Musical genius whose tastes ran to Elvis and Beethoven
Jenny McLeod was a former music professor who loved David Bowie and walked away from academia to join a cult. Remembered by friends and colleagues as a musical genius, the 81-year-old led a life more reminiscent of a rock star than someone who studied classical music and was deeply influenced by Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven.
McLeod, who learned to read music at 5, became a professor at Victoria University at the age of 29, but stepped down after just six years to join the Divine Light Mission, a Hindu cult from northern India.
Born in Wellington in 1941, her early life was spent in Timaru and then Levin. Her mother, Lorna Bell McLeod (ne´ e Perrin), played the piano and early on McLeod showed the special talent that would put her on track to become a highly successful composer.
McLeod told biographer Norman Meehan that it was at Timaru South School that she first realised how much music meant to her. Observing large symbols on the classroom wall, she asked her teacher what they were.
When told they were ‘‘music symbols’’, she was spellbound and, within half an hour, she was reading music.
‘‘It came naturally to me, it was like a language that I already knew,’’ she told Meehan.
At Horowhenua High she was lucky to be taught by Christopher Small, a hugely influential music scholar who termed the word ‘‘musicking’’, to reinforce his view that music is an active process (verb) and not an object (noun).
As well as playing hockey, she was in the school’s kapa haka group, which sparked an interest in what would later become one of her main interests in life, Mā ori culture and music.
In 1961, McLeod began studying music at Victoria University, where her teachers included Frederick Page and Douglas Lilburn.
Graduating in 1964, she headed to Europe and studied with three major European musical influences, avantgarde composers Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The highlight of her time in Europe was a composition she wrote, For Seven, which was performed in Cologne in 1966 by some of the biggest names in European contemporary music.
Returning to New Zealand, she began lecturing in the music department at Victoria and, at the astonishingly young age of 29, became a professor.
With a love of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Elvis and Little Feat she was by no means an orthodox academic.
One of her former pupils, the broadcaster and critic Elizabeth Kerr, remembers her fondly. ‘‘An inspiring and unconventional lecturer, she drove an untidy VW Beetle and we often crammed into it to head off to the rocks at Oriental Bay or, if raining, to the bar of the old George Hotel on Willis St.’’
In 1968, McLeod wrote one of her most important works, Earth and Sky. The resulting musical theatre was a rousing success, well received by audiences and reviewers.
During her time in Europe, she had read a book on Mā ori poetry and Allen Curnow’s Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. Invited by the NZ Educational Institute to compose a work for 300 Wairarapa schoolchildren, she fell back on the reading she had done in Europe to produce Earth and Sky.
Kerr describes the show as a ‘‘sensation’’ and it was subsequently produced for an Auckland festival in 1970, directed by Ian Mune and attended by Queen Elizabeth II, for which 2000 people applied for the 700 tickets.
After just six years, McLeod turned her back on academia, resigning from the university in 1976. Meehan said the reason for her decision was ‘‘complicated’’ but reflective of where she was in her life at that point.
With a growing interest in her own spiritual wellbeing, she also felt classical music was too elitist and intellectual.
A dislike of the administration involved with running a university department was another factor.
She briefly married Wellington musician Bruce Greenfield and joined a band, variously called Roxoffly and RocksOffly, playing covers of the rock groups she liked.
It was a period where she came in for some heavy criticism. University publication Salient published a strongly worded letter by Robin Maconie, chief music critic of the Times Educational Supplement and associate lecturer in composition at the University of Surrey.
‘‘Since her premature ascendancy to the chair of
Music at Victoria University . . . I have followed the career of Jenny McLeod with concern, and latterly with alarm.’’
He referred to her ‘‘continued deterioration’’ as both ‘‘pathetic and contemptible’’ and said he feared for the future of her former students.
Meehan said that media coverage suggesting McLeod had been ‘‘lost to music’’ and was some sort of wayward, pot-smoking hippie was unfair.
There was a feeling at the time that she could put Aotearoa on the international classical music map and that her unorthodox approach to life and music was a lost opportunity.
Heading overseas, she became a ‘‘very active’’ participant in the Divine Light Mission, before returning to New Zealand in 1981 and settling permanently in Pukerua Bay.
Over the next 40 years, she became an increasingly influential and revered figure in New Zealand music.
Surviving on commissions, her first work of note was Childhood for the Bach Choir of Wellington, based on her own poetry.
In 1987, she was invited to a contemporary music festival in Kentucky, where she heard For Seven performed for the first time since 1966. It was there that she met Dutch composer Peter Schat, who had invented a new theory of music called Tone Clock.
It immediately caught her attention and McLeod spent seven years developing a complex mathematical compositional framework, based on the tone-clock system.
In 1993, her career again took a new path when she was commissioned to compose He Iwi Kotahi Tatou (We are one people) for a massed choir, Mā ori choir, chamber choir, marae singers and two pianos.
It was performed in Ohakune and was to prove life changing for McLeod. She formed a close bond with the town’s Ngā ti Rangi iwi and began writing Mā ori hymns.
She learned te reo and regarded Ngā ti Rangi as her close whā nau. A request from members of the iwi to honour Hō hepa Te Umuroa led to her writing the opera Hō hepa.
Hō hepa tells the true story of Te Umuroa, a Ngā ti Rangi chief arrested during the wars of the early 1840s, at the behest of Governor George Grey, and deported to Tasmania.
Recognised as a political prisoner,
Hō hepa died of tuberculosis before he could be returned to New Zealand.
NZ Opera premiered the work at the NZ International Festival of the Arts in 2012.
Her commitment to Ngā ti Rangi led to her becoming choral judge for Katorika Hui Aranga, the annual Easter hui and choral competition held by Mā ori Catholics.
As her approach to music became more orthodox she was increasingly recognised by the musical community. She delivered the annual Lilburn lecture in 2016, and a CD was released of her complete 24 Tone Clocks performed by pianists Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons.
Meehan, a US-based author and musician, is ‘‘staggered’’ by the lack of recognition McLeod received in her own country.
In a long career, she wrote more than 130 hymns, produced highly regarded community theatre musicals, was a wellregarded academic and was able to reinvent herself a number of times.
Making her music accessible to everyone was a priority and she was never a musical snob. ‘‘She was just as happy with Wake Up Little Susie as she was with Beethoven.’’
Among the tributes to McLeod was one from New Zealand Chamber Soloists.
‘‘We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of our revered composer and friend Jenny McLeod, a truly unique individual voice and enormously creative spirit who has made a giant contribution to music in the world and for New Zealand.’’
McLeod received the Composers’ Association of New Zealand KBB Citation, for services to New Zealand music, in 2008, and in 1997 she was appointed an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. – By Nicholas Boyack
composer b November 12, 1941 d November 28, 2022
Sources: Norman Meehan, Elizabeth Kerr and Stuff Archives.