I hate myself for that lame title. But it’s a good, satisfying kind of self-hate.
So Chuck has arrived! Last night I took him out for his first good Scottish Night Out – ‘Donde las papas queman!’ (“Where the tatties are burning!”), Chilean traditional music performed by a group of Chilean ex-pats and one hairy Scot.
We met up with Jess, a Kiwi from Rotorua, and George, a Kiwi from Wellington. To paraphrase Chuck: “What could be more Scottish than listening to South American folk music with a bunch of New Zealanders?” And you know, I really don’t know what could.
Made me reflect for a bit on the absence of a ‘traditional music scene’ in Wellington, and perhaps in wider New Zealand. Traditional/cultural music groups exist, of course, but they’re pretty hard to find – I certainly never stumbled across more than one or two. (Although, now I think of it, the Cuba Street Carnival always seemed to summon them out of their shadowy corners.)
In New Zealand we have little in the way of local traditional ‘folk’ music that is shared with the community. Certainly, we have cultural music traditions that are strong – I defy any New Zealander’s spine not to tingle when a waiata rings out – but they are bounded into particular spaces and contexts. The Pacific Island musical traditions are likewise heavily tied into their particular communities. New Zealand’s European-descended pakeha seem to be largely happy to let the musical traditions of their various forefathers fade to nothing. The Asian communities are still a long battle away from being accepted as ‘part of New Zealand’ and their music likewise.
All of this adds up to a New Zealand with a quiet sort of multiculturalism.
Which is no bad thing. But it is odd – another distinguishing feature of the strangely half-formed New Zealand culture. Hell, even Aussie has a style of music (twangy guitar ballads often filled with filthy jokes) of its own. And as usual with NZ, it gives us a rare opportunity to have a foot in many worlds and construct a society with a 21st century mindset that is the Victorian humanist legacy of the nation’s modern founders.
It’s an interesting country, Aotearoa.
(Note: all the above is generalising from personal experience – I’m quite ready to believe that other parts of NZ have much wider-spread engagement in cultural musical traditions.)
(Note 2: I recognise the oddness of reflecting on NZ traditional music when Chilean music is hardly local to Edinburgh – but there is a connection, namely the fact that the hairy Scot of the players got chatting to us in Sandy Bells, local folk music pub. Everything connects, etc etc.)
I think the best example I can recall of engaging with traditional music and making it part of the community: the Pacific Island drumming that accompanied every home game for the Hutt Valley Lakers basketball team back in the early 90s. That was a beautiful thing.
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(skims back over entry)
Ah, so that’s what I’ll be using this blog for – long stream-of-consciousness rambles. Cool, I guess.
11 thoughts on “It Gets, um, *Chile* in Winter ’round here”
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there does exist a folk festival circuit, which presumably has our contributors to folk music.
Um, I don’t know, it depends how you define folk music I guess. I know that the descendents of Scottish migrants, particularly down south, try to hold on to pipe bands and that sort of thing. It’s not that long ago, that they were still reading the bible in Gaelic to each other.
“Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line”. “Tamaki Moonlight”. “Bright Fine Gold”. “Down at the Hall”.
Or more importantly on the world stage – “Now Is The Hour”, subtitled “A Maori Lullaby” when released by Bing Crosby.
There also seems to be a brass band tradition in many rural towns (which is presumably what lead to Brassouls covering “Counting the Beat”); and there are groups like the Windy City Strugglers (which I think Madeline’s father might be a member of).
However, I’d agree that your average Wellingtonian fifteen-year-old wouldn’t have been exposed to “Love in a Fowlhouse” (in any sense 🙂 – but then again, they’d also probably have trouble with anything before the invention of the CD. And are the Warratahs folk, or country? What about the Topp Twins?
I’m sure that Flight of the Concords have something useful to contribute to this thread of thought, but I’m not sure precisely how to tie it in.
You forgot ‘Paekakariki in the land of the tiki’
And yes, Madeleine’s father is in the Windy City Strugglers.
What is folk music? And to answer that question you have to answer: who are folk? and what are folk?
I was about to focus those questions with another, “why does the term exist?” but that’s not the question I want to ask. The answer is a matter of historical information: somebody invented it to suit their opinions of music produced by certain sectors of their society. Perhaps what I really wanted to ask was “why do people keep using the term?” Dunno if that’s going to shed any light on anything though.
oh yeah, me again. I meant to stick into that last one some comments about “musical traditions fading to nothing”. Ummmm, I think it’s bollocks (tentatively speaking), and that there’s a difference between “tradition” and “convention” (and am shamelessly ripping off the writer Roger Scruton). Take R’n’B: the name itself is nothing more than a term invented by marketters to replace the term “race records”. You say “what is black-people music?” and reply “just rhythm and blues”. If it were Irish, it’d be “jigs and laments”. Anyway, 40 years down the line (make it 1983), you get R’n’B covering on the one hand Michael Jackson (look, it’s 1983, it’s Thriller, he’s still cool), and on the other Doctor Feelgood. By the usage I’m trying to set up the former is “tradition” and the latter “convention”. Dr Feelgood sound more like the R’n’B of 40 years ago, but Jackson more closely reflects the life of the community that developed that style.
Although (god I’m rambling) Thriller features the very white Eddie Van Halen, in abundance…. hmmmm….
I am deeply shamed. I mentioned this thread to my mother, and she pointed out a dreadful omission on my part:
I forgot “Ten Guitars”.
(I didn’t forget ‘Paekakariki’ – I chose not to mention it. This is my position, and I’m sticking to it. 😉
Still, I think that there’s certainly a grain of truth to Morgue’s observation; the “jigs and laments” of Irish culture seem to be much more intrinsic to Irish culture than “Ten Guitars” is to NZ culture; though perhaps that’s just because there aren’t such strong stereotypes of what NZ culture is. Hmm – maybe someone needs to ask an Australian or Samoan, someone outside NZ culture but of a group that’s interested enough to form an opinion. 😉
Whaling and sealing songs.
(if you want “folk” = “antiquarianism”)
I don’t suppose the fact that there have been human beings in Ireland exponentially longer than there have been human beings in New Zealand has anything to do with our lack of old-time traditional music? Or that the majority of New Zealanders cannot trace their ancestry in this country much more than a hundred years, if that far?
hello, I’m baaaaaack. Coupla things, I might have something to say this time… One: it was getting to me, so I checked the liner notes to the Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauatamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu EP, Peter Cape is quite specific: his songs are “not folk songs (yet) and they’re not *imitation* folk songs, either – though one of these ethnologist blokes may dig them up in a hundred years and think they are”. He then says he doesn’t mind because he’ll “be dead and Anon. by then.” Anyway, he calls his songs “vernacular ballads” which is a damn good description.
And this means Peter Cape is being specific about what he means by “folk” – traditional songs of unknown authorship transmitted orally. By this definition (roughly the dictionary one) the reason NZ might not have a “folk music” tradition is easy: it’s called recording technology. So eg Whaling and sealing songs predate recording. One side effect of recording technology is the recording industry, which makes “Anon.” harder to get away with (it was frequently a rort).
There’s another one, of course: folk like ‘folk wisdom’ – the music of the common people. Again, welcome recording technology. Now we call it “popular music”, and use the term “classical” to refer to that kind of music the inventors of labels like “folk music” called “music” (it’s like “fiction” and “genre fiction” – all fiction is some genre or another).
Ignorance/indifference to one’s origins need have no bearing on what one does musically. Slide guitar is a 20th Century Polynesian invention. As “bottleneck” guitar it seems an integral part of the dialect of Blues, as “pedal steel” it seems an integral part of the dialect of Country. Still, all that happened was there was a fashion for “Hawai’ian guitar” in the ’20s, and some enterprising musicians used it for their own purposes. Just because they were “the folk” didn’t prevent them from having musical agendas – and minds – of their own.
Meanwhile, maybe it’s time I bit the bullet: what does it mean to say “they are bounded into particular spaces and contexts” of the various traditional musics found here? Are you imagining a single, fused music? Or simply context-free culture? The latter is impossible. For the former I’d direct your attention to the bible of the folk revival (the American one) Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Basically, the life of the thing is heterogenous. Country rubs shoulders with blues, jug bands rub shoulders with zydeco bands and antiquarian ballad collectors. No one found it imperative to fuse this activity in the US in order to believe they had folk music. Is there a problem?
Actually, I’ll delete this comment and just write a new blog entry.