John Purser on working with Maori musicians and their instruments

Hirini was head of Maori studies at the University of Waikato and was permanently surrounded by students – and small wonder.

A writer of stories, a composer, singer and respected academic, he was a significant figure in the revival of the Maori language. He was a charismatic man, a wonderful singer and songwriter, a man deeply in love with his culture and profoundly knowledgeable about it and yet as accessible as ... but a simile will not do here. Hirini was accessible to everyone.

I only met him for an hour, during which our conversation was embellished by student queries and Hirini’s ever-patient responses. How then did we become so strongly connected? Through music: through his desire to bring back to life a lost tradition of Maori instrumental music; through his readiness to accept stimulus from any quarter.

He knew I had worked on prehistoric Scottish music and had done so in the context of the present as well as the past. He read my book, we exchanged recordings and somehow retained a sense of contact until his untimely death from cancer in 2003.

READ MORE: Young Fathers bring politics to the stage in Stirling

The following year, I met Hirini’s brother, Sonny Melbourne, a Maori clergyman and a delightful host and visitor. He invited me to his and his wife Cherry’s house, where I was fed steaks for breakfast.

He took me to visit Hirini’s grave. Sonny’s daughter came with us after her last childbearing to bury the afterbirth in her grandmother’s grave. I stood back as she carried out this ancient custom of her people, her father, clergyman as he was, finding no disparity between her devotions and those of the official church. On that quiet, intimate occasion, religion was wearing her proper clothing and I felt privileged to be present.

Sonny came to visit us in Skye. He had all along wanted to know from me what it was that had connected me to Hirini, Hirini to me. What could I possibly tell him about his own brother? Nothing really. It was all in the music. At least I was able to return Sonny’s hospitality with a lobster we caught!

Actually, I didn’t quite owe it all to Alan and Hirini. I also owed it to Richard Nunns, who suggested me as a replacement for a Celtic/Maori musical interface from which someone had pulled out. How often do you get a phone call inviting you at short notice to join a gathering of Maori and Celtic musicians, all expenses paid, living on a marae (Maori meeting ground)?

I said yes to Ngawara Gordon without a second of hesitation. I had to fly via LA and when I arrived at Rotorua, my baggage was still two days away. Jet-lagged, with no change of clothes, no night clothes, nothing, I was shown into the whare (no shoes, no eating or drinking, absolutely no sex) and invited to choose a mattress for the night.

I made my choice in ignorance, discovering later that the side

I had picked on was pretty well exclusively Maori. What is more, my mattress was right beside Aroha Yates-Smith, whose husband was on her other flank.

I am not a credulous person. On the contrary, I am a sceptic brought up in a Scottish school of rational thought. But living with Maori people subverted all that and so I am willing to declare that Fate, or whatever name she might have in Maori culture, had determined that I would be beside Aroha, whose beauty of mind lives up to the meaning of her name.

Her name means Love. She and her family also came to Skye for a memorable visit. She was a close colleague and successor to Hirini with whom she sang as beautifully as did he. So, sweaty, exhausted, in borrowed pyjamas and having to pretend to brush my teeth in the communal shower area, I had to settle down for the night in the company of some 30 other human beings, some white, some brown, some old, some very young, some male, some female, all under a high roof, the supporting timbers carved with many tales and the whole representing one of the ancestors.

I thought it was going to be a long, miserable night. In fact I have rarely felt such a sense of peace. I spent much of it awake because I was truly two-oceans jet-lagged. The total trust that the sleeping arrangements implied and realised, the gentle breathings of people of all ages, the slight rustles and shuffles as the need for the loo extracted someone from their sleeping bag, were all part of a pervading sense of being instantly accepted. It was a social love and trust of a kind I had never encountered.

READ MORE: Munich has much more to offer Scots than football and beer

Many wonderful things happened, some hilarious, some very moving. On the hilarity side, I was playing a big deep Bronze Age horn, accompanied by a bone whistle played by a delightful American, Rob Thorne, who named himself Geekus Nerdus and did his best to fit his own billing, and the irrepressible Mizzi, a Samoan lass who taught at the Maori Arts Centre in Rotorua. To Mizzi I had assigned the Bronze Age crotals – pear-shaped rattles that are suspended by a bronze loop so that, on one occasion, Mizzi pretended they were massive earrings.

On this occasion, she had one in each hand and was swinging them speculatively and with wonderful expressions of amazement and delight as they tinkled in response to her flexible wrists.

I was getting on with the serious business of connecting with mother earth, ably supported by Geekus Nerdus but noticed that most of my audience were on the edge of laughter. I didn’t think I was that bad and looked up at precisely the moment when Mizzi had become deeply inspired and had raised her wrists to her breasts and started swinging the crotals like a Playboy bunny girl with tassels attached to her nipples.

What to do? I slowly raised my horn, a gesture not lost on my audience, got out of my seat and made up to her, blowing the while and, at the climactic moment, the horn, which is in three pieces, decided to dislocate its parts. We all collapsed with laughter.

After the “concert”, if that’s what it was, Big Boy, a rather intimidating young Maori built on a scale designed for an All Blacks scrummage, sidled up to me to say “Great impro man!”. At that moment I lost all shyness and put aside the many prejudices that were attached to perceptions of Maori young men and felt free to call him “Big Boy” from then on. There were

many lessons to be learnt. One was that all Maori musical instruments have souls and, before playing them, their permission should be sought.

When Richard Nunns visited the Gaelic college on Skye, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, he had his instruments laid out and spoke to them in Maori for some length before addressing his audience, who watched and listened with a dawning awareness of the rightness of it all.

Really this is no distance at all from the relationship between any musician and his or her instrument, but it brings it to the forefront; the acknowledgement that matter, be it wood or metal or stone, has life and that if you wish to breathe more life into it, you have to come to an agreement with its nature and situation.

If the instrument is cold or dry or wet or hot, it has to be handled accordingly, simply to evoke the basic responses. If something more profound is sought, then the co-operation between human and instrument has to reach levels approaching the mystical.

READ MORE: Glaswegian artist unveils new painting in tribute to Tartan Army

Such levels are certainly beyond scientific analysis. I was given several beautiful Maori instruments, in particular a pūtōrino made by Brian Flintoff, and a greenstone karanga manu, or bird call, mine for the korimako and made by Clem Mellish.

Equally precious was a treasure made of greenstone by poet and sculptor Hinewirangi Kohu Morgan. It is transparent, a long teardrop, beautifully engraved with flowing water or air, and with steps into another time zone. But if I am to write of her, she will need a place of her own.

Permission had to be sought not just from instruments but from the whole environment, but the environment could be induced to respond. On one occasion, about 30 of us decided to play the mist off a mountain. It took 20 minutes. Nobody seemed unduly surprised by this achievement. We had gone about our business with propriety and good intentions. Why should it not work?

One especially memorable morning a group of us ascended Mount Tarawera in time for the dawn, to commemorate and celebrate the life of Hirini Melbourne. Mount Tarawera is sacred and only parts of it are accessible to the public, and these are under the control of conservationists.

The mountain blew its top in the late 19th century and the gradual recovery of life in its crater in particular, is subject to protection. As we descended into the crater, Horomona Horo decided we should play standing on the huge boulders at its heart.

When we reached them, he took several minutes to address the mountain in Maori, explaining who we were and why we had come, and asking might we play. Horomona had a handsome Pūkāea or long wooden trumpet type of instrument, which resounded beautifully;

I played the adharc, a middle-sized Bronze Age horn, and my American friend played another of my instruments. But I made a fundamental mistake. I tried to blow continuously while turning clockwise three times. My breath gave out.

On leaving the crater, I mentioned my frustration to the Aotearoan composer Gillian Whitehead who remarked that she always found the proper direction confusing when changing hemispheres.

I had been attempting to wind up the world the wrong way and immediately performed three turns anti-clockwise, blowing the while, and could have gone on much longer; so I made a sort of peace with this strange environment in which the water exits the bath in the opposite direction.

More importantly, the guide (who had made no objection to our invading the heart of the crater) told us that, as we played, a little bird had flown into the crater and sang its heart out. He had never seen a bird fly into the crater before.

“The mountain has accepted us” was Horomona’s straightforward response.