many that the effect was cluttered or disjointed. NotationTo be faithful to the history of the Māori instrumental traditions meant their parts have to be improvised. In any case, Western standard notation is of little practical use in indicating the sounds the instruments really play. On the other hand, being a composer, I was not willing to leave the whole performance solely to free improvisation. The solu-tion has been to devise a new kind of notation which seems to work for these works, or at least, for these performers (see Ex. 1 overleaf )When I came to devise a viable notation system, I first looked at how Gillian Whitehead had addressed this issue in her work, such as Hine-Raukatauri for taonga pūoro and flutes—and saw her solutions were not so different to mine. But I decided that I needed a more flexible way of in-dicating how the music should go. In the end, I borrowed and adapted the system of ‘boxes of musical events’ from | 95CANZONA2007the study score for the well-known String Quartet by Wi-told Lutosławski. This kind of score allows the composer to completely control the macrostructure of the piece, the large scale dramatic shape and flow of events. But at the same time it means the performers have the freedom to create musical detail and line spontaneously. They gener-ate the microstructure afresh in each performance. In Hau while some thematic material is suggested for the cello, no notes or rhythms are prescribed for the taonga pūoro. But the score does indicate which Māori instruments are required, when they should be played, and the character of each section. All this means that a piece like Hau is a vague musical artefact until it sounds. Of course, while the score may be relatively non-prescriptive, each time the piece is recorded a version of it is fixed. I don’t see any problem with that.Whose piece?A score like this raises the question of ownership. Whose piece is it? Obviously my role as composer of Hau is much less determining of the final musical outcome than it is in the pieces I score out fully—for example, for orchestra. The fabric of Hau relies on the creativity of the performers, not just their technical expertise. Does this mean that compo-sitional credit for works like Hau should be shared? Shared between myself, as shaper of the macrostructure and nar-rative, and with the players who summon up the actual characters and emotions in the drama? Richard and I have discussed this issue several times, and increasingly I am coming to feel that a shared credit for composition could be right. Certainly there’s a current philosophical school of thought which considers all music to be an improvised dialogue of one sort or another.1 This piece, has, though, al-ready been played by Richard with another string player, a violist visiting from America in 2006.2 Can compositional attribution change with each change in performer line-up? It’s a challenging thought, but why not?AcknowledgementsSpecial thanks to Richard Nunns, Tom Roa, James Ten-nant and the late Hirini Melbourne for their advice and support in preparing Hau and the thinking behind it.This article grew out of a presentation made on 9 February 2007 at Victoria University of Wellington at the conference “Tradition/Transformation: composition and ethnomu-sicology in Asia and the Pacific”. The presenters were Ri-chard Nunns, James Tennant and Martin Lodge, the paper concluding with a live performance of Hau. The conference was part of the 2007 Asia Pacific Festival. 1 Benson, Bruce Ellis. The improvisation of musical dialogue, a phenomenology of music. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univeristy Press 2003)2 Timothy Deighton, based in PennsylvaniaEx. 1: Extract from Martin Lodge’s HauCopyright of Canzona is the property of Composers Association of New Zealand and its content may not becopied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express writtenpermission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

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