Making sense of Cook’s confusion
BY taking a time and place in history and turning it into music, Dunedin composer Dame Gillian Whitehead hopes to paint a picture of the confusing times when Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand.
Dame Gillian is one of four composers selected by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra to create works to mark the 250th anniversary next year of Captain Cook’s arrival in New Zealand and his meetings with Maori.
Earlier this year, the NZSO performed Tupaia, by Salina Fisher, and He iwi tahi tatou, by Gareth Farr. The fourth composer is Michael Norris.
For her work, Dame Gillian was given the theme ‘‘landfall’’, but late New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn wrote ‘‘Landfall in unknown seas’’, so she did not want to call it landfall.
Eventually, she settled on
Turanganui, the name of Gisborne and focused on Cook’s arrival there.
‘‘[Cook’s arrival] wasn’t a happy occasion at all.’’
She imagined Cook and his men arriving after months at sea to see this wonderful land.
History tells of Cook and his landing party coming ashore in search of water and meeting a Maori warrior.
The warrior approached, presumably issuing a challenge, which Cook and his men misunderstood fired warning shots over his head.
‘‘Of course, it means nothing [to the warrior], it’s just a noise, so the warrior keeps on coming. The coxswain shoots and kills a chief.’’
Luckily, an interpreter manages to explain and there is a truce.
The following day, Maori hoped to exchange weapons, but that also ended in more people shot.
Eventually, Cook and his men return to their ship and leave. It was a day Joseph Banks described in his diary as ‘‘the most disagreeable day of my life’’.
So, while Dame Gillian’s work is to celebrate Cook’s arrival in New Zealand, some of the events ‘‘are not something to celebrate’’.
‘‘That’s the theme I had to deal with.’’
This made the work’s composition quite a challenge, she said.
‘‘I lived with the story for a long time and I think I overthought it before I wrote it.’’
She finally sat down to write the piece in her Dunedin home last Christmas. While it is not a very long piece that is not how it started.
‘‘My first thoughts were of quite a long piece as there was so much you can put into it. I had to keep bringing it down in scale. I think that has worked quite well really.’’
When she was writing the piece she wanted to make it something the people involved in that story might understand.
‘‘I mean not use a language to far beyond their comprehension although it would be because the idiom is so different. It was something I felt while I was writing it.’’