Tradition Can be a Barrier

Te Ao Hou, June 1964, Page 34

Tradition Can be a Barrier It is well known that when a song is performed, it must be appropriate to the occasion. At a tangi for instance, the waiata sung will be appropriate to the dead person or will show a connection between the home tribe and the visiting tribe. Some upholders of tradition go further than this and say that a song should only be sung when there is occasion for its use. In some areas this has caused songs to die out altogether because the songs were performed so seldom that those who wished to learn them were unable to do so. If the songs still known are to survive, this is clearly one custom that will have to be modified. When the object is to learn a song there should be no barriers to performance and the occasion of teaching a song will have to be thought of as important enough to justify its performance. There are encouraging signs that such an attitude is now becoming usual. Most performers questioned by the writer said they learned their songs from individuals, and except amongst very old singers it is found that very few songs had been learnt by being simply ‘picked up’. This means that the convention restricting performance to the occasion must already have broken down to a large extent. To some, superstition is a barrier. In a few areas, memory lapses are still regarded as a sign of death or disaster, and some young people say they would sooner not try to learn

songs than run the risk of not performing them correctly. These beliefs however are unlikely to discourage anyone with real aptitude for singing. The remedy is surely to sing the song in public only when it has been properly learnt. A very real problem has been the decline of memorising ability which has corresponded with the rise of literacy. There will be few people today capable of memorising a song at one or two hearings, and the writer knows of no-one of the calibre of one of Elsdon Best's informants, who was said to have given him more than 380 songs. Most people however will be satisfied with a modest half dozen or so, and the best way of getting around lack of memorising ability is to begin with a text. Some learners are already taking song texts with them to meetings, and this—since it allows one to concentrate on the air—seems a practice worth following.