The line in the sand: Negotiating the flow of composition, collaboration and local community engagement in new Maori-Christian popular music in South West Sydney (original) (raw)

The Line in the Sand was an eight-month long songwriting and collaboration project, carried out from March to October 2011, which explored the creation of a cultural space that flowed between chant-based and contemporary Māori musics, contemporary Christian songwriting, and active community engagement with the South West Sydney Māori diaspora community. Throughout the project, I collaborated with members of Calvary Life Outreach (CLO) church in Minto. The inspiration for this project was framed by Mervyn McLean’s challenge at the end of his seminal book, Māori Music: If and when waiata (“monophonic chant”) style comes fully to terms with the intrusive Western system, it is possible that a truly integrated blend of old and new will emerge, composition will again become commonplace, and the long process of attrition which has so diminished the traditional Maori repertoire will at last be at an end. (1996, p.351) In this paper, I reflect upon the creative processes of composition and collaboration between myself and the CLO church community, as we sought to investigate what this “integrated blend of old and new” can sound like in an Australian Māori diaspora context. The resulting bilingual (Māori/English) album, Whakanuia (Exalt), is a sonic expression that seeks to capture McLean’s description above. The personal perspectives of my role as songwriter and arranger will be considered throughout. My method draws heavily upon McIntyre’s ‘operable system at work’ (2006), and is inspired by Csikszentmihalyi (1999), who fashions a triune model consisting of the ‘domain’, or the extant literature around a topic; the ‘field’ as current practitioners within the area of research; and the ‘person’, as the personal voice of the artist. It is within this system that the flow from methodology to new creative works, influenced by literature, musics and perspectives, is understood. These works, whilst being informed by previous patterns, inspire new pathways of (in this case musical) expression (Csikszentmihalyi 1999).