Kaylee was one of New Zealand’s periodic ‘pop ingenues’ from our vast and booming ‘manufactured pop music’ sub-industry. She covered ‘Broken Wings’ and for about two weeks it was inescapable. Then it was gone.
\nI loved that track. Her voice was so damn fragile and unprofessional – almost fit to shatter in the high bits – that it communicated more than proper-singer-type Hayley Westenra ever could, no matter how much she furrowed her brow. Of course, Hayley would have been trying, whereas Kaylee couldn’t help sounding like that. I didn’t care. (Still didn’t buy the single though.)
\n===
\nSo we took Chuck to a Ceilidh on Saturday night. Great fun. Held in an old stone church (NB in this country, ‘old’ and ‘stone’ are redundant descriptors for a church). You pay yer money to get in the door, and push through a curtain into the darkened shell of the church, with a stage up at the altar end and tables all around the periphery. The entire bodylength of the church is the dance floor.
\nThe bar runs all night. A band strikes up the rhythms from the front, sometimes old-time traditional, sometimes (as this time) throwing in plenty of modern-rock\/pop flourishes along the way. And everyone gets out in the dancefloor and dances.
\nThe band usually call the dance in advance, walking everyone through it, but almost all the locals know almost all the dances. They’re the traditional dances, handed down through generations. Usually you’re in sets of four or five couples, sometimes all the couples are together in one big circle. The music strikes up and you’re off, spinning and moving in and back, ducking under linked hands and through arches, whirling each other around, moving from partner to partner. It’s awesome fun and great exercise.
\nIf you watch the men in kilts carefully, the ones who *really* know what they’re doing, you can answer the question of what they wear under the kilt. At least, that’s what Cal told me.
\nAnd to finish, of course, Auld Lang Syne, all holding hands, starting sentimental and getting progressively rowdy until it’s basically a giant folk-mosh. Then out, grinning and turning into the chill night, and away.
\n===
\nCaroline\/Cal is my girlfriend. Or, according to certain medical personnel, my “partner”. Just by the way.
\n===
\nMy last ramble produced a lot of commentary. Which is always good. I’ll try and make some sense of it here. As usual, thinking this up as I go, so I might contradict myself and be just plain wrong. All part of the fun. All of this in the full entry…<\/p>\n
\nLots of Kiwi ‘folk’\/trad songs are mentioned, ‘Ten Guitars’, ‘Taumaranui on the Main Trunk Line’, ‘Now Is The Hour’. This isn’t exactly what I was getting at. While wandering I’ve tried to stick my nose into local traditional music scenes – fado in Lisbon, flamenco in Spain, ‘folk music’ here in Scotland. This is the stuff I’m talking. It is older and more resistant to change and fashion than the examples cited. And there’s an ownership of it, a widespread cultural possessiveness. It is a tangible cultural link to past times.
\nSvend comments “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.”
\nYeah! This is exactly the point I was trying to work out – the instrinsic nature is fundamental to the kind of thing I’m thinking of. If you asked New Zealanders to identify elements of NZ culture, music wouldn’t feature very strongly, except perhaps the haka.
\nNew Zealand doesn’t have strong ‘stereotypes’ of itself. It’s (as Pearce points out) very new. But the settlers from the UK came from strong musical traditions that haven’t become strong in New Zealand – compare to the musical lineage of South American music, with such heavy currents of Spanish and Portuguese within them. I don’t think New Zealanders have enough shared cultural consciousness that any one musical tradition could be called ‘New Zealand’s. (This is what I was getting at with “New Zealand’s European-descended pakeha seem to be largely happy to let the musical traditions of their various forefathers fade to nothing.”) It’s part of New Zealand’s nature as a hodge-podge of different cultural backgrounds that no one cultural background’s music can really be adopted by the whole.
\nMy comment about even Aussie having a style of its own doesn’t really fit with this. I think I’m confusing some other line of thought in there. But I’ll leave it, because I reckon there’s a style of music that’s recognisably Australian.
\nAndrew makes several other points. He identifies the fact that ‘traditional’ music is a bit of a have, an attempt to label music into one ‘proper’ form while ignoring the fact that it is constantly changing. All I can say in response is a sheepish “I guess I’m not talking about that kind of music then”, because he knows whereof he speaks.
\nI think the defining characteristic of kind of music I’m talking about is that which does have a ‘proper’ form of sorts – the kind of music where continuity to the past is direct, not generational. The kind of music your grandparents listened to, and theirs before them. I have an impression that this kind of music is seen as existing in parallel to what might be called current music.
\nAndrew also challenges my comment in the first entry that NZ’s cultural music traditions are “bounded into particular spaces and contexts”. What I meant there was that there are only limited circumstances in which such music is found – and, what I failed to say, because I hadn’t thought it through to the end, was that those spaces and contexts aren’t set up to encourage\/allow the wider participation of the NZ community. Kapa haka is continuing on a decade-long upsurge in popularity, but it very definitely belongs to a subset of the New Zealand population. I’m not looking for a hypothetical fusion of our various musical traditions (that would defeat the point) – I’m just realising that a musical connection with our shared ‘New Zealand’ cultural history is not going to happen, because such a history doesn’t exist.
\nAnd, for the same reason, traditional music in the sense I’m talking about will always be a point of division in New Zealand culture – not a point of unison.
\nWhich all seems startlingly obvious, put like that.
\n(Ahhh, I can’t be bothered reading over this. I hope I haven’t been too boring. I hope, additionally, that I haven’t made a fool of myself, but that’s the old vanity talking, and I’ll just pay it no mind.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kaylee was one of New Zealand’s periodic ‘pop ingenues’ from our vast and booming ‘manufactured pop music’ sub-industry. She covered ‘Broken Wings’ and for about two weeks it was inescapable. Then it was gone. I loved that track. Her voice was so damn fragile and unprofessional – almost fit to shatter in the high bits … Continue reading Ceilidh pron. Kaylee<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-e","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}