Songs Stories Tell and Intersecting Cultures

Abstract

This chapter synthesizes a personal narrative and an analysis of a project begun in early 2013. Although “Songs Stories Tell: Music at the Intersection of Life and Ethnography” as a music composition project began to take form during my 3-month term as the University of Otago Wallace Resident at the Pah Homestead in Auckland, the project has roots in research I did for my 2008 Ph.D. Dissertation, “A Confluence of Streams: Music and Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand.” For my dissertation I used socio-historic and ethnographic methods to build a picture of diverse elements of New Zealand culture as witnessed in the musical life of the nation. For the Songs Stories Tell project, I build on the ethnographic materials I collected and the methods I originally used in my dissertation to continue to gather and assemble elements of sound, music, image and place and associated stories of participants, but now as source material for music composition and performance. These materials were sourced in (and of) New Zealand among various people including Māori and Pacific Island peoples as well as people of European descent, who may be said to be, or to have become “indigenous” in the sense that they “belong” to the place. More to the point, these folk are instrumental in making our place and its future. Indeed it is my thesis that the sharing and exchange of music and cultural meanings is constructive of new, local meanings and it is my purpose with this project to participate in the process. Through sharing of sounds, stories and music, all of the participants in this project are engaged in a musical conversation that is mutually and reflexively constructive of our identities as New Zealanders.