Editorial introduction

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 23, Issue 2, 1 October 1990, Page 97

Editorial introduction

John M. Thomson Guest Editor

The Alexander Turnbull Library has always been at the heart of significant work on New Zealand music, never more so than today. It is an honour to have been invited to edit this special issue of the Turnbull Library Record which presents a wide conspectus of material in a rapidly developing field. Besides valuable research articles there are several surveys of important musical holdings which place New Zealand in a wider cultural background.

New Zealand music has quite a small literature compared to those of the other arts. Yet writing about music is an essential part of the process by which it is known and disseminated. Douglas Lilburn’s two talks, A Search for Tradition (1946) and A Search for a Language (1969), published in 1984 and 1985 respectively by the Turnbull, always proved extremely effective ambassadors for New Zealand music whenever I placed them in the hands of musicians overseas. John Amis quoted an extract from the latter in his entertaining anthology Words About Music published by Faber in 1989 and even American scholars seemed to respond to the lively tone of the dialogue. It may well be that the growth of a sophisticated musical discourse here has been retarded because of the lack of outlets and the lack of a continuous critical tradition, although William Dart’s effective quarterly Music in New Zealand is now reaching out to a wider audience than was possible for Canzona, the Composers Association’s more technical journal.

This issue tends to focus on the role of libraries in New Zealand musical life. Jill Palmer describes the collection of Douglas Lilburn’s scores and papers in the Turnbull. By no means yet complete, it nevertheless mirrors events in a significant era in which New Zealand music found a voice and is now delineated in a pioneering guide she has compiled. Turnbull’s other major collections include those of Diny and Paul Schramm and Frederick Page, and amongst those housed elsewhere is that of Mrs Selwyn at St John’s College, Auckland. Robert Petre discusses some of these in a scholarly survey written from the point of view of a performing musician. He shows how seemingly isolated discoveries can yet provide invaluable information that links directly with the parent tradition citing particularly the unique printed copy of Henry Purcell’s The Harpsichord Master (London, 1697) in the Rare Books Room at Auckland Public Library and the six new dances by Kellom Tomlinson in a recently discovered autograph manuscript (1708-1721), now one of the treasures of the Turnbull.

A collection of a different kind that has already won an enthusiastic following whenever it appears in public is that of the sound recording and playing machines generously donated to the National Library by

Brian Salkeld. Recognition of the role played by recordings was exceedingly slow to be established in Britain, for it took Patrick Saul many years to gain proper support for his British Archive of Recorded Sound, whereas in Europe, and especially Germany, the value of such institutions had already been recognised. From the outset the Sound and Music Centre has been an integral part of the National Library’s activities.

The documentation of our musical history is taken a stage further with Adrienne Simpson’s intriguing account of the Simonsen Opera Company’s tour of 1876. Fanny Simonsen was perhaps the best known opera singer of her generation but today she is a shadowy figure, not even appearing in the Australian Dictionary of Biography except as an addendum. With such building blocks as this the history of opera in New Zealand can gradually be written. Adrienne Simpson, National Library Research Fellow for 1991, has chosen the nineteenth-century touring opera companies as her special topic and her symposium on Opera in New Zealand: Aspects of History and Performance, to be published in 1991, admirably extends the range of writings.

Finally, another link with the European tradition is outlined in the account of Michael Balling’s campaign to introduce the viola-alta into musical life. He believed fervently that this larger-sized instrument was more effective than the customary viola, a view supported by Wagner, who had several in his Bayreuth orchestra. New Zealand audiences heard its foremost living exponent in recitals over a period of three years from 1894-6. Unfortunately the enthusiasm it aroused in Nelson and elsewhere was not reflected in sufficient strength by European critics but the account of Balling’s endeavours recorded in the British press makes an absorbing postscript to his regime here as founder of the Nelson School of Music, one of the most luminous of all episodes in New Zealand music history.

I wish to thank the staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library for their courteous and skilled help in producing this special issue, especially to Joan McCracken, Marian Minson and Mr J. E. Traue, former Chief Librarian, and Philip Rainer. I hope these articles will bring added depths to our still incompletely documented musical past and stimulate others to explore it, thus enlivening and strengthening the music of the future.