E Genes Remix Folk Process

DUNEDIN SOUNDINGS
DUNEDIN SOUNDINGS
PERFORMING PLACE
IN NEW ZEALAND MUSIC
Edited by Dan Bendrups

and Graeme Downes
Published by Otago University Press
PO Box 56 / Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street
Dunedin, New Zealand
F: 64 3 479 8385
E: university.press@otago.ac.nz
W: www.otago.ac.nz/press
First published 2011
ISBN 978
Volume copyright © Dan Bendrups 2011

Individual chapters copyright © their individual authors as listed in the contents list 2011
Publisher: Wendy Harrex

Editor: Georgina McWhirter
Typeset by Otago University Press
Cover by Fiona Moffat
Printed by PrintStop Ltd, Wellington

Acknowledgements
This book began as a collection of seminar presentations by University of Otago

music researchers, performers and their collaborators in the community on the
topic of performance as research. It represents these scholars’ efforts to engage with
a theoretical discourse that has become prominent in performing arts research in
recent years, especially in terms of defining the relationship between performing arts
practices and the tertiary education sector. While research of one kind or another
informs the past academic outputs of the scholars whose work is presented here,
this book is the first to focus solely and specifically on their own performances and
compositions. It is intended as an example of the knowledge that can be generated
through reflective and reflexive analysis.
The publication of this book was generously supported by a University of Otago
Research Grant and by the Department of Music. Wendy Harrex and Georgina
McWhirter at Otago University Press are especially thanked for their help in
publishing this book and their support for this project.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5
Contents
Acknowledgements 5
Dunedin Sounds 9
Dan Bendrups
Performance as Research
1 Practice and Performance as Research in the Arts 17

Suzanne Little
2 The Creative Artist as Research Practitioner 27
John Drummond
Music, Communication and Community
3 Songwriting Process in the Verlaines’ album Corporate Moronic 41

Graeme Downes
4 Across Cultures: The gamelan community in Dunedin 55
Shelley D. Brunt and Henry Johnson
5 Subject2Change: Musical reassemblage in the jazz diaspora 65
Dan Bendrups and Robert G.H. Burns
6 Remix Culture and the New Folk Process 78
John Egenes
7 Music for Film and Other Reflections from a Reformed Exile 87
Trevor Coleman
CONTENTS 7
Music, History and Local Identity
8 A Common Thematic: Seven songs by Anthony Ritchie 101

Anthony Ritchie
9 The New Brass Band: Stylistic pluralism and local vernacular 113
Peter Adams
10 From History to Opera: The story of William Larnach 128
John Drummond
11 Songs of Old Dunedin: A musical entrepreneurial journey 135
Judy Bellingham
12 Music, Community, and the Creation of Dunedinmusic.com 145
Scott Muir
Notes 153
About the music 165
About the contributors 167
Index 171
8 DUNEDIN SOUNDINGS
Dunedin sounds
Dan Bendrups
Dunedin, named after the ancient city of Edinburgh by its nineteenth-century

Scottish settlers, is a unique place. A bastion of economic power after the 1860s
gold rush, the city developed a civic infrastructure surpassing that of many other
Australasian colonial settlements, becoming home to New Zealand’s first university
and other civic and commercial institutions. Yet despite its initial wealth and promise,
the city has now been surpassed by its northern brothers and sisters, becoming
instead a remote beacon of New Zealand’s civic society, with a stable population of
around 120,000 inhabitants. Many of the grand gothic structures of the old city lie
disused, or occupied by small-scale enterprises ranging from antique shops to strip
clubs. The University of Otago is one founding institution that remains, playing an
important role in the social and cultural identity of the city. Attracting thousands of
students from around the country and the world, the university generates domains of
cultural activity, giving rise to artists and audiences far larger and more diverse than
would normally be expected from such a small population base. This gives Dunedin
a localised ‘culture industry’1 comparable to other examples of ‘university towns’
internationally, and which is deserving of attention on a global scale.
This book is concerned with the domain of music within this localised culture
industry. The chapters are written by university-based musicians, composers and
music producers, who discuss the research and discovery processes underpinning
their creative works – all of which contribute to the diversity of ‘sounds’ to be found
in this southern city. While the works themselves span a range of performance,
composition and production domains, they share an underlying premise: that creative
processes and products articulate, or are articulated by, their place of production. In
some cases, this is expressed in the analysis of the authors’ actions in negotiating the
opportunities and limitations of Dunedin as a place of creative production. In other
cases, Dunedin is itself the object of articulation, expressed in the way performance
connects to notions of local, national and transnational cultural identities. In order
to further articulate the link between place and creative practice, two contributions
from professionals involved in the local music industry have been included (Trevor
Coleman and Scott Muir), in each case written in autobiographical narrative form.
DUNEDIN SOUNDS 9
This underlying hypothesis – that music and place are intrinsically linked and
that this link can be demonstrated through the analysis of creative practice – is a
notion that is well supported by contemporary music research across a number of
fields, particularly popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and cultural geography.2
Books and journal issues concerning music and place are abundant, and this theme
complements existing tropes of localisation and globalisation.3 Much of the music
discussed in this book is simultaneously linked to issues of local and international
significance, or in other ways circumvents the normal expectations of place.
Dunedin sound, Dunedin sounds

Music is especially significant to Dunedin’s cultural identity: the city is one of only
a handful of places worldwide to be considered to possess its own ‘sound’. Like the
Mersey Sound of 1960s Liverpool, the Nashville Sound of the American country
music industry, Detroit’s Motown, or the Seattle Sound of 1990s grunge, the
Dunedin Sound is a media creation sustained in the global popular imaginary that
describes a particular music which is so unique to a place that it warrants geographical
definition. While the Dunedin Sound may have little direct relationship to the
artistic output of the performers and composers included in this book, it nevertheless
permeates popular thought and academic discourse around music in New Zealand,
and contemporary Dunedin musicians work within or around its shadow in many
respects. Its influence is acknowledged by musicians from other domains: in a recent
book concerned with jazz, David Edwards makes clear reference to ‘the historical
weight of Dunedin in New Zealand’s music history’.4
Surprisingly little research has concerned itself directly with the Dunedin Sound,
and its parameters, characteristics and even the very nature of its existence have yet to
be conclusively ‘tested’. Some former Dunedin Sound musicians have written about
their Dunedin Sound involvement in academic contexts, and various books on New
Zealand music, both academic and populist, refer to it in broad terms, resisting clear
definition but still asserting its existence. Cultural geographers Connell and Gibson
provide one of the most direct, reductive definitions of the Dunedin Sound (in a
table of examples of regional ‘sounds’) describing it as ‘Quirky guitar-driven pop,
alternative rock’ possessing ‘remote “uniqueness.”’5 This notion of remoteness, and
the idea that geographical isolation leads to musical innovation and ‘specialness’, is
foregrounded in their appraisal that:
notions of a distinct musical ‘sound’ were related to the contexts in which artists and
audiences were able to interact (with appropriate infrastructure, receptive crowds,
supportive venues and independent labels prepared to release unknown artists), and to
ideas of remoteness from outside influences.6
10 DUNEDIN SOUNDINGS
This said, their discussion of the Dunedin Sound also acknowledges the role that
mass-mediation – of an international (US college-based) audience and international
market strategy – plays in generating a collective definition for this music.7 Such
discussions relate quite specifically to notions of authenticity in popular music
discourse, particularly the argument that rock and rock-derived musics rely on the
ability to project an aura of authenticity in order to achieve commercial success.
Books concerned with New Zealand popular music history situate the Dunedin
Sound in the period between 1979 and 1989, starting with the emergence of iconic
band the Clean, and ending, more or less, with the move of the Flying Nun record
label to Auckland and the end of this influential label’s independent status. Of
course, Dunedin had music before and after these dates, and indeed, the focus
on the 1980s tends to overshadow the early popular music initiatives of Dunedin
musicians of the ’60s and ’70s, who were locally popular but unable to achieve
national exposure.8
It was the confluence of the development of a particular performance aesthetic
and the ability of a local record label to carve out a market niche that provided
the impetus for mass-media exposure and recognition of the Dunedin Sound. John
Dix, author of Stranded in Paradise (arguably one of the most important histories of
New Zealand popular music), describes this in terms of the development of a Punk
aesthetic in local music around 1977, and the establishment of Flying Nun shortly
thereafter in 1981:
The Clean’s national success had created great interest in Dunedin rock, but the event that
focused closer attention was the Dunedin Double EP, released in June 1982. Four Dunedin
bands – the Chills, Sneaky Feelings, Stones and Verlaines – contributed three songs each
(four from the Stones). None betrayed common musical interests, but all had a common
attitude: the anti-star, anti-tech outlook typified by the Clean. The development of these
four groups was the yardstick by which outsiders would follow the growth of the ‘Dunedin
Sound’.9
Writing at the time of the Dunedin Sound’s demise, New Zealand popular music
scholar Tony Mitchell is more specific, describing it as part of ‘a distinctive national
musical identity developed around the resolutely New Zealand-based groups and
musicians who coincided with the formation of Flying Nun in 1981’ where Dunedin’s
isolation contributed to a ‘distinctively local South Island sonic identity’.10 Mitchell
acknowledges the University of Otago as providing both an audience and a catalyst
for the music, and optimistically suggests that ‘There is evidence of a distinctive and
continuing Dunedin-based rock music culture which has developed directly from
the Clean and other southern groups’.11
DUNEDIN SOUNDS 11
Writing from an insider’s perspective, in a book based on his personal experiences
as a member of Dunedin Sound band Sneaky Feelings, Matthew Bannister emphasises
the notion of a musical lineage shared by the Dunedin Sound bands, starting with
the Clean:
There is a lineage in Dunedin rock, a sacred torch – with an aromatic smell – that is passed
down ‘from father to son’ .… The line starts with Chris Knox and The Enemy, who begat
The Clean, who begat The Chills. They shared similar sources of inspiration, a social scene,
members, and a sympathetic local commentator to keep the faith …12
One impression that dominates Bannister’s book is the extent to which the
Dunedin Sound bands of the 1980s, while competing in the same small scene, were
also supportive of – and artistically prompted by – each other’s efforts. Relating his
experience of a university gig supporting the Chills, for example, Bannister relates
that ‘the entire audience left, except for Graeme Downes [of the Verlaines], who
wrote a song about it called “Playing to an Empty Hall”.’13 Likewise, Sneaky Feeling’s
‘PIT Song’ ‘was based on a Tchaikovsky piece Graeme Downes played to David
[Pine, of Sneaky Feelings], or rather David’s impression of it’.14 Bannister continues:
‘Downes later wrote that it was a good example of a Dunedin song’ with an AABA
structure with a middle section that ‘… took off in a different harmonic direction, to
the point where it threatened to become a different song altogether’.15
While not comprehensively informative on matters of musical style, these
observations do at least confirm the notion that the Dunedin Sound bands were
part of a coherent scene based around live performances. The scene also extended to
informal performances and rehearsal spaces. With reference to an Alistair Galbraith
(of the Rip) song ‘The Holy Room’, Bannister notes:
The practice room was central to the Dunedin Sound because of its position halfway
between the bedroom and the garage. The perception was that musicians were intellectual
and antisocial: they didn’t really enjoy playing live and would rather noodle away in privacy.
Hence their indifference when they did play live – the idea that one should ‘perform’ was
frowned upon. The similarity is with folk music, where the solidarity of audience and
performer and the ‘lack of artifice’ are proof of the music’s authenticity. The other factor
was that rehearsal space was cheap and plentiful, as opposed to, say, Auckland. Clearly this
influenced the kind of music that got made, in that it encouraged experimentation.16
These observations perhaps provide the clearest and most coherent interface for
the Dunedin Sound and the numerous alternate ‘sounds’ presented in this book.
While none of the contributors here (including Downes himself ) aim to replicate the
sound of the Dunedin Sound in their contemporary work, they all operate within an
environment of experimentation, collaboration, and ‘oneness’ between performers,
composers, audiences and others within the musical community. This much-vaunted
Do It Yourself (DIY) ethic, of ‘making do’ with what resources are available at arm’s
reach, and creating direct interfaces between people, processes and products within
the local community is reflected in every chapter of this book and informs the book’s
approach to situating performance, composition and production within a research
paradigm.
Performance as research
The conceptualisation of ‘performance as research’ is now well established in
contemporary theory across a range of disciplines, including music. Studies in this
vein often mobilise first-person narrative voices and auto-ethnographic strategies in
order to convey the discovery inherent in the performance process or product.17 The
task of articulating how performances and other artistic works constitute research
has also encouraged creative artists to reconsider the research process underpinning
works perhaps not originally conceived within a research paradigm. This book
includes examples of both performance as research and research into performance.
This domain is still in a process of development, and resistance to performance as
research in some better-established disciplinary areas necessitates strong argument
from performance-as-research exponents. Brad Haseman, for example, frames his
theory for performance research in deliberately provocative terms by calling it a
‘manifesto’, thus assuming a stance of rhetorical rectitude.18
While the greatest interest in the theoretical domain of performance as research
comes from within performing arts research, other areas in the humanities and social
sciences have experienced allied shifts in how the role of the research is perceived
in relation to the researcher. In 2002, sociologist Brian Roberts claimed that the
social sciences were experiencing a ‘narrative, biographical or auto/biographical
turn’, reflecting the rapid growth of attention paid to personification in research
in many humanistic fields.19 This research trend has many theoretical delineations
(autobiography, biography, life history research, life narrative, the anthropology of
identity) but one common thread: the acknowledgement and therefore methodical
integration of human agency into descriptions of history and culture. Similar
observations have emanated from the domain of social anthropology in the first
decade of the twenty-first century. 20
To provide a theoretical context for the creative works discussed in this book, the
first two chapters present contrasting approaches to the discussion of performance
as research. Suzanne Little’s chapter is a detailed review of key texts and resources in
this theoretical domain, drawing from a wide pool of visual and creative arts sources
in order to demonstrate how they might also be applied in the context of music. In
DUNEDIN SOUNDS 13
contrast to this, John Drummond’s chapter provides an explorative and deliberately
witty subversion of the language we usually use to describe and differentiate the
‘arts’ and ‘sciences’, replacing one with the other to see how this affects our reception
of each domain. Drummond convincingly argues the hypothesis that art can be
effectively described using scientific frameworks, and that science can be understood
in terms of inspiration and creative thought.
This contrastive pairing of descriptive and narrative approaches is maintained
throughout the subsequent chapters, which are themselves divided into two sections
according to thematic approach. The first section, Music, Communication and
Community, is concerned with creative works composed or performed in Dunedin
that relate or respond to globalised influences and discourses. The second section,
Music, History and Local Identity, contains examples of creative works that
specifically articulate or encompass some aspect of local or national identity.
PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH
1
Practice and Performance
as Research in the Arts
Suzanne Little
Over the last couple of decades a new trend has emerged in research in the
performing, creative and fine arts, one that includes practice and performance as
representations of and vehicles for research. This is a highly significant and often
controversial extension to the conceptualisation of academic research. As a new form
of investigation, it has come under intense scrutiny in academia, where issues of
validity, rigour, originality and claims to knowledge are key to the acknowledgement
of work as ‘research’ and to the subsequent accrual of government and public sector
funding. As Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter note:
While performance practices have always contributed to knowledge, the idea that
performance can be more than creative production, that it can constitute intellectual
inquiry and contribute new understanding and insight is a concept that challenges many
institutional structures and calls into question what gets valued as knowledge. Perhaps
the most singular contribution of the developing areas of practice as research (PaR)
and performance as research (PAR) is the claim that creative production can constitute
intellectual inquiry.1
As an emerging area, performance-based research is still in a state of flux, growth

and acceptance; it has yet to secure a universally agreed language, assessment system
or consistent criteria for its nomination as research. This is changing, however, and
much has already been done on a country by country basis. For example, government
bodies and academic/practitioners in the UK and Australia have generated guidelines
for what constitutes this type of research and how it may be assessed and ranked. This
process is also occurring in numerous other countries, including New Zealand,where
performance-based postgraduate degrees are becoming more common. New
Zealand’s close proximity to Australia means that a climate of exchange is emerging
and hastening the acceptance of this new form of research. Reciprocal arrangements
are being made between institutions in the two countries to cover key practices such
as assessment.
To understand the major contribution that this emerging form of research is
making to the arts, it is necessary to outline briefly the many different forms that it
PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH IN THE ARTS 17

can take, the impetus for its development, and its claims to knowledge. In this, it is
important to acknowledge key debates such as whether creative work can or should
embody a form of knowledge. Should the research focus on the practice or the final
artwork and is it possible to fulfil the research criteria of ‘originality’ in this mode of
investigation? Such issues are too complex to be conclusively resolved here. However,
these matters will be touched upon in order to give an overview of the rapidly shifting
and evolving field of performance and practice as research in the arts.

   Some
  terms
  and
  definitions
A definitive list of the terminology and the various forms of research employed in
this developing field does not yet exist. Similarly, while the same term may be used
in different countries, it may involve different practices and foci. Thus, definitions in
the field tend to be somewhat blurred and often contested. This is symptomatic of
the emergent state of these practices and approaches; it is also due to the complexity
and diversity of the object of investigation – artistic practice and product. It is further
complicated by the fact that, in this type of research, the object of study is also the
means of investigation. Hence, it would seem reasonable that different terms have
arisen in different places to service diverse projects occurring across dance, music,
theatre, design, visual arts, film and contemporary performance.
Broadly speaking, Australia and Britain use the terms ‘Practice as Research’ (PaR)
and ‘Practice as Research in Performance’ (PARIP), often to distinguish between
research projects that may be solely centred on creative process (PaR) versus research
involving a significant performance element (PARIP). In the United States, the term
‘Performance as Research’ (PAR) is commonly used. Other terms include ‘Practice-
integrated Research’, ‘Creative Practice as Research’, ‘Creative Arts Research’,
‘Research through Practice’, ‘Practice-Based Research’ (PBR) and ‘Practice-led
Research’ (PLR). The last two terms, PBR and PLR, are used in the sciences also.
Some of these definitions and terms overlap, and a number are used interchangeably.
This may suggest a lack of rigour, however, it can be argued that it is due to the relative
newness of the field and that ‘methodological indeterminacy is also a consequence of
creative practice’s intrinsic emergent nature’.2 The chapters in this book represent a
wide range of practice and performance as research projects undertaken in music. In
this chapter, a number of the above terms will be used interchangeably to respect the
original terminological choices of the theorist and practitioners being quoted. Where
possible, the terms ‘performance as research’ and ‘practice as research’ will be used
to differentiate between performance- and practice-oriented research work. Carole
Gray’s 1996 definition of practice-led research is often cited in discussions outlining
the major principles and strategies involved in this type of research:
Firstly, research which is initiated in practice, where questions, problems, challenges are
identified and formed by the needs of practice and practitioners: and secondly, that the
research strategy is carried out through practice, using predominantly methodologies and
specific methods familiar to us as practitioners.3
Gray’s statement does not accommodate the breadth of strategies, methods and
questions being generated and used in the field currently, nor the use of critical
theory and conceptual frameworks that often frame and inform this research work.
But as a statement first articulated in the late twentieth century, it provides a useful
starting point for examining the origins of this new form of research and its place
within the wider research realm.
The rise of a third research paradigm?

Traditionally, research has been divided between two distinct paradigms falling under
the headings of quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research, the arguably better-
known and longer established paradigm, is commonly associated with the sciences
and operates on the principle of deductive reasoning. Proof of knowledge is normally
presented in a numerical manner and the research adheres to a largely positivist
philosophy. In other words, it works from a principle of proposing hypotheses or
research questions and then testing them against empirical, measurable evidence.
In doing this, scientific research usually conforms to a number of key principles.
These include notions of objectivity, where ‘ideally any two researchers who study
the same behaviours, processes, or phenomena should arrive at identical findings’
and replication and reliability, where ‘[r]esearch should be conducted in such a way
that those who question its outcomes can repeat it and obtain the same results. A
measurement instrument, such as a test of intelligence or personality, that yields the
same results when repeated is said to have high reliability’.4 Additionally, quantitative
research in the sciences is expected to demonstrate ‘precision in measurement’ and
validity, referring to the exactitude of ‘the fit between the concept that a researcher
wants to examine and the evidence for that concept’.5 In recent times, the principle
of objectivity in research has become contested. Despite the researcher’s best
intentions, aspects such as funding, professional rivalries, gender bias and even the
process of choosing a research topic reveal certain predispositions on the part of the
researcher, which may in turn influence the work. Researchers working in the social
sciences have thus tended to acknowledge that a degree of subjectivity is inevitable.6
Additionally, while it may be possible to control and replicate findings gathered in
a laboratory, social research and its settings are more difficult to recreate.7 Indeed,
qualitative research gained legitimacy when it was perceived that another approach
was needed to understand how we live in and make meaning of the world and that it

should be an approach that takes into account the presence and role of the researcher
in the research process.
Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln contend that qualitative research is a field
of inquiry that operates in ‘a complex historical field that crosscuts seven historical
moments’.8 For Denzin and Lincoln, North American qualitative research coincided
with the traditional (1900–50), moving then through the modernist age (1950–70),
‘blurred genres (1970–86), the crisis of representation (1986–95), the postmodern
– a period of experimental and new ethnographies (1990–95), post-experimental
inquiry (1995–2000)’, and up to the present. They contend that the present (seventh)
moment ‘asks that the social sciences and the humanities become sites for critical
conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization,
freedom, and community’.9 As such, while quantitative research has done much to
explain the biological natural world and herald advances in science, technology and
medicine, qualitative research builds on this, helping us to make sense of the wider
world and our relationship with it:
Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. It consists
of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices
transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations, including field
notes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings and memos to the self. At this
level, qualitative research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to the world. This
means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make
sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.10
This emphasis on interpretive practices, representation and the human meaning-

making process has made qualitative research a preferred approach in the arts and
humanities. That said, the line between quantitative and qualitative research is
becoming increasingly blurred with the rise of post-positivism and the adoption
of qualitative strategies in the sciences and vice versa. Mixed-method approaches
are becoming popular in a world where interdisciplinary research is seen as a way
forward for innovation and new understandings.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that research in the arts is also changing in
response to what Brad Haseman refers to as an ‘impatience’ by some researchers
with the restrictive nature of existing paradigms.11 In Haseman’s view, neither the
qualitative nor quantitative paradigm appears entirely relevant or appropriate for
a form of research that is conducted through, and embedded in, arts practice and
works:
Central to the argument for an alternative methodology for the Creative Arts is an insistence
by practice-led researchers, that research outputs and claims to knowledge be reported
through symbolic language and forms specific to their practice. Such a move challenges
traditional ways of representing research findings. Practice-led researchers believe it is folly
to seek to only ‘translate’ the findings and understandings of practice into the numbers
(quantitative) and words (qualitative) modes preferred by traditional research paradigms.
They argue that a continued insistence that practice-led research be reported primarily in
the traditional forms of research (words or numbers) can only result in the dilution and
ultimately the impoverishment of the epistemological content embedded and embodied in
practice. Thus the researcher-composer asserts the primacy of the music, for the poet it is
the sonnet, for the choreographer it is the dance, for the designer it is the material forms
and for the 3-D interaction designer it is the computer code and the experience of playing
the game that stands as the research outcome.12
This does not mean that all artistic practice conforms to, or is representative
of, a dedicated academic research enquiry. Research of this kind involves a specific
intentionality and the adoption of certain practices and aims. As Anna Pakes explains,
the key difference between a practitioner-researcher and an ‘ordinary’ artist, is
[t]he extent of her awareness of, and explicit reflection on, her art as an appropriate creative
response to the initial questions. Or, it may be the intention to approach art making as
research-based rather than ‘purely’ artistic endeavour. But in either case, a premium is
placed on the intentional agency of the creator ...13
Additionally, research of this nature is generally intended to add to a shared

knowledge, not just that of the individual artist.14 This is an important point of
difference and why it is often demanded that a written document accompany the
creative process or artwork in this type of research, a point that will be returned to
later. But for Haseman, concerned with the history and development of this new
form of enquiry, the key issue is the identification of a rupture in qualitative research
enquiry (previously the primary province of arts research) and the emergence of what
he refers to as a third research paradigm, that of ‘Performative Research’.15
Acknowledging Denzin and Lincoln’s identification of a ‘performance turn’ in
qualitative enquiry,16 Haseman takes this a step further, claiming that new practice-
led research strategies and practices have ‘over-stretched the limits of “qualitative
research”’ and a new third methodological category is emerging, namely ‘Performative
Research’.17 He draws on J.L. Austin’s notion of performativity, where the act of
saying or naming something constitutes an enacting transformation. The most
commonly used example of Austin’s concept is that of the binding and enacting
power of the words ‘I do’ uttered at a wedding ceremony. Haseman uses Austin’s
notion of performativity to explain the active and generative nature of the process
and artwork in this new form of research:

When research findings are presented as utterances, they too perform an action and are
most appropriately named Performative Research. It is not qualitative research: it is itself
.… The ‘practice’ in ‘practice-led research’ is primary – it is not an optional extra, it is the
necessary pre-condition of engagement in performative research.18
Whether these new research practices in the arts comprise a third research
paradigm or are a radical extension of qualitative research is up for debate. What is
certain is that it requires a new conceptualisation of the idea of research and a re-
thinking of the place of artistic practice in the research realm. Paul Carter examines
the emergence of creative or practice-based research from a different perspective. He
looks to Jeremy Bentham’s phrase ‘invention lottery’ as a starting point for gathering
together the various arts modes and understanding the nature of this new form of
research:19
The condition of invention – the state of being that allows a state of becoming to emerge
– is a perception, or recognition, of the ambiguity of appearances. Invention begins when
what signifies exceeds its signification – when what means one thing, or conventionally
functions in one role, discloses other possibilities …. The poet explores the ambiguous
realm between language and music; the deejay between music and the materiality of noise.
In general, a double movement occurs, of decontextualisation in which the found elements
are rendered strange, and of recontextualisation, in which new families of association and
structures of meaning are established.20
For Carter, this double movement is characteristic of a conceptual advance similar

to the Socratic method in philosophy: ‘The distinction of practice-based research is to
mediate this process materially, allowing the unpredictable and differential situation
to influence what is found’.21 These transformative qualities differentiate practice-
led research from other forms. The apparent lack of fixity and closure in what he
describes can arouse suspicion as to the validity and worth of the research. Carter
maintains, however, that what is seen as a lack or deficit is a positive attribute: ‘It is
a powerful, because complex and multi-sensorial, method of real-world analysis, and
its aleatory, constitutionally open, anything-goes character, which is said to weaken
its claim to rigour, is in reality, a sign of its sophistication’.22 Carter’s claims focus on
the process or practice of invention in creative research, revealing a complex series
of interactions and transformations that are also constitutive of the final artwork.
Arts research of this sort may elucidate the practice portion of arts production or the
artwork itself.
Conversely, Stephen Scrivener, writing from the visual arts perspective, strongly
believes that the role of visual arts research is only to produce art: ‘An alternative
position is that the art making process yields knowledge that is independent of the
actual art objects produced. However, this relegates the art object to that of a by-
product of the knowledge acquisition process, and … places visual art making in
the service of some other discipline’.23 He argues that while it may produce ‘valuable
knowledge’, this approach should not rise to dominance in arts research. Scrivener
traces the evolution of this new form of arts research and its challenge to the role of
art back to changes in the UK education system. Scrivener explains that in the UK
in 1992, polytechnics moved from the realm of vocational training bodies into the
research world of universities and with this came the acknowledgement of the art
world as an ‘equal player’ in academia.24
In 1996, the UK’s institutional RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) officially
recognised practical work as an assessable form of publication, due in part to the
lobbying of the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD).
The UK Arts and Humanities Research Board funded the five-year PARIP (Practice
as Research in Performance) project that ended formally in 2005. PARIP worked
to investigate issues raised by this new form of research in performance media.25 As
such, it made a major contribution to shaping the field, helping to illuminate and
validate its practices and offering ways in which it may be assessed. Much of the
information and guidelines generated by PARIP are still available online and there are
also numerous conferences, working groups and texts written that continue to refine
and report on developments in the field. The result is that while there is still some
resistance, practice and performance and its link between the art world and research is
firmly ensconced in a large number of universities and institutions. Similar processes
have occurred in other countries, including Australia (where it has been recognised
for nearly two decades), Finland, South Africa and Canada, and it is also gaining
recognition in other countries including New Zealand. Practice and performance as
research projects are now deemed valid research outputs for academic/practitioners
and acceptable pathways for achieving honours and postgraduate degrees in a wide
range of institutions. Despite this, there continues to be a great deal of debate from
artist-academics such as Scrivener about the role of the work of art in research and
the necessity, or not, for written documents and other documentation to accompany
the creative work or process.
Nancy de Freitas and Stephen Scrivener argue variously that an artwork cannot
be relied upon to communicate knowledge or the rationale for its significance.26
Scrivener also makes the claim that the artwork cannot, in an academic sense,
contribute to new knowledge nor is it the business of art to do such:
If an individual cannot read an artwork then there is unlikely to be consistency of
interpretation between individuals. Since this is a proposed prerequisite of shared knowing,
it is unlikely that artworks function as a means of sharing knowledge. I have argued that a

feature of a ‘body of shared knowledge’ is that it is organised such that an item of knowledge
can be authenticated by recovering its justification, i.e., the ‘body of knowledge’ comprises
both knowledge and justification. I have argued that, at least for the great mass of artworks,
such justification doesn’t exist. Finally, I have argued that claims to new knowledge require
both the knowledge claimed and its justification to be communicated. Again, this does not
appear to be a general characteristic of artworks.27
While these claims represent a significant point of view, there are a number of strategies
and approaches that are put in place to reveal and record knowledge or insights born
from such research. Often the focus is placed on the practice or process of making
creative work and the experiential knowledge that can occur in this laboratory-
like environment. The interest and valuing of experiential knowledge is part of the
rationale for another common model, the written exegesis, which works to facilitate
through reflection and to record insights and findings in a form that is publishable.
An accompanying exegesis is usually a requirement in academic performance
and practice as research submissions. The exegesis details and extrapolates on the
research process, explaining methodological and conceptual frameworks, detailing
the work and findings in a reflective and critical manner. For Barbara Bolt, it is an
indispensable text:
In the exegesis, the nature and authority of the knowledge claims that flow from practice-
led research are able to be sustained beyond the particularity of a practice to contribute
to the broader knowledge economy. Rather than just operating as an explanation or
contextualization of the practice, the exegesis plays a critical and complementary role in
the work of art.28
The exegesis should not be considered a ‘translation’ of the artwork or practice

but a document that is read in conjunction with the work, the one informing and
explicating the other and vice versa. Disputes may arise where the exegesis is seen
to take primacy over the practice and/or performance work. However, even within
this there are different permutations. The need for – and the potential role of – the
exegesis may be judged on the projected relationship between the ‘practice’ and the
‘findings’ of the research:
The crucial issue is the extent to which the research is distinct from, or distinguishable
from, artistic practice. Where research outcomes are considered indistinguishable from
dance practice, practice itself forms a primary site of, and method for, investigation. In this
instance, any other articulation of findings, such as within a written text or ‘exegesis’, may
be useful, even necessary, but will always be to some extent derivative of the dance practice.
Alternatively, if dance practice is viewed as simply one component within a larger research
design, then research ‘findings’ will exist, and be able to be articulated, to some extent
outside the mode of practice. … Thus it is possible to formulate a continuum of approaches
between these two extremes … the conflation of outcomes and practice on the one hand
and the separation of outcomes on the other.29
The types of differentiation outlined above are usually reflected in the term used
to describe the project (i.e. practice as research in performance or PARIP) where
there is a conflation of outcomes and practice, and practice-led research, where there
may be a separation between the two.
A final traditional research requisite that raises a significant issue in performance
and practice as research projects is that of originality. Along with the requirements
for the contribution and effective transmission of new knowledge, the other major
necessity for a work to be considered ‘research’ is its originality. Similar to the
arguments concerning whether knowledge can be embedded in, accessed or read
in artworks is the idea that the work may not be intellectually clear enough for
its original contribution to be ascertained. This also speaks to the notion that the
practitioner/researcher may be required to co-opt their practice and artwork to fulfil
cognitive ends at the expense of artistic development. While there is an argument to
be made that as a ‘research’ project it must fulfil these ends, it should theoretically be
possible to find a balance between the two. In effect, this can work both ways. It may
not be necessary to demonstrate originality in the artwork if it is demonstrable in the
cognitive content of the project and this may still be a contribution to knowledge of
the art form. Pakes uses the example of a choreographer tackling an issue through
dance performance:
the framework against which the object’s originality is judged seems broader, since it also
incorporates the other media of representation or discussion: the dance work’s manifestation
of the content is compared with the way, say, philosophers discuss the issue in order to see
what is different or interesting about the way dance handles these ideas.30
It is easy to imagine the same type of scenario being taken up in a music, theatre or
visual arts practice-as-research project. Similarly, practice or performance as research
may be used to introduce cultural knowledges and methodologies into artistic praxis
(where practice intersects with theory) in order to create new, ethically sensitive ways
of working.
Dunedin is a particularly fertile ground for practice and performance as research
due to the strong concentration of practitioner academics in a small geographic
space and the city’s status as a firmly established and highly innovative arts space
and incubator. The breadth and potential of the emerging forms of research outlined
above is yet to be widely accepted and understood. The ability to ‘access’ processes
of invention and creativity and utilise symbolic forms as a means to new knowledge

and understanding is undoubtedly a powerful step forward in research terms. While
there are still issues deserving of attention, including the role of art in academia and
a possible bias towards cognitive research outcomes, projects in this field promise
to extend our investigative horizons. Performance and practice as research offer the
means and space for developing existing and new art forms and a place for a new
interdisciplinary research nexus to be formed and refined.
2
The Creative Artist as Research Practitioner
John Drummond
The American dancer Isadora Duncan was greatly taken with the famous playwright
George Bernard Shaw. At a dinner conversation she was bold enough to proposition
him and suggest that they should have a child together. ‘Just think,’ she said, ‘With
your brains and my body, what a wonderful child it would be!’ Shaw looked at her.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘But what if the child were to have my body and your brains?’1
The story, which is probably apocryphal, rests on the assumption that beauty and
brains are somehow separated – that people are either beautiful or brainy, and of
course we preserve such facile distinctions in our everyday popular culture. Beautiful
blondes are ditzy, while nerds are physically unappealing – except, of course, to other
nerds. But lurking behind that distinction lies another, also perpetuated in popular
culture, which is that scientists (except for the mad ones) are people who coldly and
logically apply their immense intellects in a systematic way to the solving of complex
problems, whereas creating beauty is a kind of casual activity driven by inspiration
and genius, practised by people who are rather peculiar. Hollywood biopics sustain
this view inexorably – witness the appalling versions of Mozart presented in the
movies Amadeus and I, Giovanni.2
One might think that those images would be avoided in the lofty halls of the
academy, or that in universities we would have moved beyond such popular myths.
Well, one would be wrong. In my capacity as Blair Professor in the Department of
Music at the University of Otago, I was called to a university committee meeting
recently to address the work of one of the creative artists on our Music Department
staff. One of the members of the committee, a respectable scientist, peered at me over
his specs. ‘I see he has made a CD’, he said, in the kind of voice I’m sure he usually
reserves for first-year students who make a mess of their experiments. ‘But what does
he actually do?’ was the plaintive question. ‘Where’s the research?’
Where indeed? And where could I begin to explain? Should I start by pointing
out that his children, who learned piano from my wife, had to practise every day
if they wanted to master the discipline of music-making? Should I quote Thomas
Edison’s line about creative activity being ten per cent inspiration and ninety per
cent perspiration? Should I go on to explain that making a professional music CD
requires musical skills of a high order, as well as production skills, hours of work
THE CREATIVE ARTIST AS RESEARCH PRACTITIONER 27

and impeccable critical judgment? Well, of course, that’s what I did. But he was still
shaking his head, and looking very suspiciously at me when I’d finished. The gap
between what he did in his laboratory, and what my colleague does in the recording
studio, was too great for him to be able to bridge it easily. His view of composition
was, alas, coloured by movies like Amadeus.
This chapter is an attempt to close that gap a little, all the while engaging in a
mixture of research and creative fantasy. The hypothesis I wish to present is that what
the research scientist does and what the creative artist does differ only in the way we
describe them. To test this hypothesis, I intend to describe artistic activity using the
terminology of research science, and then describe scientific research activity using
the words that characterise artistic practice. My creative artists are today research
scientists, and the research scientists have miraculously become creative artists. It’s a
little mischievous, but let’s have fun and see what happens.
My first research scientist in the field of the creative and performing arts is Johann
Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Bach has had a long and illustrious research career
in his disciplinary field of musical composition, and he has accumulated sufficient
experience to feel he can address the Big Question. He has been skirting around and
dipping into this question with many of his previous research projects, but it is now
time to tackle it head on. The big question he wants to address is this: how can we
understand the ordered complexity of the universe? It’s a question being asked by
others at this time, not least by his near-contemporary, Isaac Newton. Indeed, the
two have much in common. In the early nineteenth century Daniel Schubart would
remark that ‘what Newton was as a philosopher, Bach was as a musician’.3
In Bach’s previous research activity, his method has been to address questions by
using the tools of his discipline: the processes and procedures, the techniques and the
formulae that are available in the scholarly field of musical composition. He learnt
these methods from his own teachers, and from accessing the research papers (the
compositions) of others. Indeed, in his youth he replicated the research of others
in order to develop his own skills. To address this particular question, he realises
that he can best use the techniques of one particular musical device: the fugue. As
Christoph Wolff points out, Bach believed that harmony was the idea permeating
God’s universe, the ‘expression of God’s operations’, and, as Bach’s friend Birnbaum
wrote, harmony – the interplay of dissonance and consonance – is ‘accumulated
counterpoint’.4 No better model could be found to explain the mysteries of God’s
universe than the ultimate contrapuntal device of fugue.
Bach’s research hypothesis, then, is that the ordered complexity of the universe
can be accurately reflected, and thereby explained and understood, in the form of
fugal compositions. He is going to compose a work called Die Kunst der Fuge, The
Art of Fugue5 (to call it ‘The Mystery of the Universe’ would be far too arrogant for
a man like Bach). The implications of this hypothesis and experimental method are
straightforward: to reflect order, there must be one single theme underpinning all
the fugues; to reflect complexity, the fugues must utilise all the possible formats and
dimensions possible with that theme.
The experiments, all fourteen of them, will involve presenting this theme in several
independent lines of music, at different pitches. The order in which the theme appears
in successive voices is a variable factor. This provides a multi-levelled complexity.
Secondary material will need to be developed to go with these multi-level statements
of the theme. Additional themes can be introduced. These elements will give Bach
two primary dimensions of complexity: the dimension of time, as the theme and its
companions are developed over time, and the dimension of simultaneity, that is, the
textural relationship between the constituent lines of music. Further, the fugue may
shift from one key to another, as if passing into a parallel dimension. Bach will be
exploring what today’s science describes as the ‘multiverse’.6
But the experiments involve the use of further devices for thematic transformation:
diminution, augmentation, stretto, inversion and retrograde.7 Using these different
techniques, and applying them to his basic theme, Bach has conducted a series of
fourteen experiments of increasing complexity, each one called a ‘contrapunctus’,
highlighting the connection between counterpoint and the ordered complexity of
God’s universe. Die Kunst der Fuge lasts for a little over an hour, so the experiment
is not a trivial one.
Having conducted these experiments, what is Bach’s conclusion? The experiments
indicate that music is capable of being used to create, and thereby to explore, ordered
complexity, and the fact that music has this capability might be explained in relation
to the idea that ordered complexity is fundamental to our universe. It may also
be true that an individual whose brain receives the complexly ordered information
in this music is thereby brought to a deeper understanding of the idea of ordered
complexity, at either a conscious or unconscious level. The music is, as it were, an
image of the complexity of the universe. Where Newton explains the complexity of
the universe in words, through his Principia,8 Bach explains it in musical sounds.
However, the fact that Bach did not complete his series of experiments might
suggest that no final conclusion is possible. We cannot know whether the hypothesis
is proved. Why did Bach leave his research project unfinished? Several theories have
been proposed: one seemingly plausible one, put about by his son Carl Philipp
Emanuel, is that before his death his health affected his ability to write – which
alas is refuted by the fact that the manuscript is in a firm hand. An interesting one
was suggested by New Zealand scholar Indra Hughes, who proposed that the final

fugue was deliberately left unfinished for others to complete.9 Several have attempted
it. And it is interesting to note that, in the final fugue, Bach introduces a theme
based on the letters of his own name. Perhaps Bach was at some level aware of the
phenomenon only properly acknowledged by physicists in the twentieth century –
the so-called ‘observer effect’ – which postulates that observation affects the system
being observed.10 It may be that Bach’s conclusion is that the complexity of the
universe has to be understood to include the complexity of the person observing it.
The first publication of the research project was in 1751, a year after Bach’s
death. Since the revival in the nineteenth century of interest in Bach there have been
many publications of the music itself, and of sound recordings of the work. But we
must remember that in this research project Bach’s goal was not to convey ordered
complexity to a mass audience, but merely to investigate the possibility that music
might reflect ordered complexity. This is blue-skies research, and the publication was
more for fellow research scientists than anyone else; indeed, the work has had an
influence on the discipline because it is a technical tour de force in the composition
of fugues. Manuals of composition have used The Art of Fugue as an example of the
highest levels of the craft; students and composers have since used it as a model for
creating their own fugues.
It may of course be argued that Bach is an easy example to choose to make my
point. Wolff speaks of Bach’s ‘achievements in musical science’.11 So let me try
another example, and propose to you that the Vorspiel12 to Richard Wagner’s Tristan
und Isolde can similarly be described in terms of a piece of scientific research. Where
Bach was modest, Wagner was arrogant and egotistical. Where Bach’s music appears
to communicate, above all else, control and discipline, Wagner’s music appears to
communicate passionate emotion. But both are simply research scientists in music,
with different personalities and different research goals.
For this project, Wagner has formulated the following research question: what
happens when an uncontrollable desire for something meets the impossibility of
fulfilling that desire? It’s a variant on the scenario of ‘irresistible force meets immovable
object’. The question has arisen at least partly from circumstances in his personal life,
for he has fallen in love with Mathilde Wesendonck. Alas, both of them are already
married, in her case to the man who is Wagner’s principal benefactor. A secondary
source, not irrelevant to the situation, is Wagner’s discovery of the medieval legend of
Tristan and Isolde, in which Tristan falls in love with Isolde, although she is destined
to become the wife of his uncle and liege lord, King Mark of Cornwall. Because
composition is his field of research activity, Wagner has decided to explore this issue of
unfulfilled, unfulfillable yearning by composing an opera on the Tristan legend.
As part of his research preparation, he has written the libretto and he now needs to
address the research question in musical terms. The starting point of his experimental
method is the humble cadence: the resolution of a dissonant chord to a consonant
one, a musical representation of arrival, fulfilment, the dissolving of tension. Building
on that idea, Wagner has come up with the experimental hypothesis that unfulfilled
yearning, the subject of his research question, can be successfully expressed in music
by avoiding the expected resolution of harmonic tension contained in the cadence.
His experimental method will be to compose tonal music that avoids cadences. This
challenges one of the fundamental rules of the tonal musical language, the tradition
in which he works. If he succeeds, then new rules will have to be found for the
musical language. Like Galileo or Darwin or Einstein, he is questioning the basic
assumptions on which his scientific discipline is founded. But, like Galileo and Darwin
and Einstein, he is not entirely alone: others have ventured down this experimental
path ahead of him. The composer-research scientist Robert Schumann included
one experiment in his Dichterliebe research project: in the song ‘Im wunderschönen
Monat Mai’ the tonic chord of the key of the piece is never sounded.
Wagner’s experiments are on a grander scale. They take the form of the fourteen
sections of which the opera is comprised: three introductions (one to each act)
and eleven scenes. In each case, the task will be this: to see whether he can express
unfulfilled yearning by avoiding expected resolutions, and do this without losing
the sense and meaning of the music. In some cases, where Tristan and Isolde are
particularly overcome with yearning, resolutions will be rarer; to point these moments
up, resolutions will be more common where others involved in the opera are in more
normal states of mind.
Wagner’s research was completed in August 1859, but publication through
performance was delayed until June 1865. Its impact was immediate: the French
composer Guillaume Lekeu reportedly fainted during a performance. Was Wagner’s
hypothesis proved? I think there can be little doubt that the opera showed that
unfulfilled yearning can indeed be successfully expressed in music by avoiding the
expected resolution of harmonic tension. It also showed, exactly as in Bach’s case,
what an extraordinary imagination, intellect, and technical skill the composer had,
making him the equal of any other distinguished scientist working in any other field
of research. Let us not be shy about our composers. Furthermore, the implications of
this research have been profound. Wagner’s opera altered the way composers wrote
music, the way other people wrote about music, and the way audiences listened to
music. In the 145 years since the first performance of Tristan und Isolde, and as a
result of the opera, new theories have had to be devised to help us understand how
music works. One might describe it as one of the most successful research projects,
professionally and commercially, ever carried out in the discipline of music.

My focus has so far been on composers: how about performing artists? Is their
work also capable of being described in the terms used by research scientists? Let us
take an example, this time not from music but from the theatre. Bach began his Art
of Fugue research project in the early 1740s, when he was in his fifties. David Garrick
was in his twenties when he conducted his research project, contemporaneously with
Bach’s. Where Bach was the equivalent of a senior research scientist, Garrick was
the equivalent of a PhD student or lab assistant. He was an aspiring young actor,
who loved the theatre, and he was familiar with the manner in which tragedy was
delivered on the London stage. It occurred to him that the current style of acting and
vocal delivery was stultified and unnatural, and that a different way of presenting
tragic heroes could be devised, one that would have a more profound effect upon
audiences. We can express this, as before, in formal scientific terms.
In order to understand the radical nature of Garrick’s hypothesis and experiment,
it is necessary to know a little about the established practice in dramatic performance.
Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, it had been characterised by the
rhetorical delivery of the text and by the use of stock gestures. The actor’s task was to
analyse the emotion behind a particular passage in the text, and then summon up the
appropriate vocal presentation and physical expression and gesture. Guidebooks were
available to assist this process. Charles le Brun, who amongst other accomplishments
was chief painter to Louis XIV, wrote A Method to Learn to Design the Passions.13
Each passion or emotion was listed, together with instructions on how to convey it.
Here’s an example:
Contempt is expressed by the eyebrows knit and lowering towards the nose, and at the
other end very much elevated; the eye very open, and the pupil in the middle; the nostrils
drawing upwards; the mouth shut, and the corners somewhat down, and the underlip
thrust out farther than the upper one.14
But be very careful. Here’s another example, this time from Aaron Hill’s book
called The Art of Acting, published in 1744.15 The topic this time is Joy: ‘Joy is
pride possessed with triumph – forehead raised and open, eye full and sparkling,
neck expanded and erect, breast inflated and thrown back, vertebrae linked and
straightened, and all joints (arm, wrist, fingers, hip, knee and ankle) connected and
boldly braced’.16 It was a complicated, even dangerous, business learning to be an
actor. And remember, this was in the days before physiotherapy was invented.
The consequence of this formulaic methodology was that all tragic characters
tended to look and sound the same. Garrick, perhaps because of his (in)experience,
wanted to break through tradition and create individual characters. He sought to
develop a stage presentation which would focus on the unique individual and the
unique situations that individual was facing. And so it was that he entered the stage
of the Goodman’s Fields Theatre on Monday 19 October 1741 in the costume of
Shakespeare’s Richard III.
The next day he wrote his research report on the first experiment, in the form
of a letter to his brother: ‘Last night I played Richard the Third to the surprise of
everybody’.17 Surprise is a common reaction to the presentation of new knowledge.
The London Daily Post and General Advertiser wrote its own report: ‘His reception
was the most extraordinary and great that was ever known upon such an occasion’.18
A member of the audience also wrote to Garrick’s brother on the same day: ‘I believe
there was not one in the House that was not in raptures. I heard several men of
judgment declare in their opinion that nobody ever excelled him in the part, and
that they were surprised, with so peculiar a genius, how it was possible for him to
keep off the stage so long’.19 Garrick’s biographers Stone and Kahrl have perused
contemporary accounts of Garrick’s acting this role, and have concluded that instead
of being portrayed like any other tragic villain, Richard was shown by Garrick to be
‘daring, bold, wicked, gleeful, splenetic, perfidious, ambitious, lonely, characterized
by rage, rapidity and intrepidity’.20
Garrick’s conclusion, in a further letter to his brother, was that he had found a
way to become successful and rich. Others concluded that a new world of acting had
been established, offering new insights into familiar characters. Thomas Davies, in his
Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, written in 1780, described him in a phrase that
again reminds us of the connection between art and science: ‘Mr Garrick shone forth
like a theatrical Newton; he threw new light on elocution and action’.21 Publication
of Garrick’s new acting style could come only through further performances. He
continued acting in London for another thirty years. The contemporary historian
Nicolas Tindal remarked of Garrick that ‘The “deaf ” hear him in his “action”, and
the “blind” see him in his “voice”’.22
For my fourth and final example of scientific research in the creative arts we move
to the end of the nineteenth century, to meet Georges-Pierre Seurat. An important
post- or neo-Impressionist painter, his most famous work is A Sunday Afternoon
on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and we can describe the process that led to this in
the terms of the scientific research paradigm as well. Seurat was familiar with the
Impressionist paintings of his contemporaries, and the way they blended colours on
their palettes and used particular kinds of brushstrokes to create illusions that reflect
the complex way in which we perceive colours in nature. But he was also aware of
contemporary research by scientists into visual perception, and in them he saw a clue
to meet the needs of artistic expression.
Investigation into the scientific writings of Ogden Rood and Charles Blanc led

Seurat to propose that the way to create the correct visual effect was not to blur
the paint, but to blur the perception of the paint, by creating a pattern of dots of
independent colour that the eye would then perceive as a whole – pointillisme, or
peinture au point. Seurat discovered from the writings of the German physicist Dove,
quoted in Rood’s book, that a phenomenon known as ‘lustre’ occurred when viewing
a painting, when individual colours start to blend into a wider perception.23 By using
dots of colour, he could therefore enhance this effect. The pigments he used must
be exactly placed in the colour spectrum, and the dots of paint applied in exactly
the right way for the effect to be achieved. His experiment was to create this effect
in a large-scale painting, Sunday Afternoon at the Grande Jatte. He began by creating
separate panels, and then transferred them to the large canvas. It was painstaking
work, and it took nearly two years to complete.
Did the experiment confirm the hypothesis? Yes, in two ways. First, Seurat’s
painting confirmed his theory of ‘chromo-luminarism’, and was very influential
upon the younger generation of Impressionist painters. Art historian Meyer Schapiro
considers Seurat’s work as:
[a]n astonishing achievement for so young a painter .... It resolved a crisis in painting and
opened the way to new possibilities. Seurat built upon a dying classic tradition and upon
the Impressionists, [who at that time were] caught in an impasse and already doubting
themselves .... If one can isolate a single major influence on the art of the important
younger painters in Paris in the later [18]80s, it is the work of Seurat; Van Gogh, Gauguin
and Lautrec were all affected by it.24
Second, it has remained a work so effective that the general public has been drawn
to it. Stephen Sondheim even based a musical upon it – Sundays in the Park with
George.
By now, I hope, the reader will have deciphered the point I am making here: the
creation of new knowledge in creative arts practice is a matter of beauty and brains.
The work of art, the artistic experience, doesn’t happen accidentally. It may have
aesthetic value, but that is the result of the exercise of intellect. But let us go a step
further. Let’s put the boot on the other foot. Can we describe the work of a research
scientist in the way we might describe the work of a creative artist? Well, let’s try.
We must begin by working out how a creative artist operates. Our starting point
could well be a few lines from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which
he describes the activity of a poet of the theatre: ‘… as imagination bodies forth /
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them into shapes, and gives to
airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’. It’s a pretty good description of the
process of artistic creativity, in any medium. But, with all due respect to Shakespeare,
it misses a few crucial steps. Let me expand a little on his proposal.
Imagination is the starting point, the creation of an image in the mind of the
creative artist. It usually emerges unbidden, and unforeseen, often as the result of
some mental tension, a clash or juxtaposition of other images or ideas. Because it
comes from ‘goodness knows where’, we often call it inspiration. What exactly it is,
and what its potential is, we may only be able to guess at – it’s an airy nothing, a
thing unknown. But when it comes upon us, we have a rush of blood, an excitement.
‘Wow!’, ‘Ha, an idea!’ Bells go off. Scientists call it ‘The Eureka Moment’; in the
arts, we call it ‘keeping an appointment with the Muse’. That excited reaction to
the inspired moment is what will motivate what happens next: it will drive us to
do something, to turn that airy nothing into a shape of some kind. We can’t do
that without having some medium or technique to do it with – the poet’s pen, or
the actor’s voice and body, or the painter’s palette. The image takes shape. It gains
identity, its habitation and its name. The original image may spawn many further,
constituent images. Finally it becomes something we can communicate, and the
image – and all its component images – can be received by a reader, an observer, a
listener. If the process has been undertaken successfully, then others will receive the
image – in whatever form it has now taken. They will react to that in whatever way
seems appropriate.
Let’s see if that explanation of the creative process can be used to describe the work
of a scientist. Meet Albert Einstein. You know the pictures of him when he was old
and famous, but this is the way he looked when he had his moment of inspiration,
in 1905. I’m not a physical scientist so I cannot hope to explain in detail the nature
of the image that Einstein conjured up, but the bare bones of the matter seem to be
this. Einstein was attempting to understand the relationship between light, space and
time. The currently proposed scientific theories didn’t seem to fit with each other,
because it wasn’t possible to devise a situation in which all of them could be correct.
There was, in other words, a paradox, an ambiguity, a clash of truths. As science
writer John Stachel explains, Einstein had been considering this difficulty for some
time. But one day in 1905, ‘there came a moment of crucial insight’. Einstein himself
later described the moment as ‘the step’, the event which triggered his discovery of
a solution to the paradox with which he was wrestling.25 In the following six weeks,
he worked hard to sort out the implications of this moment of insight, to give to his
‘airy nothing’ a local habitation and a name, and at last he presented the results in
the form of a paper in a scientific journal, Annalen der Physik, which revealed for the
first time Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.26 This theory (e=mc2) has changed
the way we understand the universe, with implications right across our culture. If
the journal article provided the first performance, we have had hundreds of cover

versions of it presented to us in the last hundred years.
My second scientific exemplar is James Watson, a young microbiologist working in
the early 1950s in laboratories in London and Cambridge with three others: Rosalind
Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick. At the time, there was something of a
race on between several scientific teams in the UK and the US to understand DNA,
and Watson was determined to be the first to sort it out. The issues were complicated.
Genes appeared to be linked in strands, perhaps two, perhaps three. They were of
different kinds, with different chemical make-up. How did they all fit together?
The first step in the process, imagination, took place in three stages. On 29
January 1953, Wilkins showed Watson an X-ray picture of a chain of genes taken
by Franklin. Watson realised, in a flash of inspiration, that the chain was in a helix
shape.27 A fortnight later, a chance sharing by Franklin of some of her data made
Francis Crick realise that two chains were running in opposite directions. At this
point Watson made an interesting decision, as he discusses in a talk now available
on YouTube.28 Instead of embarking upon a process of rigorous analysis, he decided
to try and build a model. Creating an image in order to understand something is
what composers, playwrights, poets, novelists and painters do. And so it was that
a fortnight later, while Watson was playing with some cardboard cut-outs of gene
chains, trying to see how they might fit together, the answer suddenly emerged: a
double helix.
What was his reaction? Watson later recalled his reaction as ‘near ecstasy’ and Crick
wrote that they were both ‘enormously excited’. The image of the double helix had
now to be turned into something that could be communicated to the world using the
language of their scientific discipline. Crick and Watson therefore produced a series of
public performances, otherwise known as scholarly articles, for publication in April
and May in the prestigious journal Nature, and presented a paper at a symposium
in America in June.29 At first, the reception by fellow professionals was mixed. As
Watson says, most scientists are rather dull: they want certainty before they publish.
But he and Crick thought they were probably right, so published anyway. It then
took a further three years before they knew they were correct. The double helix
model for DNA became accepted, and Watson, Crick and Wilkins were eventually
awarded a Nobel Prize in 1962 (Franklin had died in the meantime).
So what had Watson done? He had a moment of inspiration, which provided
him with an idea that he was then driven to provide with a local habitation and a
name. He didn’t call it creating a work of art, but we might well do so. In both cases,
Einstein and Watson, the protagonists, have discussed that all-important imaginative
moment, the one that began the process. Crick wrote that the discovery of the double
helix was achieved ‘not by logic but by serendipity’.30 Einstein wrote that:
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. That means it is not reached by
conscious logical conclusions. But, thinking it through afterwards, you can always discover
the reasons which have led you unconsciously to your guess and you will find a logical way
to justify it. Intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.31
Ah yes, we can always analyse the sources of the inspiration, and scientists and
musicologists and other ‘ologists’ will always like to do so. But this ability in our
heads to seemingly create an image from nothing is something all human beings
have, whether they are artists or scientists, biologists or composers, physicists or
actors or painters. It springs from what Einstein, again, described as ‘the irrational,
the inconsistent, the droll, even the insane, which nature, inexhaustibly operative,
implants into the individual, seemingly for her own amusement’.32 Of course, it isn’t
merely for amusement: it is there for the creation of new knowledge. Ultimately,
it is indeed possible to describe artistic activity using the terminology preferred
by research scientists, and vice versa. The processes are similar enough to allow
translation without causing serious injury to either party.
There are, of course, differences. One difference concerns replicability. In science,
the research must be able to be replicated. Another scientist should be able to work
with the data that Einstein or Watson found, and arrive at the same conclusion. In
artistic activity, this is just not possible. There cannot be two of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony, or two of Michelangelo’s David, or two of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In
music, theatre and ballet, no two performances will ever be exactly the same. From
a scientist’s point of view, this absence of replicability challenges the validity of the
research; from an artist’s point of view, the desire for replicability can be met only
by removing the human element. Where the scientist demands objectivity, the artist
relishes subjectivity. At the same time, these barriers are being broken down in both
directions. In scientific research, increased attention is being paid to what is called
the ‘observer effect’, which acknowledges that the act of observation can, and in
some cases always will, have an effect on the phenomenon being observed. If that is
the case, then replicability is thrown into doubt. On the other side, you may know
of Emily Howell. Her first album, entitled From Darkness, Light came out recently,
containing her Opus 1, 2 and 3 compositions for piano. If you haven’t met Emily,
she is a computer program devised by University of California’s professor David
Cope, and you can hear her compositions on iTunes and YouTube.33
The fact that Emily’s research output is a CD indicates a second and very
important difference between scientific research and creative and performance
activity: the media in which the results are delivered are very different, as are the
approaches to that delivery. Let’s use the phrase that ‘the proof of the pudding
is in the eating’ to explore this. The scientist is expected to show whether or not

the hypothesis has or has not been confirmed by the experiment; he or she draws
conclusions as part of the process, and seeks to tell everyone how tasty the pudding
is. Quod erat demonstrandum. The creative artist provides the pudding, but lets others
discover its tastiness. He or she leaves such matters to those who hear the music,
view the painting or sculpture or design, read the poem or novel, or witness the stage
performance. Indeed, it is not usual to create works of art in order to impress others
in the same field. Wagner didn’t compose Tristan for other composers; David Garrick
wasn’t addressing other actors; Seurat wasn’t painting for other painters. We think of
ourselves as serving a wider community.
It is because our outputs are different from those of scientists, and because the
difficulties of evaluation are so severe, that it becomes necessary, in my view, to focus
not on the product, or the outcome, but on the process: something the contributors
to this book all strive to articulate. Indeed, this is one more thing we have in common
with scientists: we enjoy the process.
MUSIC, COMMUNICATION
AND COMMUNITY
3
Songwriting Process in the Verlaines’
album Corporate Moronic
Graeme Downes
For thirty years now I have composed the songs on a number of albums released
under the band name the Verlaines. The band was originally part of the scene of
the early 1980s often referred to as the ‘Dunedin Sound’. The very notion of the
existence of this so-called ‘sound’ is at best problematic, especially as many of the
compositional features that might be said to define it are beyond the ken of the
popular music press, where its existence is most often debated. It is undeniable
that certain Dunedin bands of that era (the Clean, Verlaines, Stones and Chills for
example) projected a similar sound: trebly, highly reverberant guitars, and partial
bárre chords with jangling or droning open strings, for example. Perhaps less obvious,
but nevertheless no less integral, were shared compositional strategies relating to form
(singular structures rather than new music poured into pre-existing formal moulds
such as AABA or verse/chorus), a tendency to use irregular phrase structures (evading
the tyranny of the four-bar phrase that is ubiquitous in many forms of rock and
pop), polymodality and a tendency towards purely musical discourse (instrumentals
proper or songs where, relative to the usual confines of a pop song, large instrumental
sections convey or amplify poetic ideas nascent in the song’s text). In broader stylistic
terms, I would argue the Dunedin Sound represents a cultural nationalism of a sort.
The bands had a tendency to eschew cultural influences to which – as pakeha New
Zealanders generally and Dunedinites specifically – they felt no cultural ownership.
Hence Afro-American influences, such as blues, soul or funk for example, were
largely avoided. The remaining, greatly diminished, stylistic pool arguably contains
folk music, urban white rock (anything from the Beatles to the Velvet Underground)
and classical music (both of the Western variety and, possibly, via the orientalism of
the Beatles and the Velvets, Indian).
Positioning the Verlaines’ album Corporate Moronic, released in 2009, against
the band’s legacy from the Dunedin Sound period, it could be argued to represent
a discontinuation in terms of the surface ‘sound’, but a definite continuation in
terms of the less obvious compositional considerations mentioned above. Broadly
speaking, the Verlaines output is alternative rock. I use this term guardedly, but
would support it by saying that many of the compositional features listed in the
SONGWRITING PROCESS IN THE VERLAINES’ ALBUM CORPORATE MORONIC 41

previous paragraph, particularly with regard to singular forms and irregular phrases,
hold true for bands such as the Pixies, or Radiohead. In terms of ‘identity’, my songs
have consistently been a revolt against style or genre (usually dictated by the pressures
of commercialisation and the music industry). Musical styles in popular music tend
to limit choice, of harmonic palette, scale type, tempo range and, perhaps most
significantly, the subject matter that a song is permitted to investigate; put another
way, bands as diverse as Metallica or AC/DC are effectively imprisoned by their
own back catalogue. As much as my output is littered with major-key pop songs on
conventional romantic subjects, these have not been at the expense of more disturbed,
dark, angered or dispirited utterances. More than anything else, this claimed freedom
widens the research component in my work, for there is hardly anything musically or
in terms of broad humanistic enquiry that cannot be of potential use. ‘The Symphony
should contain the world’, Mahler urged; this is an ethos I feel the Beatles’ Sergeant
Pepper shares, and which I, too, try to emulate (and which I hope the stylistic gulf
between the songs discussed in this chapter will help demonstrate).
As the topic of this book is performance as research, I should begin by interrogating
this very notion. Research, in my view, is a process of problem solving. In order to
solve a problem, a researcher must be intimate with the constituent elements of
what s/he is dealing with, the solutions past researchers have achieved, their efficacy,
and the limitations or shortcomings upon which s/he can strategise advancements
or improvements. The philosophical debate as to whether advancement is a de
facto improvement is too vast to enter into here, but suffice to say I believe artistic
endeavour rests on the bedrock of existing knowledge. It is not created in a vacuum,
or as Rob Moore asserts with regard to popular music, ‘You don’t have to be a German
genius to figure out that any pop combo is only as good as their record collection
…’.1 Mahler, the composer whose music was the topic of my PhD, referred to the
period in one’s youth as a time of ‘gathering stones’ from which the composer will
construct his own work.2 In reality, this is a life-long endeavour.
Songwriters, like many artists, tend to be generalists. As our art has two constituent
components, words and music, we need to attain some degree of mastery over two
distinct fields. Music we learn from our predecessors, a field that can be as large
or limited as any given composer desires on the basis of their desired breadth of
utterance. The broad range of expression I pursue is such that my life will be too
short to exhaust what already exists musically. As to words, songwriters are, at the
very least, demi-poets (attaining some mastery of rhyme, rhythm, assonance, form
and metaphor, etc.), and so literature, again as narrow or broad as any given artist
requires, is a field of research. But in addition to this we are also communicators of
ideas. Our ability to capture an idea is predicated on the most generalised inquiry,
into politics, philosophy, religion, history, economics, current events – in short, any
aspect of the human condition. This, too, is inexhaustible.
The following discussion and analysis revolves around two songs from the Verlaines’
2009 album Corporate Moronic. Composed and performed by me, together with the
Verlaines’ constituents and with the collaboration of numerous musician colleagues
from Dunedin, these songs represent both a point in time for society at large, and
a point in time for myself. They respond, respectively, to events on the global stage,
and to life stage events in my own emotional experience.
‘Paraphrasing Hitler’
The inspiration for this song came from viewing the documentary series The World
at War, which first aired on television in New Zealand in the seventies.3 As a young
teenager I found it chilling, barbarous, almost scarcely believable. But as a middle-
aged adult in late 2007 the effect was less visceral. Age, experience, research of one
kind or another into history, and observation of current events as they have unfolded
over forty-odd conscious years caused me to engage on a deeper level, to see patterns
blinded by sheer enormity earlier in life. Most of all, the song reflects my interest in
the media as propaganda and in particular the fine line between documentary and
propaganda. No doubt Hitler was a monster and that as a documentary series The
World at War ranks amongst the finest in the genre, but that should not blind anyone
to the propaganda role it played (and continues to play with each re-run). It struck
me how powerfully Hitler’s rhetoric (on the hopeless plight of his army trapped in
Stalingrad), with Laurence Olivier’s glacial tones reciting it, combined to fix Hitler’s
monstrosity in a way that historians are perhaps less able (or flatly unwilling: Eric
Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes: The Short History of the Twentieth Century 1914–1991
maintains a calm detachment when discussing the battle of Stalingrad, a mere turning
point of history in relation to which human suffering is not noteworthy).4
But what is all that to the world of today? From ‘extraordinary rendition’ or, at the
time of writing, Karl Rove on Fox News berating Barack Obama for turning his back
on ‘enhanced interrogation’, to ‘sub-prime’ mortgages, there was then (and remains)
some strange language on the planet these days. The George W. Bush administration
was, and modern society generally is, awash with this pseudo-language: innocuous or
even pleasant-sounding phrases that actually represent something much more sinister
– various forms of torture in the case of the first two pieces of jargon mentioned
above and mortgages that are somewhere below prime in the other. Taking sub-
prime mortgages as an example, the populace was encouraged to believe, on the basis
of what Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the word’s ‘stylistic aura’,5 that
in the context of ‘real estate-speak’, ‘prime’ means something very positive, such that

we are encouraged to think that ‘sub’ modifies ‘prime’ only slightly. This of course
ignores that the prefix ‘sub’ can mean anything from slightly to massively below
prime. And of course documentaries such as The World at War and others reinforce
the name of the originator or modern perfector of these ‘special dialects’, Joseph
Goebbels.
These reflections begged the question that if the use of language places two regimes
roughly on a par, how much of Hitler’s invariably monstrous portrayal in the modern
media blinds us to our own leaders’ monstrosity? As a songwriter trying to emulate
contemporaries such as Randy Newman (who at the time of writing this song was
articulating something similar in ‘A Few Words in Defence of our Country’6), I see
myself, in composing a song like this, as some combination of composer, amateur
historian, and not unlike a cartoonist, trying to join the dots of history as best one
can outside of specialisation, to prick the public nerve and deflate pomposity with
language as plain as possible.
A songwriter first and foremost needs to gain an understanding of what can
possibly be useful in a song lyric. Lyrics tend towards poetry, though are generally
simpler in deference to their audience, which needs to process two mediums (words
and music) at once. Jimmy Webb describes song lyrics as ‘technological haiku’.7
Each word must count. And on this count, my first musings had to undergo much
tinkering.
I include the first and final drafts of my song to provide some sort of insight into
the lyric-writing process. The first is no more than capturing an idea, an observation
that might, with redrafting, attain the pungency of a lyric. The path to the seventeenth
revision was tortuous, many rewrites being purely textual (teasing out the modern
manifestations of Hitler’s callousness, which is barely alluded to in the final lines of
my first draft). The later drafts came in response to the music, which once it began
to establish itself demanded all manner of adjustments, additions, deletions, rhymes,
lengthening and shortening of phrases and so forth.
When it came to the music, the task in responding to the text was manifold, or so
it seemed to me. First, the music had to capture the barbaric (but callously rational)
nature of Hitler’s summation of the trapped Sixth Army in Stalingrad in February
1943, the 100,000 doomed to death or capture (of whom 6000 survived captivity).9
This was made possible by my understanding of the music of Shostakovich and the
eight- and nine-note modes (as opposed to the seven-note modes common to most
Western tonal music) he employs to express extreme morbidity.10 By way of quick
explanation, the traditional major scale contains three perfect intervals, four major
‘Paraphrasing Hitler’ (draft 18) ‘Paraphrasing Hitler’ (draft 17)
The individual will die in natural course Man will die in natural course.
anyway. What difference then an early death?
A premature death is therefore irrelevant The nation’s survival is all that matters’
Only the nation’s survival is important’
As words cut free
He’s a monster of course From the man and from Stalingrad
Sir Olivier’s glacial tones They are of course the soul of logic
and the music make it so That drives every army of every nation
The numbers too And low and behold!

the fate those words consigned Survive it did:
so many men to Partition, the cold-war
chilling The Berlin wall,
And the shame of it all
Taken cold, as words cut free The music, a little tarnished survives
from the man who uttered them As does strudel, beer-fests and football
from Stalingrad And we all still love rocket science,
they are of course the soul of logic Volkswagen, Mercedes and the autobahn
Every army of every land
operates on the same premise In paraphrasing Hitler,
I hear more recent voices,
‘the nation’s survival is more important’ Saying all that we hold dear
And survive it did Could go down the toilet
partition and communism Unless sacrifice prevents it
the music, not quite untainted
survives tolerably well last I looked It concentrates my mind
The precision engineering On what wouldn’t survive
Volkswagen, the autobahn Unthinkable defeat
Gone, or at least well hidden Those things, you can have no doubt,
are the bad bits, the racial purity Is what George’s war was always about
ethnic cleansing,
the righteousness that could pursue
Lebensraum at the expense of millions
We need to still paraphrase Hitler

We need to ask ourselves
when any young man forfeits
what for?
The nation’s survival is presented

as an indivisible thing
Hitler’s conceit

strings # œ œ
#œ œ #œ # œ œ nœ œ
& 43 ‰ #œJ #œ œ Œ ‰ #œ #œ œ Œ
J
‰ nœ œ
J œ Œ
3 3 3
& 4 ###˙˙˙ ™™ ###˙˙˙ ™™

3
Œ guitarœ #œ # œ œ œ œ Œ #œ œ œ œ œ nœ b œ œ œ œ
3 3
lead
œ #œ Œ
3 ˙˙ ™™
˙ ™™piano r/h ˙ ™™
æ æ æ
˙™
?3 j
4 œ œ™ œ œ
‰
œ™ œ œ œ œ™
j
œ œ
3
/4 œ œ ‰ Œ j œ ‰ Œ j ‰ Œ j
Drum Set
œ œ œ œ œ œœ
kick snare
œ
œ œ
4
œ
& ‰ œJ œ Œ ∑ ∑
dim 4th
#œ < œ > Œ
3
œ nœ œ b#œœ œ œœ
3
& ˙Œ˙ ™™ œ œ œ nœ #œ Œ
˙˙ ™™
#œ œ œ
æ parent octatonic mode
? ‰
œ™
∑ ∑
œ œ
what
Dr. / œ œ
‰ Œ
œ
j ∑ ∑
FIGURE 1. ‘Paraphrasing Hitler’: Opening harmonic sequence and mode. Graeme Downes
and no minor intervals (calculated against a tonic drone). The implied octatonic
mode on C# used in this song rests its morbidity on the minor second and third and
in particular, the diminished fourth (C#-F).
It is fair to say that my ability to get the music of ‘Paraphrasing Hitler’ to respond
to the enormity of the subject would scarcely be possible if I hadn’t gathered these
particular stones. Or put another way, if I possessed no more than a rock harmonic
palette, I doubt I could have attempted to set this text with anything approaching a
clear conscience.11
The basic tactic of the song’s opening is to underpin Hitler’s calm rationality
uttered at a safe distance with what amounts to battle music that I hoped would
hint at the violence, barbarity and suffering of the actual battle (symbolic of the
nightmare of war generally, from which Germany would have to emerge). Much of
this is onomatopoeic, the soundscape of modern warfare being one of sonic extremes
ranging from the low rumbling of tanks to the boom of large artillery, small arms and
(in the case of the Eastern front) the hellish shriek of Katyusha rockets. Additional to
the morbidity generated by the chosen modality, polymeters help depict the chaos of
battle through 3/4, 6/8, 9/8 (via the lead guitar’s triplets, though the phrasing groups
these in pairs) whilst the drums’ kick and snare pattern imply a 6/4 pattern across
two bars of the parent time signature.
The song then had to articulate a great lifting of oppression, the rebirth of the
German nation after the war, its slow agonising reconstitution of itself out of its own
destruction and painful self-analysis. Example two shows the piano progression of
this middle section. The musical signifiers here are twofold. Certain of its progressions
(the initial bVI#6 [German sixth]-Ic-#viº7-V7d for example) would not be out of
place in Beethoven (the modulation itself may well have been lifted from the second
movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, bar 29–30, whilst the third inversion
seventh chord is a late-period Beethoven signature). The iv6-I progression with the
melodic 3-4-5 ascent (doubled in the strings in the recording) was selected to evoke
the conclusions of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Götterdämmerung (described by
Ernest Newman as the ‘motive of longing’ and the tail-piece to the ‘Redemption by
Love’ motive in the respective operas).12 Additionally, the melodic leaps of a major
sixth are synonymous with German folk music.
3 j j
Œ ‰ j 68 œ œ ‰ Œ
{
&4 ∑ Œ Œ Œ ‰ j œœ Œ Œ ‰ j
‹
œ œ œ™ œ
3 æ
& 4 nnb˙˙˙ ™™™
æ™ æ
8 #n˙˙˙ ™™™ æ æ
˙™
æ
nn#˙˙˙ ™™ n#˙˙˙ ™™™ #n ˙˙ ™™ n˙˙˙ ™™™
6
par - ti- tion the cold war the
? 43 j ™
bœ œ œ œ bœ œ ™ œ œ 8 œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ
j 6
Db: V7/ii D: bVI#6 Ic #ivdim 7 V7d Ib (add 9)
œ Œ™
Œ™ ‰ ≈ œ œ œ
j
7
‰ j 38 #œ ™
j
& œ œj œ #œ œ Œ
68
{
Œ j
‹ Ber - lin œ œ œœ œ œ
æ æ 38 æ 68 fij æ æ æ™ æ æ
& n˙˙˙ ™™™ #˙˙ ™™ ™ œ ™™ œœ ™™ bœœœ ™™™ nbœœœœ ™™™™
wall the shame of it all the mu - sic a lit - tle
bœ ™
œœ ™ œ™
nœ #œ ˙˙˙ ™™
? 3 6 j j j
nœ œ œ œ œ#œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ 8 bœ œ œ 8 œ œ nœ œ œ œj œ œj œ œ œ œ œ
IV6/ii7b vi bVI#4 vi G: I iv iv6
j
13
œ j
{
& œ œ œ ‰ ‰ œ œ ‰ ‰
‹
œ œ œ
æ æ
œœ ™™ æ j æ
œœ #œœœœ ™™™™ œœæœ œœœ œœæœ ™™
j j
™
tar - nished sur - vives as does stru - del,
œ™
& œœœ œœ œœ
œ œ œ
? j j j j j j
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
I vb V7/II II7sus4
Œ™
16
j
{
& #œ œ ‰ œ œ ‰ ‰ ‰ œ #œ
‹ beer
œ
æ œœœ œœæœ ™™
j
nœœæœ ™™ æ™
™™
œ nœ bœ
™ ™
œ œ
- fests and foot - ball and we
& #œœœ œœœ
œœ ™™
J
# œœœ ™™
? j j ™ œ ™
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
J J #œ œ
II7 V7sus4
V7
FIGURE 2. ‘Paraphrasing Hitler’: Middle section harmony. Graeme Downes

Such musical allusions are no idle showing-off of knowledge and would be vulgar
if they were. They are there to raise the issue of the cultural legacy of Nazism – that,
as the lyric that accompanies the Wagner quote suggests, ‘the music, a little tarnished,
Ernest Newman as the ‘motive of longing’ and the tail-piece to the ‘Redemption by
Love’ motive in the respective operas).12 Additionally, the melodic leaps of a major
sixth are synonymous with German folk music. survives’. A visiting German classical
composer in the 1990s (whose name I no longer recall) opined that composers for
the modern German concert hall have to start from a double negative, that the music
should not sound like Wagner and, no matter what it sounds like, must be useless for
any purpose other than itself.
The critical commentary inherent in ‘Paraphrasing Hitler’ is imbued in other
songs on Corporate Moronic. For example, ‘Socrates for a Day’ alludes to the role of
rock music in propaganda (at the time of writing this song, the National Party of
New Zealand has recently purloined Coldplay’s ‘Clocks’ for a promotional DVD –
subsequently withdrawn when the media discovered it). It states a personal credo of
the role of alternative rock music (essentially a rewording of the German composer’s
contention regarding postwar classical music), namely: ‘We could do better / I
know it don’t bug me / We could make an effort / To make this music less ugly
/ But then music with no utility / Is our responsibility’.13 In this sense, the album
is dialogic, interrogating on different levels and with regard to different music the
moral conundrum of music and what it can be put in the service of.
In addition to the Germanic references and the postwar cultural legacy it
problematises, the 6/8 shuffle groove evokes the underpinning influence of American
popular music. The progression V7/II-II7 sus4-II7-V7 sus4 at the conclusion of
example two is commonplace in Randy Newman’s work but, as Peter Winkler argues,
this signature is an appropriation of older Americana, namely barbershop.14 In this
respect, the allusion to Americana has an obvious relevance to the true subject of the
song, which has yet to be revealed. There is a deliberate attempt to co-join Germanic-
and American-sounding music in this central section.
Then of course came the musical task of drawing a comparison between the
monster who was Hitler and the modern political leaders in question, achieved
simply by reprising, in slightly altered form, the music associated with Hitler at
the outset. The major departure from the initial verse material is highly significant,
that the more recent ‘rationality uttered at a safe distance’ (‘all that we hold dear’,
etc.) relinquishes the grip of the Shostakovichian musical language in favour of
a more Western tonal language (tonic and dominant, in fact). But it is the short
instrumental postlude to this text that articulates the terrible comparison that is the
song’s premise. On the one hand, the music is uncompromisingly redolent of Western
tonality (a baroque sequence, in fact, emanating from the initial I7d-IVb progression
in F and concluding with the decidedly classical Neapolitan imperfect cadence, flat
IIb-V7). But the eruption of intense polyrhythms – 9/8 in the lead guitar, 6/8 in the
rhythm section with the pizzicato strings’ duplets implying 2/4 – fuses the sequence’s
baroque rationality with the polyrhythmic gestures of the Stalingrad music, evoking
its maniacal aspect. This was designed to express, or at least I hoped it would, a
chilling equivalence between the song’s historical protagonists, their rationality at a
safe distance and the barbarism that their rhetoric sanctioned.15
In the end, the operations this song performs within the confines of a short pop
song were bound to be slightly cartoonish. But then, for me, the cramming of vast
oppositions and whole historical eras into a song of short duration has a cut-to-the-
chase succinctness that I like, whilst the short-windedness of it, the lack of breadth
to the utterance has the effect, it seems to me, of not aggrandising either party.16
An unwavering faith in technological warfare, an ideology based on the notion of
predetermination, a penchant for misleading dialects disseminated by a government/
corporate-controlled media to disguise violent actions, combined with highly
censored media coverage of foreign military adventures in the pursuit of oil: which
of the two administrations am I talking about?
Canadian writer and thinker John Ralston Saul, writing as far back as 1993, wrote
in his book Voltaire’s Bastards:
There is in the late twentieth century a general feeling that Hitler – and perhaps Stalin,
although people in the West feel no personal need to take him into account – was an
accident of history. He caught us off guard, but we recovered in time to meet this force of
evil in combat. Now he is gone. A horrible aberration. It isn’t surprising that no one wants
to hold on to the memory of Hitler as an image of modern normalcy. But if this is still
the Age of Reason and if Hitler is the great image of reason’s dark side, then he is still very
much with us.17
And of course it could not be otherwise. Knowledge that has utility (particularly
of the military or propaganda variety) passes from the vanquished to the victorious.
Even the Wikipedia page for ‘Shock and Awe’ – the military strategy of the Iraq
war in 2003 – notes the doctrine’s derivation from, among other military strategies,
Blitzkrieg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the way back to Sun Tzu.18 In writing
about a specific period of human history, I hope to have presented the argument, via
this song and the album as a whole, that effective mechanisms for the exercise of power
are always prone to recycling and that, when they are, comparisons should be made.

‘Middle age giving the lie to dreams of ‘They That Once Were Eager Fellas’
immortality’ (draft 1) (draft 8)
They that once were hardy fellas They that once were eager fellas
Turn one by one to Cinderellas Turn one by one to Cinderellas
Stay at homes, domestic types Who heed the call
not young and gay To the glittering ball
Just portly, tired and slightly gray But, domestic types, they turn it down
The city’s late night hub-bub The city’s hubbub’s out of bounds
Someone else’s playground now It’s someone else’s playground now
The old man and the sea come true Some hanker to swell the midnight ranks
the maggots feast achievement’s corpse But bow their heads to circumstance
For what else can be done? Not worth the sleep
To stay all night and fight them off Or the dates they keep
Not worth the dog’s inconvenience at dawn With the whining dog when the sun first
nor the restless in-tray’s drumming fingers lingers
Or the insistent in-tray drumming its
Comes a time to reassess fingers
Even though there’s good strength left
How many battles and at what price won Freedom pawned for a family,
and the war still lost regardless Car, a boat on the mortgage, a boat they
With thoughts such as these never use
a general cannot lead, Freedom scorned, a dull memory formed
an army will not follow While they’re slipping off brown, sensible
shoes
No, leave the jungle gyms and roundabouts As spent a force as General Lee
to prickly youths in white saloons Their escapades like books in dusty attics
to carbon foot down hard their youth away A regrettable few fight Waterloos
and leave about as much as the next man But most see sense at Appomatox
given time
They that once were eager fellas
Turn one by one to Cinderellas
And leave the neon jungle gyms,
The high street slides and the roundabouts
To prickly youths in white saloons
To carbon foot down hard their mark
In siren songs that split the dark
‘They That Once Were Eager Fellas’
The second song for discussion, ‘They That Once Were Eager Fellas’, moves away from
the political towards the personal. This is a song naturally connected with my own
middle age although it also aims to distil universal themes from personal resonances.
The substance in the song text remains much the same from the first to the final
draft. The language was simplified because I found the higher poetic tone of the
first draft fundamentally at odds with the song’s purpose as it evolved, that purpose
being to gently mock both the retiring middle-aged protagonists and their ‘boy racer’
usurpers. The text is laden with opposition: the mundane domestic world compared
to the glittering inner city, and the age and relative physical drive that separates the
inhabitants of each – the masculine and the emasculated. The unfocused military
imagery of the first draft was later condensed to specific reference, but again with an
in-built opposition, between the wasteful carnage in defeat that was Waterloo and
the sensible, bloodless capitulation of Appomattox at the end of the American Civil
War. But at the same time I hoped to communicate a sense of connectedness in the
continuum of history: that Robert E. Lee was, in a sense, another Napoleon, a hero
on a white horse who over-reached and lost.19
No matter what we do with our youth, no matter how productive we make it,
middle age brings with it (speaking from personal experience) an unassailable feeling
that in spite of our best efforts we squandered it in frivolous ways or futile gestures.
This was acknowledged in the final lines of the first draft, that the boy racers are
as much a symbol of ‘eternal recurrence’ as an oppositional entity.20 Though their
activities might differ from those the middle-aged protagonists tacitly did in their
youth, I hoped to suggest an overriding sense of equivalence, that the youths in
the white saloons are both the ghosts of the protagonists and new protagonists in
the making – who likewise will look back eventually and see they, too, made no
significant mark whatsoever (the word ‘mark’ is indeed stigmatised as its opposite
– inconsequential – whilst the carbon footprint asserts their only lasting legacy as
environmentally negative). That said, the juxtaposition of the implied wheelie with
the word ‘song’ perhaps suggests an uneasy assessment of self-expression as anything
of lasting significance, mine included, and whether indeed in composing a song like
this in middle age I am in fact fighting a regrettable Waterloo.
The challenge of this song was to underscore the text’s localised oppositions, its
geographical spaces and the sense of the present protagonists sharing a past with their
antagonists, and in turn sharing an almost inevitable future of regret. The central
poetic idea is one of circularity and futility and my main task was to find a musical
analogue to this. My PhD thesis on Mahler revolved around his and other composers’
use of an axial tonal system of keys a major third apart. This is a compositional device

& 8 Œ ™ bœ œ œ J bœ ™ bœ œ œ™
12 j bœ œ™ œ ‰ œ œ bœ œ j j œ œj
{
J J J bœ œ œ J
æ æ
& 8 bwæ ™ w ™™
bw ™
12
they that once were ea - ger fel - las turn one by one to
b w™
w b w™
8 bœæ™ œ™æ
? 12 æ
œ™
æ
œ™ æ
œ™
æ
œ™
æ
œ™
æ
œ™
æ
bœ ™
æ
œ™
æ
œ™
æ
œ™
j #œ œ ™
4
œ œ #œ #œ
2
{
& #œ J ∑
Ó™ ™ Œ™ ‰ #œ œ #œw ™ œ j œ j
w ™™ w ™™ œ œ œ œ
Cin - der - rel - las
& ##w œ #œ œ œ œ
w œ œ ##œwæ #œ œ
æ œ # œ œ œ œ
? nœ ™ œ™ œ™ œ™ nœ ™ œ™ œ™ œ™
æ æ æ æ æ æ æ æ
FIGURE 3. Opening of ‘They that once were eager fellas’. Graeme Downes
that was used extensively by Malher and the Romantic-era composers who preceded
him.21 Major-third-related keys (Ab-E-C) underscore the idea of circularity, of the boy
racers as unremarkable middle-aged men in the making. This axis of major-third keys
has three important properties. First, the keys are whole-tone related, so useful for
musical expressions of inaction, drifting, blockage or futility. Whole-tone scales and,
by extension, chord and key progressions struggle to achieve a tonal centre and are
usually weak rather than strong progressions. Second, they provide a framework for
creating a sense of circularity, for having gone two steps by major thirds, a third step
brings the music back to the tonal starting point. Third, they have the potential to
communicate a sense of tonal flux, as each major-third-related chord in the sequence is
bVI (or sharp V) to its predecessor. As such, major-third progressions have a tendency
to cancel out the tonic status of the chord that precedes them.
The song’s A section is predicated on the opposition between Ab and E.22 I tried to
build a dichotomy between the initial chord progression (Ab, F minor, Fb [E], which
appears to me quite assertive in its harmonic movement) and the E major music that
succeeds it (where the dominant chord B takes place over an E pedal, undermining
any assertiveness it might have by blurring harmonic function). It was hoped that the
dichotomy in conjunction with the lyric would delineate the remembered potency of
youth and the present diminished potency the protagonist now embodies.
At the end of the final A section, the full set of these major thirds appear. At the
point where the boy racers appear in the lyric, C minor briefly emerges to form an
association with them (see Figure 4). What pleased me about this solution is that C
sounds for the first time like the tonic (albeit temporarily) whilst the overall tonic,
Ab, which immediately succeeds it sounds temporarily like bVI in relation to it, that
is to say, hierarchically subordinate. This seemed emotionally analogous to how the
middle-aged protagonists often feel towards their former selves and the boy racers
who are the living embodiment of that memory – that while they represent no direct
threat, they are symbolically a reminder of dominance and decay. Once Ab is sounded
as bVI in C minor, the music quickly restores the Fm to Fb/E progression of the initial
verses, restoring Ab as the tonic via the bVI-I progression. It is at this point that the
boy racer’s actions, ‘to carbon foot down hard their mark’ emerges to be sung over
the protagonists’ music (the opening Ab-Fm-Fb/E progression), with the guitar and
piano triumphantly playing the tune that set the words ‘it’s someone else’s playground
now’ from the first verse immediately in its wake (shown in brackets in example four).
This I hoped would underscore the boy racers’ possession of the playground and the
ephemeral nature of their tenure. and the abject futility of their actions. In the end, the
song expires on the B-major chord over E in the bass as a final gesture of capitulation.
The boy racers may be an object of derision, anger or envy, but come what may, they
will get their comeuppance. They, too, will come to this.
8 Œ™ ‰ Œ œj nœ ™ œ bœJ bœ ‰ Œ ™ Œ™ Œ™
62
& 12 Œ œj œ œJ œ bœJ œ
{
j œ™
12 œ™ œj œæ™ ˙æ™
œ
j æ æ bœj bbœœ œ œ ™
™ ™ œœ œœ ™™ b˙˙˙ ™™™
Œ ‰ Œ
to prick - ly youths in white saloons
w™
& 8 #wœ #œœ œœ ™ bœ ˙˙ ™
æ™ æ™
œ œ b ˙ b œœ œœ
æ æ æ æ æ æ æ
œ™ bœæ™
J
æ æ æ æ
bœ ™ bœ ™ œ™
? 12
8 œ™ œ™ œ™ œ™ œ™ œ™ œ™
Cm: I i i7d bVI bVI7d
& Œ™
j j
65 Ab: I7d
j œ œ bœ œ™ œ
{
Œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
J J bœ J
bœ œ bœ œ ™
™ Œ™ j æ™
& bbœ˙˙™™ œ œ œ ™ #Œ˙ ™ j æ
to car - bon foot down hard their mark
æ ˙™ b œœ bœœ œœ ™ b œœ bn œœ œœ ™™
æ
? æ æ æ æ æ æ æ æ
œ™ œ™ œ™ œ™ bœ ™ œ™ œ™ œ™
Ab: vi bVI I
Œ™ Ó™ Ó™ Ó™
{
67
& œ™
& Œ˙ ™
j some j
œ #nœ˙ ™ œ œ™
j œ™ Œ™
(it's - one el - se's play - ground now)
œ™ œ™
bœ bœ bœœ œœ ™
æ™
œœ ™
b œœ J æ™ æ™
b œœ
æ
˙ ˙™ b œœJ
? æ æ æ æ æ æ æ æ
œ™ œ™ œ™ œ™ bœ ™ œ™ bœ ™ œ™
vi bVI I I7d
FIGURE 4. Excerpt from ‘They that once were eager fellas’. Graeme Downes

Conclusion
I designed and developed my PhD research in musicology in part to gain some degree
of mastery of the common practice tonal system, so that I could use it creatively.
As such, I view my work not as the product of intrinsic artistic ability, but as the
result of years of research, both formal, through the opportunities provided at the
university, and informal, reflecting experiences and lessons learned in performance.
Those of us who have attained a degree of celebrity might like to project to the public
that we are idiot savants, because that makes us appear a little more like magicians,
which in turn feeds idolatry and from that, record sales. But, in truth, any artistic
achievement is hard-won ground, born of the study and understanding of all that
we find appealing or useful from the many who have laboured before us. To quote
Leonard Cohen (though I mean this to be inclusive of both classical and popular
music), I too work in the ‘tower of song’ and am enabled to do so largely on account
of my ongoing research into my fellow tenants.23
4
Across Cultures:
The gamelan community in Dunedin
On Saturday 17 October 2009, the bright percussive sounds of the Central Javanese
gamelan could be heard echoing through the inner-city streets. Over one hundred
of Dunedin’s residents braved the wintry night air and climbed the steep stairs that
led to the venue known as the Temple Gallery: a historic, converted synagogue now
functioning as an art gallery that hosts occasional performances. Entering the packed
room, children raced to sit on one of the many cushions scattered over the wooden
floorboards, while adults stood against the back wall. All eyes were fixed ahead, to
take in the sight of the bronze gongs suspended from ornate wooden frames, the
gold coloured bars resting over resonating frames, the colourful lighting display and
the fourteen members of the community ensemble Puspawarna Gamelan, who were
seated on the floor. This special night, titled ‘the Echoes Concert’, was a highlight
on the local arts calendar, an opportunity to hear new compositions for gamelan
by local composers, and to encounter Javanese musical culture through a unique
performance. The lights dimmed, the performers raised their wooden mallets, and
the music began…
This chapter considers an ensemble of instruments – the gamelan – within the
context of Dunedin, New Zealand. Gamelan are metallophone gong and chime
ensembles from Indonesia, which are used to accompany performing arts such as
dance, shadow puppets and dramatic theatre. Gamelan ensembles also perform
instrumental concerts in their own right. There are a variety of reasons that explain
why these instruments have been transplanted from one relatively distant culture to
another. Like people, instruments also move around the world’s ethnoscape, as part
of global flows.1 Over the past century, and especially during the past sixty years,
gamelan instruments and music have been transplanted from Indonesia to many
countries around the globe, including New Zealand. In 1995, the Department of
Music at the University of Otago borrowed a Cirebon gamelan from Wellington
ethnomusicologist Allan Thomas, as a way of helping to nurture an interest in gamelan
among its students. The success of this venture prompted the Department to purchase
its own gamelan the following year and to establish a regular performance group.2
This gamelan hails from Surakarta in Central Java, and is still in use on campus in
ACROSS CULTURES: THE GAMALAN COMMUNITY IN DUNEDIN 55

Dunedin over fifteen years later.3 It is this particular gamelan, and its contribution to
music in Dunedin, that is the focus of our chapter, which provides perspectives on
how performing gamelan can be used as a research tool for understanding another
culture. In order to achieve this, we have two objectives. The first is to understand
the place of gamelan in Otago by emphasising the learning of Javanese instruments
as a research tool in ethnomusicology. The second objective grounds the work in
the paradigm ‘performance as research’, that is, considering not only the playing
of instruments as a research method, but also the creative process of performance
as research itself in terms of its artistic value and contribution to knowledge. In
doing this, we examine viewpoints from a Javanese gamelan instructor as well as
the players, who comprise a culturally diverse group of community members living
permanently or temporarily in the city of Dunedin.
This chapter is divided into four parts. The first three focus on establishing the
context in which gamelan is found at Otago and the rationale for undertaking this
study in the first place. Part one examines Asian music and cultural flows to New
Zealand, while part two considers gamelan in tertiary education, and part three looks
at gamelan performance as a research method. Part four looks at performing gamelan
in Dunedin and presents two case studies with the aim of providing specific insight,
first, on the community group that has evolved over many years, and second, on
tertiary instruction in gamelan at Otago.

   Cultural
  flows:
  Asian
  musics
  in
  New
  Zealand
New Zealand’s Asian soundscape is very much reflected by the nation’s increased
number of migrants from Asia, which helps form the country’s fledgling
multiculturalism.4 Over the past few decades, the organised celebrations of
various Asian cultural festivals have served to diversify New Zealand’s performance
landscape. For example, the Chinese New Year, Lantern Festival, and the Diwali
Festival are well-established cultural events that have received much attention from
the media and public, partly due to their large scale.5 Other urban festivals dedicate
specific stages to Asian performance, such as the Asia Corner in Wellington’s Cuba
Street Carnival.6 These events, along with local communities’ cultural celebrations,
form part of the annual calendar of public festivals that help celebrate New Zealand’s
growing diverse population. In addition, there is also Asian music practised by
non-Asians: New Zealanders of many cultural backgrounds are increasingly
playing not only the sounds of Europe and reflecting on the nation’s postcolonial
cultural milieu, but also the musics of, for instance, Asia, Africa and South America
– thus indicating the country’s multicultural present and the influences of global
flows. Not only has the transcultural flow of New Zealand’s European and Pacific
heritages helped shape the nation over the past few centuries, but more recently a
culturally diverse contribution to culture creation is making its place in the local
soundscape.
One may wonder about the cultural connections between Dunedin as a relatively
small southern New Zealand city and culturally distant Java. Some musical
transplantations can be explained by diasporic flows of one sort or another,7 although
in New Zealand, and even more so in Dunedin, the number of residents who self-
identify as Indonesian is relatively small compared with migrants from other Asian
cultures.8 In 2006 at the last national census, New Zealand’s Asian population
numbered 354,552 (or 9.2 per cent of the total population of 4,027,947), and of this
number only 3,261 identified as Indonesian (for this census, however, respondents
were able to identity with more than one ethnicity).9 For a country that self-identifies
as a migrant nation, and has links to Indonesia, the census figures on Indonesian
social flows to New Zealand are particularly small. Most surprising is the near lack of
any serious educational or cultural connections with a potentially profitable trading
partner and significant regional neighbour. Indeed, in the early 2000s New Zealand
witnessed the demise of the two academic programmes that helped contribute
to Indonesian language and culture studies with the closure of the University of
Auckland’s programme in 2000 and Victoria University of Wellington’s programme
in 2003. In summary, the setting of Dunedin’s gamelan is not then explained by
migratory flows, although, as shown later, the importance of one Indonesian culture
bearer, Joko Susilo,10 has been significant for the ensemble and those who learn its
teacher’s musical traditions.
Gamelan in tertiary education

The educational context of gamelan has a long history in the Western world and is
mostly connected to the rise of ethnomusicology in the 1950s and particularly to
the pioneering work of Mantle Hood.11 His work largely pertains to the notion of
bi-musicality which, during the first few decades of ethnomusicology’s short history,
usually meant having a grounding in Western art music on the one hand and engaging
with a musical tradition that was geographically or culturally distant on the other.
Hood’s goal was for students of Western performance instruments to become somewhat
fluent (to use a linguistic analogy) in another culture’s music and sensibilities, and to
gain an insider’s perspective of the technical skills and performance practices. The
intent was not always for students to become as equally proficient in gamelan as in
their primary Western instrument, rather it was a means of understanding a musical
culture through performance. Over time, this approach was adopted and adapted by
many education institutions, such that bi-musicality developed multiple uses, linking

it with knowledge acquisition, multicultural studies, cultural and ethnic advocacy,
aesthetic and artistic pluralism, and community outreach.12
A consequence of the global interest in gamelan, especially with the research-,
educational- and performance-based interest from ethnomusicologists, was that
New Zealand would eventually develop its own gamelan groups. To date, there are
several active groups in New Zealand, most of which are based around educational
institutions:13 Nelson School of Music (later relocated to Auckland as a community
ensemble), Victoria University of Wellington (three ensembles), University of
Canterbury, and University of Otago. There are three genres of gamelan currently
in New Zealand: Central Javanese (three ensembles), Cirebon (one ensemble), and
Gamelan Gong Kebyar (two ensembles). The first two types are from Java, while
the last is from Bali. The first gamelan brought to New Zealand dates from 1974
(the Cirebon ensemble),14 with the most recent set of instruments (Gamelan Gong
Kebyar) purchased by composer and gamelan performer Gareth Farr in 2003, and
originally housed at Massey University in Wellington before the establishment of the
New Zealand School of Music.15
The Otago gamelan was purchased especially for use within an educational
context, and also for community music-making. It was established at the University
of Otago with several aims: to contribute to a culturally diverse music education,
to help with the musicianship of university students, to offer a new context for the
creation of music (i.e., composition), and to provide an ensemble for community
music-making. The Otago ensemble, named the Puspawarna Gamelan, is comprised
of many members of the local community outside the university.16 This is not
unusual, as New Zealand has several gamelan based at tertiary education institutions
that are also used for community classes.17
Gamelan performance as research method

The practice of learning to play and perform a musical instrument as a research
method in ethnomusicology or world music classes has been advocated by various
scholars.18 Learning to play a musical instrument in a specific cultural context allows
a student to engage closely with the intricacies of cultural expression as embodied in
the musical traditions of the culture in question. The learning process may include
mastering techniques and building knowledge of a certain repertoire. In addition, it
often includes performing in contexts that are understood as appropriate to the music
and culture. This method is, in many ways, in keeping with Geertz’ anthropological
model of observing performing arts practices as windows into a particular culture.19
It does, however, de-emphasise Geertz’ focus on the boundary separation between
performer and player.
The field of ethnomusicology has done much over the past sixty years in terms
of its engagement with learning the music of another culture as part of the music
ethnographer’s rite of passage. Teachers and students of ethnomusicology have long
espoused the idea of learning another type of music to the one they have grown up
with (usually the Western art music tradition). While recognising that the discipline
has since changed its epistemological framework in terms of what it studies, and
how and where it does so, the practice of learning another music culture, whether
travelling across the globe to do this or to one’s neighbour in the same street, still
maintains currency as a way of understanding and celebrating music as part of the
human phenomenon.20
In connection with a broad definition of scholarly research, the process of musical
creativity, whether writing or performing music, must equally be considered part
of a research process. Here, we will focus on performance as research. Learning a
piece of music is an investigation: it is a journey into a sound world that demands
original interpretation of sonic materials that connects the player and instrument (or
voice) with the cultural product, music. The musical output is new each time; it is
performed and in a public context its reception is under the critical scrutiny of an
audience (and very often a media) gaze.
In terms of its place as a research tool, gamelan offers several parameters. While
one objective of using the instruments is as a window into Indonesian musical
practices, the researcher is also able to study how students learn by using the
instruments. The instruments act as a place for the research of music in transplanted,
diasporic and transcultural settings, where knowledge about musical and learning
processes is just as important as the study and understanding of the music itself.
In this particular setting, the researcher is able to understand more about how the
Otago gamelan creates culture in the New Zealand context and what the process
means to its players.
Performing gamelan in Dunedin

The Dunedin public is able to participate in gamelan performance by joining the
community-based ensemble Puspawarna Gamelan, the instrumental ensemble
mentioned above. Since its formation in 1995, the group has had an ever-changing
membership of up to twenty players, several of whom are long-term members and
University of Otago staff (including the authors of this chapter). Overseeing the
musical instruction is Joko Susilo, a Central Javanese dhalang (puppeteer) who
also acts as a gamelan tutor for the Department of Music. Due to the gamelan’s
connection with the University of Otago, many of Puspawarna Gamelan’s transient
players are tertiary students who may join for the duration of the academic year, and

sometimes stay with the group for the duration of their university study. Although
new members are encouraged to join at any time, most are inspired to enlist after
seeing the group perform in public concerts, often in community venues such as
Dunedin Public Art Gallery or Otago Museum. Almost all new members begin
without prior experience playing Indonesian music. Some, moreover, have never
played an instrument of any kind from any culture. This makes for an ensemble of
diverse skill levels, and calls for varied approaches in the learning of music and the
cultural context of gamelan performance.
The ensemble’s repertoire encompasses traditional instrumental music,
accompaniment to wayang kulit (shadow puppetry), and contemporary compositions
including improvisatory pieces that may incorporate non-Javanese instruments.21 The
mix of traditional and contemporary pieces in the group’s repertoire is represented
on the CD it released after fifteen years of performing.22 The CD includes eight
works: traditional pieces for gamelan and several newly composed works by Joko
Susilo and other composers based in Dunedin at the time (Alan Starrett and Brian
Bromberg).
The performance described in the opening of this chapter also featured both
traditional and new musical works for gamelan.23 It began with a small collection
of traditional pieces including ‘Ladrang Asmarandana, Laras Pelog Pathet Nem’
(‘Making Love’ [in the pelog nem mode]), and ‘Ayun Ayun, Pelog Pathet Nem’
(‘Waiting for the Loved One’ [in the pelog nem mode]). These pieces were used to
set the scene for the performance, offering the audience a taste of traditional Javanese
gamelan before the tone shifted and new compositions were presented. The first of
the new works was ‘Frogs’, described by composer Joko Susilo in the programme as
a ‘contemporary composition that combines a string trio with the sounds of Javanese
gamelan’.24 The fusion of non-Indonesian instruments with gamelan is a common
feature of Susilo’s compositions, and he instructed the audience to ‘listen out for the
frogs and insects as reflected in the Afro-Cuban guiro’ and to also ‘note the shift to
Balinese gamelan style with the rapid melody line played with hard mallets on the
gender instrument’.25 This unusual combination of instruments and cross-cultural
musical styles served to highlight the flexibility and creativity of the composer and
the instrumentalists. The sounds were designed to recreate the sounds of Java at a
particular moment, described in the programme as the following vignette: ‘As I walk,
the dappled moonlight plays across a dusty path while the sounds of frogs pierce the
summer air …’.26
The second new work to be premiered that evening was ‘Tides’, written by
University of Otago composition student and Puspawarna Gamelan performer Ali
Churcher. Instead of composing an avant-garde work, or a fusion piece like Susilo,
Churcher stated that her piece was ‘created with the goal of emulating a traditional
Javanese gamelan style’.27 This aside, she, like Susilo, was also influenced by nature,
noting that:
In older gamelan music, every instrument blends to form a cohesive wash of sound, and
individual instruments do not stand out. It is this unique blend that has inspired the title of
this piece, which also suggests that the frequent pushing and pulling of tempo in the music
is comparable with the moon’s effect on the oceans.28
The final composition performed was the highlight of the evening. This piece,
entitled ‘Echoes’, was composed by renowned New Zealand composer Anthony
Ritchie after receiving an invitation by Shelley Brunt to create a new work for the
ensemble.29 The resulting musical work grew out of the sense of collaboration and
community partnerships that are inherent in musical relationships in Dunedin.
Location and proximity also played a part: both Brunt and Ritchie are staff members
at the Department of Music, and their adjacent (and non-soundproof ) offices
resulted in many discussions about gamelan composition. During the composition
process, Ritchie came along to the ensemble’s rehearsals to get a better understanding
of the instruments:
Although I knew some rudimentary things about the instruments, composing this piece
gave me the opportunity to learn a great deal more. Being able to play a little in the ensemble
was invaluable, as was advice provided by leader Joko Susilo, Shelley [Brunt], Chris Watson
[Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago] and one of my students, Ali Churcher, who
coincidentally was writing a piece for gamelan [‘Tides’] at the same time.30
In the Dunedin setting, therefore, the gamelan group is helping to create musical
culture: through live performance of traditional Javanese and new New Zealand
musical works, and by inspiring Dunedin-based composers to write original music
for the group.
Gamelan has a place in the institutional setting of the University of Otago. Not
only is it a tool to help students understand aspects of Indonesian music, but the
instruments are also used to develop musicality, compositional techniques, and
cultural awareness. A variety of teaching and learning techniques are employed in
order to cater for both the experienced players and those who had never encountered
Indonesian music before. Students are also encouraged to reflect on their learning
experience through related coursework activities.31
In the musical environment of gamelan at Otago, student players learn about the
instruments through Susilo, who offers insider knowledge of the music and provides
a sense of authenticity for the players who are new to this type of music.32 One
teaching strategy is to instruct a single student on how to play an instrument, and

they would, in turn, teach a fellow classmate. As one student noted, ‘to have another
student there to explain to me what the bonang was all about was certainly helpful’.
This practice of ‘learning from others’ is a new experience for many students, with
some doubting their own abilities and those of their fellow classmates: ‘[I] still cannot
pick up if I lost [sic] the beat unless shown, although watching others helps but [I
am] never sure if they are right’.
Despite some students’ misgivings about this method, the gamelan practice often
enhances the collective music-making environment:
[I] often found myself looking around the group to see how someone was holding their
tabuh [mallet], how they were striking the keys or how they were dampening the notes.
Whilst Susilo was very helpful when asked for help with this, I had the impression that it
was expected in gamelan practise that you were actively trying to figure out what you had
to do yourself.
It also affords the opportunity for students to watch and learn from others before
they have an opportunity to play a particular instrument: ‘I had watched a student
yesterday so knew it was faster than the saron barung. I got help from a student next to
me who knew how to play all the instruments’. Due to the large number of students
in the class, some players are paired together on an instrument that would usually
accommodate only one player. For example, students playing instruments with a
wide pitch range (such as gambang) might each hold a tabuh (beater) and strike the
instrument an octave apart. This means that a student quickly finds confirmation
that they are playing correctly: ‘It really helped having someone else playing the
same part as me but in a different octave on the gambang. When either of us made
mistakes it was simply a matter of figuring out where the other person was up to in
the piece and following on from there’.33
What is most noticeable is the value the students place on the group learning
experience: ‘As a group effort, it was tremendous fun to be part of the gamelan
orchestra, and to feel the rhythm, to hear Dr Susilo’s singing, to anticipate the
hammers crashing down on the keys, it was a fabulous experience’. Such a student-
centred approach is, of course, one that has been argued for many years by educational
theorists such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky34 and the students
themselves valued this method considerably.
While some gamelan is taught by ear, the students also learn to play gamelan
pieces through number notation. Arabic numerals (kepatihan or cipher notation)
are provided on large whiteboards in the gamelan room and on printed handout
sheets. The tutor also sings the parts by reciting numbers in English (sometimes also
in Bahasa Indonesia) so that players can match the numbers on the instruments’
keys, or teaches by rote, where the learner will play an instrument by copying the
tutor. These methods are enlightening for many students, and provide insight into
the broader world of gamelan performance and musical collaboration: ‘A unifying
notation like this in which each instruments [sic] part is easily read by everyone in
the group made me think about gamelan performance practices. It appears to me
to be a very inclusive type of music and very much a group effort’. However, others
who had experience learning Western instruments from a Western stave found the
notation system to be confronting: ‘I cannot think of a simpler type of notation and
have no criticisms for it, it was however intimidating for me at first being so different
from Western Notation’. Such a response might be the result of the student having
already gained a firm foundation in Western music and musical practices, and the
experience of gamelan in this setting and at this moment was, as the student put it,
‘intimidating’. Similarly, students often comment on the use of symbols alongside the
numbers to indicate performative aspects: ‘I found the variety of symbols amongst
the numbers is what confused me. There were dots, bracket-like shapes on their
side above numbers, and certain numbers circled’. Some students preferred to learn
their parts from others rather than reading the notation system from the whiteboard:
‘Unless I have watched someone playing the instrument I find it hard to work out
what I have to play from the [white]board’.
Susilo’s role in the transmission of knowledge is twofold: he is both an individual,
autonomous musician, and a representative of gamelan performance tradition.35
However, gamelan learning, teaching and performance in Puspawarna Gamelan
is not intended as a means of accurately preserving Indonesian musical/cultural
heritage. Practice-based research involving contemporary gamelan music – especially
Indonesian and Western fusion – serves to highlight gamelan’s commonalities with
other music cultures, and serves to de-exoticise it.36 In this context, the gamelan
serves as a conduit for cultural understanding, and it acts as an object that can help
show different ways of structuring, interpreting, and understanding a part of one
country’s rich cultural heritage.37 The gamelan at Otago serves a place in the musical
education of tertiary students and also as a community ensemble. Puspawarna
Gamelan is simultaneously out of context in that it is recognised as still maintaining
its Indonesian roots, and even has an Indonesian tutor, and in context in that it
functions as an educational tool through its transcultural routes.38
For the players of gamelan, whether in the educational setting or in the community
ensemble, no matter what their knowledge about gamelan, or their playing ability,
every performance of a piece of music offers cultural insight through musical
interpretation. The research process in this setting is one based primarily on rehearsal
with the output being a performance. As with much other Central Javanese gamelan

music, pieces are learned in a systematic way with balungan (core melody) and
punctuating and decorating parts. Players would normally learn a basic structure in
the first instance and gradually be offered more complex ways of playing, whether in
terms of the melodic and rhythmic aspects of an instrumental part or with regard to
the musical structure. For the more competent player, the piece is usually structured
in more complex ways, particularly for the players of instruments such as gender and
bonang.
Conclusion
In the learning settings discussed in this chapter, the gamelan player creates
knowledge about many facets of gamelan performance. The use of music notation in
a learning or performance setting provides a prescriptive memory aid. The gamelan
player’s knowledge of the music is partly based on the written version of the piece
of music, where the musical structure is presented in a skeletal form for melody
and punctuating instruments. As a source material for creating insight through
musical interpretation of the notes, the use of notation helps the learner appreciate
literate aspects of the music as part of a broader comprehension of the entire learning
process. The same can be said of the use of the oral method or imitation as teaching
or learning methods for gamelan music. Each offers the learner source material for
piecing together a wider understanding of some of the strategies used for learning a
piece of music.
The process of learning a musical instrument in terms of comprehending the
musical output as a research object also contributes to culture creation. That is,
culture is created as a result of the performance of an existing or new musical work,
especially in terms of the interpretation of that work. The creation of culture that
has specific roots in Indonesia raises questions with regard to the authenticity of
the product in the New Zealand context. First, culture is being created within New
Zealand, and more locally in Dunedin. Second, this helps show the transcultural
parameters that permeate many spheres of contemporary culture, where diversity is
celebrated in an increasingly globally oriented context. As a unique aspect of New
Zealand’s increasingly diverse cultural milieu, gamelan performance in Dunedin
helps to promote a new politics of transcultural celebration, and also offers a way
of creating culture that reflects the changing dynamics of the complex make-up
of what constitutes culture in the first place. In this setting, gamelan performance
as an original ‘research’ output in New Zealand offers a hybrid cultural form that
challenges culture and creates it at the same time.
5
Subject2Change:
Musical reassemblage in the jazz diaspora
This chapter presents a discussion and analysis of the processes of composition and
performance that underscore the work of Dunedin-based jazz-fusion ensemble
Subject2Change. This ensemble has been a prominent part of Dunedin’s small jazz
scene since its creation in 2002, gigging regularly around town and performing at
local, regional and national music festivals. While initially performing a standard
repertoire from jazz, jazz-fusion, and Latin-jazz domains, the output of the ensemble
has evolved over time to focus on the representation of semi-structured and
completely improvised performances and recordings. This shift has been strongly
influenced by our own increasing interest in the notion of performance as research,
in which the ensemble, the live performance venue and the recording studio have all
become contexts for experimentation and discovery.
For us, this process is strongly tied to our efforts at reconciling different parts of
our professional musical lives as performers and music researchers. We have both
worked professionally as freelance musicians in earlier stages of our (non-academic)
careers, and have subsequently developed research careers with little or no relationship
to these earlier musical selves. Robert G.H. Burns, whose academic output is largely
concerned with English folk music, electric folk, and issues of nationalism in popular
music, was formerly a first-call session bassist in London and studio recording artist
for the BBC.1 Dan Bendrups, an ethnomusicologist specialising in the traditional
music of Rapanui (Easter Island), was formerly a brass performance teacher and
freelance trombonist involved in early music ensembles, Latin ensembles, and
other commercial performance contexts in Australia.2 Our involvement with
Subject2Change has provided both of us with a way of aligning our performative
and investigative selves within a collaborative and interactive context.
The result of this process is the development of new musical outputs, employing
and deploying performance techniques and sound elements in unusual and
innovative ways. These outputs test our ability to reconcile individual musical
thoughts with a shared narrative in the form of a song or composition. This chapter
examines the development of this process over about six years through the discussion
of four musical examples. Three of these are individual ‘songs’, while the fourth
SUBJECT2CHANGE: MUSICAL REASSEMBLAGE IN THE JAZZ DIASPORA 65

is a studio album recording. These examples chart our musical development from
simply combining extant musical styles in the first example, through to compositions
based on improvisations, and finally a studio recording involving entirely improvised
music performance.
Subject2Change in the local context

Subject2Change is an explicit product of the Dunedin context. Involving a
combination of university staff and community musicians, the ensemble was
originally formed by two New Zealanders recently returned from overseas and two
immigrants from the United Kingdom as a means of exploring ‘new directions’ in
jazz and jazz-fusion – international music domains with which all were familiar. The
instrumentation at that time consisted of a keyboard player who doubled on trumpet,
a saxophonist, a bassist and a drummer. Two more members joined the ensemble in
2004, a Peruvian percussionist and an Australian trombonist. Their experience of
working in commercial Latin American music contexts inspired the development
of Latin-jazz textures (and standards) in the ensemble’s performances – an influence
that has carried through into the ensemble’s original works. The percussionist left the
ensemble in 2006 and was replaced by an electric guitarist.
All members of Subject2Change have come from diverse backgrounds and origins,
representing training and traditions that do not all exist in Dunedin, but which,
where it not for our coming together in Dunedin, would not have merged in the
way that they have. As such, our connection to place is not reflected in identifiable
musical references. Rather, the importance of Dunedin for us is the city’s condensed
and somewhat isolated artistic environment, which has allowed us to undertake
musical experiments that, for commercial or other reasons, we may not have had
the opportunity to undertake in other places where we have lived and worked. Our
connection to the university and the university’s ethos of research experimentation
has also had a strong influence in this process.
Through Subject2Change we have enacted a kind of revival of our former
musical selves – an experience not dissimilar to other types of music revival. Tamara
Livingston defines revivals as ‘any social movement with the goal of restoring and
preserving a musical tradition which is believed to be disappearing or completely
relegated to the past’.3 She maintains, however, that among six criteria usually
present in a revival is the concept of the revivalists forming the basis of a community.
Subject2Change works as a musical community that enables members to perform
using musical styles and techniques that represent the return to a notional concept
of ‘home’, or place of origin complete with concepts of nostalgia. Subject2Change’s
musical output therefore reflects a deliberate and concerted attempt on the part of
all its members to reassemble a creative life after relocation. This results in three key
types of reassemblage: structural flexibility, interculturality and improvisation. The
shared language within which we are able to articulate these reassemblages is jazz – a
musical domain that is itself a reassembled tradition in the Dunedin context.
Jazz and improvisation in the local context

Our involvement in Subject2Change reflects our view of improvisation as the epitome
of artistic freedom, and the ensemble exists as an antidote to the creative limitations
of commercially orientated performances in which we are otherwise involved. This
said, for the ensemble to function effectively a grounding of ‘common practice’ is
required: both for musical coherence, and as a way of communicating the nature
of our outputs to potential audiences. All of us have, at one time or another, been
involved in different aspects of jazz performance, so jazz provides a practical home
for the ensemble. While the ensemble regularly plays jazz ‘standards’, these are often
altered metrically and harmonically in performance. Examples of this include Dizzy
Gillespie’s ‘Night in Tunisia’ played in 7/4 metre, Paul Desmond’s ‘Take 5’ played in
6/4, Thelonius Monk’s ‘Well You Needn’t’ played in 9/4 in the bass with the rest of
the group in 4/4, and the melody from Charlie Parker’s ‘Donna Lee’ superimposed
over Herbie Hancock’s ‘Chameleon’. There are also many original compositions that,
in the familiar construct of jazz performance, enable each member to improvise in
a non-structured format while other members play in a pre-arranged selection of
different metres. One of our early experiments placed the drums in 3/4, the bass in
5/4 and the keyboards and saxophone in 4/4.
Subject2Change regard notions of authenticity in music, and in jazz generally, as
less important than the need for self-expression, and more a way of acknowledging
commonality in musical influences and origins among members. The ensemble does
not therefore seek to situate itself within prevailing national and regional canons of
jazz practice. While conceptually indebted to the free jazz movement, epitomised
by Ornette Coleman’s seminal 1960 album which ‘… aimed to deconstruct the jazz
codes such as tonality and constant beat’,4 the music of Subject2Change shares none
of the socio-political concerns of the free jazz movement. Rather, it represents a
search for self-expression that is inclusive of the interests and perspectives of each of
the ensemble’s members.
This intertextual, polystylistic approach to jazz is shared by practitioners elsewhere
in the New Zealand jazz scene, both contemporary and historical. The origins of
jazz in early twentieth-century New Zealand were strongly tied to other pre-existing
music performance domains. As Alicia Ward explains: ‘Because jazz in New Zealand
was included under the dance music banner for the first half of the twentieth

century, its repertoire and performance practices were not specific to jazz music.
This leads to a very broad definition of jazz …’.5 Ward in fact characterises New
Zealand jazz as a ‘pastiche’ which developed in isolation from direct contact with
international sources: ‘this did not result in a syncretic (separate/regional) music, but
rather a pastiche (defined as a work or culture formed from disparate sources) as New
Zealand jazz musicians attempted to recreate American and/or British jazz’.6 Ward
argues for such developments to be considered under the guise of recontextualisation
as the basis for a new jazz culture:
The notion of cultural pastiche is embodied in the construction of a New Zealand jazz
culture, it has been demonstrated that jazz was imported into New Zealand directly
from the United States and also mediated through the jazz cultures developing in Great
Britain and Australia. This mediation of American jazz through British and Australian jazz
traditions means that by the time jazz was imported into New Zealand it had multiple,
layered influences, but these influences were decontextualized from their original sources.7
Alternatively, and articulating a cultural concept invoked elsewhere in this book,

Norman Meehan describes the work of prominent New Zealand jazz pianist Mike
Knock as having a ‘DIY’ approach, reflecting ‘a common New Zealand attitude;
one of jumping in with what you have and making do’.8 Nock’s recordings provide
something of a template for a polystylistic approach, often incorporating Latin forms
and other disparate influences.9 Meehan relates this to broader trends underpinning
New Zealand composition in general:
At a music forum in 2009, New Zealand composer Ross Harris said that he had always told
his students that the thing that marks New Zealand music as singular is that New Zealand
composers are free to do anything; lacking the historical burdens of composers from other
countries, they can do – and use – anything they want to …. Contrary to recent tourism
advertising campaigns, New Zealand culture is not pure; it’s assembled from those various
pieces to make something unique. The nature of the constituent parts themselves is not
important, it is how they are put together that is most meaningful.10
These trends in New Zealand jazz have been well maintained into the twenty-first
century, informing the jazz scenes of distinct urban centres and indeed contextualised
within the trope of music and place that underpins this book. One good example is
David Edwards’ discussion of Wellington jazz venue ‘The Space’:
The Space was a distinctly Wellington phenomenon. The Massey University jazz
conservatory was one reason for the scene taking place in Wellington, with some players
getting trained there and a few resisting the conformity that such training imposed. Others
studied composition at Victoria University, with its electro-acoustic composition facilities
proving popular, while others again had no formal training at all. Part of what made the
millennial Wellington scene distinctive was this melting pot aspect …11
Edwards further attributes the melting pot effect to the power of improvisation as
a musical tool that allows players from different backgrounds to ‘meet up’ in a free,
non-hierarchical manner.12
Like New Zealand, Australian jazz developed in relative isolation from Britain and
America, and early practitioners opted for formats that facilitated free expression. In
his discussion of collectively improvised jazz, John Whiteoak states:
[a] highly improvisatory form of music to emerge in Melbourne in the late 1930s was the
collectively improvised and highly contrapuntal style of jazz which had reached its pinnacle
or ‘golden age’ in America a decade earlier. The emergence of what subsequently came to
be known as the Australian ‘traditional jazz’ movement is one of the most significant events
in Australian jazz history.13
Bruce Johnson refers to this development as a movement in which largely self-

trained musicians participated in collective acts of free expression, unburdened by
the constraints of the commercial dance music contexts in which jazz musicians often
performed.14 Johnson contrasts this movement to the slick sound of the ‘modern jazz’
movement that developed in the 1950s,15 both being eventually replaced and/or
incorporated into the institutionalisation of jazz in tertiary education in Australia
between 1973 and 1980.16
When positioned in relation to the broader regional context, Subject2Change’s
repertoire shares a number of characteristics with Australian-based movements
that have been developing since the 1960s. John Whiteoak describes Australian
jazz experimentalism of the 1960s as including ‘hard bop, Latin jazz (bossa nova
especially), jazz and poetry … “free jazz” and “Eastern”-influenced jazz’.17 For
Subject2Change, the composition process bears more resemblance to Brian Brown’s
‘drama’ or ‘intensity’ concept of shaping improvisation,18 where a musical concept
is produced through improvised interplay by the ensemble, then developed and
intensified. While Subject2Change employ none of the story-telling techniques
attributed to Brown by Whiteoak, a kind of musical narrative may be perceived in
the way the song moves between geo-culturally identifiable genre types. Like the
McKimm/Mendelson Quartet of the 1960s, who used a ‘free jazz model, which
allowed for relatively unrestricted development of horizontal lines and contrapuntal
relationships’19 the improvisations of Subject2Change develop with few preconceived
melodic or rhythmic directives. Other more recent exponents of these models and
methods include Sydney groups the Necks and the Catholics: examples of free
improvisation in a jazz-rock context that was accessible to a broader audience, and

considerably more commercially viable than the experimentalism of the 1960s and
’70s.20
Whether emanating from the jazz avant garde, or developed within art music
circles, these movements demonstrate the longevity of the improvisatory approach
in Australasian jazz. The following discussion presents four musical examples (three
songs and one recording project) that reflect Subject2Change’s development as a
vehicle for musical experimentation.
‘Cuba’
This song, which was recorded in rehearsal and not intended for commercial release
but is occasionally performed live in concert, is an example of the ensemble’s early
experiments with combining disparate stylistic influences into a single unified output.
It reflects a time of Subject2Change’s growing interest in Latin American music,
particularly Afro-Cuban influences, and developed organically out of a rehearsal
at which drummer Paul McLennan-Kissel had been listening to Cuban hip hop
group Orishas’ CD release A lo Cubano.21 This CD included the song ‘Represent’,
in which Orishas’ rap is overlayed over samples of Cuban dance music, the most
prominent being a sample of Orlando Cachaito Lopez’s chachacha instrumental ‘Mis
Dos Pequeñas’. The piano montuno pattern from ‘Mis Dos Pequeñas’ gives structural
continuity to Orishas’ version and, along with a horn line break, is quite prominent
in the song. We began emulating these two fragments in our rehearsal for fun, and
eventually developed a song sequence which we began to refer to as ‘Cuba’ as this is
the word most prominently shouted out and repeated in Orishas’ song.
The term montuno describes a style of piano accompaniment used in some Afro-
Cuban-derived musics, where the piano plays a repeated rhythmic phase with a
characteristic rise and fall that is syncopated against other rhythmic elements of the
ensemble. Montuno has since become a common feature in much of Subject2Change’s
later material. In the Subject2Change reassemblage, the montuno pattern has
been shifted to the alto saxophone, supported by guiro, congas and the drum kit.
Meanwhile, the piano provides block chords, and the pianist executes a trumpet solo
at the same time. Multi-instrumentalism is a characteristic of Subject2Change. The
bridging section of this song closely resembles another sample used by Orishas. It
involves short melodic lines (sometimes referred to as mambos) played in three-part
harmony by trumpet, saxophone and trombone. The percussion parts and the bass
continue with patterns established in the first sample.
The end of this bridge is signalled by a short percussion break, led by the congas,
which is a standard technique in Afro-Cuban music. It is at this point that the
Subject2Change reassemblage departs entirely from Orishas’ original. Using the
harmonic structures of the first section as a framework, section two shifts into a
back-beat ska style, established this time by the bass. The bass plays a triadic crotchet
pattern using the same I-iim-V chord pattern from the previous section. The ska style
is then reinforced by a standard one-drop drum style, as well as by syncopated chord
stabs from the piano. The length of this section is free, governed by a trombone solo,
and ends with the same percussion break that signaled the end of the section one
bridge.
The third and final section of this reassembled piece introduces a further stylistic
variation – accelerating the pace of the music with Afro-Cuban inspired salsa. The
style differentiation is immediately apparent in the velocity of the music. However,
instrumental techniques also contribute to the stylistic change. The bass introduces a
syncopated tumbao pattern that anticipates every beat and drives the music forward.
The piano provides a new montuno, and the drum kit provides a 2/3 clave, which is
a style marker of salsa and many other Afro-Cuban musics.
This section is structured by a free improvised saxophone solo, but unlike previous
sections, the bridge returns here underneath the saxophone and repeats until joined
by the solo instrument. At this stage, the bridge is about twice the speed of section
one. For variety, the accompanying rhythm section instruments drop out halfway
through, then re-enter after two melodic cycles. Finally, the return of the percussion
break signals the end of the song, which terminates with a unison chord shared across
the entire ensemble.
‘Cuba’ is a clear example of the ‘pastiche’ described by Ward. While not intended
for commercial dissemination, it is a typical example of the beginning of our process
of investigation and experimentation in the repertoire of Subject2Change, and
demonstrates musical influences that were subsequently carried over into other
original compositions.
‘Subject2Change no. 1’
‘Subject2Change no. 1’ is a composition by the ensemble’s keyboard and trumpet
player, Trevor Coleman. Coleman’s compositions often feature a compositional
technique that involves layered mixtures of metres he refers to as polycycles (see
Coleman, this volume). The piece starts with a quadruple metre improvisation
section played by the keyboard, bass and drums and with the guitar improvising.
This A section, an Afro-American funk groove, is loosely based around Am7 b5 and
the guitar uses A Locrian as a solo medium. Following the guitar solo, the keyboard,
bass and drums continue the opening A section in quadruple metre over a ten-bar
cycle while the saxophone, trumpet and trombone introduce a unison motif in 7/4.
Still part of section A and following this 7/4 motivic introduction, the trombone

improvises over the ten-bar sequence prior to a unison syncopated melodic line,
played by the entire ensemble, which separates section A and the following section
B. A one-bar drum fill, a familiar Subject2Change trademark, separates the two
sections.
Section B, using an Afro-Cuban chachacha feel, starts with a repeated two-bar
phrase of F minor 7 moving to Bb7, and G minor 7 moving to C7b9 in the guitar
and bass. The brass and woodwind continue the 7/4 metre unison motif until the alto
saxophone plays an improvised solo over the remainder of the B section. At various
points, the section uses F-pedal notes in the bass while the keyboard and guitar play
one-bar phrases of F major moving to Gb major 7. The keyboard performs a solo
improvisation in the second cycle of the B section and this solo leads to a drum solo
over the opening F minor 7, Bb7, G minor 7, C7b9 two-bar cycle. On cue, the
woodwind and brass reintroduce the 7/4 motif from section A, played seven times
before the whole ensemble reintroduces the syncopated melodic line that was last
used to separate sections A and B.
‘Subject2Change no. 3’
‘Subject2Change no. 3’ is another original Coleman composition involving the whole
ensemble, which takes a similar structural and performance approach to ‘Cuba’ and
‘Subject2Change no. 1’. The tune is in two distinct rhythmic sections, one in Afro-
American funk and one in the Afro-Cuban Latin style. The song originated from a
jam session at the drummer’s house in South Dunedin in 2004, when the ensemble
had five members, including a percussionist, before the addition of trombone and
guitar. Its first title was ‘Paul’s Jam’, after the location of its origin, and its opening
is an Afro funk/fusion passage created from a motif stemming from a repeated C
diminished arpeggio between the keyboard and the bass that is played over two bars.
There are three structural sections to the piece that are referred to here as sections
A, B and C. Following the departure of the percussionist and the addition of guitar,
there is a free-form guitar solo in live settings that precedes the entry of the three-part,
sixteen-bar alto saxophone and trombone melody in the A section. The B section has
two unison descending passages in whole tones that are played by the keyboard,
guitar and bass, and this section punctuates all of the A sections, which feature the
main melody and the improvisations. The first part of the tune is in the following
form: Introduction (C diminished), A section main melody, B section descending
whole tone figures, A section soprano saxophone solo, B section.
The next stage of ‘Subject2Change no. 3’ features a short piano montuno passage
based on the opening C diminished figure and played in an unaccompanied solo
context that establishes the rhythmic pattern for the rest of the tune. On cue, the
bass and drums re-enter with the bass playing a percussive pattern by rubbing the
palm of the picking hand along the strings before establishing a tumbao rhythm over
which the piano plays an extended solo. This solo section continues with exchanged
improvised figures between the guitar and the trombone, which is played through
a guitar effects processor with the use of an internal microphone. The end of these
solos, which are played over the A section diminished figure, comes from a visual cue
from the keyboard player at which point the horns, guitar and bass play the B section
whole tone figures, although this time the rhythm arrangement of the section has
been altered to fit with the tumbao rhythm. This new arrangement of the B section is
followed by the introduction of the C section – a C minor pentatonic motif played
in unison by the whole ensemble and featuring accented and rhythmically displaced
brass stabs on Eb in the Cuban danzón style. The section ends with a unison whole
tone motif and the ensemble returns to the melody played over section A, which
remains in the tumbao pattern. Sections B and C are then repeated prior to the
ensemble playing a chromatic figure in unison that ends the tune.
Soundtracks and inventions

In December 2009, Subject2Change decided to follow a different path to the
structured compositional arrangements that had been used up to that time. Ensconced
for three days in the recording studio at Albany Street, Dunedin, the ensemble set
about recording a series of collabopratively improvides tracks. The ensemble set up
almost as if in a live setting in order to provide a means of spontaneity, although
a compromise was sound spillage. As no overdubs were intended, this was not a
matter of concern. Instead of pre-composed material, the ensemble made a list of
musical ideas and concepts and used one or more of these ideas in each of a series
of improvisations that lasted between five and ten minutes. So as to maintain a
creative flow, ensemble members did not listen to playbacks of the material as it was
recorded, preferring instead to keep performing for as long as possible in the allocated
time. Significantly, the stylistic content of the improvised material was influenced by
various elements, often drawing from the canon of jazz/fusion recordings that most
members listened to in their formative years, and some improvisations were loosely
based on music from neo-noir film soundtracks.
A common theme was the influence of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Chick
Corea, particularly their output from the 1970s and 1980s, and once this pathway
had been established, several of the improvisations had the hallmarks of this jazz
style. An example is ‘Funk in E’, with its modal trombone solo, Fender Rhodes
piano accompaniment in the style of Chick Corea, and whole tone guitar figures
overlaid on a hypnotic and understated bass and drum figure. An example of the

influence of 1970s film soundtracks providing the basis for improvisation is ‘Auto
Euro’. Starting with an insistent, fast-paced drum pattern reminiscent of the opening
of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Maiden Voyage’, the chord changes are dictated by the bass
providing an open pentatonic pattern slowly moving between chords I, IV and V. The
trumpet performance uses a Harmon mute to provide periodicity, and the guitar plays
sustained chords with a chorus effect that provide a substitute for the keyboard (in the
live context of the recording, the keyboard player is playing the trumpet solo).
A further piece, ‘Get Back in the Bubble’, has the ensemble playing in free-form
with no original plan or concept. Starting with a soprano saxophone solo, the track
enables the three brass and woodwind players to explore their own ideas before the
guitar, bass, keyboards and drums enter, again with a stylistically 1970s thematic feel
to the improvisation – in this case the drums play a double-time figure to add a sense
of urgency to the piece. The bass figure is a descending chromatic line repeated until
the ensemble change to half time, at which point the lowest string on the bass guitar
is detuned to low C. Both the bass and the guitar use envelope filter/wah-wah effects
as a means of enhancing periodicity.
This ‘live and spontaneous’ approach to improvised composition in a recording
studio context led the ensemble to its next recording that took place in May 2010.
On this occasion, Subject2Change was augmented by the inclusion of Portuguese
orchestral percussionist Pedro Carniero, who was on a concert tour of New Zealand
premiering new work by John Psathas with orchestras in Auckland, Wellington and
Christchurch. The ensemble performed a further series of improvisations in the
recording studio at Albany Street, although this time the performance was in front
of an audience. The instruments in the ensemble have very different performance
techniques and sound capabilities, each employing a different set of musical tools.
However, when manipulated, these toolkits can be used in complimentary ways to
produce effective music.
While experienced in performing with each other, none of the ensemble had
played with Pedro Carneiro before, so care had to be taken when listening to what
he might say in his music. This is a good example of how being musical is often less
about one’s ability to ‘play’ and more about one’s ability to listen. Critical and active
listening provides an immediate feedback loop that then informs performance. The
performance itself involves the careful balancing of individual spontaneity, group
cohesion, and various distinct performance practices and musical ideas. As an overall
philosophy for the concert, the ensemble was analogous to a group of seven poets,
each with different language (musical) backgrounds, all trying to simultaneously
collaborate on a poem, which is recited in real time, with no opportunity for editing
or revision.
Various concepts were adopted to formulate the musical identity of each
improvisation, although none were discussed before the performance began. For
example, the ensemble initially asked a member of the audience to provide three
notes at random on the marimba. These notes were then used as the melodic and
harmonic material for starting the piece. As it turned out, the three notes chosen
articulated a perfect fourth, which provided a useful interval from which to form
a kind of canonical progression. The second piece made extensive use of a V7
chord, played with the mixolydian mode. This scale offsets the tonic by making
it feel like a dominant, giving the piece a sense of stasis, as it does not progress or
resolve harmonically in any particular direction. This feel is also reflected in the
drum kit, which takes on a percussion role, rather than laying down a particular
rhythm or groove. The bass and drums usually set the orientation of the funk-infused
improvisations in order that the other instruments would be able to establish a sense
of Afro-American style. Carniero also made innovative use of the marimba as non-
tuned percussion by playing on the non-tuned parts of the instrument with mallet
handles.
The audience was further encouraged to interact with the ensemble at various
points and, to provide some variety during the concert, we asked them which
two instruments they would like to hear together as a form of ‘duet’. An audience
member pointed to Nick Cornish’s oboe, which was on a stand at his feet, and said
‘you haven’t played that yet’. Cornish, who is a classically trained oboist as well as a
jazz saxophonist does not usually turn to the oboe in Subject2Change improvisation
sessions, but on this occasion he obliged. The resulting duo with marimba had traces
of Samuel Barber and motives reminiscent of Joaquín Rodrigo’s famous guitar piece
‘Concierto de Aranjuez’. On this occasion, the ‘conversation’ was especially coherent,
perhaps because the two musicians involved share a background in classical music
‘language’. A later ‘duet’ themed piece introduced a piano and marimba duo, steadily
joined by other players as it progressed. The piece opened with extensive use of
whole-tone scale motives on piano – a technique allowing tonal freedom, appearing
extensively in impressionist music, especially the works of Claude Debussy and Erik
Satie. The whole tone scale obscures the relationship between the tonic and the other
scale degrees, allowing for broad movement from one key centre to another. Towards
the middle of this track, the bass establishes a sense of tonal definition through
repeated use of the first half of the whole tone scale, thus reinforcing the tonic. This
motive also implies a I-V7-I chord progression. At this point, the guitar superimposes
a Super Locrian mode over the whole tone scale, further blurring the key centre.

Conclusion
The Subject2Change songs ‘Cuba’, ‘Subject2Change no. 1’ and ‘Subject2Change no.
3’ present an illustrative case study for structural function in stylistic reassemblage,
interculturality and improvisation on a number of levels. ‘Cuba’ was inspired by
Orishas’ ‘Represent’, and to some extent, could be regarded as a version or ‘cover’ of
this song (one type of reassemblage) in much the same way as most jazz ensembles
rearrange existing standards. As already noted, Orishas’ ‘original’ is itself assembled
from extant musical texts sampled by the performers – a defining characteristic of
hip hop style, and a concept that again draws upon the notion of each member of
Subject2Change recycling techniques that provide a sense of personal musical origin.
Second, despite the influence of Orishas on Subject2Change’s musical choice on this
occasion, this song appropriates only those aspects of ‘Represent’ that were themselves
appropriated by Orishas, not composed by them. These ‘sampled samples’ are then
re-arranged to provide the framework for a range of stylistic changes. Three Afro-
Caribbean styles are presented: son, ska and salsa, but the narrow instrumentation of
Subject2Change can only hint at these styles, not reproduce them in their entirety.
Nevertheless, these styles possess enough significant style-markers (or known
signifiers) to be readily identifiable, despite the instrumental limitations of the
ensemble. Third, through jamming and group improvisation, Subject2Change were
able to assemble a structure for the song.
In Orishas’ version, structure is provided by the narrative text, but this is not
incorporated into Subject2Change’s performance. Rather, song sections are divided
by style, using bridges and improvised percussion breaks as markers. The internal
length of each section is governed by free improvisation on a different solo wind
instrument each time. The free structure of these internal sections means that each
performance of ‘Cuba’ constitutes a reassemblage, as both the melodic content and
the duration of the music are variable. These processes underpin the creation of a
five-minute song from a sample originally lasting only a few seconds.
‘Subject2Change no. 1’ and ‘Subject2Change no. 3’ take a different harmonic
approach, in that the melodic lines often use dissonant rather than consonant
harmony. The two rhythmic structures used – Afro-American funk and Afro-Cuban
son – remain within the stylistic philosophy of the ensemble in a similar vein to
‘Cuba’ in that sections are divided by rhythmic changes punctuated by percussion
and piano breaks. Whereas the opening guitar improvisation in ‘Subject2Change
no. 1’ is open ended, the solo improvisation in section B has a set structure that
is followed by the alto saxophone and the keyboard. Unlike the saxophone solo in
‘Subject2Change no. 3’ over section A, the piano solo and guitar and trombone
exchanges in the Latin section A are not governed by an arrangement structure and
are essentially free form in number. This structured and unstructured improvisation
flexibility demonstrates that ensemble members can at once improvise over set
progressions, as well as perform with spontaneity in an open-ended context.
In a similar structure to ‘Cuba’, the opening sections of ‘Subject2Change no.
1’ and ‘Subject2Change no. 3’ have a more familiar rhythm pattern in terms of
audience recognition, whereas the chachacha and tumbao sections in both tunes
are in the more regionally identifiable Afro-Cuban dance style that often requires
prior knowledge in terms of audience reception. As with much of Subject2Change’s
output, each tune is subject to a reassemblage process, but nevertheless grounded
in stylistic consistency. The compositional and arrangement processes for each was
itself a process of reassemblage of extant and external influences, and the continued
performance of the songs ensures constant internal reassemblages that keep both the
performers and their audience interested in the creative product. The performance
style provides repetition, while the reassemblage ensures contrast, thus satisfying
the age-old requirements of popular music performance. Through this process, the
displaced musicians involved in the ensemble maintain a musical conversation not
only with each other, but also with musical influences and experiences from past and
distant places.

6
Remix Culture and the New Folk Process
John Egenes
As an executant lecturer in music at the University of Otago, my research is

performance based. My work consists of composition and songwriting along with
both live and studio performance on a variety of instruments. In addition to working
on my own recordings, I work as a producer and session musician on many projects
by other artists. I perform live as a solo singer-songwriter and play as a sideman
to others, and have been doing this for many years now. I am known as a multi-
instrumentalist specialising in a variety of string instruments including guitar
(acoustic and electric), bass, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, dobro, pedal steel guitar, lap
and Hawaiian guitars, mandocello, accordion and other niche instruments such as
Theremin and musical saw.
When I was first exposed to remixing and the underground culture that produced
it, I had a different reaction than most of my songwriting colleagues. Many perceived
a direct threat to their artistic creations, and they worried about losing control over
the intellectual content they produced. I sympathised with their apprehension but
I thought about how I felt when other artists performed or recorded one of my
songs. I recalled the real satisfaction that came with the esteem I received from peers,
in knowing that a song of mine was making its own way out into the world. I felt
– and still feel – that remix culture is simply an extension of this sharing of songs,
a rejuvenation of an age-old folk process by which our songs and tales have been
carried down to us through the centuries.
The term ‘folk process’ is generally attributed to Charles Seeger, an early twentieth-
century musicologist and father of folk singer Pete Seeger, and refers to the way that
music develops over time in the public domain. Musicologists sometimes reference
the folk process when discussing changes to folk songs and folk tales. Katherine
Macdonald describes it as ‘the process by which cultural artifacts are changed,
whether minutely or in significant amounts, to form new cultural products’.1 She
points out that a song changes as people learn it from others, perform it in their own
style, and then pass it along to others in a recurring cycle. Lyrics, melody, harmony or
rhythm may be altered on purpose, or the performer may have simply forgotten the
words or music, and makes them up as he performs the song. In any event, the song
is changed, passed along, changed again, passed along, and so forth. Folk tales and
jokes are altered in this way as well. It is not a written, documented process, but
instead relies upon listening and memory, and upon a performer’s ability to play by
ear. It continues today in the same tradition, with musicians and audience members
performing songs as they learn and remember them. Further to this folk process is
a dynamic system of feedback wherein our cultural artefacts (songs, stories, poems)
are altered by their culture and in turn serve to alter that culture. Through the folk
process our songs and stories change us, just as we change them.
The folk process is noted for the absence of authentication of the creators of
intellectual works. The focus is upon the song, not the songwriter. The process
alters songs without regard for how the alterations might affect the original
composer. It uses a many-to-many, bottom–up practice fuelled by the community
at large, with changes to artistic content occurring dynamically in a give-and-take
fashion. Within this bottom–up social structure a folk song is a malleable thing,
changeable and adaptable, having an infinite number of possible futures, with no
specific past.
The digital medium treats intellectual and creative content in much the same
way. Like a folk song, an artefact saved in digital format has no particular past,
but has unlimited future possibilities as it is changed over time by computer users.
Remix culture exploits this capacity for change in much the same way musicians
at an Irish session exploit their abilities to improvise an old fiddle tune. Over
the centuries, people have created altered versions and parodies of poems, songs,
pictures and books. We have made montages of paintings and films and altered
photographs and other creations, each in an effort to create something new, albeit
derivative. A remix is an alternative version, a derivative of an artistic creation,
different from the original version. New ideas are built on the foundations of
previous knowledge. A remix is a hybrid – a mixture of influences and styles, a
combination of elements that together make up something greater than the sum
of its parts.
In his book A Year With Swollen Appendages musician Brian Eno voices his
opinion that ‘interactive’ might be the wrong word to use when describing how
we treat the content contained within our digital media.2 Instead he suggests
the word ‘unfinished’ be used when depicting our digital cooperative efforts. He
believes what we are actually doing is creating a work for someone else to finish.
In thinking about the unlimited possibilities available for future changes to a song,
I might take this a step further and propose that in the digital world a work is
never finished, therefore what we are doing is creating a work for someone else to
modify, to remix.
REMIX CULTURE AND THE NEW FOLK PROCESS 79

The road to remix
The very act of composition has come to carry with it a notion of control by the
composer. Instructions included within a musical score include not only the notes
to be played, but directions for dynamics and articulation, rhythm and timing,
and performance techniques that are specific to particular instruments. Over time,
the development of music notation has become more and more sophisticated, and
control by the composer over the music’s performance has strengthened, leaving
less and less room for interpretation by the musician. In this top–down, one-to-
many process, the originator of the intellectual content controls its future and
those who perform it have little say in the performance itself. The assumption
made is that the composer best knows how to perform his or her own work, leaving
musicians to simply follow orders and to play according to directions in the score.
Within this scenario the audience is removed from the creative process entirely,
left as passive consumers who only listen, and who have no say in the creation of
the music.
A similar top–down scenario is used in today’s popular music during the recording
process, whereby the artist (whether a band or a solo artist) creates a recording of
songs on CD (or other medium) for consumption by a passive audience that has
no input into the creation of the artistic content. Remix culture turns this idea on
its head, because the requirements of the digital medium demand that content be
created within a communal environment.3
Various artists have performed and recorded their own versions of songs I have
written. The songs inevitably take on a new life each time someone performs them,
and I become less and less influential as others learn them from recordings and live
performances and pass them along. I like that. It is interesting and intriguing. In a
strange way, the idea that my name as the author might be lost somewhere in the
telling and retelling of the tale doesn’t seem to matter to me. By observing what others
do to my songs I can learn a lot more about how to write them. The original creator
of a joke falls into obscurity as soon as the joke begins to be retold, and in the digital
domain, music and other creative content are forced to follow the same path.
Remix culture in the digital age

Today, the primary media for both transmission and storage of art and music is
undergoing massive transformation and is fundamentally different from media used
in the last 500 years or more. Our ‘electric media’, as McLuhan referred to them,4
began with the telegraph and proceeded on to the phonograph, telephone, radio,
film and television. These are all now morphing into our new digital culture with
the computer, which has the ability to store ideas in infinite numbers and to share
and distribute those ideas in infinite numbers across networks. We now store music
– indeed, all forms of intellectual works – in digital format on computers and other
digital devices. While many view these devices as simply more technically advanced
versions of earlier devices such as books, magazines, radio and television, they in fact
comprise a significantly different form of storage and constitute a platform for both
two-way communication and content re-creation. This differs significantly from
prior technical media, all of which offer only one-way transmission of ideas.
Until the invention and widespread use of computers, intellectual content was
produced and delivered through media that were both one-way and fixed. All
handwritten, printed, recorded and broadcast content has always been produced
in the same conditions. Consumption is passive, with no feedback mechanism
allowing the consumer to voice immediate criticism of, opinions about, changes
in, or reactions to the content. There is no opportunity, while reading, to argue
directly with the author of a book. You can yell at the TV screen but it won’t matter
at all to the news anchor. As soon as it is printed, a book becomes an artefact, an
unchangeable object. It will remain that way as long as it exists. It can be replaced
by an updated version, but the original book, unless destroyed, remains fixed. This
holds true for any intellectual property that is published in some form, such as
music manuscripts and recordings, television and radio broadcasts, paintings and
sculptures. Once published, they are unalterable.
The same book or music recording in computer format is not simply a digital
version of the hardcopy, but becomes an entirely different thing. It becomes not an
artefact but a course of action, not a product but a process. It is infinitely malleable
and changeable. It is nothing more than digital code that can be easily manipulated
and shared by anyone. Chris Anderson describes hardcopy artefacts as being made
of atoms, and digital content as made up of bits.5 These bits can be cut, copied
and pasted into another document, then remixed and rewritten. In digital form, the
creative work has the potential to be part of a process, a work of endless possibilities
in the hands of the consumer.
The artist previously isolated from her public is now a part of that public, living
on the digital street with all the other castabouts, slumming it and reconnecting with
her pre-artist self. As Cory Doctorow notes: ‘New technology always gives us more art
with a wider reach: that’s what tech is for’.6 Artists who use online social networks are
finding a newfound freedom to mingle with the general public without the personal
costs and risks associated with it in the past. They have yet to realise that there are
undoubtedly tradeoffs, an exchange of their individualism for access to the real world
inhabited by everyone else. It is simply the world becoming bottom–up, a process
created by – some might say required by – the digital medium.

This idea of replacing a product with a process is confusing and non-intuitive to
many of us. We will undergo profound changes in our views on intellectual property,
copyright and the idea of authorship, and the digital process will transform the
ways in which we produce and consume what we now call ‘content’. ‘Product’ and
‘process’ are not the same thing. The mistake many make today is in thinking of
digital works as simply digital versions of ‘solid’ works, when in fact they are nothing
of the sort. They are made of bytes. They are entirely variable, as is anything stored
on a computer or digital device. They can be made into something derivative or
something entirely different, and they can be altered by anyone with access to them.
Digital works are like conversations that can later become gossip. They inevitably
change as they are passed along. They don’t change in spite of the medium (spoken
word, or digital); they change because of it.
Remixing, in the sense that I use it here, means to modify someone else’s
intellectual creation or idea. The remix culture itself questions an artist’s right to
control his own intellectual property, and employs an outlook that generally views
intellectual creations as communal property. This doesn’t mean that remixers want to
see artists starve. It simply means that once in the digital domain, content becomes
freely accessible, and artists will not be able to treat this digital content the same way
they do hardcopy. Indeed, John Parry Barlow makes a case that digital content is not
content at all, any more than a conversation or a dream can be considered content.7
Science fiction writer William Gibson describes the remix culture in this way:
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe
those very activities. Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s participating. Indeed,
audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically
physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of
the digital. Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates
countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat
to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it
yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the
mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries. We live at a
peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still
coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going.8
Remix websites are being launched every day. Mainstream artists such as Nine
Inch Nails9 and Radiohead,10 alternative artists on ccMixter,11 indie artists like
LadyHawke,12 and even classical artists such as Yo Yo Ma13 have joined the remix
revolution by allowing direct public access to their recorded tracks. They don’t just
allow access, they encourage it. They understand, as did the Grateful Dead more
than forty years ago, that the free exchange of their music, whether it be in the form
of crude cassette tapes traded through the mail (as Deadheads have done for years),
or by file sharing over a network, does not have to signal the end of retail sales, and
can in fact enhance them. The giving away of plentiful digital copies creates a market
for things that are scarce, such as live performances and special CD editions.
The Stone Soup Sessions: A case study

I recorded and released my CD, The Stone Soup Sessions, over the course of several
months in 2010–11. This is a roots album, focused upon North American folk music
and what is known as Americana, a genre that includes bits of blues, bluegrass, string
band, country, singer-songwriter, rockabilly, and other styles of American music that
usually fall beneath the radar of mainstream pop culture. Americana is influenced
by rural acoustic traditions and is generally minimally produced, non-commercial,
and follows a sort of do-it-yourself path.14 The Stone Soup Sessions is a direct link to
old-time folk music and is the progeny of my first three chords on a cheap guitar, a
small musical legacy thanks to the modern folk process.
The album was recorded differently than most. After writing the songs I
collaborated with musicians from all over the world. Via high-speed networks I sent
each musician the songs on which he or she would perform. I included only very
rough versions of the songs, many containing only a rhythm guitar and a scratch
vocal, both of which would be discarded later. In each case, the musician naturally
asked for guidance about what to play and how to play it, and in each case I answered,
‘Just play whatever you want to play, whatever you feel’. This was usually met with
some trepidation, however all the musicians involved came through with splendid
tracks. These included bass, drums, acoustic and electric guitars, fiddle, pedal steel
guitar, Dobro, Weissenborn, mandolin, and backing harmony vocals. The tracks
came to me from all over New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and Denmark,
created by over twenty musicians.
In order to explain it to the musicians, I likened this process to a Friday night at
an Irish pub. Musicians sit around a table and play their music, usually old folk songs
and fiddle tunes. A song will take its shape and form from those who show up to play.
They all know the song (or have an idea about how to play it), but there is no one
directing them. They might play it a bit differently the following week, and it might
change a bit more the week after that, when others show up to play. This evolution
is the essence of the folk process. The music in a session takes its shape and direction
from those who are playing it at that particular time, with input from the audience
surrounding the performers.
There were many more people involved in the creation of The Stone Soup Sessions,
including recording and mixing engineers, a mastering engineer, a graphic designer

and a CD manufacturing house. The CD contains thirteen songs packaged in a
three-panel folding cardboard case along with a booklet containing credits and other
information. It was recorded in studios in Dunedin and Auckland; Hollywood,
Highland Park and Santa Barbara in California; Norman, Oklahoma; Houston,
Texas; Brooklyn, New York; and Copenhagen, Denmark. Mastering was done in
Boulder, Colorado, and disks were manufactured in Auckland, with printed material
and final assembly done in Dunedin.
When recording was finished, things began to get even more interesting. As final
mixing engineer, I was faced with a great many tracks from the various musicians.
Given no specific direction and being unsure of what to play, the musicians often
sent more than one track for each song. I chose those that I felt best fit together and
compiled each song from what turned out to be a multitude of possible choices. This
was time consuming and at times difficult, but also a constant source of amazement
to me as I sifted through the possible combinations of players and their various
performances. Through this process, the finished CD could just as easily have been
poles apart from the version I ultimately released.
Although I was the composer of the material, I saw my chief role as that of ‘host’.
That is, I saw myself as a facilitator more than a producer or arranger. I wanted to bring
various musicians together – some of whom had never met – in an environment in
which each of them made the crucial decisions about the artistic content and where
collectively, they created the music. My aim was not to simply record them live, as
one might record an Irish session, but rather to create a digital collaboration in which
the result was itself a sort of remix. I did not want to create a ‘finished’ product.
My other role was that of recording and mixing engineer. There were a few tracks
– including all of my own parts – on which I acted as recording engineer. These were
the tracks done locally, in Dunedin; the others were recorded by various engineers at
studios all over the world. Once recorded, they were sent to me over digital networks
and I donned my mixing engineer’s hat to assemble them. I had expected the mixing
process to require a lot of cutting and pasting, common in digital studios. However,
to my surprise very little of that was necessary, and the individual tracks flew together
quite seamlessly. It seemed I had done my job as host well, choosing the right players
for each song.
After finishing the final mixes, another version was created – this one for remixers
– to be uploaded to a website where it would be downloadable for free.15 This website
also allows users to create links to their remixes for friends and other users through
social networking sites such as Facebook, or via a cell phone, Skype, Twitter, or other
instant messaging software applications. In order to facilitate remixing I created
‘stems’, rendered versions of each track on each song. A typical song from this album
contains several tracks, such as drums, bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, pedal steel,
fiddle, lead vocal and harmony vocals. Each of these tracks then becomes a stem,
packaged in a compressed file with the other stems from that song. The compressed
song file is then downloaded by the remixer – who may import any or all of a song’s
stems into a multitrack audio programme. The remixer can sing along, play along,
cut and paste, loop, and insert other recorded material into the song, with limitless
options. They can choose to use any or all of the stems and can import or record
other tracks to go along with them. The songs can be chopped and reworked to be
reissued as derivative works by consumers-turned-creators. The point of the process
is to offer the opportunity for the public to create their own versions of my music.
This is important, because the consumer – the audience member – can now become
the author. It is this opportunity to undertake authorship that underpins digital
culture.
Remixing my way forward

Questions arise about allowing free downloads of music, and there are a number of
reasons why one might want to give their intellectual property away for free. In the
case of my own music, I prefer to think of it as something to be shared, to be free
to evolve naturally in the public domain. Copyright laws have evolved to the point
where it is actually hard for most people to imagine the above comment, much less
live by it. We treat intellectual property as just that – property – and not as ideas. But
to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly: piracy is not your enemy; obscurity is.16 Why wouldn’t I
want to spawn an idea and see it change and grow? The creative process always relies
upon access to prior creative works, especially those works that are still current and
still in the public milieu.
It is certainly possible that free downloads might kill sales of my CDs, but for
most artists who are clued into digital culture it seems to have worked in just the
opposite way. Free downloads have offered a way to connect with audiences and fans,
and a method for generating interest in artists’ music. Computer-savvy people are
naturally aware that downloading a song does not diminish inventory at all. There
are infinite copies available, which reduces the marginal cost of each copy effectively
to zero.
As artists we can no longer afford to look at digital content in the same way we
have historically viewed hardcopy. By offering digital downloads for free, and by
involving musicians and non-musicians alike in taking authorship of the music, I
am creating a market for any hard goods that I might want to sell, including my
live performances. Instead of generating a product for sale (a CD) I am offering
a two-way process wherein I receive direct feedback from listeners all over the

world in exchange for offering them authorship in the recombination of my music.
I can watch my work being reinvented through a constant digital folk process of
worldwide sharing, comparing, and rediscovery, all accomplished in a many-to-
many community network. I still perform live, and I can create products for sale at
those performances (such as CDs, T-shirts and books) that have an inbuilt scarcity
that makes them worth paying for. This is just one way of using the new folk process
in the twenty-first century. I look forward to seeing what becomes of my songs. With
my speckled musical background I have produced music in genres and styles from
country to rock, from bluegrass to rockabilly, with Hawaiian guitar, Celtic harp and
musical saw thrown into the mix. I look forward to seeing what others will make of
my music, and what new forms it might take. Truth be told, I’ll probably learn a lot
more from remixers about making music than I ever did from my music teachers.
7

   Music
  for
  Film
  and
  Other
  Reflections
  
from a Reformed Exile
Trevor Coleman
I was born in Dunedin in 1959, and although coffee was not yet known here, there
were plenty of opportunities for extracurricular learning, in the arts as well as sports,
during my formative years of the 1960s and ’70s. In this regard, for its size, Dunedin
has always been a generous fosterer of give-it-a-goers. My father was an avid brass
band man. When I was seven, the Port Chalmers Marine Band lent me a tenor horn
with a broken third valve to see if I could get a sound out of it. I think that’s what they
called an audition. Boys, and sometimes girls, were recruited young into the ranks,
typically on third cornet, to be eventually farmed out to a position in the band most
in need of filling. My mother still has a drawer full of medals from all the regular
regional and national contests that encouraged rigorous competition and technical
accomplishment. The St Kilda Brass Band was very supportive of my compositional
aspirations and performed my first major work, ‘Novus Deus’ on National Radio
when I was fifteen. Band camps were a lot of fun as were my two seasons with the
National Youth Brass Band.
My father also brought home from somewhere a pre-war trumpet, which was a
ticket to the orchestral world. The Dunedin Youth Orchestra, created and directed
by Dunedin music icon Art Brusse, was an introduction for me to the orchestral
repertoire, and stepping stone to principal trumpet in the New Zealand Youth
Orchestra. Around the age of nine, once again, my father took me to hear a piano
concerto played by a young man. The piano was virtually a ‘taboo’ instrument – being
deemed too ‘effeminate’ for a boy of that era (not so the trumpet) – but here was a
regular-looking young male pianist whose playing spoke to my inner sensitivities. I
was henceforth shipped off to the nuns for training in piano and was lucky to land
one who was not a ‘knuckle whacker’. After a year in the convent (not living there)
I was ready to learn from Eli (then Ian) Gray-Smith, another invaluable Dunedin
musical icon. From Mr Gray-Smith I learnt about chords and popular piano-playing
styles. This was eventually broadened by further classical training up to ATCL level.
It occurs to me now that all this extensive music training was completely affordable
to the average family of that time.
MUSIC FOR FILM AND OTHER REFLECTIONS FROM A REFORMED EXILE 87

From memory, my first professional (paid) gig was at age twelve, playing trumpet
in the local Budapest café with a group including guitarist Mike Moroney and
drummer Marcel Rodeka. That same group was playing in the Octagon during the
Festival procession when my father collapsed from a heart attack while marching
with a brass band. When I heard the news, my cousin, also a trumpet player, said to
just keep on playing – a piece of advice that I have kept close to heart during later
times of tribulation. The Dunedin hospital managed to bring my father back from
the dead to continue supporting his children’s ambitions.
At about age fifteen, in 1975, I teamed up with some Catholic boys (I came
from an Irish Protestant lineage), who had formed a rock ’n’ roll band playing
Rolling Stones, Beatles and other such revolutionary rock music that was still big
in Dunedin – though the rest of the world had moved on. Jazz, for me, didn’t arrive
until the age of seventeen, when a friend brought around a Miles Davis record. For
the following ten years there was not a day I didn’t listen to Miles. It was like God
had spoken to me from another planet. We formed a group called Nadis (after a
Miles Davis composition) with Craig Walters (saxophone) and John Gibson (piano),
and attempted to find our way around jazz’s complex harmonies and subtle rhythms
with the aid of method books and one Wellington workshop. Around 1979 the first
incarnation of another group was formed, In Transit, which played a more acid jazz
fusion that inspired quite a following of late-blooming hippies and magic mushroom
munchers (Dunedin hung onto the power of flowers and skipped directly to punk,
then onto the Dunedin Sound – the disco phase did not gain much traction here).
One style that was popular in Dunedin during the late ’70s was funk. I was
invited into Maori funk band Back to Back, led by Dave Hiakita, where I first began
playing keyboard and trumpet simultaneously. I was tempted to go on the road with
them but I am grateful now that my father strongly advised me to stay and finish
my music degree at the University of Otago. I subsequently joined another funk
band curiously named ‘Hampton’, who often played at the Taipei nightclub run
by the Chin family. In those days, there were copious opportunities to gain diverse
performing experience, with bands playing literally everywhere.
Typically during the last eighteen months of my university studies, I was often
playing four or five nights a week with In Transit followed by a late shift with
Hampton at a nightclub. I have but vague memories of morning lectures in the
basement of Marama Hall, studying the harmonic theory of classical music. In spite
of all the excitement, I was impatient to exit Dunedin for brighter lights, surely
never to return. Dunedin good-naturedly supported my dreams of grandeur and
provided excellent references toward a grant from the QEII Arts Council to attend
the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston to study jazz and film scoring.
Berklee
For a green Dunedin boy fresh out of New Zealand, America was like another universe.
All the things I felt were missing in Dunedin – intensity, drive, methodology, the
cutting edge of our times – were all present at Berklee hundredfold. My first jazz
piano teacher told me: ‘I want you to leave out all country and blues riffs from your
playing for the next two years’. After one summer semester it was clear I was going to
need a lot more training before Miles Davis would give me any attention. I enrolled
for the four-year diploma in film scoring and by ‘testing out’ some elementary classes
and taking summer school classes I graduated in less than two years. To support
myself, my years of gigging had given me enough professionalism to land a keyboard
position in a working Top 40 band.
At Berklee I devoured the learning opportunities, thoroughly and methodically
working my way through jazz harmonic development – which was like condensing
300 years of classical harmony into sixty years – into a language and set of harmonic
‘rules’ that was logical and comprehensive. A relatively newly formed film-scoring
department taught me the traditional techniques of the medium, which served as a
valuable foundation for the work I was about to move into. Sleep deprivation and a
messy marriage equalled burnout and I made the decision to return to Dunedin.
Dunedin 1982–85
Boston had shown me the level required to be a serious participant in professional
music. Dunedin offered welcome respite from this intensity, the space to digest and
practice the knowledge I had crammed into the last two years. Flat broke, I turned
to offering piano lessons and I was soon teaching around thirty (mostly young)
people a week, along with giving lectures in jazz history at the music department. In
between, I was practicing madly and playing solo piano restaurant gigs – plentiful
at the time.
My main focus though, was preparing to work in film music. A presentation had
been arranged at Wild South – the forerunner of TV production company Natural
History New Zealand (NHNZ) – where I was to meet the producers and show a
video of my work from Boston. Ian Taylor (later Taylormade), Neil Harraway, Ross
Johnston and Peter Hayden had expectantly gathered around a video machine –
however the US and New Zealand systems were incompatible so what I presented
them was a snowy screen and white noise. In typical Dunedin good spirit, I was given
the benefit of the doubt and immediately hired to score Ian Taylor’s Two Days to Soft
Rock Café. My studio was a borrowed Prophet synthesizer and four-track cassette
recorder in a bedroom. It was completely adequate and appropriate for the film,
however, and I went on to score many more over the next two years including: The

Garbage of Eden narrated by Bruno Lawrence and The Last of the Kowhai Bushmen,
which spliced together excerpts from improvisations with flautist Paul Hutchins.
Meanwhile at the Lucerna restaurant on Friday evenings, jamming was expanding
with the likes of Luke Hurley, so the owner decided to open an old disco room next
door, which became a vibrant jazz club where In Transit II performed regularly.
Producer Ross Johnston had a passion for the arts, which was actively supported by
TVNZ at the time. He produced Over the Wall and Out – recorded live at Allen Hall
– a collection of New Zealand poetry performed with live music accompaniment
(myself and Paul Hutchins). Among the performers were the actors Rawiri Paratene
and George Henare. Ross also realised a TV show in which I presented contemporary
versions of Beethoven themes with members of In Transit. The notion of televised
recordings of house concerts was also introduced by Ross Johnston. I was employed
as score reader for both these and NZSO (New Zealand Symphony Orchestra)
broadcasts from the Dunedin Town Hall.
Europe
A yearning to see the country in which Beethoven was born, where Fassbinder
films were made, to hear the musicians from the ECM label, and a romance with
a wandering native of Wuppertal (that continues to this day) led me away from
Dunedin again, this time in a move to Germany in 1985. What I expected might
be a one-year adventure in Europe turned into fifteen. Reuniting in Wuppertal, Ika
and I first chose Berlin as a likely city to set up operations. Berlin was, and is, an
extremely scintillating place. However in 1985, the Berlin Wall was still rock solid,
with armed guards at every gate to the city. This was just too imprisoning and creepy
for someone accustomed to staring out at a borderless and endless sea. As a more
pragmatic second choice, we moved to the Bavarian city of Munich. There I would
have better prospects for work and obtaining a work visa.
Intending to seek out a more experimental scene, I instead encountered and
formed a long-term relationship with two British buskers/pop-music comedians
named Mark ’n’ Simon. The flexibility and adaptability learnt in Dunedin, along
with the knowledge and tools gained in the US, helped me land on my feet in yet
another completely new situation. A sizeable portion of the next fifteen years was
spent touring with Mark ’n’ Simon and the Professor – the ‘Professor’ being the
eccentric role that evolved for my shy Dunedin-lad self to hide behind. In addition to
the theatrics, I played all the backing tracks live, with the exception of programmed
drum patterns.
We performed up to one hundred concerts per year, from Biker joints to Stadthalle
(town halls) and huge open-air festivals, and we performed on television and produced
CDs and DVDs. This kind of popular performance gave me invaluable insight into
the psyche of an audience: the power of a simple melody, the liberating effect of
laughter, the ways in which music can emotionally impact on a large gathering of
people. This ingrained, intuitive knowledge later assisted the more indirect art of
manipulating people’s emotions through film music.
While in Germany I was drawn to the expansive quality of Euro jazz and its
exponents, who often took a freer approach to form than their American colleagues
(with the notable exception of the free jazz movement). The resulting Trevor Coleman
Trio/Quartet with Nuremberg percussionist Yogo Pausch embraced this expansive,
often free-form improvisational quality. Our first LP was entitled First Impressions,
followed by CD release Kiwi Love. The lyrics of the title track as sung by Beate
Sampson depict a Kiwi out of context: ‘You’re walking barefoot / And your mouth
is loud / With a slight accent – / We hardly understand / … he was still wearing that
smile / on his face / His eyes – I couldn’t believe it / And I knew, he was coming from
a different space’.
The effectiveness of improvisational jazz as a world language, a cultural bridge,
was strongly in evidence in our concerts in Eastern Europe cities such as Kharkov
(Ukraine) and Karlovy Vary (the former Czechoslovakia). Later, collaboration with
expat New Yorker and five-string cellist Muneer Abdul Fataah introduced me to
more complex forms of jazz. In particular ‘polycycles’ – the simultaneous use of
different time signatures and cycles – has infiltrated much of my music to this day.
An apartment became free above Crocotone recording studios in Munich. Around
this time (1986) the now industry-standard music computer software Logic Audio
Pro, then known as ‘Notator’, was born in Germany. This was my introduction to
computer-based music composing and to the recording techniques used in state-of-
the-art studios such as Crocotone. ‘Downtime’ in the studio was made available to
me and this was usually a midnight to 6 am shift. I used this time to work on a trans-
hemispheric new-age folk record with flautist Paul Hutchins, who had recorded his
tracks in Dunedin. My parents transported the reel-to-reel tapes in a suitcase on a
visit. I overdubbed the keyboard and vocal tracks, mixed the album, and sent the
master back to Paul to get the cassette copies made in Australia.
This cross-planet collaboration, which is today the norm, sparked the notion
that I could one day become geographically independent: to be able to work from
anywhere, no matter how remote, and remain connected to the world. The lack
of adequate Internet connectivity I regarded as a distinct disadvantage to living in
Dunedin pre-broadband.
The birth of our first daughter, Larissa, provided the impetus to move to a more
child-friendly location. In Munich, a simple drive across town could take forty-five

minutes in snail-pace traffic. Freiburg, a city of 200,000 positioned at the edge of the
Black Forest and a quick escape portal to France, Switzerland and the sunny South,
is a compact, friendly university town packed with culture. Its surrounding green
hills and easy access to nature is reminiscent of Dunedin. Renting a rustic house
to ourselves in the forested outskirts of Freiburg was more like a Dunedin style of
accommodation compared to the (to me) rabbit-hutch claustrophobia of a typical
apartment in Munich.
The Choreographes Theater Freiburg was under the umbrella of the Stadttheater
Freiburg. There I began a highly productive relationship with choreographer Pavel
Mikulastik and his dance company – the majority of whom were also immigrants. I
believe Pavel was attracted to my flexibility as a musician and composer: my ability
to reference (in a contemporary manner) a large palette of styles and moods, with
openness to their interpretation, whilst maintaining a sensibility to the specific
musical needs of dancers. There I learnt how music inspires body movement, how
to interpret body language, and how to experiment with the ratio between fixed
structure versus improvisation in live performance. My last two-and-a-half years
with the company were spent in Bonn, four hours’ train journey from Freiburg,
which meant even more time spent away from the family (a second daughter, Stella,
had also presented herself ).
Running between theatre concerts in Bonn and elsewhere, and continuing tours
with Mark ’n’ Simon, a certain travel wariness was inevitable. I had visited Dunedin
twice in my fifteen years of voluntary exile, in 1990 and ’95, and my impression was:
quaint but backward.
Dunedin 2000–11
In 2000, my intention was to spend one year in Dunedin securing a direct relationship
with NHNZ, then move to either Wellington or Auckland, thinking that Dunedin
in the long term would be too limiting, even with the advent of excellent coffee.
One year became two and roots into the community grew deep for the whole family
and film-scoring work through NHNZ began to flourish. We had bought a house
at St Clair beach and a long-term dream had been realised: to compose whilst
overlooking the sea. The maximum ten-minute travel time to anywhere in the city
was an immense luxury – freeing up masses of time for composition. Dunedin was
now providing space for consolidation and growth as a composer.
My new job at NHNZ reminded me of my first experience there in 1982, in
openness towards giving the ‘new’ guy a chance. Producer John Hyde hired me
before I arrived, to score Siberian Survivors. While still in Germany I researched
some fascinating contemporary Siberian folk music from which the score was heavily
influenced. The result was a unique, fresh sounding documentary music and was
received positively.
In 2000, NHNZ was a company with strong international connections and co-
partners, but with relatively small editorial influence from the outside. Videocassettes
of new productions in progress were couriered to the US, Europe or Japan for
approval, and the time delay didn’t allow for such instantaneous response as in
recent years with the advent of faster Internet bandwidth. Coming from so-called
avant-garde Europe, sometimes my unorthodoxy was not always welcome and some
‘adaption of style’ was required. To quote one local Executive Producer: ‘We don’t
want any of that Kurt Weill stuff’. This sort of reaction revealed the desire for a more
conservative approach to composition, as well as revealing a lack of understanding
regarding contemporary European influences in this part of the world. I would
struggle to find anything resembling Kurt Weill in any film score of mine – it’s like
suggesting I wrote a theme à la ‘Mack the Knife’ for a shark documentary.
In fairness, during the inauguration period I was sometimes guilty of being ‘green’
as to what is appropriate in the documentary music idiom, and an old friend even
accused me of being ‘eurocentric’. ‘Play what’s appropriate to the style’ my cellist
friend and mentor Muneer would say. By 2001, I had mostly achieved a healthy
balance between originality and appropriateness in the scores for the co-productions
between Lawrence Wahba of Canal Azul in Brazil and NHNZ. For these two films,
Atlantic Oasis and Forgotten Atoll, I was able to introduce for the first time, although
with much resistance, the use of female vocalisation – i.e. singing without lyrics –
that promoted an evocative and more intimate relationship between the music and
images. The singer was a visiting intern from the US, Laura Thomas. Female vocals
continued to find expression in subsequent film scores. Apart from the occasional
live voice or instrument, much of my documentary film music is realised via samplers
and synths.
Technology is an equaliser for those of us choosing to work away from the major
centers. Where we don’t have easy access to the top studio musicians and engineers,
we do have the same access to state-of-the-art technology. With the right equipment,
knowledge and skill a musician in Dunedin can compete for film music work with
someone in New York, and achieve comparable results. The Internet is also an
equaliser in the job search market. Anyone can apply for the same jobs globally as
anyone else – the double-edged sword aspect being, theoretically, composers from
any location can also apply for work at NHNZ. In practice however, producers
generally prefer face-to-face exchanges.
Thirteen-part series jobs – usually thirteen one-hour episodes – guarantee
steady long-term employment for say, one year, whereas ‘one-offs’ may keep you

busy for only one month. Once the composer has established the right ‘tone’ for
a series, and created a sizeable repertoire of music, some themes or tracks can be
reused or revisited for following episodes. This leads to the often-asked ‘horse or
cart’ question: Is music written to the film, or is the film cut to the music? The
roles have somewhat reversed during the last decade. Traditionally, the pictures
were ‘locked’ before the composer would apply his or her trade. This was still
the case for me here in Dunedin up until around 2004. After ‘picloc’ we would
have approximately four weeks to compose music to the finished pictures, usually
including the recorded narrative, or at least a ‘scratch’ (i.e. stand in) narrative, so
the composer could incorporate that aspect into the architecture of the music.
This ‘traditional’ approach requires significant skill – the music must navigate its
way to various synchronisation points, possibly adjusting tempos, all the while
maintaining compositional sense within itself. This approach also requires a
generous amount of time, perhaps producing one to three minutes of film music
per day to comfortably complete the entire film within four weeks.
As production pressures mounted, the composer’s time became more compromised:
four weeks became three, which became two. As co-producers became more involved,
they were keen to have a sense of the completed film early in the process, including
an indication of the music. The ‘traditional’ scoring method became untenable and
unsuitable so by the time my first thirteen-part series, called Animal Face Off, came
up, I began composing tracks at the beginning of editing or earlier, then ‘massaging’
these tracks into a cohesive score after ‘picloc’ – typically within three days.
This also coincided with a new wave of younger editors who were accustomed to
cutting to music. At the vanguard of the new editors at NHNZ was Warren Saunders,
a brilliant conceptualiser with a very adept ear for music and sound effects, who
pushed the boundaries of pacing and perspective, delivering Dunedin documentary-
making into the modern era. Unfortunately, NHNZ was unable to retain this mega-
talent, and Warren is now one of the most sought-after editors in Sydney.
Animal Face Off was required to break new ground altogether, to appeal to the
lucrative 18–35 American male advertising market (think beer and cars), and the
music was to reflect this. I called up my rock ’n’ roll days and produced some highly
aggressive metal guitar, hard synth and trash drum sounding TechRock. The music
was a hit with all involved, a complete departure from previous documentary music,
and the Discovery/Animal Planet forums also met with favorable reactions – although
they tended to be 10–14-year-old boys …
The following year I successfully auditioned for another thirteen-part series called
Buggin’ with Ruud. Presenter Ruud Kleinpaste – the ‘Bugman’ – enthusiastically
and intimately immersed himself in the life of all things buggin’. The Executive
Producer, Mick Kaczorowski, from Discovery in DC, was a funk fanatic, and sent
me two CDs of Blaxploitation – convinced the style would constitute the basis
of all the programs. It soon became evident that funky wah-wah guitar music
would not last the distance and the score expanded into an avant-garde funky
mix of bizarre sounds and grooves that aligned with the styles I’d honed in the
US and Europe. I was coming into my own, as they say, within this idiom, being
offered far more work than I could manage. It had been a worthwhile decision to
remain in Dunedin – there not being opportunities on this scale in Auckland or
Wellington.
I did accept, alongside the Buggin’ series, a blue-chip (i.e. high-quality) six-part
series called Equator. Thirteen Buggin’ episodes, six Equator episodes, and a number of
others added up to twenty-four fifty-minute film scores in 2005 – the busiest and
most productive year of my life to date. Equator was a co-production mostly between
NHNZ and NHK of Japan. Each of the episodes focused on interesting wildlife
and fauna unique to a particular location on or near the equator: the Amazon,
Andes, Galapagos Islands, Papua New Guinea, Borneo and the African savannah.
The challenge was to compose music suitable and stimulating for both Western
and Japanese audiences. NHK had originally approached the famous Japanese
composer Ryuichi Sakamoto to compose the main themes for the series but, as he
was unavailable, I was entrusted with the task.
I have tended to prefer to experiment ‘outside the box’, when time permits, looking
for those unusual, fresh ideas that bring new energy to a project. Fortunately, Peter
Hayden, the NHNZ executive producer assigned to this series (as well as Buggin’),
encouraged such openness and, with one ear on the music of Sakamoto (to stay
connected with NHK), I felt I was given enough scope to explore my originality. The
resulting scores for two of the Equator episodes, and one Buggin’, garnered enough
attention and interest to be nominated for Emmy Awards: two in 2006 and one in
2007.
Dunedin is a wonderful place to focus on composition, but too much isolation
from the rest of the world can lead to stagnation. As fascinating as the Emmy
Awards ceremony was, my real purpose in going to New York in 2006 was to spend
a week absorbing music, jamming, and gigging with Laura Thomas, now based
in Manhattan. Regular trips out of Dunedin were inspiring, such as six weeks in
Cuba in 2007 soaking up the vibrant life and music of their culture, while filming a
documentary of the same.

Circle of life
Michael Stedman, CEO of NHNZ, has always been something of a visionary –
building the company from a small TVNZ subsidiary to one of the world’s largest
producers of factual television. Being a lover of classical music and supporter of
all things Dunedin, including being a board member of the Dunedin Southern
Sinfonia, he was the chief instigator behind live collaborations between NHNZ and
the orchestra, e.g. Southern Journeys (2000) and Timeless Land (2004) by celebrated
Dunedin composer Anthony Ritchie.
Michael Stedman heard the potential in the Equator music for a symphonic work
and multimedia collaboration on a scale beyond anything previously realised in
Dunedin. A Creative NZ grant enabled me to devote four months to transforming
some six hours of film music into a cohesive one-hour composition encompassing
an overture and six movements representing the six equatorial locations of the series.
In contrast to music written to pictures, footage from the series was edited to fit the
music – conceptually a complete departure from the original documentaries. Perhaps
some parallels could be drawn to the narrative-free film, such as Koyaanisqatsi, with
music composed by Philip Glass, although in the case of Equator – Circle of Life the
focus was purely on wildlife and nature in all its glory. A Panasonic HD projector was
especially imported from Japan for the event, allowing images to be projected onto
a 24-foot screen suspended above the orchestra, in front of the organ pipes, for the
performance in Dunedin Town Hall on 24 March 2007.
Besides the Southern Sinfonia and various ‘imported’ orchestral musicians, a one
hundred-strong City of Dunedin Choir, under the direction of David Burchell, was
also engaged. Both David and the orchestra conductor, Peter Adams, were required
to conduct simultaneously. To ensure perfect synchronicity with the pictures and
the accompanying pre-recorded electronic track, Peter was ‘fed’ a click track via
headphones. Needless to say, the technical challenges were immense and, with intense
concentration, the orchestra and choir performed admirably. The icing on this audio-
visual feast was the addition of solo soprano voice, sung by Cally Hammond-Tooke.
I had heard Cally sing at my daughter’s school functions (being in the same class)
and had always been moved by the angelic quality of Cally’s voice. I appreciated its
‘pre-operatic’ innocence: her unaffected, clear, straight tone. She was perfect for this
project and her stellar performance belied her youth.
As tempting as it would have been to perform with the orchestra, my knowledge
of the work was best utilised in mixing the sound from the back of the hall. Some
amplification was used to boost the acoustic body of the orchestra and vocalists, and
also to harmonise the live sound with the pre-recorded electronic score – the result
achieving a rich powerful Town Hall-filling resonance. This, coupled with the massive
screen displaying the high-definition otherworldly images from Equator, manifested
into an experience that was quite stunning. The concert was a prime example of
Dunedin ‘punching above its weight’ – not simply as spectacle, but as an impressive
artistic convergence of talents and skills with a positive ecological message. I felt
proud to be a son of Dunedin on this night.
My film scoring has continued since Circle of Life, along with ongoing jazz-related
projects including the group Subject2Change (as outlined in this book by Rob Burns
and Dan Bendrups). Another important contributor in the majority of these live
projects is multi-wind player Nick Cornish, without whose presence Dunedin would
be significantly quieter, and musically poorer.
The son, or daughter, of the Equator series came to life in 2010: another
collaboration between NHNZ and NHK, with Judith Curran as series producer,
called Life Force, or Mutant Planet for the American audiences (as Discovery Science
was also a major partner). A six-part series with an evolutionary theme, the influence
of US-based Discovery Science was more pronounced this time, which influenced
my compositional style, at times, I suspect, not always to the liking of our Japanese
colleagues.
Budgetary concerns impact hugely on creative processes, reducing production
time. And attempting to produce the same show for three different markets – US,
international, and Japanese – is as tricky as inviting a vegetarian to a barbecue, if
not near impossible. But with the flexibility one learns in an outpost like Dunedin,
with the ‘finding your feet’ adaptability Kiwis must have to survive the necessity of
exploring life outside these little islands, you can expect a ‘well-prepared for anything’
individual or organisation.

MUSIC, HISTORY
AND LOCAL IDENTITY
8
A Common Thematic:
Seven Songs by Anthony Ritchie
Anthony Ritchie
Songs by New Zealand composers working in the art music tradition are little known.
This was highlighted in 1995, when Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sang at the opening
ceremony of the Rugby World Cup in South Africa, and was asked if she would be
performing any New Zealand music during her visit. She replied, ‘We haven’t got a
wealth of composers out there unfortunately. We might have a little Maori song’.1
There was an outpouring of protest from composers at the time, in the form of
thirty-four letters to Music In New Zealand, and rightly so. There is, in fact, a large
repertoire of New Zealand ‘classical’ songs but, aside from Sings Harry by Lilburn,
they remain little known because most are in manuscript form. This spurred me on
to producing the album New Zealand Poets in Song: Anna and Matthew Leese sing
songs by Anthony Ritchie, released by Ode Records in 2008. The seventeen songs on
this album represent twenty-five years of collaborations with New Zealand poets and
singers. The songs engage with New Zealand literature in a significant way, and deal
with issues in a manner distinctive to this part of the world. This chapter explores
some of these issues in relation to selected tracks from New Zealand Poets in Song.
It uncovers a recurring theme on the album, both in terms of subject matter and
musical content.
Since the 1980s I have made a name for myself primarily as an orchestral
composer, with works such as the ‘Flute Concerto’ (1993), ‘The Hanging Bulb’,
and three symphonies.2 Although my work has global influences, I believe there are
distinctive New Zealand and distinctive Southern qualities in my work. Having been
brought up in Christchurch I moved to Dunedin in 1988, where I have lived for the
last twenty-three years. I believe living in the South has contributed to an open-air
quality in my music, with an emphasis on landscape, the elements, and wildlife:
‘Southern Journeys’ (1999), ‘Timeless Land’ (2003), ‘Tui’ (2005) and ‘Whalesong’
(2007) are four examples of compositions that illustrate this point. I am aware of
an element of solitary contemplation in my music, combined paradoxically with a
strong desire to communicate. Stylistically, my music finds a connection with a fairly
broad audience. For example, music critic Peter Mechen has described me as ‘one
of New Zealand’s most approachable composers’.3 My songs bring together these
A COMMON THEMATIC: SEVEN SONGS BY ANTHONY RITCHIE 101

elements of Southernness and communication, and emphasise New Zealand identity
through the words of many of our leading poets.
As I collated the songs for the recording I realised there was another common
theme to seven of them – death. The more I thought about this the more it did not
surprise me: death has been a common theme in New Zealand poetry. When James K.
Baxter died in his 40s, poet and friend Fleur Adcock wrote the following lines: ‘I find,
when I look through / your varied, eloquent poems, nearly all / frosted with hints at
death’.4 Alistair Campbell, James K. Baxter, Janet Frame and others have frequently
written poems on the subject of death. Therefore, it is not that surprising that the
theme of death is common to seven of the songs on the album. The seven songs take
a wide range of approaches to this theme, and consequently there is considerable
musical variety. However, I made a new discovery in the process of comparing these
seven songs: all of them shared a thematic connection, a common melodic shape or
contour. This connection is quite unconscious. These songs have been composed at
varying intervals over a period of twenty-five years, and no deliberate attempt was
made to link them together. I will demonstrate this connection and make some
conclusions about the relationship between music and words, and between music
and culture. In addition, I will examine the ways in which music can enhance words
and imbue them with non-verbal meaning and emotion.
The theme of death appears in one my earliest songs, the setting of Baxter’s
‘Lament for Barney Flanagan’ (1981). This poem speaks in a New Zealand vernacular,
something I tried consciously to match in my music. ‘Lament …’ adopts a musical
style that is roughly equivalent to Lilburn’s ‘folk style’ in ‘Sings Harry’: simple and
direct, with the focus on the words and the narrative rather than the creation of
beautiful sound images. The laconic character of the poem is typical of ballads but also
reflects a New Zealand attitude. The humour is understated and rather dark: ‘Cold
in the parlour Flanagan lay / Like a bride at the end of her marriage day’.5 Characters
in the poem, such as Bill the bookie and Shellshock Hogan, are ordinary, working-
class New Zealanders. The ability of Baxter to write poetry that connected with the
ordinary person is one of the reasons he became a household name in New Zealand.
This ability is something I admire and have tried to achieve in some of my songs.
National identity, Southernness, the desire to communicate, to desire to speak
in a New Zealand vernacular, and the recurring theme of death: these ideas are
the main focus of the discussion that follows. Before looking at the selected songs
in detail, however, I would like to place my ideas in context by reference to New
Zealand’s foremost composer of the twentieth century, Douglas Lilburn, and poets
contemporary with him. At a famous lecture given at the Cambridge Music School
in 1946, Douglas Lilburn said:

… I want to plead with you the necessity of having a music of our own, a living tradition of
music created in this country, a music that will satisfy those parts of our being that cannot
be satisfied by the music of other nations.6
One of the ways Lilburn set about creating this identity was through settings of
New Zealand poetry. The poets he turned to had already, in the 1930s, begun a quest
to establish a New Zealand character in their work and cut the apron strings from
Mother England. These included A.R.D. Fairburn, Charles Brasch, Robyn Hyde,
R.A.K. Mason, Allen Curnow and Dennis Glover. Glover famously summed up the
attitude of these writers in his poem ‘Home Thoughts’: ‘I do not dream of Sussex
downs / or quaint old England’s quaint old towns – / I think of what may yet be seen
/ in Johnsonville and Geraldine’.7
‘Sings Harry’ by Glover, mentioned above, is probably the most famous New
Zealand song setting. The cycle of poems is set on a Southern farm during the
depression, and develops an almost folk-like style of language: simple, earthy and
economical. Lilburn creates a deliberately simple and folk-like sound to match.
Textures are sparse and modal-based, melodic lines are uncomplicated. The lack of
sophistication marks it out as very different to European musical styles of the day.
Lilburn was aiming to create a sense of place in ‘Sings Harry’ and, it could be argued,
in all of his music.
This search for a national identity in music, literature and art was still a topic
of discussion when I was a student in the early 1980s. My studies of New Zealand
literature spurred me to set the poems of local writers as a matter of principle. Their
work seemed more relevant to me than that of overseas writers, because they spoke
of places I knew and a culture with which I was familiar. I remember attending an
inspiring lecture given by poet Alistair Campbell in 1979, and this encouraged me
to set six of his poems in a cycle named ‘Songs of Colour’. The following line is an
example of the type of New Zealand image I responded to in my music: ‘More and
more I find myself talking to the sea / I am alone with my footsteps / I watch the tide
recede / And I am left with miles of shining sand’.8
Singing is the most personal form of music making. Vocal sound is created in
one’s body and is a reflection of the singer’s character and physique. A vocal line has
the potential to create more emotional impact than any instrumental solo, especially
when the vocal line is based around a moving poem. A good singer has the ability
to create extraordinarily powerful emotions by comparison to the effect of simply
reading a text. To quote the contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho: ‘Music
can invade secret, non-rational areas of our lives such as life, death, motherhood, fear,
violence … it can create a response to these things that words cannot’.9 My desire
to write songs has always been whetted by this potential to go beyond the words

and stir up strong feelings. Death provokes strong emotions in people, especially in
cases involving friends or family. It occupies a central position in most cultures of
the world, and New Zealand is no exception. For Maori, the tangi has always been
one of the most significant cultural events. R.S. Oppenheim makes this clear in the
following quotation from his book Maori Death Customs:
Kendall, and other writers, nevertheless saw that the tangihanga was a crucial ceremony
in Maori life, that there was nothing like it in scale, or anything which placed the same
obligations upon the members of society. If there is a key to the Maori worldview then this
is where it must be sought.10
Hone Tuwhare’s poem ‘Tangi’ captures feelings of an observer at a funeral, with a

simple observation that the meaning of death does not always hit people until some
specific image or event is encountered: ‘But I heard her in the wind / crooning in the
hung wires / and caught her beauty by the coffin / muted to a softer pain’.11
In my setting of this poem, the piano accompaniment is largely static until this
verse, when a gentle undulating pattern begins and continues through to the end of
the song. This pattern takes as its cue the ‘wind crooning in the hung wires’, which
suggests movement. It is also a moment when the emotion of the situation is finally
released. One hears the same melody from the beginning of the song, but now it is
underpinned by this undulating pattern, creating a sense of emotional release.
There is no attempt to reference Maori chant or waiata in ‘Tangi’ – it is a simple
song, with a simple vocal line enhanced by the piano. A similar approach is taken in
the song ‘My Father Today’, set to a poem by Sam Hunt. Here the cultural context
is pakeha and urban, set in an area of Auckland: ‘Friends, men met on the road /
stood round in that dumb way / men stand when lost for words / There was nothing
to say’.12
Simple chords on the piano accompany a sustained vocal line that is slow moving,
aiming to exploit the vowel sounds of words such as ‘cold clay’ and ‘towed the drape
of light away’. A combination of dark modes and sustained vocal lines help release
feelings that are suppressed by the men. The piano has a recurring motif through this
section, a falling semitone from F to E embedded in a chord, which is intended to
sound like a tolling bell.
In contrast, the death of Sam Hunt’s father is depicted in a matter-of-fact,
colloquial manner in the middle section of this poem. This requires a change of
mood in the music. It speeds up, becomes jauntier in style to suit the narrative style
of the text. A sudden modulation also jolts it into a different mood, and this musical
contrast also provides an emotional contrast. It distances us from the grieving for a
brief while before the reflective third section, the final words being ‘He was a heavy
load / my dead father, today’. The semitone motif F-E is extended downwards to

FIGURE 1. ‘Tangi’ (1995). Anthony Ritchie
cover F-E-D-C, played over the tonic note A which, together with louder dynamics
and a fuller texture, suggests a greater release of emotion towards the end.
Distancing of emotion is also key to ‘Lament for Barney Flanagan’, the ballad
mentioned earlier in this chapter. Understatement, black humour, and fatalism are
all hallmarks of the ballad tradition, and this is translated into music with the use
of a similar jaunty, folksy style heard in ‘My Father Today’. In order to cover twelve
verses the word setting has, of necessity, to be syllabic in style and rapid in rhythm.
Consequently the singer’s line is functional: it tells the story in an unemotional,
detached manner. Wry commentary is provided by the piano, with references to
other musical styles to underline the meaning of the words. For example, with the
line ‘Barney was banging at the Pearly Gate’ we hear a snippet of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony played on the piano, the famous ‘fate knocking at the door’ motif. Near
the end, the Governor General toasts the dead Flanagan to the strains of ‘God Defend
New Zealand’. It is only in the last bar of the song that the solemnity of death is
evoked, with a short spoken prayer over a held chord. The banality of Flanagan’s

demise can be narrated in an amusing manner, but death itself is never a laughing
matter.
The distancing of emotion is used to create a quite different effect in the song
‘Children’, set to words by Bill Manhire. The slightly bizarre tone of the poem is set
from the beginning: ‘The likelihood is / the children will die / without you to help
them do it’.13
The poem reflects on the fact that we all have to die some time. Children find
this particularly hard to grasp, and it is one of those facts we slowly come to terms
with when growing up. The matter-of-fact way this is dealt with in the poem
creates uncertainty in the reader – is the author being detached for some perverse
reason? Is it black humour? I interpret the poem as a day dream, where the author is
quietly imagining the world in fifty to one hundred years’ time, where death simply
represents an absence of somebody: ‘They will die one by one / and not think to
call you: / they will be old / And you will be gone’. These unemotional thoughts are
reflected by a deliberately neutral accompaniment on piano and viola, consisting of
simple repeated chords and occasional imitations of the vocal line. This also allows
the words of the singer to be clearly heard, as it is the words that are more important
here than the sounds of the singer and instruments. As in the previous songs cited,
the vocal line is simple and modal in style, which also gets the text across clearly.
FIGURE 2. ‘My Father Today’ (1990). Anthony Ritchie

FIGURE 3. Seven song melodies and a common basic shape. Anthony Ritchie
The rising fifth at the start of the melody has long been a favourite interval of mine,
dating back to my cycle ‘Songs of Colour’ (1979) where the fifth acts as a unifying
element in the five songs. It is an interval I associate with New Zealand music, and
the music of Lilburn and Farquhar in particular.14 In his poem ‘Wild Honey’, Alistair
Campbell refers to Lilburn, and his solitude: ‘Alone he paces / an empty beach,
creating in his head / bare harmonies of sand and wave … “Wild Honey”’.15
Whether conscious or unconscious, the bare fifth is common not just to my
Manhire setting and Lilburn’s style, but in fact to all of the seven songs this chapter
encompasses. Moreover, the connection goes further: there is a basic melodic shape,
or what the Germans call a grundgestalt, in common, which traces a fifth upwards
from D to A, and further up to C, before returning to A and D again. This is
demonstrated in Figure 3.
Do these connections suggest that emotions and feelings associated with death
have a common musical shape and a common set of intervals? In the West we associate
the minor key with sadness, unhappiness, reflection, possibly anger, and other such
moods. However, in my music I never think in terms of ‘minor keys’ – simply in
terms of modes, or scales, such as Dorian mode or the Phrygian mode. These darker
modes dominate the seven songs, and their association with the theme of death is not
surprising. It is tempting to interpret the rising fifth as a hopeful progression, which
then progresses further, only to eventually fall back down to where it started, as hope
is replaced by the reality of death. Alternatively, we can view this basic shape as a
natural and common melodic contour, and conclude that there is no real symbolism
to be found at all. As the composer, I can offer no proof of this. As with all musical
symbolism it is impossible to be definitive. In my mind, however, this grundgestalt
has a significance that goes beyond a purely musical connection.
In the last part of ‘Children’ the poet’s futuristic daydream of the future becomes
distracted by the present: ‘Yes, it’s a tall story but don’t you think / full of promise,
and he’s just a kid / but watch him grow’. I decided to allow the music to fly off on
a tangent, to match the rather random ending of the poem. The song speeds up, and
phrases are repeated and elongated. The final word ‘grow’ is allowed to do just that:
the vocal line grows in length, becomes more melismatic, and the meaning of the
words is left behind as the sound of the music takes over. Thoughts of death are swept
away by energetic music that is youthful in its zest for life. This cathartic coda owes
something to my experiences of rock music in the 1970s. For example, songs such
as ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles or ‘Hot Love’ by T. Rex have lengthy repeated choruses
at the end, as the emotions of the song take charge in a frenzy of excitement. I have
tried using this technique in various instrumental pieces as well, such as the finale of
my First Symphony, which has a climactic section near the end.

‘Children’ is the first of a cycle of four songs entitled ‘Children and Adults’,
written in 1992. The energetic coda of this song is echoed in the final song, ‘Just
like that!’, with words by Sam Hunt. Similar repeated phrases and exuberant rock
rhythms are used but this time the effect is more bizarre in tone. ‘Just like that!’ is a
black evocation of suicide, with the author fantasising about swallowing poisonous
berries – or are they pills?
You can be a child again, eat
more than’s good for you –
here! Like this – die
this minute here now where you lie.
One, two, three, that’s it.
Just like that!16
The uneasiness in this song is created by bimodality and a higher level of

dissonance. This edgy harmony underlines the double meaning in the text, which
has a strange mix of childish imagery and adult meaning. Reactions to suicide are
more complex than with most forms of death, and I tried to reflect this in a song that
offers no real resolution, despite the ending on the tonic key. Jabbing, syncopated
chords on the piano also act to unsettle the otherwise flowing musical texture.
The thematic connection between the opening song of the cycle, ‘Children’, and
‘Just Like That!’ is conscious,and they are also related in terms of tonal progressions
and structure. Although these songs share a cathartic coda, the mood in ‘Just like
that!’ is far from euphoric. There is a deliberate hollowness in the piano’s texture that
is intended to suggest an emotionally numbed state of mind.
By comparison to the ‘Children and Adults’ cycle James K. Baxter’s ‘Song’ is
less complex in its approach to the theme of death. Here the life and death of Jesus
Christ is described, with the refrain evoking three main values: truth, love and mercy.
My setting of this poem was originally commissioned by Maureen Smith for the
ordination of seven Catholic priests at Holy Cross Chapel in Mosgiel. The song
had to be simple enough for the priests to learn without using written music. After
the premiere I decided to transcribe the song for mezzo soprano and piano, and it
is in this form that it has been performed most often. Owing to the nature of the
commission, this song is simpler in style than my other songs. I have been surprised
by its popularity, but this may have something to do with its simple vocal line and
more conventional harmonies, which help convey the message of the poem with
simplicity and conviction. The singer’s line is largely based around a descending scale
pattern presented in the first phrase, combined with Aeolian harmonies that create
a sombre mood. This descending line is then echoed in the chorus. Throughout

FIGURE 4. ‘Just like that!’ from the ‘Children and Adults’ song cycle (1992). Anthony Ritchie
the song a gentle pulsing rhythm underpins the texture in the piano, suggesting a
walking motion, and also possibly a heartbeat.
At the nadir of the song, the death of Christ is described, and at this point the
gentle pulsing rhythm stops for the only time. The following lines are underpinned
by low, dark chords on the piano that slowly fade away: ‘And the blood ran down
and the sun grew dark / For lack of his company’.17 However, the death of Christ is a
source of strength for Christians, and sombreness is mixed with hope and veneration.
After this low point the music rises up in hope, to a climax before the refrain is sung
one more time. Conventional tonal devices such as the tierce de Picardie at the end
is very unusual in my music, but I intended it as a nod towards the religious culture
of this song.
Simplicity of expression is also the modus operandi in ‘Tomahawk Sonnet’, a
setting of a poem by Bernadette Hall. However, in this case the simplicity is not
for practical or devotional reasons; it is because grieving has rendered the poem’s
speaker incapable of anything especially elaborate. I would like to draw a parallel
with the final song of Der Winterreise by Schubert, where the music is reduced to

FIGURE 5 (TOP) AND 6 (BOTTOM). Opening phrases and chorus of ‘Song’ (1992). Anthony Ritchie
an almost banal simplicity, representing madness taking hold of the singer after so
much grief has befallen him. He sees a man in the street playing a barrel organ, and
sings short, broken melodic phrases accompanied by a simple drone and repeated
phrases. Likewise, in ‘Tomahawk Sonnet’ the rawness of expression in the poem
is reflected by the use of a stark vocal line and the barest of harmonies on piano. It

also uses a drone, but here it is not sounded on the piano: the baritone and pianist
hum the drone together! A short melody on the piano plays, referring to the style of
the bagpipes and helping to establish a certain Scottish and Dunedin character. The
singer enters with the first lines of the poem: ‘So, I have done faithfully the last task /
digging into the sand at Anderson’s Bay / where your sweetheart is buried’.18 The poet
is burying her father. Later in the song, she reminisces about the past in a section that
is more ‘normal’ in musical texture and style. However, the cold numbness of the
opening returns to the final line ‘I weep white berries’, and a musical image of the
desolate Anderson’s Bay cemetery is created through bare harmonies.
This song originally belonged to a cycle called ‘5 Dunedin Songs’, set to poems
by Iain Lonie and Bernadette Hall, and aimed to capture certain characteristics of
Dunedin that seem to me to be distinctive: the bleakness of the weather, and a
sense of introversion and reflection caused by the weather. It is often said that many
creative people emerge from Dunedin because they have to spend much of their
time inside, away from the cold! Dunedin is sparsely populated. It is quite possible
to walk along one of those wonderful peninsula beaches and not meet a soul. This
also contributes to a reflective state of mind, and creative work. It seems to me no
coincidence that Dunedin is home to long-established residencies for writers, artists,
dancers and composers, and that so many of them create fine work while here.
The theme of death is central to the album New Zealand Poets in Song, as reflected
by the seven songs discussed in this chapter. Researching these compositions has
revealed that there exists a significant recurring musical shape that connects the seven
songs, and suggests a prevailing mood or tone. More broadly, however, this chapter
articulates the relationship of music and words, as demonstrated through these
collaborations with New Zealand poets. The creation of a distinctive New Zealand
identity has been an important aspect of my song writing. The musical examples
show how aspects of this identity have been portrayed, through the use of simple,
largely modal vocal settings underpinned by simple and sparse piano textures.
These songs are designed to communicate messages that are distinctly Southern in
character, through an easily understood musical style. My goal has been to create a
vernacular that reflects the character and concerns of the texts. If these songs achieve
this goal then it is my hope that the album New Zealand Poets in Song will, to some
small degree, succeed in raising the profile of the New Zealand art song.

9
The New Brass Band:
Stylistic Pluralism and Local Vernacular
Peter Adams
This chapter examines the composition process of my concerto for violin and brass
band, ‘Concerto Burlesca’, which was jointly commissioned by The St Kilda Brass
Band in 2007, under the direction of Steve Miles and (then) University of Otago
violinist Kevin A. Lefohn. ‘Concerto Burlesca’ has subsequently been recorded and
released on the CD Old, New, Borrowed and Blues – A marriage of musical genres by St
Kilda Brass in August 2009.1 In this chapter, I explore the challenge for a composer
in creating music that speaks of the ‘here and now’ of Dunedin in the twenty-first
century, while also referencing global musical cultures and styles that influence the
domains of composition and performance.
This examination of local identity is, in my view, linked to broader contemporary
processes of globalisation. Therefore it seems not merely appropriate but necessary to
approach music from a global perspective. This global worldview stands alongside our
local identity as New Zealanders, South Islanders, and Dunedinites: it complements
rather than contradicts our sense of who we are and our place in the world. Such
a worldview has seen increased awareness and respect for the lifestyles, traditions,
values – and music – of different nations and cultures. It also acknowledges the
great diversity of musical traditions within our own country – a diversity that has
contributed significantly to the richness of our national culture. The result is a
diversity of musical languages and techniques for composers to draw upon.
Music helps to inform our sense of place: ‘the musical event … evokes and
organises collective memories and presents experiences of place with an intensity,
power and simplicity unmatched by any other social activity’.2 Music also helps us to
locate ourselves – either reasserting our place in our own culture and environment, or
relocating us to distant shores. While music can be used as a means of transcending
the limitations of our own place in the world, it can also embrace and celebrate
that same place. I wanted to take up the challenge of creating something both local
and global by creating a particular musical vernacular in ‘Concerto Burlesca’ that
references both universal popular musical styles and local musical circumstances.
THE NEW BRASS BAND: STYLISTIC PLURALISM AND LOCAL VERNACULAR 113
Background
The genesis for this unusual work, marrying violin with brass band, reflects both
the significance of brass bands in local music, and the role of university-based music
academics in contributing to the local music community. In 1990, I began my
academic career at the University of Otago, and was simultaneously approached by
the committee of Dunedin’s well-established brass band, St Kilda Brass, to take on
the role of their conductor in the National Brass Band Championships being held in
Dunedin that year. I was already an experienced orchestral and choral conductor, but
I had never worked with a brass band and had little understanding of the techniques
of brass playing (I am myself a clarinettist).
My first year working with the band was a steep learning curve as I wrestled with
the strange instruments, odd scores where tubas are notated like sopranos in the treble
clef, and the complexities of balance, tone colour and technique in a large group of
brass instruments. My efforts did not make an immediate impact, but by 1992 the
band and I understood each other and we were crowned national champions in that
year’s National Brass Band Championships in Auckland. I have worked with the
band off and on ever since, and this long-standing collaboration has given me the
opportunity over the years to study, rehearse and perform many new contemporary
works from the United Kingdom and Europe.
The popular view of bands as the stereotypical amateur group performing light
music outdoors in band rotundas, or playing stirring marches on parades, is but part
of a much bigger picture of banding today. Modern bands are semi-professional
organisations with professional musical directors and professionally marketed
subscription concert series. The top bands in New Zealand will perform three or four
themed concerts a year in major concert venues, as well as competing at contests,
while still fulfilling their community obligations.3
The brass band is not an exotic outsider in this community, but rather an integral
part of it. The St Kilda brass band has played a leading musical role in Dunedin for
nearly 120 years. Brass bands and Scottish pipe bands were established soon after
the arrival of the first settlers. Such groups have evolved over the years to become
musically sophisticated and of high artistic standard, but they continue to connect to
the local imagination to the ‘motherland’ of Great Britain, as well as with the local,
celebratory role they often provide at Dunedin events. In writing for brass band, a
composer is writing for a tradition, well established in the local community, where
the music played is often uplifting and celebratory. I deliberately chose to continue
this tradition in the styles and language of ‘Concerto Burlesca’, so that my music
becomes part of a continuum and may in time become part of the tradition itself.

Identity
Despite the diversity of backgrounds, origins, and training of the ‘Concerto Burlesca’
performers and myself, it was our shared involvement in the community of Dunedin
and our interest in brass music that brought these differences together and merged
them into a new hybrid of a local expression. The commission became a means of
expressing or reinforcing my artistic identity in a piece of original music, which
was then brought to life in performance through the perspective of others: local
performers, Dunedinites like myself, but with different backgrounds to my own. The
isolation and smaller population base of Dunedin, located as it is in the south of the
South Island, prompts such unusual collaborations.
My own research domain is that of musical composition. This artistic self-
expression contributes to knowledge and understanding in a way similar to that of
a research paper: both disseminate personal research to a wider public, mine in the
form of an artistic, aural experience. However, composition as a contribution to
knowledge is different from a written paper, as music is not a language of definite and
agreed meanings – we cannot translate Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony into words.
Martin Stokes points out that for many scholars, music ‘cannot be dealing with the
kinds of events and processes that make up the predominantly verbal and visual
‘real-life’ of which social reality is assumed to consist’.4 For many people the language
of music is seen as abstract and unique: for example, in the view of the famous
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, music deals with pure, abstract structures of
potentially infinite expression – a view in line with 1950s serial composers such as
Pierre Boulez.5
While it may not be possible for us all to agree on a definite meaning in terms of
specific, concrete messages or ideas communicated in a piece of music, aestheticians,
writers and musicians do agree that music communicates subtleties of atmosphere,
mood, character and emotion that elicit deep emotional and psychological responses
in listeners. For me as a composer, performance is paramount: without it the
music is unheard, the ‘art’ lies dormant and there is no communicating of ideas
to a public, no sharing of a vision and no reception of my expression. Following
the initial performances, the creation of a recording is of further significance for a
composer because it shares this artistic experience further, allows repeated listening
and contemplation of the art work, and distributes it to a potentially much wider
audience.
Compositional considerations
An important conceptual starting point for ‘Concerto Burlesca’ was the notion that
the work should be imbued with a sense of newness, while also grounded in clear
generic parameters understood by the intended brass band audience. One thing I
have especially liked in my involvement with brass bands is the challenging new
repertoire, hot off the press, which constitutes so much of the music that bands
rehearse and perform. Brass bands are unique in the way that their amateur members
whole-heartedly embrace the newest contemporary music written specifically for
their medium. The reasons for this are intricately tied to the history and competitive
culture of the brass band. Banding has from the very beginning revolved around
contests at local, national and international levels. These contests serve as musical
and social markers in which band members can measure themselves against their
peers. For the masculine ethos of brass banding in the late 1890s and early 1900s,
contesting was an outlet for intensively competitive macho bravado in which players
competed not only on the contesting stage in musical performances, but also in the
beer tent afterwards. Much of this competitive culture remains today.
From quite an early stage in the history of their development, organisers of brass
band contests realised that the fairest way to judge bands against each other was to
commission a composer to write a brand-new arrangement of an orchestral work for
the brass band’s specific instrumentation. This ensured that no band had an unfair
advantage in playing a work already familiar to its members. By the 1930s, such
arrangements were superseded by new original works for the brass band medium.
For well over one hundred years this competitive tradition has continued, and brass
bands worldwide continue to enter contests several times annually, playing newly
composed music that provides challenges of technique and musicianship to test
groups to the full.
In a way, both the players of St Kilda Brass and I had undergone significant
pre-compositional research through immersion in the contemporary brass band
music that such contesting entails. ‘Concerto Burlesca’ has many of the features of
a new contest piece, with displays of technical prowess for both the soloist and the
band, solo passages for some of the band players, contrasts of dynamics and tempo,
irregular time changes and timbral contrasts. These elements are familiar to both the
brass players and audiences who regularly attend brass band concerts.
In reflection of this competition-oriented style, I wanted to showcase both the
band (with its brass choir and significant percussion section) and the solo violin in a
musical language that spoke of Dunedin in the twenty-first century, and which also
represented the diverse backgrounds, origins, training and traditions of the American
soloist, Welsh conductor, New Zealand composer and local band members. I

decided on the concerto form as a medium common to both brass band repertoire
and classical violin repertoire.
The concerto form is one of the least represented in the output of New Zealand
composers. One struggles to think of a single piano concerto (there are smaller scale
concertinos by a handful of composers), and concertos for any instrument with
orchestral accompaniment number only thirty out of the over 600 orchestral works
listed on the SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music website.6 Douglas Lilburn,
widely seen as the father figure of New Zealand composition, wrote no concertos,
and there are no violin concertos as such written by New Zealand composers, and
very few works for violin with orchestra. Perhaps the best known of these (but
still rarely performed) are John Ritchie’s ‘Pisces’, and Ken Young’s ‘Remembering’.
Interestingly, the composers who have embraced the concerto genre (John Psathas,
Ken Young and Gareth Farr for instance) are those who have also written works
for brass band. To me, this suggests that the extroverted and virtuosic nature of the
concerto genre is mirrored by the tradition of writing virtuosic contest pieces for the
extrovert ensemble that is the brass band.
The combination of violin with brass band, however, is unique: ‘Concerto
Burlesca’ was a world first: no other work for this combination existed and the
technical challenges for me as a composer were many. At the forefront of these were
the questions of balance and the spotlighting of the violin against the brass mass.
Brass bands usually have twenty-five brass instruments, with families of cornets (a
smaller and lighter cousin of the trumpet), horns (not orchestral French horns, but
a smaller conical bore instrument of mellow timbre), trombones and tubas (in three
sizes, from the tenor voice of the Euphonium to the deepest bass – the Bb bass tuba).
All but the trombones are conical bore instruments that are a little gentler than
their orchestral brass counterparts, and they blend together easily to produce a warm
homogenous sound.
There are many smaller subsets and groupings available from within the group
which will give subtle changes of tone colour, and all the brass instruments can be
muted by inserting different shaped devices into their bells: this further modifies
tone colour as well as reducing the volume. In ‘Concerto Burlesca’ I used three
types of mute: the straight mute which makes the tone thinner and more nasal
and edgy, the cup mute which drastically reduces the sound so that it appears
distant and faint, and the Harmon mute which has a little plunger on the end to
enable the production of ‘waa-waa’ sounds. The volume a brass band can produce
is considerable, and even when playing quietly a brass group produces a mass of
sound that is dense and thick. I tried to overcome this density with the use of
many unusual sub-groupings of brass when accompanying the violin, by keeping
the violin in a different register from the brass, and utilising the three different types
of mute in the band instruments.
There were few compositional models for this work, though I chose Gershwin’s
‘Rhapsody in Blue’ as a potential starting point, for its use of solo piano against jazz
big band accompaniment. This use of a popular jazz idiom in a piano concerto was
unique at the time of its composition, and this appealed to me as an approach for
parts of my own work. Furthermore, jazz and popular idioms abound in the brass
band repertoire and the players are very familiar with these styles. Violin soloist
Kevin Lefohn liked this idea as well. He had performed various chamber works by
Gershwin and Copland, composers from the country of his birth, and he identified
with them.
Another compositional model was the cello concerto by Frederich Gulda with
a concert band accompaniment (woodwind, brass and percussion to which Gulda
added bass guitar and drum kit). This work had several short movements in very
different styles from each other – ranging from rock ’n’ roll to baroque pastiche.
I liked this stylistic pluralism, as it seemed to emphasise how our modern world is
suffused with diverse influences from many cultures, how our everyday world of
listening can embrace many stylistic genres, and how our local identity is inseparable
from many global influences. The deliberate plurality of musical styles I use in
‘Concerto Burlesca’ range from a New World modality through gospel and blues
ballad, circus and burlesque-type music, to jazz-rock fusion.
Structure and content

‘Concerto Burlesca’ is a three-movement work lasting around twenty-four minutes.
The first movement is sub-titled ‘Burlesca’ and pits a comic circus style complete with
jarring, raucous elements against a more serious modal contemplation. The violin
part is virtuosic in the circus sections with fast running passages and many double
stopping episodes, while in the contrasting sections it is lyrical and explores both the
heights and depths of its compass. The juxtaposition of comic and serious, dramatic
and lyrical is an exploration of opposites that are brought together in the cadenza
section for the soloist. The movement is organised as a simple sonata structure, with
an opening exposition of material followed by developments, before a recapitulation
returns to the opening material, now seen in a slightly different light.
This introduction to the work draws attention to some aspects of the musical style
of ‘Concerto Burlesca’ and how it deliberately draws elements from other musical
styles, especially those evoking popular idioms and New World American music.
Here, for example, is an extract from the opening of the first movement. The extract
features ‘oom-cha-cha’ accompaniment that never settles rhythmically, the tritone

harmony dislocates the more usual perfect fifth tonic and dominant polarity, and
braying trombones add a raucous touch. The solo violin line is a simple mixed mode
creation. My musical language references both circus music and a touch of the theme
music to the television show The Simpsons, which was often on our television set
when I sat down in the room next door to work.
The second movement is subtitled ‘Ballad Americana’ and begins with the lone
voice of the violin intoning a simple pentatonically based melody that grows into a
gospel/blues ballad with warm harmonic support. Pentatonic melodies are found in
all cultures and in all eras of music. They are at once timeless and familiar: melodies
of the nursery, the hymnbook, the pop song and of folk music. I wanted to evoke this
timeless, folk quality that is at once both universal and personal. The middle section
of the movement uses more complex manufactured modes of my own devising and
is densely polyphonic, with the violin becoming just one equal voice in the passing
around and imitation of musical ideas with the brass. This gaunt, modal music is an
example of my attempt to create a vernacular musical dialect. The movement ends
as it began, with the return of the opening material, in reverse order this time, thus
forming an arch form in structure.
The second movement opens with a melody in solo violin created from the
simplicity of the timeless pentatonic mode that expands into a gospel blues idiom,
with appropriate harmony occasionally clouded with pandiatonicism (which I
discuss more later). Here again is a synthesised vernacular language: a manufactured
music that is intended to reference Americana through gospel and blues. Composers
use association and reference to other music all the time to help their listener
by placing the music in a familiar context. It is the stock in trade of the film or
television composer who often only has a few seconds to portray atmosphere, place
or emotion in music. This extract from the opening of ‘Ballad Americana’ shows the
freely shaped mixolydian line of the violin and the A-major-based gospel harmony
of the accompaniment. My intention is for the listener to draw upon associations
with American music, and hopefully to evoke some of the gentle emotion of this
language.
After a short silence, the high energy of the last movement (subtitled ‘Cumulative
Loops’) begins. This movement was the first to be written and uses many idiomatic
challenges for the violin that were discussed and tried with Kevin Lefohn. It begins
with the violin looping through virtuosic semiquavers in its highest register, while
solo cornet and then Euphonium declaim a lyrical melody (another modal creation)
underneath. This introduction has three distinct sections, each growing out of the
one before. This then leads to a jazz-fusion romp that accumulates energy and
volume to produce an exciting conclusion to the concerto. A repeated jazz harmonic
FIGURE 1 (TOP). An
  extract
  from
  the
  opening
  section
  of
  the
  first
  movement,
  ‘Burlesca’.
  Peter Adams
FIGURE 2 (BOTTOM). An extract from the opening of the second movement, ‘Ballad Americana’. Peter Adams
FIGURE 3 (TOP): B minor chord progression and jazz-rock fusion rhythms in an extract from the third movement, ‘Cumulative Loops’.
FIGURE 4 (SECOND FROM TOP): An extract from the solo violin line in the last movement, ‘Cumulative Loops’, showing improvisatory features.
FIGURE 5 (SECOND FROM BOTTOM): Motivic imitations and a gaunt, modal New Zealand vernacular feature in this extract from ‘Ballad Americana’.
FIGURE 6 (BOTTOM: Pandiatonic B Aeolian harmony in an extract from the second movement. Peter Adams
progression with many syncopated rhythms allows both violin and brass to feature
over busy percussion. As the movement continues to accelerate in energy, the violin
soars to its highest voice in an attempt to be heard above the full voice of the band.
This struggle of the individual against the mass is not only symbolic, but it adds visual
drama in live performances as the violinist’s Herculean efforts are plainly apparent in
the energetic requirements of the bowing arm.
After the introductory sections of the last movement, ‘Cumulative Loops’, the
brass and drum kit introduce a four-bar jazz/rock progression in B minor, i-VI-iv-V,
which repeats as an ostinato, accumulating energy with the characteristic off-beat,
shuffling rhythms of the genre. The looping of this accompanying ostinato allows a
cumulative building-up, and the opportunity to break off from it and digress for the
sake of contrast when necessary. Again, such a reference is used for the immediate
associations that will resonate with a listener. Above this, the violin can solo in a way
that is designed as a written-out jazz-style improvisation common to this style. The
use of triplets, offbeat attacks, syncopation, wide leaps of register, and decorations
like the grace note and trill all contribute to this improvisatory jazz-fusion style.
‘Concerto Burlesca’ is more highly organised than its casual, poly-stylistic idioms
might belie: coherence of utterance needs organisation, the three movements need
to have relationships in common so as to be sensed by a listener as belonging
together as the product of one person in one work. The three movements are
tightly bound together by motivic saturation of both pitch and rhythmic figures,
and they also share an embedded basic shape (or grundgestalt as Schoenberg called
it) that further unifies the three movements. For example, the middle of the slow
movement has a structure that shows such saturation through the close imitation
of two small musical fragments: the rising step quaver figure and the striding
crotchet ascending leap of the violin tune, which is echoed in Flugal horn and
then truncated into just its initial upward leap. This motivic saturation adds to
the coherence of the work and in this example we also see the gaunt New Zealand
‘voice’: the motivic lines are presented starkly, with no instrumental doublings or
lush padding, and the material is modal – the solo violin, for example, is in the
Dorian mode in this extract.
Finding identity in ‘Concerto Burlesca’

Composers deliberately use musical language for the associations they evoke, often
referencing styles or idioms that they think will resonate with their audience. In
‘Concerto Burlesca’, I have attempted to blend elements from different styles – the
success of which is over to the listening audience to judge. The way these styles
evoke particular moods and associations is of paramount importance to the musical
meaning of the work. This relates closely to the domain of film composition, where
composers often reference other composers and well-known musical works for
the immediate associations such a reference evokes. Many such associations have
become clichés – the heroic martial theme on French horns, the tremolo diminished
seventh chords in steps for suspense and so on. In the world of film music, composers
often have only a very short time for their music to evoke an atmosphere, suggest
a time and place, or arouse an emotional response. By referencing a well-known
musical work or a particular language (such as the yearning chromaticism of late
romantic music for emotionally charged scenes) the composer draws on the shared
memories and knowledge of his audience. Often we composers use these associations
audiences have with pre-existing musical styles to communicate directly and quickly.
Instrumental colour is another immediate tool for evoking pre-existing references in
our listeners:
There are a variety of ways of achieving an atmosphere of time and place, or, musically
speaking, ‘colour’. In a broad sense, musical colour may be taken to represent the exotic
or sensuous aspects of music … Film music is overwhelmingly colouristic in its intention
and effect …. Colour is associative – bagpipes call up images of Scotland, the oboe easily
suggests a pastoral scene, muted brass connotes something sinister, rock music may imply
a youthful theme, and so on.7
Audiences come to a new musical work with many pre-existing references that
they relate the new work to, and composers can exploit this through reference and
association.
Art music composers often look to create synthetic new references for their
audience to relate to. In a letter to Philip Norman about his song cycle Sings Harry,
New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn wrote: ‘When did I decide to set Glover’s
poems? Impossible to say. But I did give them a long period of thought, wondering
how I could possibly match their so-seeming casual qualities with equivalent
harmonies and rhythms of a “vernacular” style still unformed in our music’.8 He
expanded on this topic in his talk ‘A search for tradition’, which he gave at the
first Cambridge Summer School of Music in January 1946.9 In his view, our young
country at this time had no tradition of folk culture of its own, only the European
folk traditions settlers had brought with them. He admitted to not understanding
Maori music and that in any case it was not part of his upbringing and culture as
a pakeha. In Sings Harry and other works, he deliberately set about attempting to
create a synthetic (artificial) vernacular musical language that would evoke some of
the qualities of folk song without merely replicating the idiom of existing European
folk songs and ballads.

Like Lilburn, I have also deliberately chosen language and styles to evoke
associations in the listener: my chosen harmonic vocabulary in ‘Concerto Burlesca’
references a musical language they may well be familiar with. The harmony is often
modally diatonic, for the most part triadically based, but fused with pedal notes
(often the inverted pedal in the top of the harmony – another Lilburn characteristic).
I also use what Peter Winkler10 has called ‘prairie pandiatonicism’, where different
diatonic elements and harmonies are combined in a way that blurs diatonic function.
In a pandiatonic complex, chords may have most of the notes in a diatonic scale
or mode present in a chord. A simple C-major triad may be blurred through the
addition of other diatonic notes like D and A for example.
Here is an example of pandiatonic harmony from the second movement of
‘Concerto Burlesca’: the violin melody is in B aeolian mode. After the initial B-major
chord, the accompaniment in the first four bars of the extract also uses notes of B
aeolian. Each harmony is based on a simple triad but has other notes of the mode
present for the blurring of harmonic function and, more importantly, for the open,
gentle dissonance such harmonies achieve.
Winkler finds the origins of pandiatonicism in the musical style heard in American
concert music of the 1920s and ’30s. The roots of this pandiatonicism are in the
music of Stravinsky and other composers active in Paris in the early twentieth century.
Through the composition teaching of Parisian Nadia Boulanger, American students
such as Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson learnt about this harmonic practice. The
American movie industry, through composers such as Alfred Newman (who wrote
scores for over 250 films), picked up on this and, together with the popular concert
music of Copland (Billy the Kid, Appalachian Spring), pandiatonicism now seems
completely American. In both Copland’s music and in Hollywood the pandiatonic
evokes particular associations – open spaces of rural America and the cowboy (‘prairie
music’). The use of pandiatonicism was part of American composers’ attempts in the
early decades of the twentieth century to create their own synthesised vernacular
language. Lilburn admired Copland’s music and corresponded with the American
composer. He hoped to study with him, but it never came to pass. Pandiatonicism
became part of Lilburn’s harmonic language from the early 1950s. A harmonic
practice from another New World of spacious landscape became part of Lilburn’s
national musical voice. In turn, I have built on this harmonic language in ‘Concerto
Burlesca’, continuing this pandiatonic tradition.
Conclusion
Writers will often describe the music of a particular composer by comparing that
music to styles that are part of the composer’s chosen language – ingredients of that
style if you like. Douglas Lilburn mixed the pastoral modality of his teacher Vaughan
Williams with a Copland-inspired pandiatonicism. Sibelius is another obvious
ingredient in Lilburn’s music – especially in the earlier works – and Lilburn used
these stylistic and specific influences to synthesise his own style that would reflect our
own new world with its echoes of the old world (the ‘mother country’).
Returning to my own ‘Concerto Burlesca’, I have identified some of my chosen
ingredients – many chosen for the references and associations they evoke. We have
modal harmony and melody, some even in simple aeolian, mixolydian and pentatonic
modes. The harmony also features pandiatonic blurring and at times the use of pedal
notes that maintain a tonal hierarchy when the harmony is more dissonant. There
is a deliberate use of popular music styles (gospel and blues, jazz-rock fusion, circus
music). The instrumentation, with brass band and drum-kit and percussion, and
the chosen musical structures, evoke contemporary idioms from home and abroad
(particularly another New World country, America). No successful piece of music
exists in isolation; it is situated in a complex web of associations and connections of
various sorts with musical (as well as verbal and cultural) elements of widely diverse
origins. To investigate systematically all the ways in which a particular piece of music
connects with its musical and cultural environment is an endless task – my approach
here has been unsystematic and selective.
‘Concerto Burlesca’ premiered in Dunedin in August 2007 with a performance
two days later in the Central Otago town of Cromwell. These performances were
successful: the performers enjoyed the music, and it met the brief of the commission
from both the viewpoint of a virtuosic violin solo part for Kevin Lefohn and idiomatic
and accessible brass music for the band and its musical director Steve Miles. Both
performances received favourable reviews in local newspapers and on the British
specialist brass band website 4barsrest.com. A review of the Dunedin concert
appeared on 20 August with the headline ‘Novel Work Makes Good Impression’
that praised the concerto for its ‘unique combination of sound ... innovative twenty
three minute work, a world premiere for an enthusiastic audience ... carnival like
with appealing lyrical violin sections .... I just loved the 2nd movement ... I wanted
to hear it all over again’11. A review of the Cromwell performance appeared at the
brass band website 4barsrest.com. John Scott wrote: ‘Clever scoring of the composer
Peter Adams .... Full of beauty, wit, style and emotion ... I particularly liked the
beautiful bluesy sections of the middle movement, and the jazz rock fusion in the
finale’.12

One aspect of the concerto is still problematic: the last movement’s accumulation
of energy and volume puts the violin at risk of being swamped and some of its detail
lost in the mass of sound. In the two live performances it was difficult to achieve an
ideal balance at times, whereas this was not a problem in the recording studio for
the CD, where the violin had its own microphone and the balance could be adjusted
by the sound engineer. One solution I am keen to hear is the use of an electric
violin in this last movement. It was part of my original conception of the concerto
and its inclusion would heighten the electric rock element of this last movement.
However, Kevin had never owned or tried an electric violin so we decided that he
should perform the whole concerto on an ordinary acoustic instrument. There are
two future performances under discussion in which I hope to be able to try out
the electric option, involving soloists from the Auckland Philharmonia and New
Zealand Symphony Orchestra, together with their respective cities’ brass bands. It
would seem that the work has currency, both as a violin concerto display piece,
and as a novel work for an unusual combination. These further performances are in
New Zealand; it would be interesting to see how the work’s style and language were
received in another country.
For every composer (and I am certainly no exception) the hope is that the
consistency of individual style provides its own logic: my style in ‘Concerto Burlesca’
provides the thread of continuity that ties together all of these observations, and glues
together the different languages and styles I have used. Most importantly, however,
the concerto has succeeded in satisfying the traditional function of entertaining an
audience. The piece showcases the solo violin with virtuosity and idiomatic writing,
while not over-compromising the traditional sound and style of the brass band and
its repertoire. The use of polystylism and popular musical languages in this work
will hopefully emphasise for the listener the universality of the place of music in our
culture and act as an affirmation and celebration of the richness and variety of ‘New
Zealandness’ in the third millennium.
10
From History to Opera:
The story of William Larnach
John Drummond
My opera Larnach is based on the final days and death of historical Dunedin personality
William Larnach. This chapter explores the process of transforming historical events,
and plausible explanations for those events, into the format of music theatre. Opera
explores the spaces in between events, focusing on the emotional lives of the human
beings concerned. Taking a Dunedin story as subject matter for an opera allows
audiences to develop their sense of local identity on an emotional level.1
I have been Blair Professor of Music at the University of Otago in Dunedin since
1976, and have been engaged in opera productions on the campus and in the city
ever since then. After a performance of my first full-length opera composed in New
Zealand, Plague Upon Eyam, which was set in an English village, I was invited by
the then Minister of Arts, Peter Tapsell, to compose operas on New Zealand stories.
Two of my full-length operas since then have used events from local history – The
Stars in Orion with the 1863 Otago gold rush, and now Larnach, about the life and
death of a historic Dunedin figure. The local content probably disqualifies the operas
from international performances; on the other hand it means that the inhabitants
of the community can feel some sense of ownership of the works. Opera may be an
international art form, but it does not need to be thought of as irrelevant to twenty-
first-century life in southern New Zealand. In our local communities we all have
stories that touch our hearts and challenge our understanding, and no more powerful
way to tell these stories can be found than opera.
Larnach: The history

On 12 October 1898, in the Wellington Parliament Buildings, William James
Mudie Larnach put a revolver to his head and shot himself. Larnach was a successful
former government minister, a politician representing Otago, a businessman, and
the builder of Larnach’s Castle near Dunedin. His sudden and violent death was
a shock to everyone who knew him. In Parliament the following day, even the
Leader of the Opposition described him as ‘ever genial, kindly, courageous, cheery’.2
The exact reason for him to terminate what had appeared to be a life of financial,
political and domestic prosperity was a mystery at the time. The coroner’s inquest

could find no obvious cause, and the only verdict the jury could agree to was that
Larnach committed suicide ‘while of temporary unsound mind’.3 Only in 1977,
with the publication of Fleur Snedden’s biography of Larnach, King of the Castle, was
a plausible solution provided to the mystery. Snedden, a great-great-granddaughter
of Larnach, proposed that the key to understanding Larnach’s suicide lay in the
complex relationships he had within his family.4
Larnach, born in New South Wales in 1833, had in his mid-twenties married
Eliza Jane Guise, and together they produced six children: Donald, Kate, Douglas,
Colleen, Alice and Gladys, the first four in Victoria and the last two in New Zealand
after William’s move there to manage the Bank of Otago in 1867. In 1870, Larnach’s
business dealings had become profitable enough to enable him to buy land on the
Dunedin Peninsula, where he proceeded to have built the splendid residence now
named after him. He entered Parliament for the first time in 1876, and soon rose to
the Ministry. Through the 1880s his power and prestige grew: he began to think of
himself as founding a dynasty, with sons educated in England and daughters married
off to other prominent and prosperous settlers. However, his personal and family
life included real tragedies: his wife Eliza died in 1880, after which he married her
half-sister Mary, who died in her turn in 1887. In 1891 Larnach took his third wife,
Constance de Bathe Brandon (Conny), twenty-one years younger than Larnach and
only six years older than Donald, his eldest son.
Larnach’s eldest (and favourite) daughter Kate died in 1891. His son Donald,
groomed for a career in law and politics, married a young woman, Violet Mary
Riddle, without his father’s permission, an act which led to his estrangement from
his father. When Donald and Violet had a daughter, Gretchen, Larnach had the girl
brought to the Castle to live with him and Conny. His relationship with Donald
continued to be sour. Douglas, the second son, had a serious accident in England
and returned to live at home. Alice married a Naseby solicitor, and Colleen wished to
marry her sister’s brother-in-law, but Larnach would not give his consent.
Larnach’s family life, then, was not as happy as it appeared to be. Nor were his
business ventures as prosperous as the public supposed. In Parliament he was now
a back-bencher, treated with respect but not a significant contributor to Seddon’s
government. He hoped for recognition through the award of an honour, but none
were forthcoming.
There was, therefore, a certain hollowness to the Larnach image of public and
private success. But, according to Snedden, there was a much more disturbing skeleton
in the Larnach cupboard. For three months in 1897, Larnach, his wife Conny and
his second son Douglas were in Australia, where Larnach had been given the post of
New Zealand Commissioner to the Brisbane Exhibition. Snedden suggests that during
FROM HISTORY TO OPERA: THE STORY OF WILLIAM LARNACH 129

this trip Conny and Douglas developed a physical relationship.5 We do not know for
certain whether Larnach ever found out about this, but on the fatal afternoon of 12
October 1898 Larnach apparently received a letter which upset him: he wrote several
letters and mailed them before retiring to the Parliamentary Committee Room, where
he took his life. Snedden wonders whether the letter he received might have informed
him of his wife’s relationship with her stepson, and indicates that this might have been
a motive, along with the other stresses and strains in his life, for him to decide to end
it all.6 That letter has not survived, and nor have the letters he sent, which might well
have been farewells to members of his family, including Conny.
From historical events to stage narrative

The story of Larnach’s life and death is a powerful one. Central to it is the issue of
the space between public and private lives, between image and reality, and not only
between the public image of Larnach and his own reality, but between the reality
he imagined he lived in and the one he discovered was the true one. Having read
Snedden’s book soon after it came out, it occurred to me that here was a narrative
inviting operatic treatment. Opera is, I believe, about people facing crises, and about
the way they respond to them. Music can express the emotional consequences of this,
and thereby communicate to us in a safe way what it is like to face and deal with
personal crisis. As Aristotle put it in his Poetics, it is about pity and terror: pity as we
come to share the emotional crises of the characters, and terror as we realise that, but
for the grace of God, there go we.7
Turning a historical story into an operatic one is not a simple matter, however. It
is important to be true to the individuals involved, and not portray them in a way
that maligns them. At the same time, history cannot be simply transferred to the
stage. In Poetics, Aristotle pointed out the difference between history and tragedy.8
The former tells of what did happen, while the latter tells of what may happen:
that is, it explores the possibilities and options that lie behind events.9 It deals more
with potentialities than with certainties. Indeed, my interest in the Larnach story lay
precisely in what we do not know from history: what was going through his mind
as he put that revolver to his head? Why does a person choose suicide? My own
encounters with individuals who had tried to take their own lives had made me seek
explanations for such behaviour. Perhaps, by exploring Larnach’s particular situation
through the expressive medium of music and drama, I could find not a rational
explanation but some kind of emotional understanding, and through performances
of the opera, share this with others.
It took several years, and several wrong turns, before I was able to devise a scenario
that met the requirements of drama without being disloyal to history. For a start,

Larnach’s story has many characters, is spread over many years, and occurred in
many places. His character certainly owed a good deal to his background as a child
growing up with a brutally disciplinarian father, which led to the way he treated
his own sons. I toyed with the idea of setting the opera in the Committee Room
where he took his life, or alternatively in his study at Larnach’s Castle, with the room
inhabited by his dead parents and uncles and the images of all the people in his life
whose contributions to his personality had brought him to this point. But this would
end up rather like a coroner’s court, and a cast of thousands was likely to confuse an
audience rather than provide elucidation.
In the end I decided to focus on Larnach’s family. It was within the family that,
if Snedden was right, the final blow fell that prompted Larnach’s suicide. Other
elements such as his business dealings and his political life could be alluded to. The
family provided a network of relationships that music could explore. The opportunity
was there to create rich characters. Larnach’s three wives suggest that he was a man
who needed a woman’s support, so he could easily be understood as a man dependent
upon Conny. Her betrayal would be shattering. She could be seen as a woman torn
between her loyalty to Larnach and her strong feelings for Douglas: should she tell
her husband? If so, how could she tell him? Should she curb her feelings for Douglas?
If so, how could that work in their shared environment? Douglas, a son bullied by his
father, might see his relationship with Conny as a kind of revenge, but the evidence
suggests he was a rather weak man, so perhaps he felt unable to decide what to do.
Donald, the elder son, estranged from his father but with his daughter living at the
Castle, had a very complex relationship with Larnach, with his stepmother Conny,
and with Douglas. The daughters had their own desires to follow a pathway different
to what Larnach expected of them. Here, then, was a collection of people with whom
any audience could identify.
Creating a scenario
Creating an opera is a process in several stages. First comes the scenario, which
structures the story into scenes and acts, sketches out the characters and their
motivations, and plans the musical climaxes. It is the blueprint for the work. Next
comes the libretto, which fills out the scenario and provides the words that the
characters will sing. Last but not least comes the music, which gives expression to
the characters’ feelings, shapes the tensions in the story, and provides the emotional
excitement and release for the audience.
I have always found Sophocles’s King Oedipus an extraordinarily powerful tragedy.
It seems to me to epitomise the Aristotelian advice about the successful tragic plot,
in which we witness a powerful man brought low not by some accident but through

his own character and actions.10 I wondered if a similar approach could be taken in
working with the Larnach story. The similarity, in the discovery of an intergenerational
relationship between a mother and son (in this case the less fraught one of a wife
and a stepson) had not escaped me. I noted information in Snedden’s book that
Donald’s daughter and Larnach’s granddaughter, Gretchen, who lived at the Castle,
was born ‘before the end of 1881’.11 This led me to the idea that she would have been
celebrating her seventeenth birthday towards the end of 1898. Was it plausible that
Larnach might have summoned a family gathering for her birthday on 12 October
1898? Out of this idea for a framework a scenario emerged which telescoped several
years into a single day, and moved all the significant events to a single location –
Larnach’s Castle. By transferring his suicide from Parliament Buildings to his home I
was disturbing history, but this enabled me to avoid the device of a letter to prompt
the climax, in favour of a more direct discovery by Larnach of Conny and Douglas’s
relationship.
The story of the opera begins, therefore, on the morning of the supposed birthday
of Gretchen. Larnach expects this to be a historic and wonderful day. The family is
gathering to celebrate; even Donald is coming home, and Larnach has high hopes of
a reconciliation with his son, with Donald taking over a leadership role in the family.
Larnach also expects to hear today that he has been awarded an honour and will
become Sir William Larnach. He believes that the family is united behind him, and
that everyone will do as he wants and behave as he expects. Tonight’s birthday dinner
will set the seal on everything he has dreamed of for his family.
But the tensions beneath the surface of the Larnach family will gradually emerge
as the day proceeds. Gladys (an operatic amalgamation of the historical Colleen and
Gladys) asks Conny to persuade Larnach to allow her to marry Alice’s brother-in-
law, and Conny agrees to do so. Donald arrives, to be greeted enthusiastically by his
daughter Gretchen, and rather more formally by Larnach. He is tentative towards
Douglas and cold to Conny, as Snedden indicates that most of the children resented
their father taking a third wife.12 Conny seeks a conversation with Larnach, to plead
for Gladys, but he will not give her the opportunity, telling her of his own doubts
about himself and of the support he gained from Eliza and Mary, his first two wives.
He tells Conny he could not bear to lose her. When Gladys discovers Conny did
not do as she promised, she is furious, and begins to make her own plans. Douglas
sings of the day he and Donald as small boys climbed the hill with their father and
discovered the site on which the Castle would be built. Donald and his father find
themselves in an argument about Donald’s marriage and Gretchen, and about the
way Larnach parented his sons. Larnach explains that he was tough on his boys
to give them the means to deal with the vicissitudes of life. Conny arrives with a

telegram, which Larnach expects will confirm the award of his honour. But instead
it says no honour will be granted. Donald suggests that there is no honour in the
Larnachs anyway, which precipitates a new and more furious argument with his
father at the end of which Larnach disinherits his son. The ensemble around this
climax creates the noisy finale of the first act.
The second act opens with a scene for Conny in which she sings of her impossible
situation, without revealing her relationship with Douglas. (This scene was a late
addition to the work, and, looking back, I wonder why I had not included it in earlier
drafts, for it seems such an obvious and necessary moment.) Larnach speaks to her of
the pain of disinheriting Donald. He asks Conny ‘will you always be here for me,’ to
which she has little choice but to answer ‘yes’. Donald informs Gretchen that he will
be returning to Australia: there is nothing for him here. He asks her to come with
him, but she cannot decide yet, for she feels loyalty to her father. Douglas and Conny
meet, and, believing they are alone, sing of their love for each other. But Gretchen
returns and sees them kiss. She cries out, they see her, and she runs away. By now it is
evening, and all the members of the family are dressing for the birthday dinner, while
the dining table is prepared by the servants. Finally they all arrive, formally, and
take their places. Donald gets in ahead of Larnach in proposing a toast to Gretchen.
Larnach tells Gretchen that he and Conny are giving her a pony for her birthday,
but Gretchen announces she is returning to Australia with her father. Donald gives
Larnach a letter in which he renounces all claims on the Larnach inheritance; even if
Larnach changes his mind, Donald will not. Gladys announces that she is going to
live with her sister Alice so that she can marry her brother-in-law.
Larnach sees the family disintegrating before his eyes. Sarcastically he remarks that
at least Douglas will be staying on at the Castle. Gretchen says there is a special reason
why Douglas wouldn’t leave, and reveals that she saw Douglas and Conny kissing.
The other family members are as horrified as Larnach, who collapses in shock. The
others leave, and he becomes delirious, unable to come to terms with what he has
discovered and its consequences. Chiefly he remembers the way Conny had said she
would ‘be there for him’. The clash between his vision of his life and the reality he is
confronted with is too much for him. He rushes offstage as Conny returns. There is
the sound of a gunshot. Conny sinks to her knees in horror and remorse.
This scenario uses many traditional operatic devices. It is ‘through-composed’
(everything is sung) but the musical texture includes arias, duets, and larger ensembles.
The first act ends with a growing ensemble of ever greater tension. Larnach’s final
scene is a version of the ‘mad scene’ much favoured in nineteenth-century operas.13

Creating the music
An opera is a self-contained world, which exists only for the duration of the work.
It needs to have an identity, based perhaps on that Aristotelian unity of action, and
certainly focused on the central characters whose concerns dominate an audience’s
attention. In this case, the Larnach family becomes a complete universe; the only
others seen onstage are servants who neither speak nor sing. In my experience, an
opera also needs a musical identity, a soundscape in which the music, as it unfolds,
is heard as part of a complex but recognisable unity.
Several traditional devices have been used to provide unity in the work. The
orchestration tends towards a darker sound, with divided violas and a heavier use
than normal (for me) of lower winds. Certain intervals, melodic shapes and chord
progressions define the nature of the musical world. Musical materials particularly
connected to the different characters are used – Wagner’s idea of the leitmotiv is
a particularly effective way to convey dramatic development. Bringing back other
identifiable musical material later (themes for arias or ensembles, or significant
material from the more freely composed passages) allows for the representation of
memory onstage, as well as helping to bind the music together to create a whole.
In the scenes of Act 1 each character has his or her own musical materials –
for instance a love theme for Gladys Larnach (since a love relationship is at the
centre of her thoughts), a theme of quiet determination for Donald Larnach (who
is determined to resist his father’s bullying), and several themes for Connie Larnach,
representing her loyalty to William, her relationship with Douglas, and her own
conflicts. Bringing back those materials is helped if the libretto makes plans for that
to happen, which, as librettist, I was able to do. Furthermore, just before the final
dinner scene a scene in mime is presented, in which we see each of the characters
dressing for the forthcoming celebration. The music for this scene explains what
each one is thinking, their memories of the day’s events, and their fears for what is to
come. It provides a musical opportunity to summarise the conflicts in the Larnach
family before the denouement.
Conclusion
Translating events from history to the medium of music drama inevitably creates an
alternative reality. In opera, that reality is a particularly contrived one, in which the
characters sing all the time, and the story is organised in an artificial way that suits
the requirements of the art form. The process of creating a ‘transformed reality’ in this
way is an ancient one and it draws generic meanings out of specific events. Applying
the process to local events allows audiences to recognise the potential for discovering
deeper significance than they might expect from the world that surrounds them.

11
Songs of Old Dunedin:
A musical entreprenurial journey
Judy Bellingham
This chapter presents my experiences in undertaking the production of a DVD

of historical vocal music, Songs of Old Dunedin.1 The impetus for the project was
grounded in my experiences as a professional singer in New Zealand, as well as my
own observations about the absence of New Zealand vocal music from the repertoire
of many of my contemporaries. The project was also informed by the evolution of
my relationship with the musical community of Dunedin over many years, and a
desire to produce something of enduring significance to local history. This chapter
discusses my entrepreneurial venture to record songs by Dunedin composers, how
this fulfilled the expectations I placed on myself as an arts entrepreneur, and the
journey I travelled to bring this to fruition.
Despite producing a number of world-class singers, there is no international
figurehead representing New Zealand vocal music. Those with knowledge of classical
vocal music can easily relate the name of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to German
Lieder, Kathleen Ferrier with the music of England, Gérard Souzay with the music
of France, and so on. If we consider singers synonymous with the music of New
Zealand, then what names immediately spring to mind? Dame Kiri Te Kanawa to
the general public, and perhaps Sir Donald McIntyre to the more musically aware
public. However, Dame Kiri’s name is perhaps more accurately associated with the bel
canto repertoire, in particular the music of Mozart, and Sir Donald’s name with the
music of Wagner and the role of Wotan, which he sang at the Bayreuth Festpielhaus
sixteen times between 1973 and 1988.
One of the most compelling reasons for the absence of New Zealand repertoire
from these artists’ profiles is that New Zealanders who wish to achieve at the highest
level on the international stage must do so by singing the standard international
repertoire. No New Zealand singer will take his or her place on the world stage
by singing New Zealand music. However, the absence of local repertoire from
international contexts presents the opportunity for this repertoire to be referenced
locally, constituting a particular niche market. Through the production of works
such as Songs of Old Dunedin, it has been my intention to develop and exploit this
SONGS OF OLD DUNEDIN: A MUSICAL ENTREPRENURIAL JOURNEY 135

niche as an entrepreneurial context for my own artistic development since moving to
Dunedin in 1994. In doing so, I have engaged quite deliberately with performance
from an entrepreneurial perspective.
In the last two decades, entrepreneurship has transcended the boundaries of
business textbooks by becoming a synonym for progressive thought. But the scope
of any entrepreneurial venture has no bounds and is limited only by the initiator.
Such ventures are characterised by an abundance of passion and commitment, and
arts entrepreneurs in particular hope to make some meaningful positive difference to
the lives of others. Their actions can result in powerful legacies not only to audiences
of the future, but also to the performers, artists and administrators of the future. My
own approach to the field of entrepreneurship has been guided by the notion that
entrepreneurial action can transcend the business domains with which it is usually
associated, and that the attitudes encompassed by entrepreneurship are relevant to the
field of creative production. Joseph Schumpeter, an economist within the Austrian
School of Economics, provides a historical reference point for this line of thought.
He coined the term ‘creative destruction’ and in his 1942 work Capitalism, Socialism
and Democracy described this as the ‘process of industrial mutation that incessantly
revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old
one, incessantly creating a new one’.2 In 2006, in a speech entitled ‘Capitalism,
Entrepreneurship, and Investing –The 18th Century vs. the 21st Century’, John
Bogle wrote:
Heed the words of the great Joseph Schumpeter, the first economist to recognize
entrepreneurship as the vital force that drives economic growth …. [He] dismissed
monetary and material gain as the prime mover of the entrepreneur, finding motives like
these to be far more powerful: (1) ‘The joy of creating, of getting things done, of simply
exercising one’s energy and ingenuity,’ and (2) ‘The will to conquer: the impulse to fight …
to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but of success itself ’.3
Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction revolves around terms so often

applied to entrepreneurs: passion, commitment, vision, leadership, transformation
and innovation. Creative destruction deals with changes in entrepreneurial activity,
and demonstrates how a process changes every time a new product, company or
niche enters the market.
With Songs of Old Dunedin, my intended musical niche was to market to people
who enjoy listening to performances of New Zealand music that many singers had
overlooked. I identified Ode Records as a production company that was prepared to
identify and satisfy such a market. Current owner, Roger Marbeck, describes Ode
as follows:

[Ode Records] has become the most specialised Record Company in the New Zealand
music industry … we specialise in all genres ranging from rock and pop, jazz, blues,
country, new age, Maori, Pacific, world, and classical. We have no boundaries when it
comes to music – if we appreciate it then we will release it.4
Ode Records has a clearly defined and loyal following and it is on that basis that
they are able to maintain an economically sustainable level of sales. The firm was thus
precisely aligned in its marketing with my pioneering initiative in performing.
An entrepreneurial approach to performance

I gave my first public performance in August 1969, singing three songs with the
acclaimed New Zealand pianist Maurice Till in the Great Hall of the Arts Centre in
Christchurch. By the time of my first professional performance as the soprano soloist
in Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the Christchurch Town Hall in April 1974, I had
given many concerts and recitals and had established myself in the South Island as a
young singer with potential. Overseas study in Australia followed, learning under the
watchful eye of Dame Joan Hammond, and after a year, on her recommendation, I
went to England and studied with Otakar Kraus. I soon realised that while singing
and performing was my passion, my professional interests were broader than the
standard classical vocal repertoire, and I was keen to find a niche in which I could
make a lasting and culturally relevant contribution to my profession – a ‘new venture’
of sorts.5
Returning to live in New Zealand I became acutely aware of the marginalised
position of New Zealand music in society – reflected, for example, in the discrepancy
between sports and arts funding. I made a conscious decision to focus on performing
and recording for Radio New Zealand a repertoire that was unusual, of high quality,
and as of yet, not generally available. In this way, I would carve out a local niche,
combining unusual repertoire, New Zealand music, performance, and audience. Part
of this process involved trying to generate a clear association between my name and
this repertoire – a process that Fred Silver refers to as ‘survival of the smartest’6. In the
process, I hoped to also generate public interest in the works and their composers,
especially within localised communities, and I have applied this initiative over
decades of practice.
During my career as a New Zealand-based singer, I sang many New Zealand
premieres of works by different composers. I also commissioned and subsequently
performed many song cycles from leading New Zealand composers. In chronological
order, some of the most significant are ‘The Blossom of the Branches’, ‘Six Choruses
from Oedipus Rex’ and ‘Mary Magdalene and the Birds’ by Dorothy Buchanan,
‘Zhivago’s Mary Magdalene Songs’ by John Ritchie, his son Anthony Ritchie’s

‘Berlin Fragments’ and David Hamilton’s ‘The Lighting of the Lamps’. These works,
with the exception of the John Ritchie cycle, all used texts by leading New Zealand
authors. In 2004, I was asked by Dunedin musician and researcher David Murray to
sing a bolero, ‘O lovely land of Spain’ by Dunedin composer Raffaello Squarise, in a
concert celebrating the work of this almost forgotten musician. Squarise was Italian
by birth but lived and worked in Dunedin for many years between 1890 and 1945.
Dr Murray introduced me to more music by Dunedin composers, and together with
Dunedin-based accompanist Terence Dennis I began performing more songs by
Squarise and Arthur Barth, amongst others.
Recording New Zealand music

Few of these songs and none of the song cycles had previously been recorded, but I
knew that recording them was a project worthy of time and effort. I chose four cycles
to record, one from each composer. I was fortunate to receive funding from the
University of Otago to proceed with this recording project and with the help of my
agent, Jamie Bull, I met with Terence O’Neill-Joyce, the then owner of Ode Records.
He expressed great interest in this project. Terence was at that time serving on the
Board of SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music and through this involvement
was well aware of my passion for New Zealand music, and of my standing within
New Zealand’s music community. He felt that the nature of such a recording was
a natural fit with his philosophy of supporting New Zealand composers and so, in
December 2005, we recorded a CD of four New Zealand song cycles at Marama
Hall, Dunedin.
After the success of this recording, Ode Records expressed an interest in a further
project. My mind immediately moved to the music of Dunedin composers, having
had my appetite whetted by my earlier performing experiences. With the assistance
of Dr Murray, who was by then working at the Hocken Library, I conducted archival
research and selected a variety of songs by Dunedin composers ranging from the
period 1876 through to 1944. Song choice was predicated by a number of criteria.
First, I needed to address issues about the texts. They needed to be suitable for a
woman to sing and of a good standard. Then I looked to the music, which had to
be of good quality, well written vocally, and within the range of my soprano voice.
Finally, there needed to be a clearly defined historical perspective to the songs. I
wanted songs by composers who lived and worked in Dunedin from about 1860–
1940. Once all those criteria had been met, it was possible to choose an appropriate
repertoire.
I was convinced that the niche for local performance of local compositions required
an air of authenticity for their successful reception. The re-enactment needed to be as

historically accurate as possible: the music needed to be enhanced with costumes and
props that were representative of the era. The compositions had to be of the highest
standard, and performed in an appropriate context, and the suitability of the songs
for my voice had to be perfect. I felt that the niche would respond more immediately
to a visual rather than merely an audio recording. Ode Records readily agreed with
me, and so a DVD was planned.
The decision to make a DVD rather than a CD was reinforced once the music was
chosen. The songs were unknown, of no one particular style, and yet had a clearly
defined historical perspective, from 1876–1944. This period in Dunedin’s musical
and societal life could easily come alive visually. There were many other quality songs
that fell outside this time frame that I was unable to consider for that very reason.
The songs
The songs are of varied genres. The first song, ‘Thoughts’, is actually an operatic aria
from one of the first operas ever written in New Zealand, by Carmini Morley, who
at the time was a local singing teacher. This is followed by ‘The Tramp of the Fire
Brigade’, included for it’s historical significance in that the words are by Thomas
Bracken, the author of New Zealand’s national anthem. ‘The Old Flag’ is by Vincent
Pike, a 14-year-old pupil from Otago Boys’ High School.
‘Tranquil Vale’ was written about 1890 and is set ‘somewhere in the vicinity of
Dunedin’. ‘New Zealand’s Answer’, written about 1900, was dedicated to New
Zealand premier Richard Seddon. Arthur Barth, one of the composers that originally
set me on this quest, is represented by ‘Sons of the Southern Cross’, a song dedicated
to the Australasian soldiers who fought in the Boer War. ‘Lest We Forget’ is a song
by James Brown, the son of a Green Island hotelier. Two oddities are the musical
monologues by Mildred Carey-Wallace, who was educated in Dunedin and was
the daughter of an Evansdale publican. ‘Britons of the South’ dates from around
1915 and is by Hamilton Thompson, a prominent Dunedin accountant. ‘Lads of
the Silver Fern’ is of a similar vintage and is by a woman composer from Dunedin,
Bessie Hume. The two wartime songs by Alf Pettit have hugely emotional and heart
rending texts (‘… Daddy, soldier Daddy, keep me on your shoulder till the bugles
play…’), and achingly beautiful melodies.
The Mayor of Dunedin during the Depression, Robert Sheriff Black, wrote the
text of the song ‘Thoughts Set to Music’ in 1919. The New Zealand South Seas
Exhibition of 1925 is represented by the song ‘Dunedin! The Exhibition Foxtrot’
by Burt and Anson. Silent movies were played in Dunedin’s Regent Theatre, which
was the scene for the filming of ‘Flower of the Bush’, a song David C. Sharp wrote
to accompany the film The Bush Cinderella. Sharp also wrote the penultimate song

FIGURES 1 (LEFT) AND 2. ‘Flower of the Bush’ and ‘Sons of the Southern Cross’.
on the recording, ‘The Fairy Tale Parade’. This song won the Hansell Laboratories
songwriting contest in the 1940s. The final song on the DVD is the 1932 hit ‘Come
to Dunedin’ and this aptly capture the spirit of this most Scottish of cities with its
unsubtle inclusion of the melody of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
These songs are all by Dunedin composers and many of them have texts by
Dunedin authors. Some are based on New Zealand interpretations of international
events, some on local events. They were all performed in Dunedin venues, some of
which still exist. In at least two cases (Alf Pettit and David Sharp) the composers are
fondly remembered by people living in Dunedin today.
‘Sons of the Southern Cross’

This song, with music by Arthur Barth and text by J. Thornton Stewart, dates from
about 1900. Stewart was a shipping clerk in Dunedin and his words have been used
in several other songs. Arthur Barth was the organist at Knox Church in Dunedin for
twenty-one years, and he was well regarded as a conductor and musical administrator,
as well as a composer working in a number of different genres.
One of Barth’s other well-known compositions is ‘March of New Zealand’ and
the style of ‘Sons of the Southern Cross’ is reminiscent of this with its martial style

introduction and strong feel of four beats to the bar. As an organist, Barth would
have been strongly influenced by the ability of the organ to take on different moods
and styles, and a march would have been suitable as patriotic for the city and as
a processional within a worship situation. There are semiquaver organ flourishes
reminiscent of trumpet fanfares, and again these could have been played splendidly
using a trumpet stop on the Knox Church organ. The accompaniment would also
work just as well on harmonium or piano. The text is redolent of the Victorian
era, dripping with words now considered old-fashioned. It refers to the flag as the
‘banner’ or ‘Standard’ and is quite gender-specific, referring to ‘manly forms’. The
text also harks back to all that is good on ‘England’s distant shore’ and refers to the
‘Mother Country’. It finishes ‘we’ll fight for England’s righteous cause and England’s
Empress Queen!’ and talks of the emigrants ‘Island homes afar’.
Musically, ‘Sons of the Southern Cross’ is very traditional and pushes few
boundaries. It is in the key of G major. While this key may have been chosen for it’s
harmonic colour, it is probable that it was also chosen for the ease of playing in that
key. There are only two modulations. A significant one moves into the dominant
key of D major, and the other gives us hints of E minor, the relative minor. So,
there are no surprises there. Harmonically, the song is very much based around
traditional tonic dominant shifts. The song is strophic, having a verse and chorus.
The range is not extensive, covering only a ninth. This range puts the song well
within the performance capabilities of most amateur singers, both male and female.
The performance indications use traditional Italian terms such as tempo di marcia,
risoluto, marcato, con espressione, and vigoroso. These are all terms in common usage.
However, Barth’s use of the word soave, meaning gentle, is very much out of place in
the song as it is not a commonly used musical term.
The recording and production process

A requirement of the niche market I had identified, and which I had to ‘sell’ to Ode
Records, was the technical standard to be achieved in the production process, for
which they had the financial liability. This required me to organise and provide the
services and assemble a team of key personnel: a sound engineer, a cameraperson,
a wardrobe person and an editor. Terence O’Neill-Joyce as producer was in charge
of the entire project. Mike Clayton from Christchurch was the sound engineer (as
he had been for the CD). Through Natural History New Zealand I was able to
meet Sina Walker, who agreed to edit the film. Sina advised me to speak to Lindsey
Davidson, who had also worked for Natural History New Zealand as a cameraperson,
to ascertain her level of interest. Lindsey was very keen and gave me a copy of her film
on the life cycle of an eel, Longfin, so that I could observe the quality of her work.

Lindsey, although at the time working a job with very anti-social working hours, was
excited about the project and agreed to participate. There were two benefits to her
participation. One was that Lindsey was able to borrow camera gear from Natural
History New Zealand and the other was that she and Sina had worked together
before, so they understood how they each worked and Lindsey understood Sina’s film
preferences. The only drawback with Lindsey’s involvement was her hours of work,
and the rest of the team had to be flexible and work around this.
Once I had an agreement from Ode Records and knew the project was proceeding,
I flew to Wellington and met with Mr David Dell, the Director of the New Zealand
Sheet Music Archive. This archive holds original copies of New Zealand songs,
including many songs written in Dunedin. I searched the archives and carefully
selected the songs I wished to view. Mr Dell painstakingly took each song out of
storage, laid it carefully on a black cloth that I had supplied, and I then took a digital
photograph of each cover page, many of which were beautifully illustrated and in
colour. These photographs were to prove invaluable to Sina and Lindsey and they are
included in the final film.
All the initial preparations were complete, the groundwork done, and it was time
to record. I took my beautiful hand-turned walnut music stand into Marama Hall
thinking that it would look better than a ghastly modern metal one in a film that
focused on historical perspectives. There are nineteen songs on the DVD. Many of
the songs are strophic in nature, resulting in many words to learn. In addition, much
of the grammar was very old-fashioned, and I found memorising the words to so
many songs almost impossible and very stressful. We decided to make the film as if
Terence and I were rehearsing the music, meaning that I could have the sheet music
in front of me.
The recording took place over three days, with a further morning reserved for re-
recording if necessary. The change of clothes for both Terence and myself over these
days led to headaches for Sina when she edited the film, as in one shot I may be in
one outfit, and in a second shot, a different one. The layout of Marama Hall proved
wonderful for Lindsey as she was able to film on the ground floor, on the stage itself,
and from the upper gallery which extends around the stage. This enabled her to get
some interesting camera angles, especially of the pianist’s hands and the sheet music
on the piano.
At the conclusion of filming in Marama Hall, we needed to film on location, in
venues that were extant and operating in the period 1876–1944. The venues chosen
were the Town Hall, the Mayfair Theatre, Knox Church, First Church, and Burns
Hall. For the location shoots, I decided that to wear period costume of the time
would be appropriate and visually more appealing for the DVD. Brenda Rendall

designed and made costumes to suit the venues and the period. She accompanied
Lindsey and me to all the venues and ensured every costume was complete to the last
detail to achieve total authenticity.
Our first venue was the Burns Hall in the grounds of First Church, as this was a
prominent concert venue at the end of the nineteenth century. Here I chose to sing
‘The Old Flag’. I had borrowed a Union Jack from Adams Flags in Dunedin to add
to the musical and visual atmosphere. They had supplied an aluminium pole from
which to hold the flag, but this was not particularly appropriate for 1886. The staff
at First Church, who got a terrible fright seeing me in full Victorian costume, were
able to find an old wooden long-handled garden fork to which I attached the flag.
This worked very well, as long as I did not turn around on even the slightest angle.
If I did, the bright orange prongs of the fork could be seen behind me! The staircase
at the front of Burns Hall is original, as is the stage, and we filmed from those two
locations. Interestingly Geoff Adams, reviewing the DVD in the Otago Daily Times,
said ‘Most delightful is the appearance of Bellingham a couple of times in Queen
Victoria mode, even waving ‘The Old Flag’ to suit the 1886 song of that title’. 7
We then moved into First Church itself, as the flags in the Church saw active
service during the Boer War and World War I. From there, it was to the Mayfair
Theatre in South Dunedin. This was opened in December 1914 as the King Edward
Picture Theatre. I sang two songs from World War I as they fitted perfectly into the
time period when the theatre opened: ‘Coo-ee’ and ‘Daddy, Soldier Daddy’. In Knox
Church, I acknowledged the Church’s first organist, Arthur Barth, by singing his
song ‘Sons of the Southern Cross’.
Originally a cinema, the Regent Theatre opened in June 1928 and the interior is
elaborately decorated in a baroque style. ‘Flower of the Bush’ by David Sharp was the
song I chose to sing here, as it was inspired by the 1928 New Zealand film The Bush
Cinderella. The original cover states that the song was dedicated to a former Miss
New Zealand, Dale Austen.
And finally we proceeded to the Dunedin Town Hall. This is the only period
town hall still in existence in New Zealand, and was opened in 1930. I sang ‘Come
to Dunedin’ on the huge bare stage, perhaps very much in similar circumstances to
a performance eighty years ago.
Jim Sullivan of National Radio heard about this project and invited me to speak
to him in a recorded interview about the project. By then, I had the audio from the
DVD and so Jim was able to play several of the tracks over the radio. This led to a
number of people contacting me with snippets of historical information, but by far
the most exciting contact was from the daughter of one of the composers, David
Sharp. I met with Valerie on several occasions and sang one of her father’s songs to

FIGURE 3. Cover of the DVD
Songs of Old Dunedin. Ode Records
her in her living room. It was a most moving experience when the elderly woman
sat by me with tears streaming down her face as she heard her father’s music for the
first time. Valerie entrusted me with many of her father’s musical mementos, which I
placed in the Hocken Library for safe-keeping and to facilitate further research.
The next major decision was the order in which to put the songs on the DVD.
I decided that chronological order was best because I felt it was the relevant way to
view the DVD. Then came the problem of what to title the disc. This was almost
immediately resolved, unintentionally, by the sound engineer, Mike Clayton. When
saving the sound tracks to computer, Mike had simply called the folder ‘Songs of
Old Dunedin’.
Conclusion
Songs of Old Dunedin was a project that I initiated with no thought of gaining
celebrity status or financial gain, but which aligned with my professional niche profile
as an advocate of New Zealand music. In order to bring the project to fruition,
I enlisted the help of Ode Records, a respected New Zealand company who had
already identified, and were able to market, niche musics. To have preserved such
an important slice of Dunedin’s musical history on DVD is of immense pleasure, as
is the knowledge that it is now accessible to a wide cross-section of the community
throughout New Zealand. However, the project is ultimately a clear product of my
longer-term goal to develop a niche market for classical vocal music from and for
New Zealand.

12
Music, community, and the
creation of Dunedinmusic.com
Scott Muir
It’s 1980. I’m eighteen in Invercargill and playing the Clash’s Clampdown over and
over and over again on the stereo at home. Joe Strummer’s words reverberate in
my head: ‘The men at the factory are old and cunning / you don’t owe nothing
so boy get running / it’s the best years of your life they want to steal’. It drove my
mother to distraction. My friends that year had left for university in Dunedin and
elsewhere, and here I was stuck in Invercargill, where dour farmers and hard men
doing ‘jobs for life’ dominated the landscape. In those days, the only form of escape
came from one source. On Sunday nights, TV2 played Radio With Pictures – a TV
show that ran from 1976 to 1986 and played the ‘forbidden music’ relegated to late
Sunday evening, when all ‘good folk’ would be in bed. The Tubes, the Stranglers,
the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Blondie – and each night also featured a New Zealand
band. This was the closest a mass audience could get to see New Zealand artists
doing original music since the demise of Studio One (a talent quest show for New
Zealanders that was mediocre, although both Shona Laing and Alastair Riddell got
their breaks there).
Radio With Pictures was edgy, it was somewhat irreverent (at least to my young
teenage brain) and it played the music that the guy in the local record store wasn’t
stocking. The anomaly was that the music on Radio With Pictures simply wasn’t
on the radio in those days. Commercial radio was all about Casey Kasem and his
American Top 40 or, worse still, the local radio host Boggy and his pet budgie. Radio
With Pictures became the centre of my world, and that of my friends. It gave us a
sense of escape, and proof that there was something that existed past the cemetery on
the outskirts of this stolid farming support centre.
Between 1980 and 1982 I began to visit Dunedin, where many of my friends
had gone to study at the University of Otago. On a couple of those sporadic visits I
found myself in the middle of the afternoon at a gig at the Cook, or at the Empire
watching some band that my scarfie mates had heard were pretty cool. My friends
and I had traded all sorts of music at school and so we knew when something was
good – it’s an intrinsic thing, born of the great arrogance that comes with youth.
These bands would later become synonymous with the Dunedin Sound, particularly
MUSIC, COMMUNITY AND THE CREATION OF DUNEDINMUSIC.COM 145

the Chills, the Clean, and the Verlaines. One of my strongest memories from these
encounters was that the bands were just like what I saw on Radio With Pictures. Yet
the smoke haze, the sloppy jugs of beer and the crowds generated an environment
that was really real.
I’m sure all my uni-going buddies were busy eyeing up the ladies, but I have to say
I was transfixed by the bands and I just got lost in the music. And what music it was!
A trip to Christchurch late in 1980 left me with a very mod haircut and an encounter
with Toy Love, who also blew me away. Back in Invercargill I harassed the record
store guy for music anything like these bands. Returning to Invercargill was hard.
Fast forward to London in the early 1990s. I had been getting the Flying Nun
newsletter and devouring all the info I could on what was happening so far from
where I was. This latest issue promisingly revealed that Chris Knox was coming to
play solo in London (on a Tuesday at Elephant and Castle in some dingy pub). I
dragged everyone I knew to see this, including members of Kiwi band Julie Dolphin
(who I met at a random party) and we joined a pub half full of bemused locals.
Chris was stunning. As ever, he put all his energy into a one-man band show, then
sat with us and drank beer. I was amazed that this guy on a musical pedestal would
actually sit and drink beer with us. Famous people aren’t supposed to do that. This
community music attitude has never left me and the great thing for me was that it
had originated in Dunedin.
Forward again to 1998 and I’m back in Dunedin, living with my sister and running
Fuel, a café in town with lots of space for bands, 4000 square feet all up. As soon as
I could, I started hosting live performances. The second week in June 1998 was New
Zealand Music Week. The first two gigs I hosted were Jay Clarkson, Songbong, Lou
Kewene, Bridget Ellis and Emma Gomez playing a local singer-songwriter night,
and a pair of local musicians, Rob and Marty, playing on the footpath on a wooden
pallet as a stage. They annoyed the living daylights out of the taxi drivers parked
outside, and entranced and bemused those walking past. This was in a time when
New Zealand Music Month and quotas didn’t even exist, and for us all it was just
a way of celebrating something cool. Music at Fuel took off. Local band Jetty did a
‘world tour’ of Southland. The Empire was in the throes of dying, Arc Café was just
beginning to host gigs as well, and both Fuel and Arc became known as places where
‘something cultural’ was going on.
The next four years were a maelstrom of fun times, whacky musicians and hard
work. I started going grey, told myself I had had enough, and on the day I sold the
business was offered a job running the student bar at the university. They wanted to
replicate my venue on campus. Around this time I also started working alongside
Martin Phillipps of the Chills. He had played a few times at Fuel and I was (and still

am) in awe of his talent. Despite his poor health at the time, I got to see, hear, and
collaborate with someone I and many others consider to be a living legend. Martin
and I have now worked together for nearly ten years. A mutual friend asked me to
assist with the release of a Chills EP, and that was to become my introduction to the
truly magical world of Martin Phillipps. We became firm friends and I am pleased to
say that developed into a full management role for me. We still work closely together
and I have had the honour of representing Martin and his band in many and varied
endeavours, from record company disputes to overseas tours and encounters with
the many thousands of Chills faithful dotted all around the world. There really is
never a dull moment working with an artist that has had such an interesting career.
Our relationship is somewhat representative of the Dunedin music scene in general:
there is no fame barrier, and we all seem to coexist at all levels regardless of who you
know or who you are.
The time I spent as a venue manager between 1998 and 2002 taught me a lot
about the local music scene. While the days of the Dunedin Sound were over, there
was still plenty of music, perhaps more than ever, performed largely by student bands.
Students seemed to perform as an extra activity – it wasn’t usually the main focus of
their reason for being in Dunedin, though this is something that has changed more
recently. Meanwhile, those artists who had spearheaded the Dunedin sound of the
’80s and early ’90s, and who had released with Flying Nun, were still around but
didn’t really seem to talk to each other much any more.
There seemed to be a degree of resignation among some of them and also a kind
of scant disregard for each other. Too much spotlight in their twenties perhaps, or
perhaps they felt that their efforts had been for naught (from a financial perspective
anyway). This is probably a distorted outsider’s perspective, not having been in
Dunedin when the media picked up on the Dunedin Sound, but what was clear was
that these musicians had all been through a lot, and had been churned around by a
nascent national music industry still finding its feet at the time. Perhaps a break from
each other (had they all really been ‘together’ anyway?) was what was needed, and in
any case, it left a space for others to fill. It’s odd when I think about it because there
seemed to be this unspoken camaraderie manufactured by grouping the Flying Nun
artists under one banner. The perception and the reality certainly were poles apart in
hindsight. This is not to say that there was no sense of connectedness, nor to denigrate
the music or the musicians, but merely an outsider’s observation that the phenomenon
was not as coherent as the popular perception of the Dunedin Sound might suggest.
I also believe that things have changed a lot in the intervening years. As time goes on,
the true influence that these people have had on our national identity and sense of self
is now beginning to be recognised. They seem quite a happier lot now too.

To go from running a café and music venue in town to running the student
bar on campus was a fairly easy transition. The University of Otago prides itself on
providing a unique environment for the many students who call Dunedin home
during their three or more years’ stay here; for most, this time in their lives is a
particularly formative period where they are open to new experiences. In addition to
this, the university has a long and proud history of supporting the arts. This in turn
feeds and inspires the local community.
I take a great deal of pride in being involved in the ‘legendary campus life’ at
Otago,1 and it was through working with some very talented and smart individuals
that Dunedinmusic.com was born. The Music Department’s programme in
Contemporary Music (also known as the ‘rock degree’) had been going for a couple
of years and the kids going through it were frequenting the student bar on a regular
basis, performing in jazz bands, rock bands and comedy. Students have spare time,
and my experience is that they like to feel they are a part of something, be valued
contributors and acknowledged as such, have some fun and expand their horizons.
So we provided (and continue to provide) that environment for them.
It was through this sense of engagement, being around these young people’s day-
to-day lifestyle, knowing where Dunedin had come from, musically speaking, that
the idea of providing an online community for and about Dunedin music came to
me. It was both an inspiration and a challenge, as having spent so much time in and
around musicians, I knew that the possibility of getting them all in one room at
the same time to talk about how to improve their lot was a remote possibility. Sure,
helping each other out one to one was easy, but actually having them all in one place
seemed somewhat of a pipe dream.
In early 2003 a couple of guys I knew, Hugh Harlow and Rob Milne, were
playing around with a simple online forum with much the same ideas as I had. We
got together with John Seaton and brainstormed for about six months over what
Dunedinmusic.com should or could be about. Little did we know this would be an
attempt at social networking literally years before MySpace, Facebook and Twitter
came online. The term ‘social networking’ meant something altogether different
back then, I’m sure. Over this period we examined lots of options for our ideas and
settled on becoming a small business, rather than a charitable trust, as we could not
see long-term sustainable funding for something like this, and at the same time it
seemed to have little costs associated with it other than our spare time.
Our vision was to promote Dunedin music, and provide comprehensive resources
for the Dunedin music community. Along with this, we decided that our values should
be to foster Dunedin’s music community, to be enterprising and entrepreneurial
and encourage those values, to provide direction in an inclusive environment for all

Dunedin musicians, to be supportive of local music and musicians, and to be leaders
in the global music community. Quite a lot to aspire to!
Once the web interfaces were in place, we gathered all the info we could find
on venues and musicians and history of music in Dunedin and started filling the
site with content. Reviews, features, artist profiles, and venue profiles soon started
coming in. To be fair, it was a pretty big ask of all those involved, and the results
were good but not earth-shattering. At this point a long-time friend of ours returned
to Dunedin and, as Hugh stepped away, Evan Sunley James threw himself into the
project. His energy, vision and commitment simply lifted us to a whole new level.
We developed a user-friendly gig guide, added images, an online store (to sell only
Dunedin music of course) and redesigned the thing from the bottom up. In the
space of just a year and a half we added over 1000 users to the forums and had listed
hundreds of gigs.
Since our inception we have collated the city’s artists and venues into a formidable
database, listed thousands of gigs, staged and supported several successful large
music events and released several compilations of locally made music, showcasing
Dunedin’s top acts to the rest of the country and the world. By connecting artists
with venues and the public we aim to create a viable, well-used social and industry
network. In 2009, dunedinmusic.com expanded its operation, acquiring WebStage,
a service that provides easy-to-operate websites for musicians. At this time we also
entered successful negotiations with Apple iTunes to become an aggregator to their
online store, thus allowing Dunedin musicians direct access to this new world of
legal digital music sales. This was something of a coup as there are only two to
three active iTunes suppliers in New Zealand and we are very pleased to be able
to continue to offer this service to local artists. You can reach global markets from
literally the ends of the earth.
Dunedinmusic.com shows no signs at present of generating huge revenue, but
that was never the point. The point is that we are doing something that fulfils each
of us who are involved in a way that transcends simple monetary transactions. We
have been at this now for around seven or eight years and as I look back I think
what a journey this has been. We have lit a fire under the Dunedin music scene and
shown faith in the people who make music here in our city. We have strived to give a
bunch of disparate musicians literally at the bottom of the world a voice and a place
to belong. It hasn’t been easy and nor did we expect it to be, but despite the obstacles
we have gone from strength to strength. The world of digital technology has caused a
massive disruption in the music delivery chain; we have not only weathered this but
learned and adapted, and continue to do so.
Paul Resnikoff, who publishes a digital music newsletter, commented that ‘a

concentrated but small community can certainly help to launch careers, scenes,
groups, labels, etc’.2 I would argue that an additional advantage of digital technology
is that you don’t have to be in any specific large music industry centre to make things
happen. The music speaks for itself; supporting that is the key thing, I think. In our
view, young audiences want authentic experiences and are able to reach out so much
more easily than in previous generations, or as Rachel Botsman puts it: they want the
music not the CD, and the messages not the answer phone.3 The days of the many
layered middlemen are rapidly evaporating and provision of a real experience, even
an online one, is central to this.
There is no doubt that the cult of The Dunedin Sound and Flying Nun brands
have helped give Dunedin music a greater profile than music in other similar small
and isolated places, but music made by passionate individuals telling their own story
in their own voices reaches, for me anyway, a very special place that is both hard to
emulate and at the same time destined to be taken up by others. Witness the bands
today that name-check the Chills, the Verlaines and the Clean. What I am seeing
with some sort of warped mother-hen pride is the local bands doing things their
way. They are prickly, sometimes uncomfortable individuals to deal with who have
something to say and are immune, in a sense, to the mass-media driven music that
dominates (albeit increasingly briefly) the Top 40 charts today. I actively encourage
local musicians to ‘do it for themselves’, because trying to please the industry makes
you thirsty but in the wrong way. If we do things locally for ourselves the outside
world will look in and the industry will sit up and take notice, not perhaps in the
way that happened in the 1980s (the media doesn’t work like that anymore) but in a
way that might see a local artist doing something meaningful while at the same time
actually earning enough to live a comfortable lifestyle.
I run Refuel with much pride and gusto to this very day. It’s taken a few years but
people (oddly enough in tough economic times) are finally ‘getting’ that a bar doesn’t
have to be a booze barn to succeed. We host open mic nights, jazz nights, and bands,
bands and more bands. In an average year we have around 25,000 people come to
Refuel and enjoy music in one of its glorious incarnations. The byline for Refuel is
‘its about the music …’ and it really is. Alcohol consumption is secondary to the
social experience, not the driver of it. I have watched with some degree of pride many
staff and patrons get ‘turned on’ to a cultural and musical environment.
Dunedin is a beautiful and compact gothic city with possibly the most diverse,
crazy and passionate bunch of people I have ever met. As a sixteen year old told me
recently, its about ‘stease’ or teenage speak for style and ease. Dunedin has that in
spades – it has style to burn. We are a city where being stylish isn’t frowned upon
and it’s okay to be quirky (possibly because of the churn of students that we suffer

through and love – depending on your perspective and your level of involvement
with them). And it is easy (please don’t tell anyone this) to do just about anything
in Dunedin. Most of all its easy to pick up a guitar on a dark winter’s afternoon and
head to a like-minded friend’s place for a jam. People here are generous with their
time, their expertise, their equipment and they are not suspicious. You can ask for
help and by and large you will usually get it. There is no ‘what’s in it for me?’ that
seems to permeate larger cities. Sound engineers, musicians and supporters across the
city engage and help each other out all the time. You can do it here. There is a very
strong sense of community.

Notes
Introduction / Dunedin sounds Meets South: Popular Music in Aotearoa/New

Dan Bendrups Zealand, eds. Philip Hayward, Tony Mitchell
1 John Connell and Chris Gibson, Soundtracks: and Roy Shuker (Sydney: Perfect Beat
Popular Music, Identity and Place (London/ Publications, 1994), 38.
New York: Routledge, 2003), 7–8. 11 Mitchell, ‘Flying in the Face of Fashion’, 40.
2 Key examples include Mark Slobin, 12 Matthew Bannister, Positively George Street:
Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the A Personal History of Sneaky Feelings and the
West (Hanover: University Press of New Dunedin Sound (Auckland: Reed, 1999), 27.
England); Martin Stokes, ed., Ethnicity, 13 Bannister, Positively George Street, 36.
Identity and Music: The Musical Construction 14 Bannister, Positively George Street, 39.
of Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 15 Bannister, Positively George Street, 40.
1994); Tony Mitchell, Popular Music and 16 Bannister, Positively George Street, 65.
Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe 17 Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Christine Evans,
and Oceania (London: Leicester University eds., Music Autoethnographies: Making
Press, 1996) and John Connell and Chris Autoethnography Sing/Making Music
Gibson, Soundtracks: Popular Music, Identity Personal (Brisbane: Australian Academic
and Place (London: Routledge, 2002). Press, 2009).
3 In particular, see Ian Biddle and Vanessa 18 Brad Haseman, ‘A Manifesto for
Knights, eds., Music, National Identity and Performative Research’, Media International
the Politics of Location: Between the Global Australia incorporating Culture and Policy
and the Local (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 118 (2006): 1–12.
4 David Edwards, ‘The Space’, in Jazz 19 Brian Roberts, Biographical Research
Aotearoa: Notes Towards a New Zealand (Buckingham/Philadelphia, PA: Open
History, eds. Richard Hardie and Allan University Press, 2002), 3.
Thomas (Wellington: Steele Roberts 20 Geoffrey M. White ‘Afterword’, in Identity
Publishers, 2009), 75. Work: Constructing Pacific Lives, eds. Pamela
5 Connell and Gibson, Soundtracks, 98. Stewart and Andrew Strathern (Pittsburgh:
6 Connell and Gibson, Soundtracks, 97. University of Pittsburgh Press, Association
7 Connell and Gibson, Soundtracks, 96. for Social Anthropology in Oceania), 174.
8 John Dix, Stranded in Paradise: New Zealand
Rock and Roll 1955 to the Modern Era, 2nd Chapter 1 / Practice and Performance as
ed., (Auckland: Penguin, 2005), 233. Research in the Arts
9 Dix, Stranded in Paradise, 235. Suzanne Little
10 Tony Mitchell, ‘Flying in the Face of 1 Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter,
Fashion: Independent Music in New eds., Mapping Landscapes for Performance
Zealand; Part 1 – Pakeha Sounds; Part as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative
2 – He Waiata Na Aotearoa: Maori and Cartographies (New York, NY: Palgrave
Polynesian Music in New Zealand’, in North Macmillan, 2009), xv.
NOTES 153
2 Maggi Phillips, Cheryl Stock and Kim Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative
Vincs, Dancing Between Diversity and Materials (London: Sage Publications,
Consistency: Refining Assessment in 2003), 470.
Postgraduate Degrees in Dance (Mt Lawley: 17 Haseman, ‘A Manifesto for Performative
West Australian Academy of Performing Research’, 5–6.
Arts at Edith Cowan University, 2009), 18 Haseman, ‘A Manifesto for Performative
11–15. Research’, 6.
3 Carole Gray cited in Brad Haseman, 19 Paul Carter, ‘Interest: The Ethics of
‘Identifying the Performative Research Invention’ in Practice as Research, Approaches
Paradigm’ in Practice as Research, Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, eds. Estelle Barrett
to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B. Tauris &
and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007), 15.
Co Ltd., 2007), 147. 20 Ibid., 15–16.
4 Paul Gray et al., The Research Imagination: 21 Ibid., 16.
Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative 22 Ibid.
Methods (Cambridge: Cambridge 23 Stephen Scrivener, ‘The Art Object Does
University Press, 2007), 10–11. Not Embody a Form of Knowledge’, 1.
5 Ibid., 11–12. 24 Ibid., 2.
6 Ibid.,10. 25 Angela Piccini, ‘An Historiographic
7 Ibid., 11. Perspective on Practice as Research’, Studies
8 Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, in Theatre and Performance 23, no. 3
‘Introduction: The Discipline and Practice (2003): 191.
of Qualitative Research’, Handbook of 26 Nancy de Freitas, ‘Activating a Research
Qualitative Research, eds. Norman Denzin Context in Art and Design Practice’,
and Yvonna Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: International Journal for the Scholarship of
Sage, 2005), 2. Teaching and Learning, 1, no. 2 (2007): 2.
9 Ibid., 2–3. Stephen Scrivener, ‘The Art Object Does
10 Ibid., 3. Not Embody a Form of Knowledge’, 13.
11 Haseman, ‘A Manifesto for Performative 27 Ibid., 10.
Research’, 3. 28 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Magic is in the
12 Original emphases, Haseman, ‘Identifying Handling’, in Practice as Research,
the Performative Research Paradigm’, 148. Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, eds.
13 Anna Pakes, ‘Art as Action or Art as Object? Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London:
The Embodiment of Knowledge in Practice I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007), 34.
as Research’, Working Papers in Art and 29 Maggi Phillips, Cheryl Stock and Kim
Design 3 (2004), http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/ Vincs, Dancing Between Diversity and
artdes_research/papers/wpades/ vol3/apfull. Consistency: Refining Assessment in
html, 5. Accessed 1 October 2011. Postgraduate Degrees in Dance (Mt Lawley:
14 Stephen Scrivener, ‘The Art Object Does West Australian Academy of Performing
Not Embody a Form of Knowledge’, Arts at Edith Cowan University, 2009), 15.
Working Papers in Art and Design 2 (2004), 30 Anna Pakes, ‘Original Embodied
http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/research/ Knowledge: the Epistemology of The New
papers/wpades/vol2/scrivenerfull.html, 2. in Dance in Practice as Research’, Research
Accessed 1 October 2011. in Dance Education 4, no. 2 (2010): 130.
15 Haseman, ‘Identifying the Performative
Research Paradigm’, 147–157.
16 Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln,

Chapter 2 / The creative artist as 12 Vorspiel refers to the Prelude, Introduction
research practitioner or Overture of the opera.
John Drummond 13 Charles Le Brun’s Méthode Pour Apprendre
1 See http://www.anecdotage.com/index. à Dessiner Les Passions was published
php?aid=6851, also http://wakeup-noirceur. posthumously in 1698.
livejournal.com/1909.html, accessed 8 14 G.W. Stone Jr. and George M. Kahrl,
October 2010. David Garrick, a Critical Biography
2 Roger Forman, Amadeus, screenplay by (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press,
Peter Shaffer (1984); Carlos Saura, I, 1979), 32.
Giovanni, screenplay by Carlos Saura, 15 Aaron Hill, The Art of Acting (London:
Raddaello Uboldi and Alessandro Vallini 1753)
(2009). 16 Quoted in Stone and Kahrl, 34.
3 Daniel Schubart quoted in Christoph 17 Quoted in Stone and Kahrl, 26.
Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned 18 Ibid., 26.
Musician (New York, NY: W. W. Norton 19 Quoted in Carola Oman, David Garrick
Company, 2001), 1. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), 35.
4 See Wolff, 171 and 485. 20 Stone and Kahrl, 30.
5 Johann Sebastian Bach, Die Kunst der 21 Quoted in Stone and Kahrl, 518.
Fuge (Göttingen and Leipzig: Neue Bach 22 See http://www.tititudorancea.com/z/
Ausgabe, ca.1745–50), VIII/ii. david_garrick.htm, accessed 8 October
6 http://xxx.lanl.gov/ftp/quant-ph/ 2011.
papers/0104/0104033.pdf, accessed 8 23 See http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-
October 2011. 3/sdsherma/archives/001470.html and
7 In diminution, the note values of a theme Norma Broude, ‘New Light on Seurat’s
are reduced; in augmentation, they are “Dot”: Its Relation to Photo-Mechanical
increased. In inversion, the intervals of the Color Printing in France in the 1880s’, The
theme are inverted. In retrograde, the notes Art Bulletin 56, no. 4 (1974), 581. See also
of the theme are presented in reverse order. Richard Thomson, Seurat (Oxford: Phaidon
In stretto, the entries in a fugal texture occur Press, 1985), 33, and William Innes
at a shorter distance than previously. Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting
8 Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964).
Principia Mathematica was published in 24 Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art, Nineteenth
1687. and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers
9 Indra Hughes, ‘Accident or Design? New (New York, George Braziller, 1978), 104.
Theories on the Unfinished Contrapunctus 25 John Stachel, How did Einstein Discover
14 in J. S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue Relativity? http://www.aip.org/history/
BWV 1080’ (DMA thesis, University of einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm,
Auckland, 2006). accessed 15 October 2011.
10 See Werner Heisenberg, Physikalische 26 ‘The Special Theory of Relativity, [which]
Prinzipien der Quantentheorie (Leipzig: essentially deals with the question of
Hirzel; English translation The Physical whether rest and motion are relative or
Principles of Quantum Theory, Chicago: absolute, and with the consequences of
University of Chicago Press, 1930) or Einstein’s conjecture that they are relative’,
http://www.vision.net.au/~apaterson/ http://www.allaboutscience.org/theory-of-
science/observer_effect.htm, accessed 8 relativity.htm, accessed 15 October 2011.
October 2011. 27 ‘My mouth fell open and my pulse began
11 Wolff, 1–11. to race’. James D. Watson, The Double
NOTES 155
Helix, A Personal Account of the Discovery World at War’ episode 9 is ‘What is life?
of the Structure of DNA (Harmondsworth, Life is the nation. The individual must die
Penguin Books, 1970), 132. anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is
28 See http://www.youtube.com/ the nation.’
watch?v=2HgL5OFip-0 9 The figures quoted in the documentary
29 James D. Watson and Francis Crick, ‘A episode itself.
Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,’ 10 Ellon D. Carpenter, ‘Russian theorists
Nature 171 (1953): 737–738. on modality in Shostakovich’s music’ in
30 Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal Shostakovich Studies, ed. David Fanning
View of Scientific Discovery (New York: (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Basic Books, 1988), 65. 1995), 76–112.
31 Quoted in John Stachel (2002) Einstein 11 In maintaining one, the example of
from B to Z (Springer: Einstein Studies, Shostakovich’s music (in particular his 13th
2002), 158. Symphony, the first movement of which
32 Ibid., 158. certain motives in this song allude to)
33 http://www.youtube.com/ looms large as a primary research source.
watch?v=QEjdiE0AoCU, accessed 8 12 Ernest Newman, Wagner Nights (London:
October 2011. Pan Books Ltd, 1949), 295; 666.
13 The notion is further problematised later in
Chapter 3 / Songwriting Process in the same lyric which contends ‘businessmen
the Verlaines’ album Corporate Moronic / and politicians’ to be ‘men who like their
Graeme Downes markets free and their music with utility’,
1 Cited by Will Straw in ‘Sizing up Record concluding ‘the trust it breeds when it
Collections: Gender and connoisseurship gently rocks, especially when it rhymes with
in rock music culture’ in Sexing the Groove: ‘Clocks’’. The German composer’s ‘double-
Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila negative’ is hopefully recontextualised
Whiteley (London: Routledge, 1997), 3. within alternative rock, that it should not
2 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of sound like Coldplay and should have no
Gustav Mahler (London: Faber and Faber, utility.
1980), 131. 14 Peter Winkler, ‘Randy Newman’s
3 ‘The World at War’ produced by Jeremy Americana’, Popular Music 7, no.1 (1987):
Isaacs, narrated by Laurence Olivier, score 5–9.
composed by Carl Davis, first broadcast on 15 Whilst this instrumental commentary on
ITV, 31 October 1973–8 May 1974. The the text is rather short, it is redolent of the
episode in question is number 9. function of instrumental sections alluded to
4 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short earlier as a Dunedin Sound attribute.
Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: 16 Indeed, Newman uses the same tactic to
Penguin group, 1994), 40. the same ends in ‘A Few Words in Defence
5 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problem of Speech of our Country’. The cartoonist’s ‘cutting
Genres (Austin: University of Texas Press, down to size’ by brutal summary is in effect
1986), 87–8. here.
6 http://www.youtube.com/ 17 John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The
watch?v=OldToIF5ZGs, accessed 15 Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New
September 2009 York: Vintage, 1993), 78.
7 Jimmy Webb, Tunesmith (New York: 18 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_
Hyperion, 1998), 37. awe, accessed 21 May 2011. The doctrine
8 The actual quote as it appears in ‘The was authored by Harlan K. Ullman and

James P. Wade. Chapter 4 / Across Cultures: The gamelan
19 When either of these commanders deigned community in Dunedin / Shelley D. Brunt
to be portrayed on horseback, the tendency and Henry Johnson
is for their horse to be white. The colour 1 Cf. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large:
choice of the boy racer’s car (which, from Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
personal observation, is often indeed white) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
was a deliberate echo. Press, 1996).
20 I am not using Nietzsche’s concept here 2 See Henry Johnson, Preliminary
in the way he intended it, implying Examination of the Pitches and Intervals of
a recurrence of a type rather than an the Otago Gamelan: Difficulties Encountered
individual, though the song was meant as a and Questions Raised (Lebanon, NH:
provocation to self-evaluation in middle age 1998) Monograph Series, Distributed by
and whether in living my life recurringly the American Gamelan Institute; Henry
(or indeed committing to a fourth decade Johnson, ‘Striking Accord! Gamelan,
of creativity in rock music which amounts Education, and Indonesian Cultural Flows
to something similar) I could answer in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, in Asia in
Nietzsche’s question in the affirmative as the Making of New Zealand, eds. Henry
it appears in The Gay Science, http://www. Johnson and Brian Moloughney (Auckland:
theperspectivesofnietzsche.com/nietzsche/ Auckland University Press, 2006), 185–203.
nrecur.html, accessed 8 May 2011. 3 The University of Otago gamelan contains
21 For a detailed discussion of axial tonality, a ‘double set’ of instruments (gamelan
my doctoral thesis ‘An Axial System of seprangkat): one tuned to the five-note
Tonality Applied to Progressive Tonality slendro scale, and the other tuned to the
in the Works of Gustav Mahler and seven-note pelog scale. There are a wide
Nineteenth-Century Antecedents’ variety of individual instruments in the
(University of Otago, 1994) can be accessed gamelan, from the bronze-key xylophone-
here: http://hdl.handle.net/10523/463 like saron to the bonang, with its two
22 The song is AABA in every respect bar its rows of horizontal gong kettles. Other
proportions and the fact that the A sections instruments include a collection of drums,
are neither structurally nor harmonically known as kendhang, a wooden flute
identical. This individualisation of strophic called suling, and a fiddle called rebab.
units derives from research into Mahler’s The varied instruments are not used as
approach to strophic form as discussed by solo instruments, rather, they work in
Donald Mitchell in Song and Symphonies of collaboration within the ensemble.
Life and Death (London: Faber and Faber, 4 Cf. Henry Johnson and Brian Moloughney,
1985), in particular with regard to the eds., Asia in the Making of New Zealand
Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde. (Auckland: Auckland University Press,
23 Lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s song can be 2006). When New Zealand relaxed its
found at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/ immigration policy in the late 1980s,
leonard+cohen/tower+of+song_20082815. Asian migrants of Chinese and Indian
html, accessed 22 May 2011. ethnicity were by far the larger number to
become new New Zealanders. The latest
census figures indicate that in 2006, New
Zealand’s Chinese population numbered
147,570 and its Indian population 104,583
– see www.stats.govt.nz, accessed 1 October
2011.
NOTES 157
5 Henry Johnson, ‘Performing Identity, Past no. 2 (2009): 80–97; Ronald M. Radano
and Present: Chinese Cultural Performance, and Philip V. Bohlman, Music and the
New Year Celebrations, and the Heritage Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of
Industry’, in East by South: China in the Chicago Press, 2000); Tina K. Ramnarine,
Australasian Imagination, eds. Charles ‘‘Indian’ Music in the Diaspora: Case
Ferrall, Paul Millar and Keren Smith Studies of ‘Chutney’ in Trinidad and in
(Wellington: Victoria University Press, London’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology
2005), 217–42; Henry Johnson, ‘‘Happy 5 (1996): 133–53; Mark Slobin, Subcultural
Diwali!’ Performance, Multicultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover:
Soundscapes and Intervention in Aotearoa/ University Press of New England, 1993);
New Zealand’, Ethnomusicology Forum 16, Mark Slobin, ‘Music in Diaspora: The
no. 1 (2007): 71–94. View From Euro-America’, Diaspora 3,
6 Shelley Brunt, ‘Sounding Out the Streets: no. 3 (1994): 243–51; Hae-Kyung Um,
Performance, Cultural Identity and Place ed., Diasporas and Interculturalism in Asian
in Wellington’s Cuba Street Carnival’, in Performing Arts: Translating Traditions
Many Voices: Music and National Identity in (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2005).
Aotearoa/New Zealand, ed. Henry Johnson 8 Cf. Robert Didham, ‘Intersections:
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Southeast Asia and Diaspora Engagement’,
Publishing, 2010), 39–49. Outlook 11 (Wellington: Asia New Zealand
7 See, for example, Gage Averill, ‘‘Mezanmi, Foundation, 2009); Wardlow Friesen,
kouman nou ye? My friends, how are ‘Asians in Dunedin: Not a New Story’,
you?’ Musical Construction of the Haitian Outlook 9 (Wellington: Asia New Zealand
Transnation’, Diaspora 3, no. 3 (1994): Foundation, 2009).
253–71; Gerard H. Béhague, ed., Music 9 See www.stats.govt.nz, accessed 1 October
and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean 2011. The 2006 figure was approximately
and South America (New Brunswick: double the number of Indonesians counted
Transaction Publishers, 1994); Jochen in the 1996 national census.
Eisentraut, ‘Samba in Wales: Making 10 On Susilo see further http://www.gamelan.
Sense of Adopted Music’, British Journal org/jokosusilo/index.html, accessed 1
of Ethnomusicology 10, no. 1 (2001): October 2011.
85–105; Frederick Lau, ‘Performing 11 For example, Mantle Hood, ‘The Challenge
Identity: Musical Expression of Thai- of Bi-musicality’, Ethnomusicology 4,
Chinese in Contemporary Bangkok’, no. 2 (1960): 55–59. See also Anne K.
Sojourn 16, no. 1 (2001): 37–69; Kip Rasmussen, ‘Bilateral Negotiations in
Lornell and Anne K. Rasmussen, eds., Bimusicality: Insiders, Outsiders, and
Musics of Multicultural America: A Study of the ‘Real Version’ in Middle Eastern
Twelve Musical Communities (New York: Music Performance’, in Performing
Schirmer/Prentice Hall International, Ethnomusicology: Teaching and
1997); Peter Manuel, East Indian Music Representation in World Music Ensembles, ed.
in the West Indies: Tān-singing, Chutney, Ted Solís (Berkeley: University of California
and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture Press, 2004), 215–28. There were some
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, influences before the 1950s, which included
2000); Jonathan McIntosh, ‘Indonesians a gamelan visiting France that inspired
and Australians Playing Javanese Gamelan the French composer Claude Debussy
in Perth, Western Australia: Community (1862–1918). On some of the influences
and the Negotiation of Musical Identities’, of gamelan on the western world see
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 10, further Maria Emma Mendonça, ‘Outside

South-east Asia’, S.v. ‘Gamelan’, in The New ‘Ethnomusicology, Intermusability,
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Performance Practice’, in The New
ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd ed. (London: (Ethno)musicologies, ed. Henry Stobart
Macmillan, 2001), 9, 505–7; Neil Sorrell, (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press,
A Guide to the Gamelan (London: Faber 2008), 117–134; Patricia S. Campbell,
and Faber, 1990); and Kiyoshi Tamagawa, ‘Ethnomusicology and Music Education:
Echoes From the East: The Javanese Gamelan Crossroads for Knowing Music, Education
and its Influence on the Music of Claude and Culture’, Research Studies in Music
Debussy (PhD dissertation, University of Education 21 (2003): 16–30; Timothy
Texas at Austin, 1998). For other data on Rice, ‘The Ethnomusicology of Music
gamelan outside Indonesia see especially Learning and Teaching’, College Music
the International Gamelan Institute (http:// Symposium 43 (2003), http://symposium.
www.gamelan.org). music.org/SupportingFiles/ArticlesVol43/
12 Keith Howard, ‘Performing Ethnomusicology: Rice.htm, accessed 1 October 2011;
Exploring how Teaching Performance Carol Silverman, ‘Forum Comments:
Undermines the Ethnomusicologist Within Learning to Perform, Performing to Learn’,
University Music Training’, Musiké: The Journal of American Folklore 108,
International Journal of Ethnomusicological no. 429 (1995): 307–16; Ted Solís, ed.,
Studies 3 (2007): 22; Ricardo D. Trimillos, Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and
‘Subject, Object, and the Ethnomusicology Representation in World Music Ensembles
Ensemble: The ethnomusicological ‘we’ (Berkeley: University of California Press,
and ‘them’’, in Performing Ethnomusicology: 2004).
Teaching and Representations in World 19 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of
Music Ensembles, ed. Ted Solís (Berkeley: Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
University of California Press, 2004), 37. 20 John Blacking, How Musical is Man?
13 Johnson, ‘Striking Accord!’; Allan Thomas, (London: Faber and Faber, 1976); John
‘Gamelan in New Zealand: A Chronology’, O’Flynn, ‘Re-Appraising Ideas of Musicality
Balungan 2, no. 3 (1986): 41–42. in Intercultural Contexts of Music
14 The Cirebon ensemble was purchased by Education’, International Journal of Music
ethnomusicologist Allan Thomas in 1974. Education 23, no. 3 (2005): 191–203.
Based at the New Zealand School of Music 21 The embracing of new as well as established
(Victoria University of Wellington campus), gamelan music is in keeping with more
it is rarely used today. recent approaches in institutional contexts,
15 The schools of music at Victoria University and updates Hood’s aim of teaching
of Wellington and Massey University primarily classical gamelan music to remain
merged to form the New Zealand School of true to what he conceived of as traditional
Music. Indonesian repertoire.
16 ‘Puspawarna Gamelan’ (meaning ‘kinds of 22 Puspawarna Gamelan, Gamelan and
flowers’) is a name dating from 2008 for the Strings: New Music and Traditional Works
University of Otago community gamelan by Puspawarna Gamelan and Strork String
group. Orchestra, featuring Joko Susilo (Dunedin:
17 Johnson, ‘Striking Accord!’; cf. McIntosh, New Zealand Music Industry Centre,
‘Indonesians and Australians’. 2010).
18 John Baily, ‘Learning to Perform as a 23 Author Henry Johnson attended this
Research Technique in Ethnomusicology’, performance as an audience member,
British Forum for Ethnomusicology while author Shelley Brunt organised
10, no. 2 (2001): 85–98; John Baily, the event and played saron demung as
NOTES 159
part of Puspawarna Gamelan. The other (1994): 1–7.
performers were Joko Susilo (leader), Alex 37 Players are, for example, immersed in new
Campbell-Hunt, Ali Churcher, Kullasit cultural protocols: before they enter the
Chutipongpisit, Sarah Claman (gamelan dedicated gamelan room, they are required
and violin), Caillan Crowe-McAuliffe, to remove their shoes in keeping with
Donna Glasson, Ditte Holm, Melinda Indonesian cultural practice.
Kernik, Farina Lim, Abby Lute (gamelan 38 Cf. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and
and cello), Amos Mann (double bass) and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century
Justin Wood. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
24 Puspawarna Gamelan, Programme Notes: 1997).
Echoes Concert (Temple Gallery, Moray
Place, Saturday 17 October, 2009), 2. Chapter 5 / Subject2Change: Musical
25 Ibid. reassemblage in the jazz diaspora
26 Ibid. Dan Bendrups and Robert G.H. Burns
27 Ibid. 1 Burns’ publications include ‘German
28 Ibid., 3. Symbolism in Rock Music: National
29 For more information on Anthony Ritchie, Signification in the Imagery and Songs
see http://www.anthonyritchie.co.nz. of Rammstein’, Popular Music 27, no.
30 Puspawarna Gamelan, programme notes, 3. 3 (2008); ‘Continuity, Variation and
31 The following data is extrapolated with Authenticity in the English Folk-Rock
permission and anonymously from some of Movement,’ Folk Music Journal 9, no.
these performance journals of students with 2 (2007): 192–218; ‘British Folk Songs
no prior experience of learning gamelan. in Popular Music Settings’, in Folksong:
32 Susilo has pointed out that he modifies Tradition, Revival and Re-creation, ed. Ian
performance in the New Zealand context Russell and David Atkinson (English Folk
as a way of adjusting to the cultural Dance and Song Society and the University
values he faces as a performer outside of Aberdeen: Aberdeen, 2004), 115–129.
his Indonesian homeland (Joko Susilo, 2 See, for example, Dan Bendrups, ‘Sounds
unpublished interview by Henry Johnson, of Easter Island: Music and Cultural
Dunedin, 2003). Compare also Hardja Representation in Ogú y Mampato en
Susilo, Enculturation and Cross-Cultural Rapanui,’ Animation Journal 17 (2009):
Experiences in Teaching Indonesian Gamelan 72–85; ‘Navegando, Navegando: Easter
(Wellington: Asian Studies Institute, 2005). Island Fusion and Cultural Performance,’
33 Unlike the other students, this student The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 10,
already had some minor experience with no. 2 (2009): 115–28; ‘Pacific Festivals
gamelan. as Dynamic Contact Zones: The Case
34 See, for example, David M. Sadker, Myra of Tapati Rapa Nui,’ Shima 1, no. 2
Pollack Sadker and Karen R. Zittleman, (2008): 14–28; ‘Easter Island Music and
Teachers, Schools and Society (New York: the Voice of Kiko Pate: A Biographical
McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2007). History of Sound Recording,’ The World
35 Cf. Timothy Rice, May it Fill Your Soul: of Music 49, no. 1 (2007): 112–127; ‘War
Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago: in Rapanui Music: A History of Cultural
University of Chicago Press, 1994). Representation,’ Yearbook for Traditional
36 Cf. Matthew Isaac Cohen, Alessandra Music 38 (2006): 18–32.
Lopez Y. Royo and Laura Noszlopy, 3 Tamara Livingston, ‘Music Revivals:
‘Indonesia Performing Arts Across Borders’, Towards a General Theory,’ Ethnomusicology
Indonesia and the Malay World 35, no. 1 43, no. 1 (1999): 68.

4 Pierre-Emmanuel Seguin, ‘Traditional 17 Whiteoak, ‘Improvisation and Popular
Free Jazz: Toward the Mainstream of 21st Music’, 42.
Century Jazz,’ in Stuck in the Middle: The 18 Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib, 280.
Mainstream and its Discontents, Selected 19 Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib, 280.
Proceedings of the 2008 IASPM-ANZ 20 Whiteoak, ‘Improvisation and Popular
Conference, eds. Catharine Strong and Music’.
Michelle Phillipov (Hobart: IASPM-ANZ, 21 Orishas, A Lo Cubano, Universal Latino
2009), 86. CD, 2000.
5 Aleisha Ward, ‘“Anzac, Hollywood and
Home”: Constructing a New Zealand Chapter 6 / Remix Culture and the
Jazz Culture’, in Many Voices: Music and New Folk Process
National Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand, John Egenes
ed. Henry Johnson (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1 Katherine Macdonald, Reflections on the
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 97. Modern Folk Process (MA thesis, Bryn Mawr
6 Ward, ‘“Anzac, Hollywood and Home”: College, 2005), 4.
Constructing a New Zealand Jazz Culture’, 2 Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendages
94. (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 402.
7 Ward, ‘“Anzac, Hollywood and Home”: 3 Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity
Constructing a New Zealand Jazz Culture’, and Generosity in a Connected Age (New
100. York: Penguin, 2010).
8 Norman Meehan, ‘Mike Nock: A New 4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media:
Zealand Voice in Jazz’, in Many Voices: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley: Ginko
Music and National Identity in Aotearoa/ Press, 2003).
New Zealand, ed. Henry Johnson 5 Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009),
Publishing, 2010), 104. 12.
9 Meehan, ‘Mike Nock: A New Zealand 6 Corey Doctorow, @ontent: Selected Essays
Voice in Jazz’, 105. on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and
10 Meehan, ‘Mike Nock: A New Zealand the Future of the Future (San Francisco,:
Voice in Jazz’, 105. Tachyon Books, 2008), 43.
11 Edwards, ‘The Space’, 72. 7 John Parry Barlow, ‘Foreward’ in @ontent:
12 Edwards, ‘The Space’, 73. Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
13 John Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib: Copyright, and the Future of the Future, ed.
Improvisatory Music in Australia 1836–1970 Cory Doctorow (San Francisco: Tachyon
(Sydney: Currency Press, 1999), 245. Books, 2008), xviii.
14 Bruce Johnson, ‘Australian Jazz: An 8 William Gibson, ‘Gibson on Remix
Overview’, in Sounds of then, Sounds of Culture,’ Wired Magazine, July
Now: Popular Music in Australia, eds. Shane (2005), http://www.wired.com/wired/
Homan and Tony Mitchell (Hobart: ACYS, archive/13.07/gibson.html, accessed 8 July
2008), 120. 2011.
15 Johnson, ‘Australian Jazz: An Overview’, 124. 9 http://remix.nin.com, accessed 10
16 Johnson, ‘Australian Jazz: An Overview’, September 2011.
124; John Whiteoak, ‘Improvisation and 10 http://radioheadremix.com, accessed 10
Popular Music’, in Sounds of then, Sounds of September 2011.
Now: Popular Music in Australia, eds. Shane 11 http://ccmixter.org, accessed 10 September
Homan and Tony Mitchell (Hobart: ACYS, 2011.
2008), 44. 12 http://www.ladyhawkemusic.com/remix,
NOTES 161
accessed 10 September 2011. 11 Hone Tuwhare, Mihi: Collected Poems
13 http://www.indabamusic.com/featured_ (Auckland: Penguin, 1987), 66.
programs/show/yo-yomacontest, accessed 12 Sam Hunt, Collected Poems 1963–1980
10 September 2011. (Auckland: Penguin, 1980), 169.
14 Amanda Petrusich, ‘Meet the New Stars of 13 The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse,
Americana’, Spin Magazine, May (2011), 479.
http://www.spin.com/articles/meet-new- 14 See, for example, Lilburn’s ‘Sonatina
stars-americana, accessed 9 July 2011. No.1’ for piano (1946), or Farquhar’s
15 JohnEgenes.com remix website: http:// ‘Concertino’ for piano and strings (1960).
remix.johnegenes.com, accessed 10 15 Alistair Campbell, Collected Poems
September 2011. (Martinborough: Stonerain, 1981).
16 Tim O’Reilly, ‘Piracy is Progressive 16 Sam Hunt, Collected Poems 1963–1980, 91.
Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the 17 James K. Baxter, Collected Poems, 477.
Evolution of Online Distribution’, 18 Bernadette Hall, Still Talking (Wellington:
OpenP2P.com (11 December 2002), http:// Victoria University Press, 1997), 52.
openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/
piracy.html, accessed 5 August 2011. Chapter 9 / The New Brass Band:
Stylistic pluralism and a local vernacular
Chapter 8 / A Common Thematic: Peter Adams
Seven Songs by Anthony Ritchie 1 Recording Released independently by St
Anthony Ritchie Kilda Brass (CD SKB1), Dunedin, New
1 William Dart, ‘Kiri-Speak: Dame Kiri Te Zealand.
Kanawa on New Zealand Music,’ Music in 2 Martin Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity, and
New Zealand 30 (Spring 1995): 8–9. Music: The Musical Construction of Place,
2 For more information on these and other (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3.
compositions see www.anthonyritchie. 3 For a comprehensive historical overview of
co.nz, accessed 20 September 2011. brass band performance culture, see Roy
3 Peter Mechen, Upbeat, Radio NZ Concert, Newsome, The Modern Brass Band from the
April 17 (2006). 1930s to the New Millennium (Aldershot:
4 Fleur Adcock, Poems 1960–2000 Ashgate, 2006) and Arthur R. Taylor,
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, Brass Bands (London: Granada, 1979). For
2000), 69. a more recent study of how brass bands
5 James K. Baxter, Collected Poems (Oxford: are perceived in New Zealand, see Dan
Oxford University Press, 1979), 136. Bendrups and Gareth Hoddinott, ‘Brass
6 Douglas Lilburn, A Search for Tradition Bands and Orchestras in New Zealand:
(Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library Band Participation as seen by Orchestral
Endowment Trust, 1984), 9. Brass Musicians’, Context 32 (2008):
7 Denis Glover, Selected Poems (Wellington: 61–71.
Victoria University Press, 1995), 25. 4 Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity, and Music, 1.
8 The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, 5 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the
ed. Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen, Cooked (Hardmonsworth: Penguin, 1986),
(Auckland: Penguin, 1985), 324. 23.
9 Quotation from a pre-concert talk attended 6 See www.sounz.org.nz/finder/show/works,
by the author (unpublished). London, accessed 20 September 2011.
2008. 7 Roy M. Predergast, Film Music: A Neglected
10 Roger S. Oppenheim. Maori Death Customs Art, 2nd ed. (New York/London: Norton,
(Wellinton: Reed, 1973), 13. 1992), 214.

8 Philip Norman, Douglas Lilburn: His Life 8 Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, 43.
and Music (Christchurch: Canterbury 9 Historians nowadays might find Aristotle’s
University Press, 2008), 237. view of their subject a little naive. Good
9 Douglas Lilburn, A Search for Tradition history goes beyond the facts and seeks to
(Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library, find explanations and motives. Nonetheless
1984). the artist can afford to be more speculative
10 Peter Winkler, ‘Randy Newman’s than the scholar of history.
Americana,’ Popular Music 7, no. 1 (1987): 10 Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, 48.
15. 11 Snedden, King of the Castle, 144.
11 Elizabeth Bouman, ‘Novel Work Makes 12 Snedden, King of the Castle, 201.
Good Impression,’ Otago Daily Times, 20 13 Mad scenes were popular in early
August 2007. nineteenth-century opera. They
12 ‘St Kilda Brass in Concert: Classical provided the slightly scary excitement
Brass,’ 4barsrest, 18 August 2007, http:// of seeing someone whose behaviour was
www.4barsrest.com/reviews/concerts/ unpredictable, the opportunity for truly
con437.asp, accessed 18 August 2007. exciting coloratura vocal writing, and a
chance for virtuoso opera performers to
Chapter 10 / From History to Opera: display their musical and dramatic talents.
The story of William Larnach The most successful ones were those where
John Drummond the heroine has been driven to profound
1 Larnach, an opera in two acts, words distraction by unhappy events. Examples
and music by John Drummond, was can be found in the works of Donizetti
first performed at the Westpac Mayfair (notably Lucia di Lammermoor and Anna
Theatre in Dunedin on 5 May 2007. Bolena) and Bellini (I puritani and La
John Drummond was Musical Director, Sonnambula). Benjamin Britten’s Peter
Jacqueline Coats was Stage Director, Grimes includes a notable twentieth-century
Designer was Martyn Roberts, and example.
Costume Designer was Brenda Rendall.
Malcolm Ede played William Larnach, Chapter 11 / Songs of Old Dunedin:
Alethea Chittenden played Conny, A musical entreprenurial journey
Matthew Landreth played Donald, Stephen Judy Bellingham
Smith played Douglas, Fiona Henry 1 Judy Bellingham and Terence Dennis, Songs
played Gladys and Crystel Benton played of Old Dunedin (Auckland: Ode Records,
Gretchen. The Southern Sinfonia provided 2007), DVD.
the orchestral accompaniment. 2 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism
2 Fleur Snedden, King of the Castle: a and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975).
Biography of William Larnach (Auckland: 3 See http://blog.
David Bateman, 1997), 233. herosjourneyentrepreneurship.org/2007/03/
3 Snedden, King of the Castle, 233. arts-entrepreneurship-as-academic.html,
4 Snedden, King of the Castle. accessed 1 October 2011.
5 Snedden, King of the Castle, 228. 4 Personal communication with the author, 7
6 Snedden, King of the Castle, 231. December 2009.
7 Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry,’ in 5 Jeffry A. Timmons and Stephen Spinelli,
Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary New Venture Creation (New York: McGraw-
Criticism, translated with an introduction Hill, 2003).
by T.S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 6 Fred Silver, Auditioning for the Musical
1965), 48. Theatre (New York: Penguin, 1985), 171.
NOTES 163
7 Geoff Adams, Otago Daily Times, 14 June pim2010/otago.html, accessed 1 October
2008, http://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/ 2011.
music/9513/cd-review, accessed 11 October 2 See http://www.digitalmusicnews.com,
2011. accessed 1 October 2011.
3 Rachel Botsman, ‘Collaborative
Chapter 12 / Music, community, and Consumption Author Presents Compelling
the creation of Dunedinmusic.com Case for 21C’, http://www.youtube.
Scott Muir com/watch?v=zpv6aGTcCl8, accessed 7
1 See http://www.business.otago.ac.nz/com/ September 2011.

About the music
Many of the musical works discussed in this book are stored online and available
via a permanent URL: http://www.otago.ac.nz/music/media. The list of works by
chapter, including original publication details, is as follows:
Chapter 3 / Songwriting Process in the Verlaines’ Album Corporate Moronic

Graeme Downes
The Verlaines, ‘Paraphrasing Hitler’ by Graeme Downes, Corporate Moronic, CD,
Dunedinmusic.com, 9 421901 666 156, 2009.
The Verlaines, ‘They That Once Were Eager Fellas’ by Graeme Downes, Corporate
Moronic, CD, Dunedinmusic.com, 9 421901 666 156, 2009.
Chapter 4 / Across Cultures: The gamalan community in Dunedin

Puspawarna Gamelan, ‘Lancaran Singo Nebah Laras Slendro Patet Menyuro’
traditional, Gamelan and Strings, CD, NZMiC independent release, 2010.
Puspawarna Gamnelan, ‘Lancaran Slamet Laras Slendro Patet Menyuro’ traditional,
Gamelan and Strings, CD, NZMiC independent release, 2010.
Chapter 5 / Subject2Change: Musical reassemblage in the jazz diaspora

Subject2Change, ‘Cuba’, unreleased demo, 2007.
Subject2Change, ‘Subject2Change no. 1’ by Trevor Coleman, Subject2Change no.
1, CD, independent release, STC001, 2008.
Subject2Change, ‘Subject2Change no. 3’ by Trevor Coleman, Subject2Change no.
1, video of live performance, 2008.
Subject2Change ,‘Get Back in the Bubble’, Soundtracks and Inventions:
Subject2Change featuring Pedro Carneiro, CD, Ode Records, CD MANU 5119,
2011.
ABOUT THE MUSIC 165

Chapter 6
John Egenes, ‘Facebook Page’, The Stone Soup Sessions, CD, Delta Vee Music
(BMI), 2010.
John Egenes, ‘Greenbroke Horse’, The Stone Soup Sessions, CD, Delta Vee Music
(BMI), 2010.
Chapter 7 / Music for Film and Other Reflections from a Reformed Exile
Trevor Coleman
Trevor Coleman, ‘Amazon’, Second movement of the symphonic work Equator –
Circle of Life, 2007.
Chapter 8 / A Common Thematic: Seven Songs by Anthony Ritchie

Anthony Ritchie
Anthony Ritchie, ‘Song’, New Zealand Poets in Song, CD, Ode Records, CD
MANU 5032.
Anthony Ritchie, ‘My Father Today’, New Zealand Poets in Song, CD, Ode
Records, CD MANU 5032.
Anthony Ritchie, ‘Tangi’, New Zealand Poets in Song, CD, Ode Records, CD
MANU 5032.
Chapter 9 / The New Brass Band: Stylistic pluralism and a local vernacular
Peter Adams
St Kilda Brass Band with soloist Kevin A. Lefohn, ‘Concerto Burlesca’, Peter
Adams, Old, New, Borrowed and Blues: A Marriage of Musical Genres, CD,
independent Release, SKB1, 2008.
Chapter 11 / Songs of Old Dunedin: A musical entreprenurial journey

Judy Bellingham
Judy Bellingham, ‘Sons of the Southern Cross’, Songs of Old Dunedin, DVD, Ode
Records, DVD MANU 8002, 2007.
Judy Bellingham, ‘Daddy, Soldier Daddy’, Songs of Old Dunedin, DVD, Ode
Records, DVD MANU 8002, 2006.

About the contributors
Peter Adams
Peter Adams is a Senior Lecturer in the Music Department of Otago University and
a well-known conductor, composer and clarinettist. After completing a Bachelor of
Music with First Class Honours from the University of Otago, a Commonwealth
Scholarship took him to London and King’s College, where he completed a MMus
in Theory and Analysis and studied clarinet with Georgina Dobree and conducting
with John Carewe. In his twenty years on the staff at Otago, Peter has built up a
fine reputation as a musical leader in the local community, as a composer, and as a
conductor and musical director working thoughout New Zealand.
Judy Bellingham
Judy Bellingham is the William Evans Senior Lecturer in Voice at the University of
Otago. She trained in Christchurch with Mary Adams-Taylor and Joan Davies, in
Australia with Dame Joan Hammond and Antonio Moretti-Pananti, and in England
with Otakar Kraus. She has sung many operatic roles, including six roles in New
Zealand operas, and has sung as soloist with all the major choirs and orchestras in
this country. In 2010 she worked with the National Youth Choir of Great Britain,
the Royal Copenhagen Chapel Choir, the David Jorlett Chorale in the USA and the
Dan Laoghaire Choral Society in Dublin. Judy is the Director of the New Zealand
Singing School, Te Wānanga toi Waiata. She is also the author of Sing what you see,
See what you Sing, a book on how to learn to sight-sing, and has recorded a CD of
New Zealand songs and the DVD Songs of Old Dunedin.
Dan Bendrups
Dan Bendrups is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith
University, Brisbane. Between 2005 and 2011 he was Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in
Music at the University of Otago. His research is on Ethnomusicology and Popular
Music Studies, focusing on the music cultures of South America and the Pacific. As a
trombonist, he has performed in a wide range of commercial and community music
contexts internationally, particularly in jazz and improvised music.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 167

Shelley D. Brunt
Shelley D. Brunt is a Lecturer in Popular Music and Ethnomusicology in the
Department of Music at the University of Otago. Her research interests include
Japanese popular music, with a focus on issues of identity, community and gender,
as well as Asian music in New Zealand festival contexts. Shelley is a performer in and
the manager of Puspawarna Gamelan, Dunedin’s community gamelan ensemble.
The staging of ‘the Echoes Concert’ (described in this chapter) was supported by
her grant from the Performing Arts Fund, Division of Humanities, University of
Otago.
Robert G.H. Burns

Robert G.H. Burns is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University
of Otago. His interests include nationalism in European folk and pop music, popular
music iconography, musics of the Caribbean and the recording studio environment.
Burns has published several works on the amalgamation of British folk music with
rock music, and the rise of nationalism in German rock music. Prior to entering
academia, he was a professional studio musician in the UK for twenty-five years.
Trevor Coleman
Trevor Coleman, born and bred in Dunedin, studied piano, trumpet and composition
from an early age. He was principal trumpet/cornet in the National Youth Orchestra
and National Youth Brass Band respectively, pianist for the National Youth Jazz Big
Band, and active in many jazz, rock and experimental music groups in Dunedin
during the 1970s. After receiving degrees in music from the University of Otago and
Berklee College of Music in Boston, he began his career in film music composition
with Wild South in New Zealand, later known as NHNZ. From 1985–2000 he was
based in Germany, performing throughout Europe in jazz and music comedy groups,
including eight years as resident composer, musical director and performer for the
Freiburg and Bonn Stadttheaters. Returning to Dunedin in 2001, he has spent the
last decade composing music for film and television, for which he has received three
Emmy nominations. He continues to perform jazz and world music.
Graeme Downes
Graeme Downes completed his PhD on the music of Mahler and nineteenth century
antecedents in 1993. He regularly contributes pre-concert lectures on the music of
Mahler and Shostakovich for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and, more
recently, for the Southern Sinfonia. Graeme has a thirty-year career as a songwriter
and performer in his rock band the Verlaines and as a solo performer. He is a Senior

Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Otago where he teaches
song writing and analysis. He is also a freelance musicologist in the area of copyright
disputes.
John Drummond
John Drummond is Blair Professor of Music at the University of Otago. He trained
as a musicologist and composer in the UK, specialising in opera, and worked as a
repetiteur on professional productions as well as a director of student productions.
At Otago, he directed an opera each year for some twenty years, often translating
and sometimes editing them, giving a start to many students who have gone on
to professional opera careers. His involvement in music education nationally and
internationally led to his being elected President of the International Society for
Music Education and he served in that role from 2000 to 2002. From 2002 to
2009 he served as Associate Dean of Humanities at the University of Otago. His
compositions in recent years include an opera for the Children’s Opera of Prague,
and a song cycle for soprano, recorder and piano, which has been successfully
performed in the UK.
John Egenes
John Egenes lectures in contemporary music and technology at the University of
Otago. Known as a versatile session player and multi-instrumentalist, he plays the
electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, mandola and mandocello, pedal steel and
lap steel, dobro and Weissenborn guitars, accordion and keyboards, bass, fiddle,
Theremin and musical saw. John is currently immersed in the study of digital culture
and its relationships to music, arts and the folk process, and is doing his best to drag
folk music into the twenty-first century. He lives in Port Chalmers with his wife
Kathryn and their cats Ozzie and Harriet.
Henry Johnson
Henry Johnson is Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Otago.
He studied music as an undergraduate at Dartington College of Arts, and then
ethnomusicology at University of London. He holds a doctorate from the University
of Oxford. His teaching and research interests are in the field of ethnomusicology,
particularly the creative and performing arts of Asia and its diasporas. His books
include The Koto (Hotei, 2004), Asia in the Making of New Zealand, co-edited with
Brian Moloughney (Auckland University Press, 2006), Performing Japan co-edited
with Jerry Jaffe (Global Oriental, 2008) and The Shamisen (Brill, 2010).
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 169

Suzanne Little
Suzanne Little is Lecturer in Theatre Studies and the Coordinator of the
interdisciplinary Performing Arts Studies programme at the University of Otago.
She completed her PhD on framing theory for theatre at the Queensland University
of Technology and has additional qualifications in Visual Arts and Film. Suzanne has
published on reflective learning and the representation of trauma in political dance
and documentary theatre.
Scott Muir
Scott manages Martin Phillipps, the Chills, and Delgirl along with several other
Dunedin bands. He founded www.dunedinmusic.com. He is Student Events and
Venue Manager at the University of Otago, Deputy Chair of Independent Music NZ
and Deputy Chair of Dunedin Fringe Arts Trust. He also sits on the board of Music
Managers Forum (NZ) and plays a role in mentoring young musicians through guest
lectures at the University of Otago, and by providing direct consultancy.
Anthony Ritchie
Anthony Ritchie studied composition at the University of Canterbury and the
Liszt Academy in Hungary. He moved to Dunedin in 1988 as Mozart Fellow in
composition at the University of Otago, and was later Composer-in-Residence
with the Dunedin Sinfonia, completing his Symphony No. 1 ‘Boum’. In 2000, his
Symphony No. 2 was premiered at the International Festival of the Arts. In 2004,
his opera The God Boy was a critically acclaimed success at the Otago Arts Festival.
In the last five years he has had six CDs of his compositions released, including New
Zealand Poets in Song and his latest, Octopus, featuring chamber works performed
by members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He has composed over 150
compositions, and many have been performed overseas. He is now Senior Lecturer
in Composition at the University of Otago.

Index
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INDEX 171
INDEX 173

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DUNEDIN SOUNDINGS

Edited by Dan Bendrups

First published 2011

Volume copyright © Dan Bendrups 2011

Publisher: Wendy Harrex

Printed by PrintStop Ltd, Wellington

This book began as a collection of seminar presentations by University of Otago

1 Practice and Performance as Research in the Arts 17

Music, Communication and Community

3 Songwriting Process in the Verlaines’ album Corporate Moronic 41

8 A Common Thematic: Seven songs by Anthony Ritchie 101

Dunedin, named after the ancient city of Edinburgh by its nineteenth-century

Dunedin sound, Dunedin sounds

As an emerging area, performance-based research is still in a state of flux, growth

PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH IN THE ARTS 17

The rise of a third research paradigm?

PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH IN THE ARTS 19

This emphasis on interpretive practices, representation and the human meaning-

Additionally, research of this nature is generally intended to add to a shared

PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH IN THE ARTS 21

For Carter, this double movement is characteristic of a conceptual advance similar

PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH IN THE ARTS 23

The exegesis should not be considered a ‘translation’ of the artwork or practice

PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH IN THE ARTS 25

THE CREATIVE ARTIST AS RESEARCH PRACTITIONER 27

THE CREATIVE ARTIST AS RESEARCH PRACTITIONER 29

THE CREATIVE ARTIST AS RESEARCH PRACTITIONER 31

THE CREATIVE ARTIST AS RESEARCH PRACTITIONER 33

THE CREATIVE ARTIST AS RESEARCH PRACTITIONER 35

THE CREATIVE ARTIST AS RESEARCH PRACTITIONER 37

SONGWRITING PROCESS IN THE VERLAINES’ ALBUM CORPORATE MORONIC 41

SONGWRITING PROCESS IN THE VERLAINES’ ALBUM CORPORATE MORONIC 43

The numbers too And low and behold!

We need to still paraphrase Hitler

The nation’s survival is presented

SONGWRITING PROCESS IN THE VERLAINES’ ALBUM CORPORATE MORONIC 45

& 4 ###˙˙˙ ™™ ###˙˙˙ ™™

FIGURE 2. ‘Paraphrasing Hitler’: Middle section harmony. Graeme Downes

SONGWRITING PROCESS IN THE VERLAINES’ ALBUM CORPORATE MORONIC 47

SONGWRITING PROCESS IN THE VERLAINES’ ALBUM CORPORATE MORONIC 49

SONGWRITING PROCESS IN THE VERLAINES’ ALBUM CORPORATE MORONIC 51

SONGWRITING PROCESS IN THE VERLAINES’ ALBUM CORPORATE MORONIC 53

Shelley D. Brunt and Henry Johnson

ACROSS CULTURES: THE GAMALAN COMMUNITY IN DUNEDIN 55

Gamelan in tertiary education

ACROSS CULTURES: THE GAMALAN COMMUNITY IN DUNEDIN 57

Gamelan performance as research method

Performing gamelan in Dunedin

ACROSS CULTURES: THE GAMALAN COMMUNITY IN DUNEDIN 59

ACROSS CULTURES: THE GAMALAN COMMUNITY IN DUNEDIN 61

ACROSS CULTURES: THE GAMALAN COMMUNITY IN DUNEDIN 63

Dan Bendrups and Robert G.H. Burns

SUBJECT2CHANGE: MUSICAL REASSEMBLAGE IN THE JAZZ DIASPORA 65

Subject2Change in the local context

Jazz and improvisation in the local context

SUBJECT2CHANGE: MUSICAL REASSEMBLAGE IN THE JAZZ DIASPORA 67

Alternatively, and articulating a cultural concept invoked elsewhere in this book,

Bruce Johnson refers to this development as a movement in which largely self-

SUBJECT2CHANGE: MUSICAL REASSEMBLAGE IN THE JAZZ DIASPORA 69

SUBJECT2CHANGE: MUSICAL REASSEMBLAGE IN THE JAZZ DIASPORA 71

Soundtracks and inventions

SUBJECT2CHANGE: MUSICAL REASSEMBLAGE IN THE JAZZ DIASPORA 73

SUBJECT2CHANGE: MUSICAL REASSEMBLAGE IN THE JAZZ DIASPORA 75