OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF STYLE

Te Ao Hou, June 1964, Page 38

OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF STYLE Scale. The melodic organisation of Maori waiata centres as a rule around a fixed intoning note or ‘oro’ as it has been called. If the notes used in a chant are written out consecutively in the form of a scale, the ‘oro’ will be found somewhere close to the middle. Since each departure from the ‘oro’ is ordinarily followed by a return to it, the ‘oro’ is invariably the most frequently occurring note of a melody. In most cases it is also the final and often it starts the song as well. In musical terms, the ‘oro’ can thus be thought of as the tonic, and the melody as a whole can be described as centric. Usually there are fewer notes in the scale than is generally the case with European song. It is not uncommon for songs to have only 3 or 4 notes. Range. In keeping with the small number of notes commonly employed in the scale of the traditional chant, the melodic range is correspondingly small. From the lowest note to the highest, the range of the Maori chant seldom exceeds the musical interval of a 4th. Melodic intervals. Maori melody for the most part employs melodic intervals no larger than a Minor 3rd and the bulk of the melodic movement is by Major and Minor 2nds. It might be expected that with so few notes, such limited range and such small melodic steps there might after all be something to the criticisms of ‘monotony’ which is often levelled at Maori chant. Such a view however would be altogether too facile and quite unjustified since it fails to take account of the frequently non-diatonic nature of the melodic intervals employed in waiata. Another way of saying this, is that the melodies of Maori chant need not conform to the major and minor modalities of the European scale system. Since at each step in a Maori melody the next note may be a Minor 2nd, Major 2nd, or Minor 3rd, either upward or downward, there are clearly more possibilities than would exist if the melody were limited by the demands of the major or minor modes. Melodic diversity is thus obtainable without need of increasing either melodic range or the size of the melodic interval. At this stage something might be said about the vexed question of quarter tones. Several early writers expressed the opinion that Maori music employed quarter tones and others today have uncritically followed suit.

A good deal of the apparent strangeness of some Maori melodies can be explained by the non-diatonicism described above. For the rest, whatever may have been the case in the past, intervals of less than a half tone are not prevalent today. Most waiata as at present sung, conform fairly closely to Western tempered intervals. In some 400 items analysed to date the writer has found only a few instances of genuine microtones and most of these were used incidentally rather than structurally. Form. Most waiata use as a formal principle, the varied repetition of a basic melody. The end of each repetition is marked by the ornamented leader solos and meaningless syllabifying referred to earlier. The end of a structural division—such as the end of a verse where there are several—the end of the song itself, and drop-outs by individuals in group performance are all marked by a device which the writer has called the ‘terminal glissando’. This takes the form of a characteristic expulsion of breath accompanied by a glissando drop of the voice over an interval of a 3rd or 4th. Recited items are through-composed and cannot be said to exhibit form in the usual sense. Polyphony. Maori chant is monophonic. This means that in a group performance everybody sings the same part. There is rhythmic unison in the case of the recited songs and both rhythmic and melodic unison in the sung items. Any appearance of added parts is either fortuitous (e.g. ‘riding in’) or is bad singing (rangi rua). Accompanying instruments are not used and with the exception of the koauau (open tube flute) appear not to have been used in the past. Informants are agreed that the koauau always played in unison with the voice part. Thus even with instrumental accompaniment, performance was still monophonic. Tempo, Metre and Rhythm. With few exceptions, tempo is invariable in Maori chant. Once a tempo is established it is kept up right to the end of a song. That this should be so is fairly clearly a consequence of the need in group performance for all the singers to be together. Much of the musical interest of Maori chant, in both its sung and recited forms, derives from the rhythms. Typically highly complex, the rhythms give to the Western ear the impression of constant syncopation over an unchanging beat. This impression arises from the fact that although the metre of Maori chant can be divisive, it is often modified in such a way as to become additive. Once this is realised, it becomes possible to notate the seeming syncopations as a series of time changes rather than by tying across from one rhythmic group to another. This also greatly simplifies the problem of reading the notation. It must be clearly understood however that the time changes, as notated, must be thought of in terms of the smallest metrical unit. To give an example, the rhythmic group is five units long and no attempt should be made to force it into the confines of the divisive system by lengthening the first two quavers as or– In other words, when the metre changes, the duration of the beat changes also. If the metre changes from 2/4 to 6/8, the beat changes from two units of length to three. Istesso tempo, whereby the dotted crochet of 6/8 becomes equal in duration to the crotchet of 2/4 does not apply.