Glenroy Auditorium, Dunedin
Saturday, June 17
A small audience of newcomers to the chamber music scene were honoured with a hopefully increasingly less rare treat in Awe’s performance on Saturday night at the Glenroy Auditorium.
At the close of a mesmeric and immersive event performers, composers and improvisers Jeremy Mayall and Horomona Horo fielded questions from the audience. An array of naive and innocent inquiry followed and were answered generously to break through our collective ignorance. Us skinny white guys have a lot of catching up to do. We can greatly assist this process by exposing ourselves to ancient sounds their associated technical prowess and belief structures just as we expect of ourselves in the rediscovery and enjoyment of western medieval sounds.
Embarking on the winding path through the craft and art engendered by Māori experience of New Zealand will open a world where music plays a holistic role.
We have all sung to our babies, made gentle noises in the company of the sick and dying and taken joy in birdsong, the rush of wind and breathe of a river. It is both enlightening and refreshing to realise that our magical listening experiences can and should hold a treasured position in our cultural expression.
Mayall and Horo shepherd the listener through this experience via the ancient voices amplified and enlarged by modern technology.
But the evening really belonged to Horo. His intimacy with taonga puoro, the delicacy with which he uses a single digit to curve the wave of air escaping from the conch has to be seen. The tonal nuances extracted by using the cavity of the mouth and breathe as natural amplifiers are astounding.
His orchestral collection range celebrates natural materials. Wooden pipes, percussive (gourd, stone and wood), stringed (whale intestine), all play upon the breathe of life.
