Māori music
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Māori music is music composed or performed by Māori, the native people of New Zealand, and includes a wide variety of folk music styles, often integrated with poetry and dance, as well as modern rock and roll, soul, reggae and hip hop.
Kapa haka is the most basic kind of Māori performance art. It is a combination of song and dance, and can involve items such as a poi, a small ball at the end of a string which is whirled around. Dance in kapa haka can be like sign language, with specific moves standing for ideas that the audience can understand.
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[edit] Waiata
Waiata is a kind of song that has been around among the Māori since before the arrival of Captain Cook in 1769. By 1870, waiata began developing and modernizing. In 1911, Maggie Papakura began touring around the UK, while Māori music at home became more lively.
The middle of the 20th century saw waiata and other forms of Māori music modernize while foreign genres were imported, including jazz, swing and rock. In 1964, the Aotearoa Traditional Māori Performing Arts Festival was founded, though the board did not actually schedule its first concert until 1972, with the express purpose of encouraging the development of Māori music.
[edit] Musical instruments
Traditional Māori musical instruments are:-
1) Flutes:
Koauau: A small native flute from 4 to 8 in. long, open at both ends and having from three to six fingerholes placed along the pipe with no apparent system. They resemble primitive flutes the world over both in tone quality and in the range of sounds that can be produced by directing the breath across the sharp edge of the upper aperture. Māori flute players were envied and feared because of the power it gave them over the affections of women.
Nguru: A small wooden, stone or bone flute shaped like a whale's tooth and sometimes made from an actual tooth. It is from 2 to 6 in. in length, wide at the blowing end and tapering to the lower where it is slightly turned up. It has two or three fingerholes and an extra hole bored on the underside, near the curved end, through which a cord could be passed so that it could hang round the owner's neck. It is played in the same way as a koauau and produces a similar pure flute-like sound. The nguru is sometimes classified as a nose flute perhaps because the word “nguru” means to sigh, moan, or snore. This is unlikely because the large end is too wide even for a stout Polynesian nostril and, if the curved end were placed in that same position, the flute would lie at an impossible angle for the player to manipulate the fingerholes.
2) Trumpets:
Putorino: The putorino is a purely Māori invention, occurring nowhere else in Polynesia or in any other part of the world. It is a wooden trumpet varying in length from 9 to 20 in. and has an uneven bore, swelling out to the centre and diminishing evenly towards the lower end, where the pipe is quite narrow and either completely closed or has a very small opening. The outer shape was carved from a solid piece of wood, split in half lengthwise, hollowed out like two small canoes and then lashed together again with flax cord. At the widest part of the pipe there is an opening shaped like a grotesque mouth. The finest specimens are decorated at both ends with carved figures, and the open mouth is part of a head which is outlined on the flat surface of the pipe. It can be played with bugle technique, with closed lips which are set in vibration by the rapid withdrawal of the tongue. Small variations of pitch can be produced by moving the forefinger over the centre opening. An expert horn or trumpet player can produce scale passages covering two octaves or more but it is unlikely that the Māori explored its full range.
[edit] See Also
Kapa haka
Music of New Zealand
[edit] External links
| Polynesian music |
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| Easter Island - Fiji - Hawaii - Samoa - Tonga - Tuvalu - Wallis and Futuna French Polynesia: Austral - Marquesas and Tahiti - Tuamotus |
