Classical composition arose in New Zealand during the 20th Century—a period when music was undergoing its global post-romantic revolution. Since that time, Kiwi composition has gone from strength to strength.
It is normal for people to think of science and art as pursuits occupying polar extremes, left brain versus right brain, mechanical versus unpredictable, or something along those lines. But I think the plodding unimaginative scientist captures the same space as the dull, self-plagiarising artist. It follows too that the work from a scientist that can inspire a shift in our thinking is equivalent to a masterpiece by a compelling sculptor or original writer. Creativity is the key. And creativity is a strange blend of qualities—so often dismissed as talent, but better thought of as a cocktail of traits: curiosity, wit, thoughtfulness, playfulness, informed scepticism regarding accepted wisdom, and an ability to apprehend deeper truths that lie at the bottom of layers of packaging and conditioning. Before the information age, seemingly opposing interests, science and art, were occasionally seen in the same individuals—Aristotle and Leonardo-style polymaths—who synthesised breadth with depth and eloquently demonstrated that creativity is creativity whatever the application. Today's creatives, working at the disparate frontiers of arcane fields are often out of the public view, but they share another perculiarity. When their work is published, they are often misunderstood and even vilified for spouting uncomfortable ideas or deconstructing comfortable ones. Which brings me in circuitous fashion to where I'm going in this (seemingly directionless) directorial. During my sixth form school year, a biology teacher, Mr Emil Melnichenko, exposed me to music by the polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki, and showed me a fragment of one of Penderecki's wildly notated scores. I have named Emil in this piece for a reason. He was not an off-the-shelf sort of a science teacher (or these days, librarian). Aside from his excellence as an artist and a musician, he is an internationally top-ranked chess composer, a winner of many titles and tournament prizes. Chess composition? Never heard of it? Hardly surprising—this is a discipline without a profile in New Zealand. It is a well-established artform though, with a large and devoted following, mostly in Eastern and Continental Europe, but in Asia and the Americas too. Chess composers create board positions that are played out following chess convention, merging a grand master's deep knowledge of chess principles with an artist's flair. Such studies—composed usually at the endgame—are a form of kinetic art that can even reveal themes: perhaps a meditation on the movements of a web-spinning spider, a re-enactment of an obscure military engagement, or the realisation of an architectural principle from the Ming Dynasty. Compositions are rated for beauty, economy and originality, and the good ones are truly spellbinding. I invite you to google his name for more information. So getting back to Penderecki. An unworldly lad, there I was hearing this strange, hitherto unsuspected music of a living composer, and right there I had an epiphany. Until that moment, I thought that I had been applying the same sort of yardstick to music that I routinely apply across the arts, and indeed across the whole spectrum of creativity. But I hadn't. Sure, my favourites: Zappa, King Crimson, Hendrix and Miles Davis, were rock/jazz artists with greater substance than most, but that is not the point. We routinely judge art on artistic merit, incorporating ideas like originality, depth, boldness of experiment, finesse; yet even though we call musicians "artists", we mostly judge their work by extremely different criteria. Music for the vast majority of us is a thing of taste and familiarity, which has nothing much to do with art. So what if our favourite bands seldom go beyond a limited range of chord changes, beats and licks, or recycle lyrics in word-order variations on common themes. Who cares if an identical set of recycled jazz chords overlaid with a predictable attack of chromatic fingering is used by Joe Pass as with Pat Methany? We like it and that's enough! Perhaps. Perhaps not. If you call it art, shouldn't you treat it like art? Matsuo Basho, the great Japanese haiku poet, put this thought succinctly: Rhyming imitators—musk melons whacked in halves In this issue we are running a story on New Zealand music and the artists who create it. This issue is also accompanied by a double cd, illustrating the depth and stylistic range of their work. Dave Dobbin and Split Enz don't get a mention here. Nesian Mystic, Scribe and Bic Runga aren't included either. Kiwi rockers and crooners can be seen on TV, heard on the radio, and found in other publications. We are featuring contemporary composers. Some readers will protest at our generosity (and that of NZ composers who have not levied a fee for this exploitation of their work) on the grounds that such a story and its sonic illustration is outside NZ Geographic's proscribed subject matter. Not so! We have made the claim since our inception that we are the Journal of New Zealand, with an interest in the people and the culture of these isles. New Zealand was the last major landmass to receive humans and we are a young country. Elsewhere, nations judge themselves by their artistic legacies. Germans consider Beethoven and Bach to be more important to their sense of identity than Boris Becker or Franz Beckenbauer. For future generations of New Zealanders, a few of the obscure composers in this feature will be far better known and fondly remembered than today's crop of TV celebrities and sporting heroes. Imagine that?
There are thought to be about 7500 Hector's dolphins living in several areas around the South Island plus some 100 of the North Island subspecies, known as Maui's dolphin, spread between Maunganui Bluff north-west of Dargaville and north Taranaki. It is the world's rarest marine dolphin and also the smallest. The West Coast of the South Islandhosts the largest population, and there is a reserve to protect an east coast population around Banks Peninsula. Adult females reach a length of only 1.4 m and weigh a mere 45 kg. Males are even smaller. The females reach reproductive maturity at 7-9 years, mate (above) in spring, and give birth to a single calf the following spring. Newborns are huge (50-60 cm) relative to the size of the mother, and are born with their dorsal fin partly folded over and with creases around their body. Although they learn to eat fish and squid after about 6 months, calves may continue to feed on their mother's milk for a further six months. Because these dolphins only give birth every 2-4 years, population growth is slow. In her 20-year life, a female Hector's dolphin may give birth to only four offspring. Hector's dolphins are endemic to New Zealand.
In mid September, a dozen kiwi eggs were collected from nests in inland northern Hawke's Bay under the Operation Nest Egg scheme and transported to hatching and rearing facilities at Rainbow Springs, Rotorua, and at Napier's Westhaven Wildlife Reserve. Once the birds have hatched and grown to 800 grams—probably by April 2007—half will be transferred to a new reserve being created in the Cape Kidnappers area of Hawke's Bay and the remainder returned to the forest from which the eggs were collected. The project has several interesting aspects. The eggs were collected from a privately-owned forest and the Cape Kidnappers reserve is also a privately-funded conservation initiative. Maungataniwha, the egg collection site, is a 6,600 ha native forest bordering Te Urewera National Park. It and a second block, Pohokura of 11,300 ha, were both bought from logging companies by Simon Hall, the chairman of Tasti Products, and a man with a keen interest in preserving the environment. Both blocks are now held by Hall's Forest Life Force Restoration Trust which is carrying our pest control (on predators, goats, possums and deer) and ecological restoration work. Between them, the two properties are home to 19 pairs of the increasingly rare blue duck, long and short-tailed bats, North Island fern bird, black shag, yellow-crowned kakariki, long-tailed cuckoo, kereru, grey duck, New Zealand falcons, kaka, North Island brown kiwi, skinks as well as mistletoe, the rare shrub Pittosporum turneri, and more. Twenty kilometres of foot access tracks are being cleared and a number of small huts erected. In contrast, the intended destinationtion for some of the kiwi chicks, the Cape Kidnappers and Ocean Beach Wildlife Preserve, is dry coastal farmland with areas of teatree scrub. Topographically, the area is a peninsula and the owners of the land, Andy Lowe and Julian Robertson, are protecting a substantial 2200 ha area with a predator-proof fence across its broad neck. The fence, which will be between eight and nine kilometres long, is under construction at present and should be completed by the end of February 2007. Beach lies at both ends of the fence route and this cannot be fenced, so extensive predator control measures will be necessary there. Another unusual feature of the project is that the fence will enclose a considerable swathe of working agricultural land-600 ha of pasture, 300 ha of pines plus 180 ha of kanuka and 200 ha of sand dunes behind Ocean Beach on the south side of the peninsula. A country club and golf course are also planned inside the enclosure. The balance of the land is coastal cliffs and gullies which will be re-vegetated with native plants. Burrow-nesting seabirds, which were once widespread on mainland New Zealand but have now almost entirely disappeared, will be reintroduced into these areas which should be ideal for such a project. Grey-faced petrel and fluttering shearwater will be the first seabirds introduced. Birds of this type return to the area in which they were raised, so large chicks will be brought into the reserve and installed in partly-buried wooden nesting boxes and hand-fed until they fledge. After three to five years away, they should return to the peninsula to breed. These introductions will be continued for at least five years, and in the project's later stages, seabird calls will be broadcast to attract birds in at the appropriate time of year. Additional species of seabird and skink will also be brought in in future. As regular readers of this magazine will appreciate, seabirds once played a vital role in replenishing the fertility of the land. Their droppings and food remains transferred plant nutrients from sea to land. The superphosphate we now spread from aircraft mimics this process, the phosphate being largely derived from old guano deposits. Revegetation is underway in the preserve and volunteers have recently installed 120 nesting boxes for blue penguins behind Ocean Beach. Although local volunteers are providing a lot of labour for the project, all costs, including the fence, are being met by the landowners. Kiwi are just the first in what is intended to be a long line of introductions.
Among all the music the weather makes, thunder is arguably the most dramatic. To the ancients it sounded like the Gods knocking down the door, come to deal to human misbehaviour or maybe warring amongst themselves. For the Greeks it was the sound of Zeus's thunderbolts; to the Vikings the sound of Thor's hammer; to the ancient Sumerians the bellowing of the bull of Adad, the weather god; and to the Plains Indians, the beating of the wings of the giant thunderbird. The temperature of a lightning bolt has been measured at around 30,000°C and we now attribute thunder to the explosive expansion of air heated instantaneously as the lightning bolt passes. Although the electric current only takes a fraction of a second to reach the ground, the sound of thunder typically lasts many seconds. The long roll of sound is a consequence of the fact that the lightning stretches a long way up inside a thunderstorm cloud. So, while you may only be a few kilometres from where the lightning strikes the ground, you may be twice as far away from where the lightning starts, high up in the cloud. This also explains why a clap of thunder starts loud then tails off as the sound from the top of the lightning bolt has dissipated more in its longer journey. Nor is thunder the only sound that lightning can make. People close to the strike often report hearing a loud hissing sound just as the lightning hits. If thunder is the most dramatic weather sound, perhaps the most terrifying is the roar of a tornado—often likened to the sound of a freight train hurtling through the sky. At their worst tornados have wind speeds in excess of 500 km/h and can lift railway engines off the ground as well as obliterate buildings. These extreme winds are caused by the large difference in air pressure between the inside and outside of a tornado. This was finally measured a couple of years ago when a pressure sensor was placed in the path of a tornado. Just 84 seconds after the sensor was left on the ground it recorded a pressure drop of over 100hPa as the tornado went over. The pressure change was concentrated in a few tens of metres across the eye-wall making a pressure gradient much more intense than that of a hurricane. In New Zealand, most people never see a tornado, let alone hear one, but most of us are familiar with the roar of a gale. The wind is at its most musical when it has something to play with—pine trees for example. I was enchanted, as a child, when my father told me that the sound of the wind running through the tall pines on the farm where he grew up was known as the "soughing" of the wind. I looked the word up in the dictionary recently, hoping to find that it was ancient and restricted to that usage but was disappointed to find that it had a plethora of more mundane meanings. Aside from trees, buildings also provide the wind with something to gnaw on. In a country that has done so much with corrugated iron, it is not surprising that the wind has found the iron especially useful for making noises. As Allen Curnow writes in his iconic poem: "Wild with the iron that tears at the nail And the foundering shriek of the gale." Flags and washing flap and crack like dull whips, and nowadays there is that agitated tinkling when you pass marinas as the ropes slap against the metal masts of the yachts. The waves that the wind makes on water carry latent music–packets of sound the wind sends thousands of miles across the oceans, like so many wet hands to smack the drum of a beach, sometimes soft and soothing, sometimes loud and threatening. During the cyclone of February 1936 the sound of the waves breaking in Cloudy Bay was so loud it was heard as far inland as Blenheim. Rain also makes a rich music on the various surfaces it falls on, be it tin roofs, glass windows, concrete paths, trees or leaves. I was particularly taken with a phrase I read years ago where a novelist described " a gentle rain with mercy on its mind." In fact, I found out recently that villagers in Iran and Turkey use the same word for rain and mercy. Then there are the various noises of moving water from the tinkle of a steep mountain stream to the roar of a flood. And, once heard, who can ever forget the eerie sound of boulders knocking together under water as they are rolled downstream by a mountain river in full spate. Frozen precipitation has its own special music, from the rattle and clatter of hail, varying with its size and fall speed, to the magical silence of falling snow. Once on the ground, there is the squeak of fresh snow as your feet sink into it. Glaciers creak and groan as they grind slowly over bedrock, then crash as ice calves off the front end, while little can match the terrible roar of a large avalanche. In fine weather, the sun joins the meteorological orchestra, heating rocks until they crack open in sudden small explosions, or trigger the larger clatter of rock falls. And what have we humans done about all this music? Great mimics that we are, we have made music right back, using drums and bullroarers to summon the rain gods to break droughts. Now we even put musical opportunities in the wind's path when we hang wind chimes from veranda porches or build wind harps. In Catalonia, Spain, there is even a giant wind organ constructed to a design left by Salvador Dali. The organ can only be played when a gale force Tramontana pours down off the Pyrenees much like a Canterbury Nor'wester pounding down from the Southern Alps.
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In May 1891, the government temporarily gazetted Resolution Island, in Dusky Sound, as the country’s first reserve for the preservation of native flora and fauna. Rugged and remote it certainly was, but there was some doubt as to whether it was far enough from the mainland to protect it from swimming predators. Was rival island Little Barrier a better choice? Only after persistent lobbying from Otago over the next two years did the government finally vote funds for a curator who would stock Resolution with birds and look after them. It was Richard Henry’s dream job.
While officially we were neutral in this bitter curtain-raiser for WWII, a handful of volunteers became involved, most of them on the side of the left-wing government fighting Franco and his fascist supporters.
The skinny world of stick insects
3
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