Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

This is New Zealand music month. We decided we should celebrate that fact by pointing out some of the Kiwi music to be found on Te Ara. I started looking and, to my consternation, found rather less than I would wish.

This isn’t because we’re all tone deaf and never attend gigs or enjoy music – if you were to walk into Te Ara’s office you’d see that about half of those hunched over computers are also wearing earphones, listening to music. Nor is it because the wonderful team that search out our photos and films and sounds have not looked hard enough for music – far from it.

Rather, it is because the cost of putting up clips of most New Zealand music is just too great. The Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA) controls the licensing and collection of copyright fees for most New Zealand performers and song-writers; and their charges for use of most commercial music on a website is simply out of our league. This is not to criticise APRA – New Zealand musicians deserve recompense and few of them live in gilded palaces. But the effect is to exclude many fine songs from a site like ours.

So how have we coped with this dilemma? Not by making Te Ara silent, but by ingenuity. These are some of the ways we’ve got some really unusual Kiwi music onto Te Ara:

• We’ve asked others to sing for us. For instance, there is a fascinating sealer’s song that was recorded for us by the Bach Choir. It tells of some sealers abandoned for four years at Open Bay Island in Westland.

• We’ve made the most of our friendships. TrinityRoots were really kind to a Te Ara staff member and gave us a lovely piece from their album, Home, land and sea.

• We’ve been treated really generously by a number of record companies. Because of Festival Mushroom Records you can hear Split Enz perform ‘I see red‘. Kiwi Pacific Records have been really helpful and thanks to them, if religious music is your thing, you can a listen to Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral choir and the rather different but equally beautiful choir of the Samoan Congregational Christian Church in Grey Lynn. Another great Pacific sound came from Warm Earth Records, who allowed us to use Te Vaka in the entry on the Tokelauean community.

• We’ve found nice musical clips in television or radio programmes. Neither the decimal currency song nor Country Calendar’s musical fence are high art, but they are both worth a listen. Rather more serious and stirring is a waiata telling the story of the love between Kahungunu and Rongomaiwahine, which we found in the television archives. And in the Radio New Zealand Sound Archives our researchers tracked down the Ngāti Porou anthem, ‘Paikea’, Douglas Lilburn’s Drysdale Overture, and Ron Goodwin’s New Zealand suite.

• When we couldn’t get permission for the music, we’ve at least been able to show images of record covers (e.g. The Chills and, another Dunedin band, Straitjacket fits), photos of the singers in action (such as Bic Runga and Fat Freddy’s Drop and King Kapisi), or even the text of lyrics (see Peter Cape’s 1958 classic ‘Down the hall on a Saturday night‘).

All this is but a tiny portion of what we would like to have you hear, but it’s a start. Let’s finish with the song which an Encyclopedia of New Zealand simply had to have.