SOME THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF MAORI CHANT

Te Ao Hou, September 1964, Page 38

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF MAORI CHANT by A. Mihi Hill I was most interested to read, in the June issue of ‘Te Ao Hou’, the two articles by Mr Mervyn McLean on Maori chant, or traditional music. Mr McLean, a professional student of traditional music (the academic term for this is ethnomusicologist) is devoting a great deal of his time to collecting and preserving old Maori chants. He is studying their nature and structure, and he has worked out a method of notating the airs. But he is not stopping there. He is re-distributing recordings of these chants within the tribal areas from whence they came, at no charge to the tribal authorities; he asks only that they be made available to groups within the area wishing to make use of them. Thank goodness for people like them, and how ashamed it makes me. For I continue to think how great a tragedy it is that the preservation of such material should almost always rest in the hands of a few far-sighted Europeans who see further ahead than we ourselves do.