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Published: December 25th 2010
Water Sounds
Getting the contrast beween the break, upcurrent, and draw back to the ocean.After some much needed sleep last night, Evan and I were up early to visit a local retired art teacher and Maori art advocate. Gavin was an incredible, incredible wealth of experience. We were welcomed into his home freely, and the moment we walked in we saw it: The living room table was completely covered in his beautiful instruments. The first few minutes were just filled ith Evaan and I picking up the instruments and admiring their beauty. The culture places a huge emphasis on decorating their instruments with meaningful carvings. Most of the instruments we saw were beautiful carved with figure of the Maori gods, or depictions of some of their legends.
What really impressed me most about Gavin was his interest in interplaying the Arts and Nature. What inspiried this study mostly was the idea that many Maori instruments were designwed to imitate nature. It is owed to the great luck, that a few men discovered these instruments in a museum in Britain about 20-30 years back and wondered, “How would I play that?”.
We must have spent 2.5 hours with Gavin, sharing tea, and mutual love for learning about our musical cultures. Evan brought his low
D Irish Flute and played for our new friend. His wife appeared out of the kitchen when Evan was playing and said, “Oh, I’ve never heard my Husband play like that before!” with a huge smile on her face. On leaving, Gavin gave us each a really nifty instrument, its this necklace that unwinds and is swung around the head to imitate bird chatter.
The drive to Lake Tekapo was uneventful(except for the lucky chance of running into a scottish pipe an brass band in the middle of the road), and we made it their by dinner time. Since it was Christmas Eve, we assembled our Christmas Tree(read: Christmas lights wrapped around a coat hanger, with a card board cutout topper, it was precious) and started some Christmas Music! Even in the middle of summer, it still felt like Christmas was here.
Until Tomorrow’s Adventure....
*****
MORE ABOUT MAORI CULTURE
The Maori had a vigourous composing tradition, unfortunately with nately in most cases it is the style that gets saved not the particular song. Maori's perfect keepers of time: song had a purpose, rhythym had a reason. Paddling songs, etc. and a big focus
on perfection was made. Because the playing of Taonga Puoro is so spiritually intertwined for so many of the performers it is considered a very bad and almost curse-bringing thing in some traditions to play a song incorrectly. And we all thought Beethoven's father was tough on him with the rapping of the knuckles!
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