It was a scene imagined by Robert Wiremu (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Porou) as he composed a piece commissioned by Chamber Music New Zealand to be accompanied by Voices New Zealand (the national chamber choir).
Facing composing an hour-long piece of music for the first time, Wiremu, who had never written anything longer than six minutes previously, realised the only way he could do it was to think of a narrative to hold the piece together and make it cohesive.
"It must have been in my mind somewhere, the Erebus story. And then I chose that the Mozart Requiem would be the thematic material for that storytelling. But I chose Erebus first, Mozart Requiem next and then it was all guns blazing from there."
Luckily, Wiremu found out his notion of a "tech geek" passenger’s Walkman with a recording of Mozart’s Requiem, which was left unfinished at the time of the composer’s death in 1791, playing on it in the Antarctic snow after the tragedy of Air New Zealand Flight TE901 was not totally inconceivable.
"I guessed that at the time of the crash, which was in 1979, that Sony Walkman might have been in circulation and, as it so happened, Sony released the Walkman earlier that year, July of 1979.
"That idea gave me licence really, gave me the freedom to change the order, to make the story prevalent and to have everything else serve that story."
What followed was eight months of thinking before he did any writing at all.
"I do a lot of thinking — I don’t do any writing, which is a bit scary with a piece of this size.
"And then once I sat down, I think the ideas had formulated well enough in my head that from the time I started writing to the time I submitted it, it must have been about two weeks."
He was helped along by two "strict rules" he gave himself. One was that he would not change a single note of Mozart’s.
"The Mozart notes for the choir are exactly as Mozart intended, although the context has changed, and the order has changed to fit the story."
The second was not to depict a person, people or event.
"You won’t hear a crash. It was really important that I didn’t want to debase that moment, that trauma for people that were really impacted by the story."
At one stage he did consider using Justice Peter Mahon’s line, an "orchestrated litany of lies", when referring to the airline’s witnesses’ statements because of its use of the word "orchestrated" and its musical inferences but decided to stick to his rule.
"I didn’t want to offend the Erebus families."
The idea of some of the wreckage being recognisable and some not, like at any crash scene, is reflected in how he treated Mozart’s music.
"So some of the Mozart in context will be very familiar to the audience and some of the Mozart will not. I think my entire movement 3 is based on four notes from I think it’s the first or sixth movement of the requiem, and I’ve been able to make a several-minute piece out of these four notes.
"Of course, it doesn’t sound like Mozart even though it is based on Mozart."
Composition is only one of Wiremu’s talents. He has had a career as a performer (piano and singing) and teacher. Music has always been part of his life from a childhood attending church and singing in the choir.
From then on performing in choirs came naturally. He describes being selected for the New Zealand Secondary Students’ Choir as a life-changing event, which led to him joining the New Zealand Youth Choir.
It was through these organisations Wiremu first met Dr Karen Grylls, founder and music director of Voices New Zealand, and got to tour and work with "amazing conductors".
He went on to study singing, music history and composition at Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Auckland and the Queensland Conservatory of Music.
As a singer he has performed and worked with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Dame Malvina Major and with singers with southern connections such as Simon O’Neill, Jonathan Lemalu and Anna Leese. He has also worked with Dunedin singing teachers Judy Bellingham, Isabel Cunningham and the late Honor McKellar.
His love of choral singing never waned and his first teaching job was at Westlake Girls’ High School working with its choirs before he joined Auckland University, where he still works today as a professional teaching fellow of music.
"I was working with Karen Grylls again, but this time in a teaching capacity with the choirs at the university and other choirs out in the community. I’ve worked with so many choirs, mostly around Auckland, but also other parts of the country and other parts of the world as well."
He also has had his own compositions performed by all of New Zealand’s national choirs, including the New Zealand Secondary Students’ Choir, the New Zealand Youth Choir, Voices New Zealand as well as Auckland University’s choir, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Music New Zealand.
"I don’t write a lot.
"I’ve got to say I only write maybe two pieces per year. And I totally understand how lucky and blessed I’ve been that even though I only write two pieces a year, I’ve had such high-profile performers present my work. I’m lucky."
He puts his passion for choral singing down to the draw of being involved in a group with a single vision and having the same mission without having to verbalise it.
"It is an almost psychic connection that great choirs have and you hear that your mate next to you is doing something and that inspires you to do something and you’ve inspired someone else next to you to do something and you might hear someone near you who’s struggling a bit so you up your game to compensate for them or you might be struggling and you can trust that the person next to you has your back.
"And when you hear a really in-tune choir, you will never hear anything that’s in tune anywhere else."
The only thing that comes close is a good string orchestra or quartet or brass band, he says.
"When you get those harmonics lined up, it’s spine-tingling. Same with a string quartet. When those harmonics line up, it’s just spine-tingling.
"Well, I’ve had a lot of those spine-tingling experiences with choirs before where the message is on point and agreed upon psychically and the tuning is amazing and the camaraderie is ... I don’t know. It’s just such a connection."
But he also works with and teaches opera singers and is a trustee of the Dame Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation. He was involved in the recording of Māori Songs with Dame Kiri in 1999, trained the Opera Factory chorus for the concert "Kiri and Friends" as part of the Rugby World Cup (2011) festivities and helped out with the collaboration between Dame Kiri and Voices NZ when they appeared together, conducted by Grylls and accompanied by Prof Terrence Dennis, at the International Arts Festival in Wellington in 2016.
"I sang on stage for a number of years. But singing is very fulfilling. Teaching is more fulfilling.
"Composing is very fulfilling. I think composing and teaching have really become my focus. I’m glad that I’ve done these other things. I’m glad that I’ve been on opera stages. I’m glad that I’ve done the oratorio circuit. I’m glad that I’ve worked as a singer with composers. I’m glad for all these experiences. Because it means that I have these experiences that I can share with my students. I think that’s important."
For the Erebus piece Wiremu knew it would be performed in smaller venues, which meant the piece was restricted to seven instrumentalists and a choir of 18.
So to accommodate that he went through a variety of instruments to work out the best mix.
"I thought about some of these strange combinations like piano and pedal organ that you would have in someone’s Victorian grandmother’s household, and harps and all sorts of things."
In the end he realised the story of Erebus would tell him what instruments were needed.
"So I chose six string players, two trios of violin, viola and cello that are facing each other, and in the middle of those, a vibraphone player. There is just some amazing colours that you can get from a vibraphone."
A vibraphone provides a metallic sound and can sound percussive.
"Or you can use double bass bows to play the keys on a vibraphone instead, and you get the sound which is like a purer version of wine glasses, but totally in tune. And because every instrument on that stage had a bow in their hands anyway, there are times when you will hear seven or eight notes bowed on a vibraphone at the same time, which is something I’ve not known about before, so I’m really proud of that particular idea.
"But that sound, you can imagine what a group of perfectly in-tune wine glasses might sound like. It sounds a bit like icicles, and it’s got coldness about it, and it’s got a kind of disembodied remoteness about it. I thought actually those are exactly the instrumental colours that I need to look for."
Then adding to those colours he asked the choir to do different characters of whisper and whistling based on themes from the requiem.
"It would be done in such a way, kind of improvised on things from the requiem, but made to sound like New Zealand bird songs. So as if New Zealand birds were able to sing Mozart."
What he was trying to achieve was not immediately apparent to the choir until heard alongside the instruments.
"And then by the time we got to the third or fourth performance, it was so, I don’t know how to describe it, they took real ownership of it. They were narrating in a much clearer way. In the first couple of times they were trying to do their best for me; they were trying to do their best for the Erebus family members that came to that first performance; they were trying to do their best for lovers of Mozart that came.
"They were just working so hard, and I’m so proud of them for making that jump."
To see:
Reimagining Mozart, Dunedin Arts Festival, St Paul’s Cathedral, March 30, 6pm; Wānaka Festival of Colour, Lake Wānaka Centre, March 31, 7pm.
