The Study of Maori Chant by S. M. Mead

University of Auckland In this short article I review briefly the research which has been undertaken to date on Maori chant and indicate the areas which require either new research or further investigation. Such a review is justified by the fact that Maori chant is becoming popular not only with the general public of New Zealand but also as a subject of study among scholars. Now that there are three published volumes of Nga Moteatea1. Part I, 1959: Part II, 1961; Part III, in press, but a prepublication issue not translated into English is available at the time of writing. the range of data available for the study of Maori chant is greatly increased. The term ‘Maori chant’ is used here in the same way that McLean2. McLean, 1964: 36. defined it, that is, it refers to the traditional music of the Maori. Furthermore, it refers to both the musical and linguistic aspects of chants. The 271 song texts published in the three volumes, together with texts in other collections, such as in Grey3. There are 533 song texts in Grey, 1853, and a few more in his 1857 book. and in McGregor4. In McGregor, 1893, there are 421 texts. See Ngata, 1959: XIV, XXV, for other sources of Maori chant., provide a total corpus of many hundreds of songs. By some accounts, it is doubtful that the published texts at present available are, by any means, representative of the total corpus. McLean has compiled an index of about 4,000 texts from published sources and Simmons has indexed at least 2,000 titles from manuscript sources. Allowing for duplications, McLean, estimates that there must be at least 5,000 texts in the literature and in tape-recorded collections5. Personal communications from Dr McLean. Of these, only a handful are published in Nga Moteatea. However, the relatively low number of chants in Nga Moteatea is balanced by the high content of explanatory material associated with each song and are further enhanced by the fact that the texts are translated. Thanks to the industry and foresight of Sir Apirana Ngata modern scholars have the kind of data which they can use immediately for testing hypotheses and for gaining a richer understanding of the motivations, purposes, conventions and satisfactions connected with Maori chant as a cultural activity. Maori chant may be studied from a number of different standpoints. For example, a musicologist may study the musical aspect, a linguist the linguistic aspect, a psychologist the psychological aspect, and an anthropologist the cultural aspect. Alternatively, different aspects may be studied by the same investigator, for example, an othno-musicologist studies both the musicological and cultural aspects of Maori chant. However, whatever the central interest of the investigator might be, the cultural aspect will impinge upon it, because, in the final analysis, the activities of composing and performing chants are expressions of cultural behaviour in a specific social, spatial and temporal context. Thus, a study of Maori chant from any particular viewpoint is bound to yield information of anthropological interest. Detailed studies of Maori chant have barely begun. Maunsell6. In Grey, 1853, in the preface. was the first and only student of Maori chant to take an