Postgraduate Students

Michelle Willyams

Methodism, Music and Maori in New Zealand: A History of the Waiata Maori Choir, 1924-1939

I am investigating New Zealand’s performing arts and social history between the 1920s and 1930s. The Waiata Maori Choir was borne out of the Methodist Church’s Maori Mission Department in 1924 by the Reverend Arthur Seamer. A study of this choir will illuminate social and cultural features of New Zealand. I will investigate who belonged to the choir (they were often members of different iwi), their cultural identifiers and reception by audiences, and the repertoire they performed. Initial research has revealed that the music the choir performed were fusions of European folk tunes and Maori lyrics, potentially modifying the ways in which the choir was understood and portrayed in twentieth century New Zealand culture. Can performance practice and music be a locale of cultural maintenance but also of transformation? What sort of effects did musical hybridism have on the Maori communities? I am interested in finding out what these Maori choirs reveal about performance practice history, Maori Anglicization and Christianization through the European institution of choirs, and the changing Maori cultural identifiers. Was music used as an educational tool or as a way to bring disparate Maori groups together? How did local and regional communities receive these choirs? By exploring these themes and questions I hope to uncover and understand New Zealand’s social history and to examine whether music was a conduit for change in the twentieth century.

Supervisors: Professor Barbara Brookes and Dr Mark Seymour.