Why tangi when we could be oney?
Martin Doyle
I’M not trying to be funny. This is deadly serious.
A few nights ago, as I was sitting back in a balcony seat in the magnificent Michael Fowler Centre, my leaden heart was swept up in a surging wave of joy as I listened to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra weaving its tremendous power and charm. The sheer mechanics of orchestras always amaze me – all those massively different instruments, all played by romping thoroughbreds of musicality (nothing less), and everyone trying to read their music sheets and sort of chime in at the right moment with 50 others going hell for leather all at the same time. When you think about it, there’s plenty of scope for stuff-ups. That’s why they look to a conductor, to give vision and guidance. On Saturday, they looked to Perry So, the brilliant Chinese 28-year-old, elegant yet supercharged, like an electric eel with a baton between his teeth.
Anyone and everyone would have been struck by the ease with which So drove the performers: first through Chinese pieces by Sheng, then the Symphonie Espagnole by Lalo, followed by arias from Alley composed by Wellington’s own Jack Body. These items bring to mind how New Zealanders have at different times fought and struggled to support the peoples of Spain and China. For example, the ones who opposed Fascism (when it wasn’t fashionable to do so) in the Spanish Civil War, or others like Rewi Alley who contributed work skills and poetry to 20th-century China. The climax was Antonin Dvorak’s From the New World written after visiting the United States.
The common theme running through these works, if one might be allowed to feed them all through the juice-extractor of one’s thirsty brain, was the richness of freedom after struggle, and the nobility of common purpose. And seeing the NZSO in such rampaging good health also, for some reason, made me think how successful the Treaty of Waitangi has been. Most people haven’t actually read the Treaty (but so what). For me, the seminal words weren’t written down in the document itself. But some attentive hobbit noted that after each person signed, Captain Hobson said, “He iwi tahi tatou” [We are one people].
Hobson’s words invite a breath-taking new unity. And so simple: a piece of verbal Number 8 fencing wire to hold the whole circus together. And they came with a quality of mind you can see in the “brave” social achievements of the decades following the signing. Ordinary men got to vote, revolutionary New Zealand women won the right to vote, and in 1909 and 1911 a Maori politician (representing a ‘European’ electorate) was our acting Prime Minister. That’s a winning nation. Ground-breaking, collective, well-tuned, almost symphonic.
Recently, though, the age-old rats of class smugness and racial identification have swum ashore and are busily gnawing the edges of our proud, tattered Treaty. Be warned: there’s no limit to how big those buggers can grow.
A few nights ago, as I was sitting back in a balcony seat in the magnificent Michael Fowler Centre, my leaden heart was swept up in a surging wave of joy as I listened to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra weaving its tremendous power and charm. The sheer mechanics of orchestras always amaze me – all those massively different instruments, all played by romping thoroughbreds of musicality (nothing less), and everyone trying to read their music sheets and sort of chime in at the right moment with 50 others going hell for leather all at the same time. When you think about it, there’s plenty of scope for stuff-ups. That’s why they look to a conductor, to give vision and guidance. On Saturday, they looked to Perry So, the brilliant Chinese 28-year-old, elegant yet supercharged, like an electric eel with a baton between his teeth.
Anyone and everyone would have been struck by the ease with which So drove the performers: first through Chinese pieces by Sheng, then the Symphonie Espagnole by Lalo, followed by arias from Alley composed by Wellington’s own Jack Body. These items bring to mind how New Zealanders have at different times fought and struggled to support the peoples of Spain and China. For example, the ones who opposed Fascism (when it wasn’t fashionable to do so) in the Spanish Civil War, or others like Rewi Alley who contributed work skills and poetry to 20th-century China. The climax was Antonin Dvorak’s From the New World written after visiting the United States.
The common theme running through these works, if one might be allowed to feed them all through the juice-extractor of one’s thirsty brain, was the richness of freedom after struggle, and the nobility of common purpose. And seeing the NZSO in such rampaging good health also, for some reason, made me think how successful the Treaty of Waitangi has been. Most people haven’t actually read the Treaty (but so what). For me, the seminal words weren’t written down in the document itself. But some attentive hobbit noted that after each person signed, Captain Hobson said, “He iwi tahi tatou” [We are one people].
Hobson’s words invite a breath-taking new unity. And so simple: a piece of verbal Number 8 fencing wire to hold the whole circus together. And they came with a quality of mind you can see in the “brave” social achievements of the decades following the signing. Ordinary men got to vote, revolutionary New Zealand women won the right to vote, and in 1909 and 1911 a Maori politician (representing a ‘European’ electorate) was our acting Prime Minister. That’s a winning nation. Ground-breaking, collective, well-tuned, almost symphonic.
Recently, though, the age-old rats of class smugness and racial identification have swum ashore and are busily gnawing the edges of our proud, tattered Treaty. Be warned: there’s no limit to how big those buggers can grow.
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