PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Te Ao Hou, September 1961, Page 22

PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE The old Maori music is often called ‘primitive,’ in the sense of one being “in an early stage of development,” that is, belonging to undeveloped peoples. However, the word “primitive” does not

mean that the music is “simple”; there is nothing simple about the microtonal intervals (intervals smaller than a semitone) which give a distinctive flavour to Maori chant. Primitive music, then, is the art of peoples, people who have no written language and therefore no formulated theoretical system. It is aurally passed on from one generation to the next. The most important difference between primitive music and art music is to be found in the purpose which music serves in relation to the life of the community. In the Western world, music is a thing apart, something that affects the lives of some people seriously and others, hardly at all. But in a primitive society the case is very different; it concerns the everyday life of each person in the tribe in an intimate way that is quite unknown in more highly developed communities. Reference has already been made to the important role of music in pre-European Maori life. Primitive music is primarily vocal, and instrumental music, where it exists at all, is used to accompany singing. An instrumental song has words associated with it. The words are of prime importance and the tune serves the purpose of the words. A “song without words” is a Western concept of music as is also the idea of listening to music as an end in itself. Elsdon Best explains that when a Maori flute player played a “rangi koauau” he would try to suggest the words associated with that tune by his manner of playing the flute. “It would sometimes happen,” he wrote, “that an adept would so play his flute as to make the sounds resemble the wording of a song; in such a case his playing was much admired by women.” The second point of difference between primitive and art music is, then, that in primitive music the words are of primary importance and in art music, music need not and often does not serve the purpose of the words. In other words, the music can be an end in itself.