Songs of a Kaumatua Sung by Kino Hughes.(Book Review)

By Mervyn McLean and Margaret Orbell. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2002. [xii, 278 p. ISBN 1-86940-258-8. $59.95 (pbk.).] Music examples, bibliography, indexes, 2 compact discs.

By example rather than rhetoric, Mervyn McLean and Margaret Orbell have placed decades of scholarship into the service of New Zealand's indigenous Maori communities. Songs of a Kaumatua Sung by Kino Hughes is an eloquent volume of musical transcriptions, lyrics, and commentary that raises the bar for music editing endeavors. The heart of the volume is a set of sixty songs transcribed in a modified version of Western staff notation. Separate appendices present notes on text sources, and on the songs and transcriptions. Introductory matter includes a biographical sketch of Kind Hughes, historical notes on the Tuhoe people who live along the east coast of New Zealand's North Island, commentary outlining six major categories of song styles--recited (haka, karakia, patere) and sung (oriori, waiata, pao), and notes on transcription methods. Two compact discs packaged with the book present Hughes's own performances of forty-nine of the songs, drawn entirely from McLean's extensive field recordings made in the 1960s and 1970s.

The focus on the repertoire of one singer, Kind Hughes, breaks with ethnomusicological conventions of valorizing group consensus as the basis for generalizations. By inverting the convention of consensus, what comes into view is testimony to the centrality of individual tradition bearers and the contextualization of their knowledge within a framework of indigenous epistemology. Before his death in 1986, Kind Hughes was a revered elder who worked with McLean to document his knowledge of Maori songs. To this core, McLean and Orbell have painstakingly located Hughes's repertoire within other archival manuscript and recording sources. While archival collections are important historical repositories, they can obscure any understanding of how individual tradition bearers relate to the collected contents, and how individual items within collections are distributed across individuals in multiple communities. Songs of a Kaumatua demonstrates the historiographic insights to be gained in tracking relationships between individual tradition bearers and collective resources. For example, in addition to his mother's Tuhoe traditions, Kind Hughes's repertoire included songs associated with his father's Ngati Maniapoto relatives, some of which are not to be found in Nga Moteatea, Sir Apirana Ngata's authoritative collection of song texts heavy on Tuhoe traditions (n.p.: printed by E. S. Cliff & Co., 1928-29).

Inclusion of the compact discs provides an important opportunity to weigh the communication value of sound and visual documentation of musical performance. On this point, McLean and Orbell make frequent reference to their earlier volume, Traditional Songs of the Maori (Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 1975; rev. ed., 1990). At a time when Maori youth were turning back to reclaim Maori traditions, Traditional Songs of the Maori was a pioneering endeavor, distinct from existing literary collections of song texts and translations in its inclusion of musical notation of tunes. The volume's contents were intended to provide a representative selection of repertoire across genres, and designed to enhance the process of cultural recovery. Because of then-prevailing accusations that publication of cultural patrimony (in other contexts) was tantamount to commercial exploitation, sound recordings were not included. McLean and Orbell note that times have changed: "The CDs packaged with the present book have been included at the express request of tribal representatives" (p. 278).

Thus we now have in our hands the tools necessary to assess the materials in terms of the editors' intentions. When Traditional Songs of the Maori appeared, Kino Hughes, long recognized among Maori people generally as an outstanding orator and respected elder, had already been collaborating with McLean to document his extensive repertoire. The ...