From the time that the ancient voices of Oceania were first heard, tens of thousands of years ago, there was singing. 1 The songs belonged to the indigenous cultures that inhabited the many islands of the Pacific. They sang about their ancestors, their relationship with the land, their daily lives, and they told their Creation stories and communicated with their deities. 2
In the Pacific, singing represented an elevated form of verbal utterance. Singing, chanting, or intoning was deemed the most effective way to communicate with the deities, and the one sure way to appeal to the human appetites of the Polynesian pantheon was through good singing. Poets, composers, and choreographers (often one and the same person and highly regarded) wrote songs and choreographed dances, which added the visual dimension to the expression of the words. The singing traditions in Eastern Polynesia were unison, while those in the Western Polynesian tradition were choral, that is, they sang in parts. 3 The songs were part of daily life and, more important, ritual, and the ability to sing was a part of the individual’s self-identity. 4 So great was the power of the uttered word expressed in both song and dance that the role given to instrumental music was comparatively small.
Songs were defined essentially by their function, and great expectation and importance were attached to the singing of them. 5 Performances were socially significant, and ridicule and shame were attached to anyone who did not perform with style and excellence; for example, when a leader failed to start the group together. Group performances at festivals and special occasions created a degree of friendly rivalry and competition. Songs (in both recited and sung styles) were categorized according to their purpose, and chant formed the basis of much of their musical content. 6 Like the Polynesian songs, the Aboriginal songs were defined by function. 7 Inherited networks of songlines, the songs and verses that acted as maps and guides across the land, had to be preserved. 8
McLean refers to the “choir” in the Pacific as “a group of singers.” 9 Singers sang in groups dedicated either to sacred or to secular music. These groups had leaders, but not conductors in the European sense. Those who led (fuatai mi [Samoa] and tahiva [Tonga]) kept or beat time, and did so with a unique style and grace. The stylized and rather exaggerated gesture comprised movement that indicated and controlled the rate of clapping, and contained elements of mime (not regarded as dance) and sometimes humor, which gave a visual dimension to the words. 10 The leader faced the audience (it was considered rude to do otherwise) and performed the role with appropriate style. Voice parts are described with a mixture of local and English terms, 11 and there are clearly identifiable vocal qualities, although the manner of singing is more difficult to describe. 12 The vocal quality, often related to the function of the chant and the role of the person who sang it, is generally one that can be heard outdoors; consequently there is a degree of nasality and pure chest tone used in the singing. 13 The imene tuki , the traditional hymns of the Cook Islands, display loud, piercing, shrill tones. 14 This same shrillness and nasality are the qualities also most admired by the Australian Aboriginals. 15 (The sound essentially comes from the throat and the nose.) By comparison, the Hawaiian sound is sweeter, possibly influenced by the European style.
The traditions of learning the songs were oral. 16 An exception to this is the Tongan notation system , a variant of solfa based on Tongan numerals with durations indicated by standard punctuation marks. 17 Solfa was also used almost a century later in New Zealand by Sir Kingi Ihaka to teach his compositions, the waiata from his hymnbook, to the members of the Auckland Anglican Mā ori Club. 18 Nonetheless, the Oceanic traditions were oral, and those who sang the songs considered them taonga or treasures for the generations to come. 19
The first European contact in Oceania began in the seventeenth century, and it was the arrival of the immigrants and missionaries from Europe that rather changed everything. 20 One of the first musical contacts between the Europeans and the Polynesians was in New Zealand , an exchange of trumpet calls between one of Tasman’s crew and the local Mā ori at Golden Bay in 1642. 21 A century later, in 1769, Cook’s ship the Endeavour arrived in New Zealand. Cook found the Mā ori waiata “harmonious enough but very doleful to the European ear.” 22 Nicholas, in his narrative of a voyage to New Zealand with Samuel Marsden on the Active in 1815, described the singing of the Mā ori on board as “a plaintive and melodious air and seemed not unlike some of our sacred music . . . as it forcibly reminded me of the chanting in our cathedrals, it being deep, slow and extended . . . It was divided into parts, which the chiefs sang separately, and were joined in chorus, at certain intervals, by the other New Zealanders; while they all concluded it together.” 23 In 1773, James Burney, a young officer on the Adventure , observed that the performance of Te Rangihouhia and his party also demonstrated singing in harmony. 24
The missionaries discovered very quickly that singing was a means to conversion, and the single most important European influence on the musical traditions of Oceania was hymn singing. This came at a price, however – the indigenous singing and dancing traditions suffered as a result “[since] anything relating to ‘heathen’ religion or ceremony was resolutely opposed [by the missionaries].” 25 The explicit sexual nature of some of the dance forms and the warlike dances, such as those of the New Zealand Mā ori, were hugely at odds with the missionaries’ puritanical, Victorian ideals.
There was, as a result, a tragic loss of traditional repertoire. English tunes were set with local language texts, yet as McLean points out, “Nowhere did the missionaries enjoy immediate success.” 26 In 1839 the missionary Richard Taylor wrote of the Mā ori singing: “The native airs embrace no more than three or four notes and they carry no more into the hymns they sing, indeed it is the most discordant singing I have ever heard, no country choir in England being worse . . .” 27 In Australia , the Lutheran clergy founded the Mission at Hermannsburg, Inkat’irbirberintjaka (in Ntaria, west of Alice Springs) in 1877. From the early days there, the traditions of Christian congregational singing coexisted with the songs of the Arrente. “The musical impact on the indigenous community was significant, with the community taught Bach chorales translated into their own Aranda language. Today the members of the Ntaria ladies’ choir perform no pre-Lutheran music, but sing chorales in a highly emotive manner, importing fluid aboriginal vocal styles into the metrical structures of the chorale.” 28 The Aboriginals found the Western music easy to learn since it had none of the microtonal complexity found in their own music. Moses Tjalkabota, 29 the Aboriginal evangelist, who recalled learning the hymns as a child, remembers being taught the melodies from the violin. Torres Strait Island was so heavily missionarized that it is now difficult to know what indigenous music there may have been. 30
New Zealand ’s first missionaries were Anglican and French Catholic. 31 In 1859 the Reverend J. W. Stack established the Mā ori Mission 32 at the Mā ori Pa, Kaiapoi Nature Reserve. This mission boasted a fifty-strong choir at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church; there was seating for two hundred people at the regular choral services and the choir (nearly all Mā ori) sang the hymns and chants for the Anglican services. In Hawaii, through the work of the Hawaiian Congregational Missions from 1820, the himeni were little more than “the ancient spirit of the Hawaiian tradition clothed in European harmony.” 33 Throughout Oceania, the trend from the 1830s onwards was for indigenous choirs to sing music more and more influenced by the European choral traditions.
The music and traditions that the German, Irish, Welsh, English, and Scottish immigrants brought with them significantly influenced the musical life of cities and towns in New Zealand , Australia , and Polynesia from the 1830s onwards. In 1836, with the settlement of German Lutheran immigrants on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, came German vocal traditions. In 1858 Lutherans founded the Adelaider Liedertafel , 34 the oldest male choir in Australia.
Cathedral musical traditions, Catholic and Protestant, played a large part in the development of church choral music. Irish-born Catherine Fitzpatrick , regarded as the first Australian choral conductor, was a schoolteacher who arrived in New South Wales in 1811. She organized a small group of singers to sing at mass , and when the church was finally built she became the first woman conductor at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney (1818–43), the first Catholic church in Australia .
The Welsh brought with them their great hymn singing festivals and eisteddfods. 35 There were also Scandinavian choirs which sang songs and hymns from their religious traditions, while others embraced their own folk music traditions. 36 In Australia , the early songs recalled the hardships of convict life; by the late nineteenth century, the songs recounted the adventures in the lives of the farmers and herders. Folk music from the British Isles formed a large part of the repertoire of songs sung in schools and communities in the colonies well into the twentieth century.
Alfred Hill (1869–1960), 37 born in Melbourne and educated at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music , was one of the most influential musicians in New Zealand and Australia in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As well as his study of European music at the Leipzig Conservatory, Hill’s fascination with Mā ori waiata resulted in numerous compositions; Waiata poi , 38 the cantata Hinemoa (1896), 39 and his opera Tapu (1902–3) attracted much attention and critical acclaim. It was a bold move to compose with indigenous song; it worked for Alfred Hill perhaps because the Mā ori waiata had already been impregnated with European musical language, and the lilting melodies were well suited to the Romanticism of the late nineteenth century. This was less the case in the decades that followed.
From the start of the twentieth century, musicians arrived in Australasia from England , 40 many to work in the churches, community choirs, and universities. 41 Peter Godfrey ’s arrival in New Zealand in 1958 transformed choral singing and laid the foundations for the years that followed. 42 The choral sound, aesthetic, and repertoire were from the finest English cathedral tradition; the didactic models and music were European. These musician immigrants worked tirelessly to establish conservatories and university schools of music, to establish and conduct choirs and orchestras, and to compose new music.
In turn, local musicians went to Europe and England to train; 43 they were encouraged by their teachers to establish and explore their own national identities. 44 In one of Douglas Lilburn ’s successful early works, Prodigal Country (1939) for baritone, SATB chorus and orchestra, the choice of Robyn Hyde’s poem Journey from New Zealand was particularly apposite in this respect.
Percy Grainger (1882–1961), sometimes called the Charles Ives of Australia , had a great interest in folk songs from the British Isles and arranged many of them for choir. By the twentieth century, the folk song was a genre that told stories: the stories of the convicts’ lives, of the gold rushes, of the hardships endured by the immigrants, of the lives of the whalers and sealers. 45 They were the stories of colonial life, often sung to familiar melodies from the homelands.
Choral societies, 46 harmonic societies, and philharmonic choirs abounded in Australasia from the mid nineteenth century, and their repertoire was largely oratorio . Common fare included works such as Handel ’s Messiah and Mendelssohn ’s Elijah , and sometimes glees, madrigals, and excerpts from oratorios. 47 As well as the Victorian choral societies, antipodean ensembles also included glee clubs, 48 madrigal societies, male choirs and Liedertafeln. By 1930 the Rotorua Mā ori Choir and the Tahiwis , a Mā ori male quartet, were recording for the Columbia label in Australia . There were also Mā ori church choirs. 49 The music sung by the Mā ori artists sometimes included the traditional waiata but with European-style melodies and harmony. From the 1980s in New Zealand , there was an upsurge of smaller ensembles, chamber choirs, vocal ensembles, and early music groups that continue to flourish. So too do the gay and lesbian choirs which were established in the 1990s. 50
As early as 1979, national choirs were formed first in New Zealand and then in Australia . These included: the New Zealand Youth Choir (1979) and the New Zealand Secondary Students’ Choir (1988) founded by Dr. Guy Jansen , whose vision and entrepreneurial spirit have given young singers in New Zealand excellent choral singing for three decades; Voices New Zealand (1998) founded by Karen Grylls and Jacqui Simpson ; Australian Voices (1993) founded by Stephen Leek and Graeme Morton ; the Sydney Children’s Choir and the Gondwana Choirs founded by Lyn Williams ; the National Mā ori Choir (active around 2000), and various national male choirs. Immigrant choirs and choirs with a social or political emphasis have added to the colorful choral canvas that exists today. 51 One of the newest choirs in Auckland is the CeleBRation (CBR) Choir , a singing group for people with neurological conditions. 52
Once there were choirs, 53 composers could write for them, and this is essentially how the corpus of choral music developed from the mid twentieth century. Tongan punake had long understood the importance of commissions for occasions. 54 Composers in the Western traditions now had the chance to engage with new initiatives and enterprises; the remoteness of the Pacific gave those who put together their musical ideas the opportunity to explore their own identities with considerable freedom. After World War II, eastern and southern Europeans made their way to Australia , and in the 1970s immigrants came from Asia and the Pacific. From the middle of the twentieth century, composers began to write choral music that reflected the landscape and the many musical traditions of those who called the islands of the Pacific home. 55
A group of composers embraced the traditions of Asia – Anne Boyd and Jack Body had interests in both the gamelan and medieval music. 56 In As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams ( 1975 ) Boyd adopts a Japanese compositional structure, basing the piece on three different pitch-sets and groups of gagaku instruments. 57 The text is from the writings of an eleventh-century Japanese noblewoman. David Hamilton ’s Rakiura ( 1993 ) tells a true story of a Japanese woman living in a cave on Stewart Island and the work is based on the stylized character of the Noh drama. 58 With invented languages for each movement, Body’s Five Lullabies ( 1989 ) creates different ethnic atmospheres, and his musical textures are “inspired by the vocal polyphonies of China ’s minority cultures.” 59
The compositions of Eve De Castro-Robinson and Stephen Leek explore the natural world with the sounds and colors of the land; Leek ’s impressive aleatoric textures draw upon the stories of the Dreamtime with Aboriginal texts. Birdcalls have inspired some of his work as they have for De Castro-Robinson in Chaos of Delight III ( 1998 ). 60 Poets, too, provided inspiration. Griffiths and Farquhar were drawn to the writings of A. R. D. Fairburn, James Baxter, Charles Brasch, Denis Glover, and Hone Tuwhare. For her song cycle The Poet ( 2007 ), Jenny McLeod set Janet Frame’s witty, bittersweet poems about the life of the poet as artist.
Lilburn ’s Prodigal Country ( 1939 ) and Sculthorpe ’s Port Essington (1977) and Child of Australia ( 1988 ) reflect on the landscape, life in the colonies, and the pride in one’s native land. At the start of Child of Australia Sculthorpe used an indigenous melody but, as Shearer observes, it little resembled the melody in its original context. 61 Douglas Mews begins The Lovesong of Rangipouri ( 1974 ) with a complete Mā ori chant recorded by Hone Crown at Makara in 1963 and transcribed by Mervyn McLean. 62 Hopkins asks that the second melody in Past Life Melodies ( 1991 ) be sung with an appropriate nasal, strident tone. Increasingly, permission to use indigenous material in composition and performance comes as a result of the relationships built between individuals and performing groups. Without such a relationship, Anthony Ritchie avoids integrating authentic waiata in Ahua ( 2000 ). 63 Instead, like Marshall in Tangi ( 1999 ), he has used some of the conventions from the indigenous tradition.
At the start of the first movement of Journey to Horseshoe Bend ( 2003 ), Andrew Schultz combines the sounds of the Ntaria Women’s Choir singing Aboriginal words to the Lutheran chorale “Wachet auf” with those of a symphony chorus and orchestra. For the Ntaria women, it was a long journey from Alice Springs to the stage of the Sydney Opera House. In 1996, the New Zealand Youth Choir and Te Waka Huia traveled from New Zealand and stood on that same stage for the first performance of a New Zealand choir and kapahaka group.
Gillian Whitehead showed the author the first copy of Taiohi taiao , ( 2004 ) some months before the first rehearsals: “There are no corners in this piece,” she said, “it needs to flow just like the water from the spring.” The piece is about water as the life-giving force, the spiritual essence that pervades every part of life. The music, the songs are that essence, the taonga , the treasures that the composers will write, that the voices of Oceania will sing out. The ancient voyages of the Pacific, the Malaga , will continue. There are stories not yet told . . .
I am very grateful to Faye Dumont (Melbourne) and Richard Moyle (Auckland) for their generous and sage advice during the writing of this chapter.