TY - JOUR
AU - van Rij, Inge,
AB - Abstract In 1889–90 the city of Dunedin staged the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the colony instigated by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi by indigenous Māori and representatives of the British Crown. In acknowledgement of the bicultural perspective encoded in the Treaty, this article takes a tour of the musical artefacts of the exhibition, including both Māori and Western instruments and musical works, to reveal how colonial identity was forged through museum culture: whereas Māori instruments (taonga puoro) were curated by settlers and exhibited as the curiosities of a supposedly dying race, Western musical instruments and practices were beholden both to narratives of progress and to the rhetoric of the imaginary museum of musical works, inherited from Britain. However, while the framing of music at the exhibition often contradicted Māori perspectives, a closer look at the exhibition of music in New Zealand in 1889–90 reveals unexpected resonance between the two Treaty parties. Moreover, by tracing the afterlife of one of the Māori instruments displayed at the exhibition, this article reveals how Māori have more recently helped to reshape museum culture itself. Music is the type of the harmony by which God created the world. Inscription from the wall of the display of Messrs. Charles Begg and Co., New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, Dunedin 1889–90 It was in the night, that the gods sang the world into existence. From the world of light, into the world of music. Matiaha Tiramōrehu On 26 November 1889, less than a month after the Paris Exposition Universelle closed its doors, the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition opened in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island. It was common for such events to celebrate important moments in the shaping of national identity. Whereas the Paris exhibition marked the centennial of the French Revolution, New Zealand’s exhibition commemorated the ‘Jubilee of the colony’, offering what the Exhibition President John Roberts described as ‘an illustration of the progress of New Zealand during the first half-century of settlement’.1 That settlement had been instigated by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi by indigenous Māori chiefs and representatives of the British crown in 1840. If, fifty years later, Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) could proudly celebrate the ‘progress’ of their colony, for Māori the Treaty offered less cause for celebration. The Māori version of the Treaty differed from the English text, particularly in how it presented the concept of sovereignty.2 While agreeing to accept the protection of the British Crown, Māori had nonetheless expected to retain control of their own assets. The massive influx of colonists in the wake of the Treaty, and the large-scale appropriation of Māori ancestral land that ensued, resulted in the New Zealand Wars. These culminated in the 1860s, and many Māori lost their lives as well as their land.3 The speech made by Roberts at the opening ceremony wrestled with this awkward legacy: Fifty years ago those Europeans who inhabited these Islands lived only by the forbearance of the Natives, obliged often for their security to take part in the tribal quarrels of the Maoris [sic], to join in their wars, and to adopt their customs.  To-day, though not without having passed through a period of strife and bloodshed which did not always redound to our glory, and which has sadly burdened our finances, we English rule the country in peace and contentment. Equal laws exist for Maori and European; Native and Englishman are alike represented in the Parliament of the colony.4 The Exhibition made the resulting positions of Pākehā and Māori, as promoted to exhibition visitors from home and abroad, all too clear. The President’s speech praised the stripping of the ‘silent’ forests to make way for farmland and industrialism. Māori were absorbed into narratives of progress and praised for assimilating: the law courts now saw ‘litigants who fifty years ago would have been considered savages, while the representatives of the ancient inhabitants sit and vote side by side with yourselves … ’.5 The use of the second-person plural (‘yourselves’) reveals that, despite this purported equality, the default subject is assumed to be Pākehā. Indeed, while accounts of the opening ceremony mention the presence of (unnamed) ‘Native chiefs’, the Official Record proceeds directly to state: The scene from the gallery at the time the proceedings commenced was animated and effective, and must have completely disabused the minds of the strangers among the company of any lingering notions as to New Zealand being a foreign country. The view was indeed such a one as might have been presented in Old England itself—in the less populous parts, of course.6 An attempt to dispel ‘lingering notions as to New Zealand being a foreign country’, and to promote the image of ‘Old England’ can also be seen in the musical performances of the exhibition. Music was described by Roberts as the first of ‘three great benefits to be found in an exhibition’, along with educating people in the fine arts, and ‘the excellent purposes [an exhibition] serves to the colony as a whole’.7 Indeed, nine per cent of the total exhibition budget—£4,500—was directed towards music.8 But while there were almost daily performances of the orchestra, and a major brass band competition, Māori voices and indigenous instruments were silent. Māori music was represented primarily in the exhibition’s ‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas Court’, where musical instruments were treated as artefacts bespeaking the traditions of a race that most Pākehā believed was destined either to assimilate within European culture, or to die out altogether.9 The sounding of European music and the silencing of Māori music at the New Zealand and South Seas exhibition in 1889 reflects the impact of colonization that was bemoaned even as it was promulgated. In 1946 Douglas Lilburn (often seen as the founding father of New Zealand composition in the European tradition) noted that his generation of composers in New Zealand had yet to find their own voice, in part because of what he described as ‘the vast amount of music in the world already’, much of which could be accessed by ‘gramophone or wireless’. He went on: ‘I sometimes think of what happened in the Pacific, say 150 years ago, when many of the traditional customs and beliefs of the islanders and of the Maoris [sic] too went down before the impact of a foreign culture. It wasn’t so much a conquest by force, but that more dangerous thing, a conquest by ideas.’10 The ‘conquest by ideas’ that Lilburn describes was manifest in the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, not only in the framing of Māori music, but also in the display and discourse of Western art music. Indeed, while the Exhibition’s approach to music reflected the significant differences between the respective positions of the settlers and Māori, underpinning both is the museum culture of the exhibition itself: progress narratives and the curatorial agenda framed traditional Māori instruments as the silent artefacts of a dying race, and the display and discourse of ‘Classical music’ at the exhibition invoked the imaginary museum of musical works.11 In this article I draw on the bicultural perspective encoded in the Treaty of Waitangi in order to explore how the 1889 Exhibition enacted a ‘conquest by ideas’ through its implementation of both literal and metaphorical museum culture, with consequences for Māori and Pākehā alike, before examining the afterlife of one of the 1889 exhibits and considering how museum culture has more recently been reimagined through new forms of dialogue and self-representation. In considering Māori and Pākehā perspectives I might be seen to risk invoking binary paradigms that have long been deconstructed; however, there are both regional and historical factors that justify running that risk. Biculturalism has been promoted in New Zealand since the 1980s as a means of acknowledging the significance of Māori as an equal partner with Pākehā and fulfilling obligations laid out in the Treaty. However, the bicultural model is also challenged within New Zealand from two perspectives: on the one hand, some prefer a multicultural model, in acknowledgement of the diversity of New Zealand’s immigrant population; on the other hand, both multiculturalism and biculturalism can be seen to overlook the iwi (tribal) element of Māori identity and instead reduce Māori to a monolithic group.12 Moreover, in the context of music at the New Zealand jubilee exhibition, the Pākehā/Māori polarity can all too easily elide with musicological bifurcations of abstraction/embodiment, score/performance, not to mention universal/exotic. In fact, these bifurcations (or some version of them) were often being constructed precisely through acts of colonialism, the ‘conquest by ideas’, and statements of musical identity encapsulated by the New Zealand and South Seas exhibition, and understanding their history better helps us to challenge their legacy in the present. An investigation of the music of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition also affords an opportunity to draw on a range of musicological and ethnomusicological approaches to Western and non-Western instruments and musical performances at exhibitions.13 Annegret Fauser’s study of music at the 1889 Exposition Universelle has demonstrated the benefits of a multivalent approach international exhibitions.14 The New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition referenced its Parisian predecessor with a 40-metre-high wooden replica of the Eiffel Tower, but my approach to the Dunedin exhibition is, like the tower and the exhibition itself, considerably more modest in scope. Drawing on archival material (including minute books and letters), as well as official exhibition publications and journalistic accounts, at the centre of this article are three case studies, each focused on select exhibits at different sites in the exhibition building. Following the path of a visitor through the exhibition complex, we will first visit the ‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas Court’ (in the area designated ‘Government Exhibits’ in Pl. 1), which included Māori musical instruments. After either crossing or circumventing the gardens, visitors could next either visit the centre of the complex, where Britain had its display, or they could traverse the lengthy corridors down the perimeter (or margins?) of the building, where the various New Zealand and Australian provinces displayed their wares along a North/South axis corresponding to the geographical layout of those regions. Here we will take the latter route, and explore the display of the music shop of Messrs Charles Begg and Co. in the Otago regional court. The ultimate destination of the 1889 exhibition was reached at the rear of the complex, which housed the Art Gallery and the Concert Hall, where various musical works were ‘exhibited’. Pl. 1 View largeDownload slide Plan of the building of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition 1889–90, Official Record of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition Held at Dunedin, 1889–90 (Wellington, 1891). Image courtesy of the J. C. Beaglehole Room, Victoria University of Wellington Pl. 1 View largeDownload slide Plan of the building of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition 1889–90, Official Record of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition Held at Dunedin, 1889–90 (Wellington, 1891). Image courtesy of the J. C. Beaglehole Room, Victoria University of Wellington Just as visitors to an exhibition typically read journalistic accounts or perused the prefatory material of exhibition publications before beginning their tour, it is helpful to preface our own tour with a consideration of the frameworks implied first by the layout of the building, and second by the museum ideology of the international exhibition medium. exhibitions, progress, and walking backwards into the future In its signification, the layout of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition buildings was typical of its genre. Drawing on evolutionary narratives of progress informed by recent developments in geology and anthropology, international exhibitions and world’s fairs often channelled their visitors through exhibits that set up other cultures as ‘primitive’, before leading to the exhibits of the art and/or technology of the West. Western culture was inevitably viewed as the telos, thereby bolstering the rationale for imperial conquest and colonization.15 Exhibition documentation, including official catalogues and guides, worked in tandem with the physical layout of the buildings, ordering ‘the world’ of objects contained in exhibitions through elaborate classification systems. Two primary systems of classification underpinned most exhibitions: one according to substance and manufacturing process, one according to national origin. Although the balance between the two systems differed from one exhibition to the next, taken together they reinforced the period’s tendency to map the ‘progress’ of raw material into consumer product onto the ‘progress’ of human civilization as a whole, from ‘raw’ materials and ‘primitive’ cultures to the sophisticated industrial applications of those materials ascribed to the West.16 The march of exhibitions around the globe loosely paralleled the progress narratives propounded within the exhibitions themselves, as the events moved from the centres of imperial power in Europe (exhibitions in Paris and London in the 1850s and 1860s, followed by Vienna in 1873), to the emergent centre of industrial power, the United States (Philadelphia 1876), to the further flung colonies of Australasia (Sydney 1879, Melbourne 1880 and 1888, Adelaide 1887), where the narrative was typically one of progress achieved under colonization and great hopes for the future. The New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of 1889, like its precursors in Dunedin (1865) and Wellington (1885), was not large enough to be officially classed as an international exhibition. With most exhibits coming from the Australasian colonies, Britain, and the Pacific region, and only small unofficial displays from America, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, and Japan,17 Dunedin’s 1889 exhibition was planned as a more modest ‘intercolonial’ event.18 Nevertheless, in almost every respect other than scope the New Zealand and South Seas exhibition can be seen to participate in the tradition established by its famous predecessors. Peter Hoffenberg has revealed how Australia, as a ‘white-settler community’, negotiated exhibition agendas in relation to its indigenous population: ‘ Aboriginal visitors at the exhibitions would help advertise the civilizing process and its successful converts, the civilized Aboriginals, as “living” examples of cultural assimilation.’19 Māori were typically described by Europeans as superior to indigenous Australians—rhetoric that infiltrated exhibition publications, where Māori sometimes took on the status of ‘de facto Europeans’.20 The Dunedin exhibition held in 1865 had categorized and described Māori objects in a variety of ways, some of which had granted them the status of skilled ‘manufactures’ able to contribute to the colony’s ‘progress’.21 However, the exhibition of 1889–90 manifested a multifaceted shift in New Zealand’s colonial identity and the position of Māori. Following a period of economic depression, New Zealand had entered a phase of ‘recolonisation’.22 The Official Record of the exhibition reveals that the shock was still fresh, but suggests that ‘ere long New Zealand will earn the oft-applied title—Britain of the South’.23 While trade ties with Britain were strengthened, the loss of colonial independence was met with a renewed interest in traditional Māori culture as supplying a distinctive ‘history’ for settlers. With the phase described as ‘Maoriland’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pākehā New Zealanders appropriated ‘picturesque’ elements of Māori culture, while at the same time living Māori were praised for assimilating.24 The ‘conquest by ideas’ of this assimilation becomes clear when we realize just how foreign the exhibition’s mantra of progress was to indigenous Māori perspectives. ‘Ka mua, ka muri’, states a popular proverb. Mua means ‘before’, capturing the dual meaning of what is in front and what is in the past, and muri signifies both what is behind and the time to come. The complete expression is most commonly translated as: ‘we walk backwards into the future’. As Māori historian and anthropologist Sidney (Hirini) Moko Mead writes: ‘It is the future that we cannot see and hence it lies behind us, not in front as the Europeans would have it.’25 The highly prized objects (taonga) crafted by Māori that were displayed in exhibitions carried within them the lives of the ancestors who had created and cared for them: ‘To Maori thinkers, no matter how early the art looks, it is still the art of the ancestors.’26 Indeed, while Pākehā sometimes praised Māori objects according to the developing concept of art-for-art’s sake, for Māori taonga are viewed as ancestors themselves.27 In visiting some of the musical instruments of the Māori court of the 1889–90 exhibition, we will see how the connection of taonga to ancestors was lost, and how Māori were framed by Pākehā curators and visitors as confined to the past, rather than as encompassing that past in order to walk into the future. Indeed, the classification of music at the Dunedin exhibition was typical of international exhibitions in the period, and another blatant manifestation of the Western progress narrative. In Dunedin in 1889, as at other international exhibitions, the instruments that entered the official classification system and were assessed for prizes were those associated with or developed for Western art music. Although there was some ambiguity from one exhibition to the next as to whether musical instruments were primarily industrial or aesthetic objects, it was clear that Western instruments signified sophistication, complexity, and commercial desirability. By contrast, at international exhibitions indigenous instruments from the colonies were routinely displayed as signifying ethnic otherness. They were often mixed up with a variety of other objects and raw materials, and were not assessed in competition—in other words, they were not seen as offering models for future industry.28 Jann Pasler has demonstrated how the classification systems and narratives that built up around musical instruments displayed in French exhibitions and museums could reinforce progress narratives and justify colonial agendas.29 The same ethos was very much in evidence in the Australasian exhibitions. Sydney’s exhibition of 1879 introduced an Ethnological Court (conceptualized by New Zealand geologist James Hector), which was an important precursor to Dunedin’s ‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas Court’.30 Descriptions of Māori artefacts displayed in Sydney not only emphasized connections with the ancient history of European cultures (again suggesting Māori evolutionary historicity), but also placed emphasis on the ‘savage’ qualities of that race. As Rebecca Rice has suggested, such acts ‘justif[ied] the use of force to control them, as well as legitimising the civilising and colonising mission’.31 In visiting the Māori instruments of Dunedin’s Exhibition, we will see similar agendas at play, reinforcing a bifurcation that was entirely typical of international exhibitions generally: two distinct cultures are recognized, but these cultures were ultimately reduced to ‘Western’ (including the settler communities of the colonies of New Zealand and Australia) and ‘other’ (Māori and South Seas); and, typically, these cultures were further mapped on to future and past respectively in a single teleological narrative. Countering this narrative, we will also attempt to see beyond the museum rhetoric and consider the taonga pūoro (musical instruments) on their own terms, as ‘walking backwards into the future’.32 musical museum culture The Māori conception of ‘walking backwards into the future’ might also help us to interrogate the Pākehā narratives framing the display of Western music at the exhibition, and in particular the role of museum culture. New Zealand inherited from Europe the culture of what Lydia Goehr has famously termed the ‘imaginary museum of musical works’.33 The museum language was used in the nineteenth century, including by Liszt, with reference to performances that could draw on musical works of the past as if they had the ontological status of museum exhibits. In broad terms this culture was responsible for an increasing tendency to prioritize works by deceased composers.34 Liszt’s reference to ‘a new museum’ is presumably an allusion to an art museum rather than a general museum (his example refers to the Louvre),35 but the museum terminology invites us to consider not only questions of conservation, display, and canon-building, but also wider-reaching ideologies of colonialism, imperialism, and ethnology. With their diversity of musical representations and ethnicities, and their connection to the literal museum,36 exhibitions are fertile sites for a consideration of musical ontology. The Paris 1889 exhibition had seen a significant step in implementing music’s march ‘backwards into the future’. As Fauser has pointed out, the Exposition Universelle actively sought to address the presence of musical compositions as markers of national identity in terms strongly suggestive of canon formation.37 The ‘conquest by ideas’ to which Lilburn alluded in his description of the fate of Māori music can also be identified in what Goehr has termed ‘conceptual imperialism’. In the final chapter of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works Goehr lays out how the concept of the musical work, whose formation she famously assigns to the post-1800 ‘Beethoven paradigm’, has increasingly been imposed on musics originating in other times, places, and traditions, by persons believing that ‘the closer any music embodies the conditions determined by the romantic work aesthetic, the more civilized it is’.38 Goehr’s employment of the term ‘museum’ for the canon of European art music focuses on that institution’s tendency to preserve objects of the past, but it overlooks the implications of the museum for the very real imperialism exerted over other ethnicities. Her ‘conceptual imperialism’ can thus be seen to have an additional meaning—not only the imperialism enacted by one concept over other concepts, but the imperialism of conceptual thought itself (or abstraction, Gnosticism, the mind) over objects and bodies (or physical experience, embodiment, and tangibility). Examining the relationship between the imaginary museum and the actual museum culture of the international exhibition might encourage us to perpetuate that dichotomy but it also enables us to challenge it. New Zealand’s approach to ‘exhibiting’ music was largely imported from Europe. Yet the colonialism officially commemorated in the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, and the unique relationship between indigenous population and settlers encoded in the treaty, present a particularly rich opportunity to scrutinize the dichotomies of musical ontology, and the diverse ways in which music, museum culture, and the Māori spirit of ‘walking backwards into the future’ interact. In focusing on exhibits, I draw on both Māori and Pākehā awareness of the fluid boundaries between objects and peoples: museologists and organologists have deconstructed curatorial agendas and vested agency in objects;39 similarly, Māori scholars and practitioners of Māori music have articulated the importance of the kōrero (talk, narration) that taonga (prized or sacred objects), including taonga pūoro (musical instruments), carry with them.40 My exploration of the 1889 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition is necessarily an imaginative one, constructed through documentary records, some of which (much like the scores of musical ‘works’) were designed to give an element of collective permanence to an experience otherwise confined to individual memory. However, some objects can be tracked beyond the exhibition into the present, and I will conclude by considering what the kōrero of one such instrument might teach us about musical museum culture today. early history, maori, and south seas court After coming through the turnstiles and passing the large statue of Queen Victoria in the foyer, the visitor to the 1889 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition might have paused to take in the inscription around the central cornice: Labor ominia vincit improbus. Fax mentis incendium gloriae. Forti omne solum patria. Virtutem sequitur Gloria. Incessant toil conquers all. Glory is the torch of the mind. The man of courage makes all lands his home. Merit wins credit.41 With these sentiments of conquest and glory in mind, the visitor then passed immediately into the rooms of the ‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas court’, where New Zealand’s colonial history was traced, and where objects of Māori origin were aligned with history, and physically excluded from the vast corridors where contemporary ‘New Zealand’ was displayed (see Pl. 2). Indeed, while this court also created an ostensible alignment between Māori and ‘South Seas’ culture, the organizing committee had made a conscious decision to prioritize the connection between Māori and history, with a division occurring at the subcommittee level between Maori and Early History, on the one hand, and South Seas on the other.42 Pl. 2 View largeDownload slide View of the Maori Court, New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition 1889–90. Photograph by David de Maus, Album 78, no. 49. Image courtesy of Toitū Otago Settlers Museum Pl. 2 View largeDownload slide View of the Maori Court, New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition 1889–90. Photograph by David de Maus, Album 78, no. 49. Image courtesy of Toitū Otago Settlers Museum The preface to the section detailing the ‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas Court’ in the Exhibition’s Official Record emphasizes the notion of Māori as a race whose proper place is in the past. The preface was written by the Chair of the ‘Early History and Maori’ Committee, the physician Dr Thomas Hocken, whose personal interest in New Zealand history fuelled a collection that would subsequently form the core of one of New Zealand’s most significant research libraries (the University of Otago’s Hocken Collections). Hocken’s preface credits European settlers with the ‘discovery’ of various Pacific Islands (which had in fact been settled for centuries prior to the arrival of the first Europeans), and for transforming these ‘dark’, ‘savage’, or ‘silent’ lands. Although Hocken is critical of the ‘fire and the sword’ of ‘zealous’ Christian missionaries, he suggests ‘[the savage] yet recognized in the new comer a being far superior to himself’. Hocken continues to suggest that Māori subsequently ‘became insolent and threatening’, but they eventually ‘learnt the lesson’ of living peacefully with the settlers. ‘Rest attained, the colony progressed under the great immigration and public works policy with rapid strides.’43 According to Hocken, the Māori collections demonstrated Polynesia still to be in a ‘Stone Age through which Europe long ago passed’.44 Other documents framing the experience of the exhibition extended the concept of the historicity of Māori. For example, in the guide published in the Evening Star on the day of the exhibition’s opening (‘Through the courts’), the Māori court is described as housing ‘relics, household gods, and general impedimenta of an ancient, and, as some say, a fast dying race’.45 In fact, exhibition administrators had made efforts to incorporate living peoples into the Māori and ‘South-Seas’ exhibits. In an ‘Executive Commissioner’s Report’ published in local papers in January 1889, Richard Twopeny proclaimed: It may be as well here to mention that I impressed upon all these gentlemen, from Sir George Grey downwards, the desirability and almost necessity of any island or Maori representation being no mere dumb collection of products and weapons, but a living exposition of manners and customs. The probabilities, as far as I can see my way at present, point to a separate court for each group, thus exciting competition, some of the courts being mere collections of curios, with one or two huts from each island, and a few Natives at their occupations from one or two groups, with possibly a dancing troupe, for whose performances an extra charge would be allowed.46 The minutes from the ‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas’ committees reveal extensive negotiations over the costs and practicalities of transporting groups of ‘natives’ from Tonga (including a ‘Tongan Band’), Samoa, and Fiji.47 It was only when the committee started to understand the expense involved that these projects were abandoned: £900 to bring groups from elsewhere in the Pacific was considered prohibitive. Correspondence between D. Harris Hastings (the Secretary of the Exhibition Commission) and Hocken reveals that the Executive Commission considered even £170 for the Tongan Band ‘excessive’—though the same committee approved an expenditure of £200 for scores for the orchestra, and £400 for the conductor.48 Presumably financial concerns would not have ruled out Māori participation in the exhibition, but the minutes reveal other possible motivations for the exclusion of all representatives of indigenous cultures: the committee feared the Samoan dancers ‘might be troublesome [and] unmanageable’.49 As Conal McCarthy expresses it in his discussion of New Zealand representation at international exhibitions abroad: ‘When real Māori proved to be too much of a handful or refused to live up to their ethnic stereotype, wax models were found to be a much more malleable substitute, their mortuary pallor signifying their fate in a much more acquiescent way.’50 The New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition did not feature wax models, but it did display preserved heads (mokomokai) as well as paintings of Māori by Gottfried Lindauer (a Czech-born and Viennese-trained New Zealand artist), which historicized and aestheticized Māori for the Pākehā consumer.51 Thus Lindauer’s ‘Māori at Home’ depicts Harawira Mahikai, who was described as a ‘grand old chief’, and one of ‘the few survivors of those who signed the Treaty in 1840’.52 Exhibits of living peoples at overseas exhibitions often shaded into the problematic ethics of the ‘human zoo’,53 but they could also afford a valuable opportunity for self-representation on the national and international stage. Such was the attitude of Māori who performed on the marae (meeting house) at the 1906 exhibition held in Christchurch.54 In failing to employ Māori in the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in 1889, the commissioners thus allowed Māori culture to be the ‘dumb collection of products and weapons’ that Twopeny had feared. Exhibited as ‘non-competitive’, the items of the Māori and South Seas court were positioned clearly in relation to the museum dimension of the exhibition, separated from narratives of progress, commercial interest, and also living performance. Māori objects were presented as curiosities and, increasingly, as art, but both frameworks represented a Western culture of display, the lens of the museum.55 The supposed historical nature of Māori was emphasized in other aspects of the exhibition and its documentation. Some accounts drew attention to the chronological element behind the arrangement of the artefacts, with the visitor passing from items from the Māori ‘stone age’ to those of made of wood and bone. Such an approach was antithetical to the Māori conception of taonga, as described by Mead: ‘Carving was not used to show up differences in age—every ancestor is ageless.’56 Other accounts, including the Official Record, group the exhibits according to the name of the Pākehā collector who had loaned them, but this method of categorization could serve to reinforce the ‘dying race’ hypothesis by removing agency and mana (prestige, spiritual power) from the creators and obscuring the whakapapa (genealogy) of the objects, placing it instead in the hands of Pākehā. At some earlier exhibitions, both at home and abroad, Māori were able to exert greater agency. For example, Māori exhibits at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 were listed by the name of the chief who had supplied them to Resident Magistrate R. W. Woon of Whanganui, and with descriptions in official publications that clearly articulated the value placed by those chiefs in the objects donated.57 And at the 1865 exhibition held in Dunedin Māori were named as contributors to the exhibition, and were encouraged to attend.58 As McCarthy suggests: ‘By participating in local and international fairs, Māori saw themselves as partners in colonial development rather than as subjects of it.’59 The 1889 exhibition in some respects represented a step backwards from this stance. Hocken and his colleagues on the 1889 committee had solicited and received items directly from a number of Māori across the country; however, Māori, when mentioned at all by official guides as contributors, were listed simply as ‘The Native owners’; it was the Pākehā mediators who were named (‘through Mr Donald Fraser’), and who appear to have supplied the commentaries in exhibition documentation.60 Musical instruments were found in the exhibition displays of at least five Pākehā, and both the displays themselves and their accompanying commentaries suggest narratives of historicity, or of progress (and its victims). For example, the display of Frederick Revans Chapman (1849–1936) included ‘Five instruments, either flutes or bird-calls; made of albatross bone’, as well as one ‘Bird-call, of sea-bird bone’.61 Chapman’s background was in law but he was noted as an ethnologist, having already penned a highly regarded article on the moa (the large flightless bird that had been hunted to extinction by the mid-fifteenth century). In ‘Notes on Moa Remains in the MacKenzie country and other locales’ Chapman made it clear that he saw Māori ‘tradition and customs’ as ‘kindred matters’ to the fate of the moa, for they were ‘growing scarce’, and in need of preservation by ‘colonists with good opportunities’.62 The alignment of Māori and the extinct bird was by this time a familiar one, having underpinned New Zealand’s contribution to exhibitions abroad.63 The flutes displayed by Chapman were thus associated with a world of imminent extinction. Following the collection of Chapman in the Official Record is that of John White (1826–91), one of the Commissioners of the Exhibition, who served on the Early History and Maori Committee. White’s contribution to the Exhibition included ‘31. Bone flutes and other instruments’, ‘43. Putara, or tetere (shell trumpet)’; and in between them ‘36. Moa-egg shells found in Maori middens’.64 That the moa-egg shells were displayed in White’s collection in the Māori section, rather than in the separate Natural History Court, reinforces Chapman’s alignment of Māori and the extinct bird. White supplies few details of the instruments in his collections. However, he had earlier collected song texts from a range of informants, and in his monumental Ancient History of the Maori White does offer some insight into Māori perspectives on music, incorporating a saying that positions music at the centre of creation: ‘It was in the night, that the gods sang the world into existence. From the world of light, into the world of music.’65 White’s methods and reliability have been questioned.66 The narrative revealing music’s role in creation was taken from a manuscript written by the tribal leader Matiaha Tiramōrehu (c.1800–1, Ngai Tahu iwi) in 1849 for the Revd Charles Creed.67 However, White made no acknowledgement of the original source of the narrative. Like the instruments he contributed to the exhibition, his use of Tiramōrehu’s words disconnects them from their source, and despite White’s engagement with living Māori he might ultimately be seen as complicit in the transferral of their taonga from living tradition to historical artefact. Also contributing Māori musical instruments to the exhibition from their personal collections were Augustus Hamilton (an ethnologist) and Thomas Hocken himself. Both men are significant in terms of the framing of Māori objects in the historic and aesthetic terms of the museum. Hamilton, in particular, is famous for encouraging Māori taonga to be viewed as art,68 but with the consequence that he is also seen as having codified conceptions of ‘traditional’ Māori art in ways that stifled future development.69 However, details of the musical instruments contributed by Hamilton and Hocken are brief. The most significant narratives in the Official Record accompany the instruments displayed by Captain Gilbert Mair (1843–1923). Mair played a very active role in the New Zealand Wars. As a government representative he was a formidable enemy to those Māori who resisted the European appropriation of their lands. However, Mair also trained and fought alongside Māori from the Te Arawa (a group of tribes associated with the Rotorua region) in tribal disputes, and was fluent in Māori; he expressed sympathy for the perspectives of his opponents, and became critical of the government’s approach to the occupation of Māori land. Indeed, Mair was very highly regarded by Te Arawa: he was known to them by the Māori name ‘Tawa’, granted the status of rangatira (or chief), and was ultimately buried in their cemetery—an honour rare for a Pākehā. Although not all the items in his extensive collection of Māori artefacts were obtained ethically,70 many were gifted to Mair by Māori. Paul Tapsell and a team of Māori researchers and museum curators investigated Mair’s collection and its origins, and contextualized its items in relation to the New Zealand Wars, revealing how many of these gifts, which included musical instruments, functioned as petitions to the government that Mair represented, ‘to recognize and honor its 1840 Treaty of Waitangi promise to protect the tribes’ leadership (tino rangatiratanga, absolute chieftainship) over their lands (whenua, placenta of Earth Mother), villages … , and resources (taonga, any item tangible or intangible passed down from kin-ancestors/tribal knowledge base)’.71 Among the items in Mair’s collection at the exhibition were at least seven Māori musical instruments—various types of flute and trumpets that were laden with meaning for the people who had gifted them to Mair. Some instruments also had deep significance for Mair himself. For example, No. 41 in the catalogue of Mair’s items is described as: ‘Human-bone flute, koauau, made from leg-bone of Te Kooti’s butcher and bugler, Baker McLean, shot 1870.’72 What is not clear from this brief description, though it was probably familiar to many exhibition visitors in 1889–90, is the fact that Mair himself was the one who had fired the first shot at Baker McLean (also known as Peka Makarini), following a skirmish with the followers of Te Kooti (a prominent figure in the resistance to the government control represented by Mair). McLean’s bones were subsequently made into fish hooks and flutes, including one which was presented to Mair.73 The use of the bones of an enemy was a common expression of utu (retribution), and a number of the instruments and other items exhibited in Dunedin were crafted of human bone. The instrument that perhaps carried the greatest significance for both Māori and Pākehā is found at No. 39 in the Official Record: ‘Human-bone flute, koauau, named Murirangaranga; played on by Tutanekai eleven generations ago.’74 (See Pl. 3.) The wealth of information available about Murirangaranga in its journey before, through, and (as we shall see in the concluding section) beyond the Dunedin exhibition makes it a particularly rich illustration of the workings of museum culture. Pl. 3 View largeDownload slide Murirangaranga. Photo courtesy Krzysztof Pfeiffer and Ngati Whakaue Pl. 3 View largeDownload slide Murirangaranga. Photo courtesy Krzysztof Pfeiffer and Ngati Whakaue The story of Tutānekai and his beloved, Hinemoa, was itself a taonga that had been passed down amongst their descendants. It was also familiar to Pākehā through a number of written versions, including most notably George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology in 1855. Visitors to the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition were additionally provided with an account of the flute’s history through local newspapers.75 At Tutānekai’s birth, his father Whakaue had arranged for a tohunga (priest) called Te Murirangaranga to baptize him. Te Murirangaranga was seen gathering and eating berries before the ceremony had been performed. This was a violation of tapu (sacredness), which dictated that a priest should not touch food with his hands for an extended period before conducting such a ceremony. Whakaue therefore had Te Murirangaranga killed, and a flute made from his arm bone as an expression of utu. The flute was given to Tutānekai, who became a proficient musician. When Tutānekai grew up he encountered the young woman Hinemoa at a meeting of their respective tribes (from Mokoia Island in Lake Rotorua, and from the mainland respectively), and the two fell in love. Their families were opposed to the union, so Tutānekai played his flute to Hinemoa across the waters of Lake Rotorua.76 She swam three kilometres to be with Tutānekai, following the communications from his flute. Their union brought peace to the region, and the flute was passed down through generations of their descendants of the iwi Ngati Whakaue, eventually coming to Tohi-te-Ururangi. When Tohi-te-Ururangi, who supported the government, was killed in the New Zealand Wars in 1864, the flute was hidden in his throat for safe-keeping, before passing to his cousin Ngahuruhuru Pango. It was Ngahuruhuru Pango who gifted the flute to Mair when he helped to defend the iwi against Te Kooti in 1870.77 The popular story of Hinemoa and Tutānekai inspired several Pākehā musical treatments, including Alice Rowley’s Hinemoa: morceau pour piano (1889) and later Alfred Hill’s cantata Hinemoa (1902), becoming a vehicle for ‘Maoriland’ fantasy: a local Romeo-and-Juliet narrative, it served to aid European settlers to forge a New Zealand identity through the employment of Māori motifs in decidedly European frameworks.78 Considering the flute of Tutānekai, and trying to see beyond its display beneath the glass of the exhibition cabinet, can both reinforce and challenge Maoriland-style narratives. The scant details of this and other Māori instruments at the exhibition suggested their status as ancient artefacts (‘generations old … ’), the exotic curiosities of a barbaric race (‘human bone … ’, ‘butcher … ’). Moreover, the historicity or even invisibility of Māori in relation to objects exhibited in Dunedin was emphasized by the suppression of the details of Māori—both individuals and iwi—who had cared for the items and for whose descendants they were taonga of living significance. Instead, visitors were encouraged to scrutinize the instruments and other objects as historical artefacts assembled by Pākehā collectors. However, an exploration of the instrument both as material object and as embodying its originating context can reveal a quite different conception of Māori music. Tutānekai’s flute, Murirangaranga, is a kōauau—a short, end-blown flute. Brian Flintoff, an instrument maker who has examined a number of historical taonga pūoro, suggests: All instruments are seen as individuals and so naturally have different voices, but these differences are kept within the boundaries of their family’s origins. Innovation that crosses these boundaries is strongly discouraged as it could contravene the natural order of things as set down by the gods, and marked by the Pou Tiri Ao, or guardian posts.79 Taonga pūoro were thus conceptualized in terms wholly foreign to the exhibition’s typical narrative of innovation and progress. Moreover, the exhibition’s display of these instruments as the possessions of Pākehā collectors also overlooked Māori perspectives of instruments as individuals and ancestors—the agency and subjectivity of objects that ethnomusicologists and museologists have more recently acknowledged.80 Flutes such as the kōauau were associated with the goddess Hineraukatauri, who was said to have loved her instrument so much that she chose to live inside it.81 The pūtōrino—a bugle flute—takes the shape of the case moth, Hineraukatauri’s embodiment, and it has been speculated that performers on flutes imitated the sounds of nature, including the prolific birdsong of the forests (which give the lie to the ‘silent forests’ of the exhibition’s narrative of pre-contact New Zealand). However, in the early twentieth century the few remaining Māori performers of instruments, and the Pākehā ethnologists who heard such performances, stressed the importance of words in musical practice.82 The range of the kōauau was consistent with the range of traditional waiata (songs), and it was often used to support the voice in song. It is also possible that the performers articulated words into the flute, facilitated by a performance technique which sees the flute held at a slight angle, with space between the instrument and the mouth allowing the lips to move. Johannes Andersen, author of Maori Music with its Polynesian Background (1934), claimed he could make out words in a 1923 kōauau recording, and that when he played it to a Māori visitor the man could identify the text.83 According to one account, Tutānekai composed a ‘koauau song’ for Hinemoa, to be recited into the flute as it was being played with the nose,84 and Andersen suggests that Tutānekai ‘conveyed certain words to Hinemoa, telling her the course of action she was to adopt in leaving her people and coming to him across the lake from Mokoia’.85 Regardless of whether words were articulated through the flute, the instruments can be seen to have occupied a very special position for those who held them: they were vehicles not only for song in an abstract sense (and song could attain the status of taonga passed through generations), but for the breath itself, the life-giving force exchanged in the traditional hongi (greeting through the pressing of noses). The fact that Murirangaranga had been hidden in the throat of Tutānekai’s descendant, Tohi-te-Ururangi, after his death before passing to his relatives, is thus particularly significant. Flutes such as the kōauau had been among the most popular instruments for Māori, with one European account from 1807 suggesting that ‘the flute is an instrument in almost universal use’.86 However, Māori performance on taonga pūoro was in a period of rapid decline at the time of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, reinforcing the wider narratives of a ‘dying race’. In a prime example of what Lilburn describes as a ‘conquest by ideas’, Christian missionaries and teachers encouraged Māori to abandon their musical practices, because, as Flintoff suggests, ‘they did not understand them (or understood their spiritual nature all too well)’.87 Moreover, new Western instruments introduced by the European settlers attracted Māori interest, further discouraging the use of taonga pūoro. However, the fact that Māori were no longer performing on indigenous instruments does not necessarily signify a decline in their value. It is possible that Māori chose to destroy some of their instruments precisely because they retained a sense of their worth—in Flintoff’s words, ‘because they were deemed too precious and special to be denigrated’.88 Many flutes had additional holes bored in them for a cord, to allow the owner to carry it around his or her neck as a sacred object. In gifting Murirangaranga to Mair, Tutānekai’s descendants were recognizing the breath and words imbued in the taonga and bestowing a great honour upon the man who had defeated their enemy. The description in the exhibition’s Official Record hints briefly at the flute’s significance, but the displays at the exhibition made no reference to the items’ whakapapa (genealogy). Grouped together in cases according to the Pākehā collector who had contributed them, instruments became disconnected from iwi, despite the fact that genealogy charts were displayed in proximity to some of Mair’s instruments at the exhibition.89 The display of Māori items suggested that, despite—or because of—Pākehā sensitivity to their aesthetic value, they were increasingly fetishized as historical or primitive objects. In any case, whether viewed historically or aesthetically—and the very dichotomy is itself characteristic of Western musicological discourse90—Māori items were construed in European terms, in pronounced contradiction to a traditional Māori world-view. They ‘walked backwards’, yet were permitted to take in only a small portion of their history, and they ‘walked into the future’ in a museum construed primarily by Pākehā for generations to follow. otago court: c. begg and co. dunedin—collection of english and foreign musical instruments After passing through the ‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas Court’, the visitor to the 1889 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition could follow the path of ‘progress’ down the lengthy corridors of the New Zealand exhibits, which were arranged by province along the complex’s eastern wing. The largest provincial display was that for Otago (the region in which the host city, Dunedin, was located), and within this section was the display of Messrs Charles Begg and Co. (hereafter referred to as ‘Begg’s’)91 of Dunedin, which was described as ‘one of the smartest looking displays at the exhibition’.92 According to accounts in local papers, the two bays of the Begg’s display were very ‘stylish’, with walls, carpet, and curtains of chocolate brown and black, and gold lettering for the Begg name along the joining rails that connected the turned pillars framing the outside of the display. The decoration was seen as ‘in keeping with the nature of the display’,93 and indeed these aspects of the description suggest the Begg’s exhibit itself evoked a giant piano. When we also take into account the stained-glass windows, friezes, and large wall-mirror, as well as the ‘bust, after Boehm, of the celebrated composer Liszt, recently deceased’, the display evokes the ultimate bourgeois parlour, fused with aspects of the church. The pianos displayed by Begg’s were similarly characterized in terms likely to appeal to respectable, bourgeois, church-going buyers, and especially young women, or those buying instruments for daughters and wives: ‘a very neat and chaste appearance’ is the description offered of one instrument (by ‘Heyl of Leipsig’), and of Begg’s ‘Exhibition model’ piano, we are told ‘the cases are chaste and elegant in design, and possess a rare appearance of external beauty and delicate refinement’.94 This framing of instruments in the Begg’s display was similar to international exhibitions in other countries, but in the context of an exhibition commemorating the jubilee of New Zealand’s treaty between Māori and the crown it carried a distinctive signification. Western instruments were set up to tell a very different story from the taonga pūoro of the Māori exhibit—or rather, to demonstrate the same progress narrative but from the perspective of the telos rather than the origin. As early as 1865, when Dunedin hosted its first exhibition, the types of instrument exhibited by Begg’s were viewed by the jurors as ‘more necessities than luxuries’,95 and by 1889 European instruments were an integral part of settler culture in New Zealand. Whereas taonga pūoro were framed as objects of the past, the instruments of the Begg’s display were objects of the industrial present, and the way of the future. The ethos behind the display of Western instruments can be traced back some fifty years, to the manifesto for the 1839 industrial exhibition in Paris: Establish a comparative perspective governed by the idea of progress Put the consumer in direct contact with the manufacturer [fabricant] Display objects that are the products of ordinary industry, and are thus accessible Accept objects according to the criteria of quality, beauty, and utility.96 In this spirit, visitors to Dunedin’s exhibition were informed of the technology that contributed to the manufacture of the instruments: the workshop of the piano firm Collard and Collard, for example, was ‘provided with every practical contrivance and the latest improvement in the art of piano manufacture, and contains a vast amount of steam machinery for both wood and iron work’; and the guide to the Begg’s display also includes details of piston technology designed to improve the intonation of valve instruments.97 Moreover, the instruments of the Begg’s display were entered for competition, most notably against those of the rival Dunedin music company, the Dresden Piano Company, whose store was on the same Dunedin street as Begg’s, directly vying for market share. Both companies rode the wave of the rising popularity of the piano in New Zealand, which Clare Gleeson suggests crossed classes in New Zealand to a greater extent than in Britain, reflecting both the country’s desire to maintain connections with European culture and ‘a less rigid class structure’ in the colony.98 In this vein, Begg’s had earlier claimed to be the first company in New Zealand to introduce hire-purchase payment plans, enabling ‘all classes [to] acquire a really high-class instrument without feeling the cost’.99 It was for a similar purpose that Begg’s commissioned the ‘Ward piano’, which was designed to have an action suitable for amateurs and, importantly given the local climate, to be ‘not affected by damp’ and thus not to require frequent—and costly—tuning.100 Similarly, the ‘Exhibition Model’ Begg’s promoted through the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition was described by one newspaper as putting ‘a trustworthy, serviceable piano within the reach of many who would otherwise have to deny themselves the gratification of having such an instrument in their house’.101 Among those purchasing or playing upon those pianos were those Māori in homes (often with a Pākehā father) or schools where performance on the piano was viewed as a marker of successful assimilation into European culture.102 In this way, instruments such as those of the Begg’s display may have contributed directly to the silencing of the taonga pūoro displayed elsewhere at the exhibition. The fact that European-style instruments were of the present and future, while traditional Māori instruments were of the past is also evidenced in the element of tactility that appears in some descriptions of the former: ‘In regard to the tests most readily applied, the visitor may for himself discover that the cases are of the best material and workmanship, and that there is not an instrument in the bay which is not entirely satisfactory in terms of touch and tone.’103 These instruments were not silent artefacts to be viewed behind glass cabinets, but items to be touched, played upon—and purchased. Indeed, visitors to the Begg’s display could hear and watch the instruments being played. While Begg’s do not appear to have hosted formal concerts, as occurred in the ‘Pavilion’ of their rival,104 the Dresden Piano Company, one newspaper describes how the Begg’s display attracted visitors with lively demonstrations: ‘ An opportunity is frequently given to visitors of judging of the tones of the instruments, a young gentleman being present, who from time to time plays upon them.’105 Begg’s also loaned instruments to be played upon in the concert hall, including a harp that featured in a concert given by the pupils of the Dominican Convent,106 as well as donating the euphonium awarded to the winner of the solo euphonium section of the exhibition’s ‘Grand Band Contest’.107 On the surface, the separation of the Māori and Pākehā instruments in the exhibition seems comprehensive. However, behind the heavy curtains of the Begg’s display we find an unexpected echo of a sentiment suggestive of Māori concepts of music. On the wall above one of the friezes was written: ‘Music is the type of the harmony by which God created the world.’108 The positioning of music at the centre of creation reads almost as a paraphrase of the words of Matiaha Tiramōrehu, as transcribed by John White, curator of several of the Māori instruments displayed. Did White, who was one of the Commissioners of the Exhibition, and who served on both the ‘Early History and Maori’ and ‘Gardens’ Committees, acknowledge or even propose the analogous inscription? Regardless of White’s involvement, the resemblance might encourage us to seek other forms of resonance between the framing of music in the Māori court and the Begg’s display. Indeed, although the instruments exhibited by Begg’s were entered for competition, and thus participated in the exhibition’s progress narrative more directly than the taonga pūoro of the Māori court, the Māori perspective of ‘walking backwards into the future’ is strikingly apposite for the conceptualizing of European art music at the New Zealand exhibition more broadly. In addition to the canonizing ideology of the ‘imaginary museum of musical works’, in a New Zealand context the backwards glance was also laden with nostalgia for the British and European homeland, which informed the new nation’s progress into the future. The numerous references in the official exhibition publications to Britain as the ‘homeland’ of Pākehā New Zealanders were subtly replicated in journalistic descriptions of the Begg’s display, where items originating in Britain and Europe were particularly prized. However, pianos, like settlers, were expected to adapt to local conditions: ‘in the making of imported instruments special attention has been paid to such details as will ensure durability in this changeable climate of ours’, wrote one journalist of the Begg’s exhibit.109 At the exhibition staged in Dunedin in 1865 Charles Begg had displayed a piano he had constructed himself, with a case of Otago rimu (a native hardwood) housing the action imported from Broadwood of London, winning a bronze medal ‘For Piano Manufactured by him in New Zealand, and of New Zealand woods’.110 However, Begg had subsequently concluded that the challenge of producing his own instruments to a high standard without the appropriate machinery was too great, and he focused instead on importing instruments from abroad. His 1889 display did include a locally manufactured instrument, however. Frederick Howell displayed a ‘local piano, made in our own city’, and was characterized in the newspapers as a ‘plucky’ colonist. ‘[A]ll true colonists will be glad to hear of the successes he has achieved, and of any that he may achieve in future’, the journalist added.111 A similar concern with colonial adaptability can also be seen in the ‘ Anthropometrical Laboratory’ elsewhere at the exhibition. Visitors had their skulls measured, in part to ascertain ‘what has been the effect (if there has been any) of their residence under the social conditions that exist in the Australasian Colonies, and in a climate which has remarkably affected introduced animal and vegetable life’.112 Music played an important role in fostering continuity with the ‘homeland’ and, eventually, in forging a distinctive national identity for the colony. In the exhibition, we see ‘Classical music’ imported primarily to serve the former purpose. The Begg’s display featured a number of the signifiers of canonicity that signalled musical antecedents, with descriptions of several of the manufacturers emphasizing their age: Collard and Collard is one of the ‘largest, and oldest’ establishments in England; Schiedmayer and Sohne are the ‘oldest manufacturers in Germany’.113 However, it is particularly in relation to composers and composition that such ideology of ancestry and canonicity, as well as the ultimate timelessness of the ‘imaginary museum of musical works’, was manifest. The memorializing of particular composers through busts and iconography is indicative of the canonization process.114 The bust of Liszt, ‘recently deceased’, has already been mentioned, and elsewhere in the display ‘busts of Beethoven and Haydn, the two great composers’ were positioned prominently, surmounting a case of instruments from Boosey and Co.115 Items bearing the imprint of the musician (and particularly the deceased and canonized composer) were also highly prized. The Begg’s display had the autographs of Berlioz and Joachim, the ‘original score of a symphony written and composed by Mendelssohn’, ‘and some other interesting manuscripts of past and present composers’, all donated by the local music teacher Annette Wilson.116 But perhaps most interesting, in terms of ‘facing the past backwards’, is the item mentioned in the account published in the Otago Daily Times and Otago Witness: ‘There is an autograph letter by Mendelssohn, written at London on the 26th November 1829—60 years to a day before the opening of this exhibition—and a manuscript, to which the letter relates, of a C minor symphony arranged for piano, violin, and violoncello.’117 The score-as-artefact joins with a relic of the composer who created it, and the fortuitous coincidence of the date connects the historic taonga to its spiritual descendants at the exhibition sixty years later. The fact that the score was by Mendelssohn, favourite composer of Queen Victoria and the staple of the British concert hall, is significant, suggesting how both the backwards glance of the canon and the backwards glance to Britain coalesced in New Zealand’s musical museum culture.118 The same message was reinforced in the concert hall, as we shall see in our last stop on the tour of the exhibition complex. in the concert hall After surveying the Begg’s display in the Otago and Southland courts, the visitor had only a short walk to the entrance to the Concert Hall. Positioned at the rear of the complex of buildings, for the musically inclined visitor the Concert Hall could be seen as the ultimate destination, in both senses of the word. (See Pl. 1 above.) The close proximity of the Dining Rooms and Art Galleries inside, and of the popular side shows and switchback railway just outside the Concert Hall, was characteristic of exhibition buildings, signalling the status of musical performance as both entertainment and art. Indeed, the Concert Hall was where the museum culture of Western music was negotiated in the most conspicuous terms. The opening ceremony in particular showed New Zealand ‘walking backwards into the future’: deference to British and Commonwealth traditions of previous exhibitions combined with signals that New Zealand was now able to perform on the international stage. The music of the opening ceremony reinforced the official image of the country as a British colony capable of participating in the Empire’s definitions of progress. All accounts of the opening ceremony make reference to the size and spectacle of the choir of 340 singers (almost all local) and to the orchestra of approximately forty-five players, including thirty professional musicians, some of whom had come from Australia and Madrid, and who were led by the Italian-born Raffaello Squarise.119 The music performed for the opening was fully in keeping with opening ceremonies at other exhibitions in the British Empire, which Hoffenberg suggests ‘framed the sense of place, social roles, economic structure, and political authority of the empire in terms of a traditionalist commonwealth centered by the Crown’.120 Brass bands accompanied the processions to the entrance of the exhibition buildings, and once inside, ceremonies began with the National Anthem, accompanying the arrival of Queen Victoria’s representative, Governor William Jervois. A prayer was then read by the Exhibition President, and two responses were chanted by the choir, followed by the Hundredth Psalm.121 The religious tone (common in opening ceremonies) was maintained in the musical work that followed: a ‘Song of Thanksgiving’ by Frederick Cowen, which had been performed at the recent Melbourne Centennial Exhibition (1888). Cowen’s text, taken from Psalms 107, 147, 35, 127, and 79, gives thanks to the Lord for enabling man to transform the wilderness into prosperous cities with bountiful vineyards and wheat crops—in New Zealand, as in Australia, the settlers thus framed their transformation of the land in terms of progress towards a civilization that had God’s blessing. The cantata for the opening of the 1879 Sydney exhibition had made passing reference to indigenous Australians by way of justifying their forcible suppression: Upon the hills that blaze to-day With splendid dome and spire, The naked hunter tracked his prey, And slumbered by his fire. … The life and heat of light have chased away Australia’s dark mysterious yesterday. A great, glad, glory now flows down and shines, On gold green lands where waved funereal pines.122 In Melbourne the next year, however, the exhibition cantata made no reference to indigenous Australians, constantly reiterating the idea that the land was ‘silent’ before the arrival of Europeans.123 Cowen’s cantata for Melbourne’s 1888 exhibition similarly does not acknowledge the presence of indigenous peoples, leaving no scope for acknowledging Māori when it formed part of the music of the opening of the New Zealand Exhibition the following year. At the closing ceremony as well, the music signalled New Zealand’s deference to Britain. As the awards granted to various nations were announced, ‘appropriate selections’ of music were performed, including ‘Rule Britannia’ for awards given to British exhibits and the ‘Marseillaise’ for awards granted to France. For New Zealand, it was Frederick Leech’s ‘Hail! Zealandia’ that was performed.124 Title page, words, and music all emphasize the position of the colonial subject in relation to the Empire. Captain James Cook, celebrated by the British settlers as the most significant figure in the ‘discovery’ of New Zealand (following his landing in 1769, and two subsequent voyages), is literally placed upon a pedestal and further monumentalized by the protective shield drawn around him (see Pl. 4). By contrast, local culture is represented by native trees rather than indigenous inhabitants. Pl. 4 View largeDownload slide Cover of ‘All Hail Zealandia: solo and chorus’, music by Frederick Leech, words by Francis H. Valpy. Music qSON 1800s. Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, N.Z. Pl. 4 View largeDownload slide Cover of ‘All Hail Zealandia: solo and chorus’, music by Frederick Leech, words by Francis H. Valpy. Music qSON 1800s. Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, N.Z. Similarly, the British national anthem (the first phrase of which is given at the end of Leech’s score) shapes Leech’s composition: the triple-time hymn-like nature of ‘God Save the Queen’ is retained, with explicit melodic reference making the connection still clearer. The bracketed passage marked ‘x’ in Ex. 1 appears in both the first phrase of the British anthem (the final six bars), and Leech’s anthem, suggesting that ‘Hail! Zealandia’ is one of the Empire’s ‘sons in song [which] shall the refrain prolong’, as the text states. Moreover, the lyrics emphasize that New Zealand, though in its ‘infancy’, is rearing a ‘stalwart race’ who will extend ‘empire’ through their ‘toil’ on the ‘virgin land’, and cries of ‘ All hail Zealandia!’ drown out the ‘cannon’s roar’. Ex. 1 View largeDownload slide Piano reduction of Frederick Leech’s ‘All hail Zealandia’ Ex. 1 View largeDownload slide Piano reduction of Frederick Leech’s ‘All hail Zealandia’ The suppression of the cannon’s roar, and the notion that the land was ‘virgin’ (which either treats Māori as themselves part of the land to be conquered by Europeans, or erases their presence on the land altogether) are representative of the ways in which Māori voices and the extensive conflict between Pākehā and Māori in the Land Wars were largely silenced within formalities in the Concert Hall. Between the opening and closing ceremonies, during the five months of the exhibition, the Concert Hall was used for concerts on an almost daily basis. Here Māori were still more comprehensively silenced. Instead, the negotiation of museum culture was between ‘Classical’ and popular repertory, and touched at the very core of the concept of the ‘imaginary museum’. As Twopeny reported, after consultation with various members of the Music and Entertainments Committee: ‘If there is one thing in the Melbourne Exhibition by which we should endeavour to take warning it is the mistake made by the commissioners in sacrificing the general liveliness of the exhibition to the requirements of the concert room.’125 The statement is almost the complete reverse of Twopeny’s conception for the Māori exhibit: where Māori performance would transform a ‘dumb collection of objects’ into living tradition, performance of ‘Classical’ music is seen as sacrificing ‘liveliness’ for the museum-like requirements of the concert hall. ‘Living’ music was to be found elsewhere, Twopeny seems to imply. The Oamaru Mail reported the Committee’s plans: There is not a class of music lovers in the colony that have not been adequately provided for; and it is therefore patent that the musical affairs at the Dunedin Exhibition are not going to be marred by that classical exclusiveness which created so much dissatisfaction in connection with the Melbourne Centennial. The only really highly classical performances will be those that are to be given at intervals in the afternoon, and even they, we are bound to say, will be such as to delight numbers of persons who have not the smallest suspicion that they have a liking for high-class music. It is the name that scares them. We are all rapidly acquiring a musical taste, which, whilst it will never cause us to turn our backs on the dearly loved songs of our native land, will yet enable us to find quite a new delight in more elaborate compositions.126 Similarly, the Nelson Evening Mail reported: ‘Every care will be taken to keep the music popular, but the severely classical, for those who enjoy this kind of music, will not be forgotten, as a series of afternoon piano recitals, with quartettes, trios, etc., by leading members of the orchestra, will be given.’127 Classical music was thus characterized as ‘exclusive’, ‘elaborate’, ‘severe’, and even scary (by name/reputation, if not in reality), and as the antithesis of the music that is ‘dearly loved’; the ‘requirements of the concert hall’ are juxtaposed against ‘general liveliness’, as if the performance of ‘Classical’ repertory enacted the stillness of the tomb, as well as the historicity of the museum. Juxtapositions and conflicts between Classical and popular repertories continued when the exhibition was up and running. Complaints were sometimes made about the preponderance of ‘operatic arrangements, waltzes, polkas, and the lighter kind of overtures’, with one reviewer concluding: ‘dear me, at many a French or German restaurant you can dine to the same sort of thing’.128 However, at a designated ‘Classical’ concert, the same reviewer, after complaining about a ‘gloomy ditty’ by a ‘German composer’, with ‘three bars of melody and only one high note’, as well as other music lacking in melody or cheer, surmised: ‘This Saturday concert, supposed to be purely classical, was doubtless intended to demonstrate that the public don’t like classical music.’129 Indeed, the series of specifically ‘Classical’ concerts presented by members of the orchestra on a weekly basis was soon cancelled for lack of audience interest. On the other hand, complaints were also made that the orchestral music ‘did not include a sufficient number of classical selections’.130 Moreover, the standards of the ‘imaginary museum’ were increasingly being applied to the orchestral performances. Thus one visitor complained that the Dunedin audiences would ‘blunder in and out, changing their seats and holding audible conversations with one another at the very moment when there should be a dead silence’.131 The increasingly polarized separation of Classical and popular evidenced by the concerts of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition was obviously not new. William Weber has traced the impact of the distinction on the concert hall back to the mid-nineteenth century.132 Moreover, in Highbrow/Lowbrow Lawrence Levine has explored how the ideology developed in Europe was reconfigured in the ‘New World’, the categories of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ culture only gradually dividing audiences in the United States in the late nineteenth century.133 A distinctive feature of the New Zealand case, however, is the fact that this dialogue was being negotiated through an exhibition designed to commemorate New Zealand’s unique founding document: a treaty recognizing the rights of both Māori and Pākehā under British rule. New Zealand’s connectedness to Britain was certainly manifest in the exhibition music, with discussions of the music referring to ‘the singing in harmony of some of our old English, Irish, or Scottish melodies’,134 and the ‘massive choirs in the Old Country’ that were to be evoked.135 The British (and particularly Ossianic) folk idiom has been seen as another dichotomous element in the definition of the Germanocentric ‘Classical’ or ‘ Art’ tradition.136 New Zealand thus participated from the ‘margins’ in this European discourse: popular and folk idioms functioned as markers of community and connections to the (British) ‘home’, but at the same time ‘Classical’ music was seen as indicating the achievement of high culture. The New Zealand exhibition revealed a self-conscious attempt to foster a school of New Zealand art, with works exhibited in the Fine Arts Gallery and, indeed, in the Concert Hall itself, and debate by the judges as to which subject matter might be most appropriate (with complaints at the ‘monotony of so much mere landscape work’).137 The same mentality is not evident in relation to music. Compositions by New Zealand-based composers that were performed at the exhibition fell almost entirely within the ‘occasional’ or ‘entertainment’ category. Even the work that was awarded the prize for best composition was not assessed in musical-aesthetic terms.138 ‘South Seas Valse’, by Dunedin resident Walter Leslie, was premiered at the President’s Ball during the exhibition. However, journalistic reports make it clear that the Waltz was assessed as a printed text, rather than in terms of its musical content: ‘music well printed and frontispiece tastefully executed’,139 noted the summary of jurors’ awards printed in the Otago Witness, while another newspaper implied that the award was made to the Dresden Piano Company in Dunedin, who had published the score, as opposed to Leslie, the composer.140 The fact that compositions were judged as exhibits is itself significant, however, in emphasizing the ‘object status’ of musical works within the European tradition.141 Published ‘expressly in connection with the exhibition’ by the Dresden Piano Company,142 the score was described as ‘one of the most creditable productions of its class hitherto brought out in that city’, and with ‘lithographic and printing work … that … would do credit to a London office’.143 The cover itself combines aspects characteristic of the imagery exhibited by New Zealand artists at international exhibitions with aspects that we could imagine emanating from a faraway ‘London office’ (see Pl. 5). Typical of New Zealand self-representation during this period is the focus on natural imagery, with Māori inhabitants invisible, but implied, contained at sea at a safe distance (and framed by a potentially symbolic fallen tree). On the other hand, the nature of the boat depicted as well as the font suggests a ‘South Seas’ identity that is imagined or constructed from outside the country, perhaps by an artist inspired by the Japonisme that was fashionable in Britain at the time. If New Zealand was wrestling with the culture of the ‘imaginary museum’ of music, in terms of the literal museum component of the exhibition and its display of musical artefacts, then the silencing of Māori was thus accomplished. It was Pākehā who looked back to Māori, making them over in their own image to create a future for the new nation. Pl. 5 View largeDownload slide Cover of Walter Leslie, ‘South Seas Valse’ (Dunedin: Dresden Piano Company, 1889.) Music Box LES Sou 1889. Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, N.Z. Pl. 5 View largeDownload slide Cover of Walter Leslie, ‘South Seas Valse’ (Dunedin: Dresden Piano Company, 1889.) Music Box LES Sou 1889. Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, N.Z. beyond the exhibition Summarizing the exhibition after its closing ceremony, the Otago Witness called for the items of the ‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas Court’ to be displayed in a permanent ‘national collection’. The works displayed in the Art Gallery were similarly highlighted as worthy of preservation. Turning to music, the writer suggested: ‘The preservation of the concert hall, which in addition to having a large capacity is lofty and admirably lighted, has been strongly urged, but no movement with that object has yet taken definite shape.’144 If the taonga pūoro and other items in the Māori court, as well as the paintings of the Gallery, were being treated as museum collections in want of a permanent building, the concert hall was a building awaiting its canon. In the event, the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition itself embodied the paradox typical of its genre—an orgy of the object, it was also ephemeral, its buildings dismantled, its objects distributed far and wide after its closure in 1890. The Concert Hall was pulled down, an action symbolic of the fact that the canon of New Zealand ‘Classical’ music took further years to develop. In a context where musical museum culture is often derided and the very notion of ‘Classical’ music is under attack, we might be justified in historicizing and deconstructing museum ideology, interrogating the importation and imposition of such a culture through the ‘conquest by ideas’ that Lilburn condemns.145 As we have seen, the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition contributed to that ‘conquest by ideas’ through its ideology of the museum, and the attendant narratives of progress, on the one hand, and preservation on the other—both of which were at times antithetical to Māori approaches to ‘walking backwards into the future’. However, rather than reject the museum metaphor or confine it to musical history, may we not reimagine it? A powerful paradigm for such a reimagining is to be found in the ‘afterlife’ of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition. This final section traces briefly how the flute Murirangaranga walked backwards into its future today. Calls for the exhibition’s collection of ‘Early History’ and Māori items to form the basis of a permanent national collection were not answered. However, after the exhibition closed in April 1890, Gilbert Mair donated his own collection, including Murirangaranga, to the Auckland Museum, where it remained for more than a century. Removed from its whakapapa in the central North Island, encased in glass, Murirangaranga thus continued to be framed as an exhibit for Pākehā eyes. As Tapsell writes of Mair’s collection: Since 1890 they [the taonga of Mair’s collection] had been isolated from their ancestral trajectories; intentionally separated from ancestral accountabilities and obligations of indebtedness many still carried. The nineteenth-century gift-intent underpinning his key taonga has remained obscured for over 100 years. Instead, they had been ideologically recast from one curatorial scene to the next as curious, native, primitive, art-like muted actors in a colonial theatre (i.e. exhibition) about the ‘Other’.146 However, the late twentieth century saw a so-called ‘Māori renaissance’, which reshaped the way Murirangaranga would be positioned. Government acknowledgement of the status of Māori was evidenced by the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, to investigate violations of the Treaty of 1840 (extended, in 1985, to historic violations). Te Reo Māori (Māori language), which had been in steep decline as the Māori population became increasingly urbanized, was actively encouraged in schools and recognized as an official language of New Zealand through the Māori Language Act of 1987. Both Pākehā and Māori were responsible for moving Murirangaranga out of its glass cabinet, responding and contributing to the ‘Māori Renaissance’ in two ways. The first was the taonga pūoro revival. Through playing on and recreating the instruments that survived in museums, and taking their music to Māori elders, Richard Nunns (instrumentalist), Brian Flintoff (instrument maker), and Hirini Melbourne (singer and composer) were able to reimagine taonga pūoro. This reimagining involved both history (new knowledge, derived from the experience of playing and crafting the instruments themselves, about how they may have functioned for Māori ancestors) and the musical spectrum of contemporary New Zealand: taonga pūoro performers have collaborated with string quartets and orchestras, jazz musicians, and electroacoustic artists, and the instruments are found in film scores, radio jingles, and sporting opening ceremonies. Indeed, taonga pūoro are today heard in exhibitions designed to signify a modern New Zealand identity that references concepts of Māori tradition. In other words, performance on instruments such as Murirangaranga today seeks to blend the sounds and ideologies that the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition had kept separate or silenced altogether.147 Similarly, Matiaha Tiramōrehu’s account of the role of music in Māori creation, appropriated by John White (who similarly displayed taonga pūoro in Dunedin without acknowledging their sources), and echoed in the Begg’s piano display, has been cited—now with attribution to Matiaha Tiramōrehu—by Flintoff in his study of taonga pūoro.148 Pākehā Flintoff and Nunns thereby look to Māori voices of the past and present as they seek to ‘walk backwards into the future’.149 While the taonga pūoro revival moved beyond the museum, the other significant development of the late twentieth century has been the rethinking of museum practice itself. The development of ‘new museology’ signalled increasing critical awareness of museum practice and the role of museums in constructing the objects contained within, with obligations both to the cultures in which the objects originated, and to the visitors who experienced them.150 Moreover, the ‘material turn’ encouraged new thinking about the ontology of museum artefacts. Nicholas Thomas suggests that ‘objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become’.151 Thomas also points to the ongoing ‘entanglement’ of museum objects with the cultures of colonization that had so long framed their exhibition: ‘since exhibitions or museums of history are no less prominent now than in the epoch of the world’s fairs, that is a sort of entanglement that most of us cannot step aside’.152 Building on Thomas’s argument, Kevin Dawe has gone so far as to suggest that ‘musical instruments become so entangled with museum culture and colonization by the “host” that their meaning and exchange value are useful, and function only in relation to, the concepts that make up museum culture’.153 However, without denying that such a history has become part of their kōrero (discourse), more recently museum objects have also been newly appreciated as bearing significance to living peoples, as summarized by Billie Lytheberg, Maia Nuku, and Amiria Salmond in a volume co-authored with Nicholas Thomas: Instead of taking museum pieces as fragments of a world long past, to be painstakingly reassembled in order to grasp the whole, it has been more common to see people acknowledging these objects as actual or potential taonga (in the Māori term)—that is, as vectors of still-active ancestral agency, even as living ancestors.154 Specifically with reference to musical instruments, Lytheberg, Nuku, and Salmond signal how they may exercise this ‘still-active ancestral agency’: ‘musical instrument makers and players work out the relationship of void and shaping to tone, pitch and vibration by breathing hau—the breath of life—through carved-out, bound-together casings’.155 The use of the Māori term taonga is significant. Lytheberg (descended from the Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī iwi) and Nuku (Ngai Tai) offer recent examples in a long history of how Māori have participated in the reimagining of museum practice.156 A key event in the Māori Renaissance, and in the contribution of Māori to a reimagining of museum practice, was the Te Māori exhibition of 1984–7. Items from New Zealand museum collections were assembled in full consultation with Māori. As McCarthy suggests, objects once displayed as the artefacts or ‘primitive art’ of colonization were now displayed as ‘ Art’ and emblems of decolonization.157 Moreover, ‘two distinct categories in the culture of display—art and taonga—became intertwined’.158Taonga were conceived as bearing ‘immanent power’, able to ‘mediate between the two worlds’ of the living and the dead, rather than being ‘inanimate art objects’.159 The accompanying volume of essays was self-consciously bilingual and bicultural. As Sidney Moko Mead expresses it: ‘What we wanted might be described as “bicultural scholarship” which aimed at bringing forward, from the body of knowledge we have referred to as matauranga Māori (Māori education), facts that help give a bicultural view to the art.’160 Similarly, Piri Sciascia stated: ‘Today, Maori people aspire to be bicultural. We have felt the demand to value, to maintain, and to live according to our Maori heritage. We share in a Pakeha heritage as well.’161 Biculturalism and acknowledgement of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) was subsequently at the core of the establishment of the new national museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, in 1992.162 It remains central to their mission. The museum began to employ a high number of Māori staff, and made changes to their storage and exhibiting practices in response to tikanga Māori (Māori protocol). Rather than ethnological exhibits, items were now understood as taonga, and as ancestors: where possible, they were grouped by iwi, they were classified according to Māori frameworks, and Māori ritual practices were (and continue to be) observed by those who interacted with taonga.163 Murirangaranga is not part of Te Papa’s collection, and its recent life reflects a rather different approach to museum practice. In 1993 the flute was moved from Auckland Museum to Rotorua Museum on long-term loan, to be closer to its ancestral region.164 In 1994 Tapsell (himself descended from the Ngāti Whakaue iwi of Te Arawa, and at that time a curator at Auckland Museum) then took Murirangaranga back to Mokoia Island, telling the story of the flute to its descendants: The emotion was overwhelming as the taonga were taken into the arms of their descendants after a century or more of separation. The kuia, who only minutes earlier were cheerfully conversing in the van, were now consumed with grief as they rejoined with their Arawa counterparts to remember the dead who had once been associated with the taonga before them. The Auckland Museum conservators could only look on as the mucus and tears flowed.165 At the conclusion of the visit, Tapsell felt reluctance to force Murirangaranga back into the museum: ‘Murirangaranga’s home was Mokoia and we could feel in our hearts his pain of having to leave once again… . It was a sad moment as Murirangaranga returned to his case to keep Tohi te Ururangi’s wahaika company. For a brief twelve hours he had become more than a museum curiosity, passively interacting with strangers.’166 In 2005–8 Murirangaranga was part of the Ko Tawa exhibition, led by Tapsell and his team of Māori curators and researchers. Taking its name from the name (Tawa) by which Gilbert Mair was known to the people of Te Arawa, Ko Tawa comprised a selection of the taonga Mair had gifted to Auckland Museum, and was created in collaboration with that museum. The exhibition was distinctive in several respects. As Tapsell writes, Ko Tawa represented a deliberate move from Te Papa’s ‘government-led ideology of bicultural (pan-Māori/Pākehā: two peoples, one nation) displays’ to a perspective that understood taonga as located in ‘marae-community perspectives’.167 Where Te Māori had toured New Zealand, after first exhibiting in the United States, Ko Tawa was from the outset created in collaboration with the marae (meeting grounds) of the communities where the objects had originated. Moreover, Ko Tawa sought to disrupt the ‘objectified gaze’ museums had formerly directed towards indigenous peoples.168 The result was a distinctive reimagining of museum practice: [W]e agreed that as the taonga were our ancestral grandparents it would be rude to push them against the wall and objectify them as static beings suffocated within glass cabinets. Should not we, the living, be subordinate to our great ancestors and provide them with the opportunity to gaze down on us, reflecting their relative genealogical superiority, but all the while sharing each other’s breath?169 During the same period, on the other side of the world, the Pasifika Styles exhibit opened in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. Fifteen New Zealand artists interacted with the taonga of the museum, which has one of the most extensive collections of items accrued during James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific, ‘fomenting a process of engagement between contemporary practitioners and historic artefacts’, with ‘distinctive significance in the space between art and museology’.170 As the curatorial assistant Fanny Wonnu Veys relates, artists ‘experiencing’ taonga in the museum often greeted objects such as ornaments, fish hooks, and weapons ‘with dance, songs and personal address’, and at the opening ceremony one of the pūkāea (wooden trumpets) acquired in the nineteenth century was ‘brought to life’ by the musician Jermone Kavanagh. Veys suggests: ‘For the artists, this performativity established an intimacy with the objects’ former owners, and also, in a way, with the museum as a safe-guarding institution.’171 ‘Instrument museums are mausoleums, places for the display of the musically dead, with organologists acting as morticians, preparing dead instrument bodies for preservation and display’, suggests Eliot Bates, before arguing for the ‘agency’ and ‘social life of musical instruments’ beyond the museum’s walls.172 The New Zealand historian Anne Salmond (whose work typically embraces bicultural perspectives) concludes her essay for the Te Maori volume with a quotation from Heidegger that similarly suggests that the very act of being placed in a museum—or exhibition—carries with it a process of loss of identity for the object: However high their quality and power of impression, however good their stage of preservation, however certain their interpretation, placing [works] in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world… . The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is them themselves, to be sure, that we encounter there, but they themselves are gone by.173 The ‘works’ in Heidegger’s paradigm could just as easily be the musical works of the imaginary museum. Indeed, the museum metaphor is often applied to music in the Western art tradition as a criticism, chiming with the mortuary imagery that has plagued the discourse of this music in recent years: ‘ As soon as we place these works in a museum, we wrench them out of their own frame and utterly transform their meaning’, suggests Robert Morgan, while Roger Scruton complains of works arranged ‘behind the glass of authenticity’.174 However, as Lawrence Kramer suggests, this negative application of the museum to music is misguided: ‘It gives too little credit to museums.’175 Kramer concludes that Classical Music is ‘a living museum, living precisely because it is a kind of museum’.176 Exhibitions like Ko Tawa and Pasifika Styles provide a vivid demonstration of how museums might shed the baggage of the ‘mausoleum’ and ‘musically dead’, and instead embrace the ancestry of taonga as a living presence—indeed, how museums might ‘walk backwards into the future’. The Exhibition of 1889 has become part of the history and kōrero embedded in objects such as Murirangaranga. Understanding the ‘conquest by ideas’ enacted by the exhibition is essential to hearing the voice of taonga like Murirangaranga today. However, in key respects the exhibition’s narrative has been inverted. No longer offering a deferential backwards glance to Britain and Europe, New Zealand has instead looked to the Treaty commemorated by the Dunedin exhibition to explore how Māori and Pākehā musical cultures might meaningfully inform each other in a national identity defined from within. If Pākehā music now interacts with taonga pūoro, may the culture of the British and European ‘imaginary museum of musical works’ also interact with the recent reconceptualization by Māori of museum practice and create new dialogue between history and the present that recognizes musical works as living taonga? Only by ‘walking backwards into the future’ will we find out. This article is derived from a paper presented at the New Zealand Musicological Society Conference ‘Searches for Tradition’ in Nov. 2015, Victoria University of Wellington. Numerous librarians and archivists facilitated this research. I owe particular thanks to Emma Knowles (Toitū Otago Settlers Museum), David Murray (Hocken Library), Manaaki Pena of Rotorua Museum, and Sue Hirst (J. C. Beaglehole Room, Victoria University), as well as my research assistants Lynne Wenden and Corrina Connor. Brian Flintoff and Peter Walls supplied helpful responses to my queries, and Brian Diettrich offered invaluable suggestions on an early draft. I am also very grateful to three anonymous readers as well as Stephen Downes and Bonnie Blackburn for their insightful comments. The first epigraph comes from Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. The second epigraph was transcribed by John White in Ancient History of the Maori, trans. Hirini Melbourne in Brian Flintoff, Taonga Pūoro: Singing Treasures. The Musical Instruments of the Māori (Nelson, 2014), 12. Footnotes 1 Speech by John Roberts, President of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, at the opening ceremony. D. Harris Hastings (comp.), Official Record of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition Held at Dunedin, 1889–90 (Wellington, 1891), 23. 2 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders (Auckland, 1996), 194–6. 3 See James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland, 1986). 4Official Record, 25. It is now standard practice to write ‘Māori’ with a macron. However, I have preserved original spellings for quotations and titles (‘Early History, Maori, and South Seas Court’). 5 Ibid. 26. 6 Ibid. 21. 7 Ibid. 344. 8 David Murray, ‘Fitchett’s Fallacy and Music at the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, Dunedin, 1889–1890’, New Zealand Journal of History, 42 (2008), 42–59 at 44. 9 Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori: A History of Colonial Cultures on Display (Oxford, 2007), 39–40. 10 Douglas Lilburn, ‘ A Search for Tradition’ (1946), in A Search for Tradition; and A Search for a Language (Wellington, 2011), 29. 11 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1994). 12 Conal McCarthy, Museum and Māori: Heritage Professionals, Indigenous Collections, Current Practice (Wellington, 2001), 230–2. For a glossary of Māori terms, see the Appendix to this article. 13 Sue Carole DeVale, ‘Organizing Organology’, in DeVale (ed.), Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, 8: ‘Issues in Organology’ (1990), 1–34; Jan Pasler, ‘The Utility of Musical Instruments in the Racial and Colonial Agendas of Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129 (2004), 24–76; Joël-Marie Fauquet and Florence Gétreau, ‘Nouveau status de l’instrument de musique en France au XIXe siècle dans les expositions nationales et universelles’, in Robert Illiano and Luca Sala (eds.), Instrumental Music and the Industrial Revolution (Bologna, 2010), 361–89; David Dunstan and Mimi Colligan, ‘ A Musical Opening’, in Dunstan (ed.) Victorian Icon: The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne (Melbourne, 1996), 108–14; John Mansfield Thomson, ‘“A triumph for instrumental music of the highest type”: From the Orchestra to the Besses O’ Th ’Barn Band’, in Farewell Colonialism: The New Zealand International Exhibition Christchurch, 1906–7 (Palmerston North, 1998), 79–94; Jennifer Royle, ‘“Turning the wilderness into flowers”: Music as Triumph at Australia’s International Exhibitions, 1879–1888’, Context, 22 (2001), 51–60; Murray, ‘Fitchett’s Fallacy’. 14 Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, NY, 2005). 15 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London, 1995), 39. 16 Ibid. 81–2. 17Official Record, 24. 18 Ibid. 10. 19 Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, 2001), 224. 20 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 36. 21 Ibid. 33. 22 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders. From the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Honolulu, 2001), 11; McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 39. 23Official Record, 223. 24 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 39–40. 25 Sidney Moko Mead, ‘Ka tupu te toi whakairo ki Aotearoa: Becoming Maori Art’, in idem (ed.), Te Maori: Maori Art from New Zealand Collections (Auckland, 1984), 63–75, at 64. See also Judith Binney, ‘Maori Oral Narratives, Pākehā Written Texts: Two Forms of Telling History’, New Zealand Journal of History, 38 (2004), 203–14 at 203–4. 26 Mead, ‘Becoming Maori Art’, 64. 27 Ibid. 64. On the significance of the shifting definitions of taonga, see McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 26–30 and 176–7. 28 A piling up of objects was typical of museums and exhibition displays in general during this period—in part as an expression of ‘bourgeois acquisitiveness’ (McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 18). It was the lack of nuanced classification—the fact that non-Western instruments were sometimes displayed solely as indicators of ethnicity—that was problematic for visitors like Adrien de La Fage, who complained in 1855 that the Paris Exposition Universelle of that year clumped together Indian instruments with baskets, knives, and fruit as well as instruments that were not Indian at all. Adrien de La Fage, Quinze visites musicales à l’exposition universelle de 1855 (Paris, 1857), 22. 29 Pasler, ‘The Utility of Musical Instruments’, 39; also 26–7. 30Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879 (Sydney, 1881), 364. 31 Rebecca Rice, ‘Picturing Progress in Paradise: New Zealand on Display at International Exhibitions, 1873–1886’ (MA diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2003), 47. 32 The term taonga pūoro is of relatively recent origin, combining taonga (treasure, possession, or prized object) with pūoro (music). 33 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. 34 William Weber, ‘Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770–1870’, International Journal of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 8 (1977), 5–21. See also Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford History of Western Music, 3; New York and Oxford, 2010), 682–3, which outlines the situation whereby Brahms, the first living composer to succeed in entering the symphonic canon of the future, did so by ‘walking backwards’ and engaging with his musical ancestry. 35 Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 205. Goehr’s translation suggests Liszt called for a ‘musical museum’, but the original text of Liszt’s essay refers to ‘un nouveau Musée’. See Franz Liszt, ‘De la situation des artistes’ (1835), in Jean Chantavoine (ed.), Pages romantiques (Paris, 1912), 72. 36 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 61. 37 Fauser, Musical Encounters, 12–18. 38 Goehr, Imaginary Museum, 248–9. Goehr’s examples in her concluding chapter primarily concern various European and American musics, and she could be accused of failing to pay sufficient attention to the racial dimension of ontologies of Western art music that position it as absolute and transcendent. See Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano, ‘Introduction: Music and Race, their Past, their Presence’, in Bohlman and Radano (eds.), Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, 2000), 1–45. 39 Kevin Dawe, ‘The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments’, in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (New York, 2003), 274–83; Eliot Bates, ‘The Social Life of Musical Instruments’, Ethnomusicology, 56 (2012), 363–95; Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 40 Paul Tapsell, ‘Ko Tawa: Where are the Glass Cabinets?’, in Raymond Silverman (ed.), Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges (Abingdon, 2015), 262–78; Bradford Haami, Pūtea Whakairo: Maori and the Written Word (Wellington, 2004), 16–17; See also Sidney Moko Mead, ‘Nga timunga me nga paringa o te mana Maori: The Ebb and Flow of Mana Maori and the Changing Context of Maori Art’, in Mead (ed.), Te Maori, 20–36 at 21: ‘ A lump of wood of little or no great significance is thus transformed through the art process, by building words (korero) into it and by contact with people, into a thing Maoris class as a taonga, or in full, he taonga tuku iho.’ It is also worth noting that taonga can incorporate sacred things that are not tangible objects, including waiata (or song). 41Evening Star 8074 (26 Nov. 1889), Supplement, 3. 42 Entry for 6 Mar. 1889, Minute book of the Early History, Maori, and South Seas Committee, New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, University of Otago Hocken Collections, ARC0131 MS-0101. 43Official Record, 216–17, 220, 223. 44 Ibid. 220. 45Evening Star 8074 (26 Nov. 1889), Supplement, 3. 46 Richard Twopeny, Executive Commissioner’s Report, published in Evening Star 7821 (29 Jan. 1889), 2; Otago Daily Times 8404 (30 Jan. 1889), 4; and Te Aroha News 6/339 (2 Feb. 1889), 3. 47 Entries for 6 and 19 Aug. 1889, Minute book of the Early History, Maori, and South Seas Committee, ARC0131, MS-0101 48 D. Harris Hastings to Thomas Hocken, 8 Aug. 1889 and Hastings to Henry Mackenzie (acting chairman of the Music Committee), 14 Sept. 1889, Letter Book of the Early History, Maori, and South Seas Committee, University of Otago Hocken Collections, ARC-0131, MS-0339, 182 and 483; Entry of 5 Apr. 1889, Minute book of the Director of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, University of Otago Hocken Collections, ARC-0131, MS-0335. 49 Thomas Hocken to W. Giles, 3 Aug. 1889, Letter book of the Early History, Maori, and South Seas Committee, University of Otago Hocken Collections, ARC-0131, MS-0102, 116. 50 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 42. 51 At the Colonial and India Exhibition (1886), Lindauer had in fact complained that his paintings were exhibited in the ethnographically centred Maori Court rather than in the gallery of Albert Hall: Rice, ‘Picturing Paradise’, 74. 52 Quoted by Rebecca Rice, ‘Gottfried Lindauer’s “big OE”’, http://arts.tepapa.govt.nz/off-the-wall/8970/gottfried-lindauer-s-big-oe, accessed 27 Mar. 2017. 53 Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, Charles Forsdick (eds.), Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires (Liverpool, 2008); Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep (eds.), The Invention of the Savage: Human Zoo (Paris, 2011). 54 Bernard Kernot, ‘Maoriland Metaphors and the Model Pa’, in Thomson (ed.), Farewell Colonialism, 61–78, at 76–7. 55 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 46. 56 Mead, ‘Becoming Maori Art’, 64. 57 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 35. 58 Conal McCarthy, ‘Dunedin 1865’ and ‘Dunedin 1889–1890’, in John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle (eds.), Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions (Jefferson, NC, 2008), 35, 109. 59 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 38. 60Official Record, 235. 61 Ibid. 233. 62 Frederick Revans Chapman, ‘Notes on Moa Remains in the MacKenzie Country and other Localities’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 17 (1884), 172–8 at 173. 63 Rice, ‘Picturing Progress’, 29; Ewan Johnston, ‘Maori, Moa and Progress: Representing New Zealand at International Exhibitions’, in ‘Representing the Pacific at International Exhibitions’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Auckland, 1999), 207–54. 64Official Record, 234. 65 Matiaha Tiramōrehu, transcribed by John White in Ancient History of the Maori, i, trans. Hirini Melbourne; Flintoff, Taonga Pūoro, 12. 66 Kendrick Smithyman, ‘Making History: John White and Percy S. Smith at Work’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 88 (1979), 375–413; Arini May Loader, ‘Tau mai e kapiti te whare wananga o ia, o te nui, o te wehi, o te toa: Reclaiming early Raukawa-Toaranagira writing from Otaki’ (Ph.D. diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2013). 67 Matiaha Tiramōrehu, Te Waiata o te Atua, ed. Manu van Ballekom and Ray Harlow (Christchurch, 1987), vi. 68 Augustus Hamilton, The Art and Workmanship of the Maori Race in New Zealand (Dunedin, 1896–1900). 69 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 47. 70 Paula Savage, ‘Mair, Gilbert’, from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1m4/mair-gilbert, accessed 27 Mar. 2017. 71 Tapsell, ‘Ko Tawa: Where are the Glass Cabinets?’ 266. 72Official Record, 235. 73 Paul Tapsell, Ko Tawa: Maori Treasures of New Zealand (Auckland, 2006), 50. 74Official Record, 235. 75Otago Daily Times 8673 (10 Dec. 1889), 5 (Supplement). 76 Some variants suggest that Tutānekai himself was not an accomplished player, and it was actually the performances of his friend Tiki that seduced Hinemoa. In Grey’s account, Tutānekai plays a ‘trumpet’, and it is Tiki who plays the flute. There is also the suggestion that the relationship between Tutānekai and Tiki was an intimate one. 77 Tapsell, Ko Tawa: Maori Treasures of New Zealand, 108. 78 J. O. C. Phillips, ‘Musings in “Maoriland”—or Was there a Bulletin School in New Zealand?’, Historical Studies, 20 (1983), 520–35; Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914 (Wellington, 2014), 10–22. On Alfred Hill’s interaction with ‘Maoriland’, see Melissa Cross, ‘The Forgotten Soundtrack of Maoriland: Imagining the Nation through Alfred Hill’s Songs for Rewi’s Last Stand’ (MMus diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2015). 79 Flintoff, Taonga Pūoro, 16. 80 Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, ‘Objects and Materials: An Introduction’, in Eleanor Conlin Casella, Gillian Evans, Hannah Knox, Christine McLean, Elizabeth B. Silva, Nicholas Thoburn, and Kath Woodward (eds.), Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion (London, 2004), 1–8; Bates, ‘The Social Life of Musical Instruments’, 363–95. 81 Flintoff, Taonga Pūoro, 14. 82 On the significance of words to Polynesian instrumental performance, see Jane Moulin, ‘Kaputuhe: Exploring Word-Based Performance on Marquesan Musical Instruments’, Galpin Society Journal, 55 (2002), 130–60. 83 Recounted in Mervyn McLean, Maori Music (Auckland, 1996), 187. 84 James Cowan, The Maori: Yesterday and Today (Christchurch, 1930), 96–7. Mervyn McLean disputes whether flutes were commonly nose blown. (McLean, Maori Music, 186.) 85 Andersen, Maori Music with its Polynesian Background (1934) (repr. Christchurch, 2002), 234. 86 John Savage, Some Account of New Zealand … (1807), quoted in Andersen, Maori Music, 66. 87 Flintoff, Taonga Pūoro, 17. 88 Ibid. 17. 89West Coast Times 7577 (20 Dec. 1889), 4. 90 Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge, 1983), 19–33. 91 As Clare Gleeson explains, the company was known by a number of variants on the name of its founder, Charles Begg, but since 1906 has been commonly referred to as ‘Begg’s’. Clare Gleeson, Meet Me at Begg’s: The Story of Charles Begg & Co, Music and Appliance Manufacturers and Retailers, 1861–1970 (Wellington, 2012), 9. 92Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Gleeson, Meet Me at Begg’s, 29. 96 Vicomte de Pontécoulant, ‘Exposition des produits de l’industrie’, in La France musicale (1839, various issues), summarized by Fauquet and Gétreau, ‘Nouveau status de l’instrument de musique’, 365–6. 97Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. 98 Gleeson, Meet Me at Begg’s, 41–2. 99 Ibid. 42. 100 ‘Charles Begg & Co, Circular’, reproduced ibid. 43. 101The Southland Times 11457 (16 May 1890), 2. 102 Kirstine Moffatt, Pianoforte: Stories and Soundscapes from Colonial New Zealand (Dunedin, 2011), 37–62. 103Evening Star 8112 (11 Jan. 1890), 2 (Supplement). 104Evening Star 8097 (23 Dec. 1889), 2. References to specific recitals can be found in Otago Daily Times 8700 (13 Jan. 1890), 2 (zither recital) and Evening Star 8134 (6 Feb. 1890), 2 (cornet recital); 105New Zealand Tablet 17/40 (24 Jan. 1890), 3. 106Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. Details of the concert appear in Evening Star 8095 (20 Dec. 1889), 4. 107 Gleeson, Meet Me at Begg’s, 51. 108Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. 109Evening Star 8112 (11 Jan. 1890), 2 (Supplement). 110 Quoted by Gleeson, Meet Me at Begg’s, 29. 111Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. 112Official Record, 163. The racial profiling that such ‘scientific’ experiments often incorporated appears to have been absent from the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition: no comparison between settlers and Māori is suggested. 113Otago Daily Times 8691 (1 Jan. 1890), 2 (Supplement); the same text was also published in Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. 114 Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York and Oxford, 2009), 31–2. 115Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. 116Otago Daily Times 8641 (2 Nov. 1889), 4. 117Otago Daily Times 8691 (1 Jan. 1890), 2 (Supplement); the same text was also published in Otago Witness 1980 (23 Jan. 1890), 20. The score of the arrangement of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor Op. 11 and the accompanying letter (to the publisher John Baptist Cramer) are now held in the Whittall Collection of the Library of Congress. 118 Mendelssohn’s music was also popular in the United States during this period: Steven Baur, ‘Music, Morals, and Social Management: Mendelssohn in Post-Civil War America’, American Music, 19 (2001), 64–130. 119 On Squarise see David Murray, ‘Raffaello Squarise (1856–1945): The Colonial Career of an Italian Maestro’ (D.Phil. diss., University of Otago, 2005). On the orchestra of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, see also Inge van Rij, ‘Votes and Notes: Exhibiting and Contesting Gender in the Orchestra of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition (1889–90)’, Women and Music, 21 (2017), 3–42. 120 Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 263. 121Official Record, 21–2. 122 Paolo Giorza, words by Henry Kendall, Cantata (Sydney, 1879). 123 Leon Caron, words by J. W. Meaden, Victoria: Cantata (London, 1880). 124Otago Daily Times 8747 (21 Apr. 1890), 1 (Supplement). 125Otago Daily Times 8425 (23 Feb. 1889), 2. 126Oamaru Mail 14/4387 (5 June 1889), 2. In fact, despite some initial protests that the music of the 1888 Melbourne exhibition failed sufficiently to cater for ‘low-brow’ tastes, the musical director Frederic Cowen was generally praised for ‘elevating public taste’. See Mimi Colligan, ‘More Musical Entertainments’, in David Dunstan (ed.), Victorian Icon: The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne (Melbourne, 1996), 217–18; Thérèse Radic, ‘Some Historical Aspects of Music Associations in Melbourne 1888–1915’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 1977), 19–20, 44. 127Nelson Evening Mail 23/137 (24 June 1889), 4. 128Otago Daily Times 8699 (11 Jan. 1889), 5 (Supplement). 129 Ibid. 5 (Supplement). 130Otago Witness 1891 (24 Apr. 1890), 18. 131 Quoted in Murray, ‘Fitchet’s Fallacy’, 47. 132 William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge, 2008). 133 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). 134Nelson Evening Mail 23/137 (24 June 1889), 4. 135Oamaru Mail 14/4387 (5 June 1889), 2. 136 Mathew Gelbart, The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘ Art Music’: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge, 2007). 137Official Record, 293. 138 Ibid. 290. 139Otago Witness 1984 (20 Feb. 1890), 19. 140Evening Post 39/41 (19 Feb. 1890), 2. 141 On other scores that were entered for competition see Murray, ‘Fitchett’s Fallacy’, 50. 142Otago Daily Times 8712 (27 Jan. 1890), 2. 143Bruce Herald 21/2139 (11 Feb. 1890), 3. 144Otago Witness 1891 (24 Apr. 1890), 18. 145 Lilburn, ‘ A Search for Tradition’, 29. 146 Tapsell, ‘Ko Tawa: Where are the Glass Cabinets?’, 265. 147 Richard Nunns and Allan Thomas, Te Ara Pūoro: A Journey into the World of Māori Music (Nelson, 2004), 110–29. 148 Flintoff, Taonga Pūoro, 12. 149 Nunns articulates the role of Hirini Melbourne in mitigating the challenges of his own role as a ‘Pākehā in the Māori world’: ‘Maori had had enough of being studied and written about by others.’ Nunns and Thomas, Te Ara Pūoro, 18. 150 Vergo (ed.), The New Museology; McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 172. 151 Thomas, Entangled Objects, 4. 152 Ibid. 5. 153 Dawe, ‘The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments’, 274–83 at 282. 154 Billie Lythberg, Maia Nuku, and Amiria Salmond, ‘Relating to, and through, Polynesian Collections’, in Thomas, Julie Adams, Billie Lythberg, Maia Nuku, and Amiria Salmond (eds.) Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories (Dunedin, 2016), 43–55 at 44. 155 Ibid. 44. 156 Similarly, McCarthy has argued that Māori themselves participated actively in early exhibitions, exerting an element of agency that encourages us to nuance postcolonial indictments of the imperialism of exhibitions. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 38. The third collaborator on the Pasifika Styles project, Amiria Salmond, is Pākehā, but with ‘close family connections to Maoritanga’, http://auckland.academia.edu/AmiriaSalmond, accessed 29 Nov. 2017. 157 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 135. 158 Ibid. 135. 159 Mead, ‘The Ebb and Flow of Mana Maori’, 23. 160 Ibid. 34. 161 Piri Sciascia, ‘Ka pu te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi: As the Old Net Piles up on Shore, the New Net Goes Fishing’, in Mead (ed.), Te Maori, 162. 162 McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 168–73. 163 McCarthy, Museum and Māori, 120–8. 164 Tapsell, Maori Treasures of New Zealand, 108. 165 Tapsell, ‘The Flight of Pareraututu: An Investigation of Taonga from a Tribal Perspective’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 106 (1997), 323–74 at 323–4. Tapsell also offers an account of Murirangaranga’s trip to Mokoia Island in Maori Treasures of New Zealand: Ko Tawa, 113. 166 Tapsell, Maori Treasures of New Zealand: Ko Tawa, 114. 167 Tapsell, ‘Ko Tawa: Where are the Glass Cabinets?’, 267. 168 Ibid. 268. 169 Ibid. 268–9. 170 Nicholas Thomas, Preface, in Rosanna Raymond and Amiria Salmond (eds.), Pasifika Styles: Artists Inside the Museum (Cambridge, 2008), pp. vii–ix. 171 Fanny Wonu Veys, ‘ Awakening Sleeping Objects’, in Raymond and Salmond (eds.), Pasifika Styles, 111–16 at 114–15. 172 Bates, ‘The Social Life of Musical Instruments’, 365. 173 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings from ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964), ed. D. F. Krell (London, 1978), 167; Quoted by Anne Salmond, ‘Nga huarahi o tea o Maori: Pathways in the Maori World’, in Mead (ed.), Te Maori, 109–37 at 137. 174 Robert P. Morgan, ‘Tradition, Anxiety, and the Current Musical Scene’, in Nicholas Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Oxford, 1988), 57–82 at 72; Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1999), 448. These and other examples of the museum metaphor are presented and critiqued in Peter Walls, History, Imagination and the Performance of Music (Woodbridge, 2003), 75–6, 147–9. Additionally, see Colin Eatock, ‘The “Death” of Classical Music’, Queen’s Quarterly, 109 (2002), 409; Joseph Kerman, Opera and the Morbidity of Music (New York, 2008), 7–8. 175 Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley, 2007), 12. 176 Ibid. 13. APPENDIX Glossary iwi—tribe kōauau—a short, end-blown flute kōrero—talk, discourse, narration kuia—elderly woman mana—prestige, influence, spiritual power Māori—indigenous people of New Zealand; ordinary, normal, natural marae—meeting ground and buildings mātauranga Māori—Māori knowledge, wisdom Pākehā—New Zealander of European descent; foreign, exotic pūkāea—long wooden trumpet pūtara—shell trumpet pūtōrino—double-chambered bugle flute rangatira—chief taonga—ancestral treasures, including both objects and intangible items taonga puoro—musical instruments tohunga—specialist, expert, priest tapu—sacred, prohibited tikanga Māori—Māori protocol, customs utu—retribution, revenge waiata—song, chant whakapapa—genealogy, descent © The Author(s) (2018). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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TI - ‘Walking Backwards into the Future’: Music, Museum Culture, and the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition (1889–1890)
JF - Music and Letters
DO - 10.1093/ml/gcy038
DA - 2018-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/walking-backwards-into-the-future-music-museum-culture-and-the-new-XOo3FDRjfN
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VL - 99
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