Difficult At First To Understand

Te Ao Hou, September 1964, Page 38

Difficult At First To Understand I have a musically trained ear, and yet when I first started listening to Maori chant when employed by the N.Z.B.C., I was amazed at the seeming ‘monotony’. It took many weeks of solid listening before I began to appreciate this completely different musical form. As for understanding the words, I speak reasonable

Maori and yet I found them very difficult to comprehend. I did finally come to admire and enjoy tremendously this traditional music, but I believe this was at first primarily because I wanted to like it. How many younger Maoris like myself have had the opportunity of spending eighteen months listening solidly to traditional Maori chant, combined with twelve years of musical training, and an (albeit small) knowledge of the Maori language? I would venture to suggest that they would be very few, and yet it took me weeks of listening to come anywhere near an appreciation. When I was compiling Maori programmes for the N.Z.B.C. I felt that if people did not have the opportunity of hearing Maori chant they would never learn anything about it. So I prepared a series of programmes mixing both chant and action song together. We received many letters and phone calls asking ‘what this rubbish was’ and ‘how much nicer the action songs were than these old has-beens’. Conversely we did receive several letters from Maoris saying how much they had enjoyed having the opportunity of hearing the old traditional music. For those few people I think the programmes were justified and well worth doing. But the many unfavourable reactions certainly showed the difficulties that people experience when they first attempt to listen to this music. (Incidentally, as Mr McLean mentioned in his article, the N.Z.B.C. has a fine collection of recordings and tapes, some sponsored by the Maori Purposes Fund Board and collected mostly by Mr W. Ngata, and many others recorded by the N.Z.B.C. There is also a collection of cylindrical recordings made back in the first years of this century, which is held by the Internal Affairs Department. Unfortunately no detailed work has been done on these, and because of technical problems all this music will have to be re-recorded if it is not to be completely lost.)