Making Our Own - Two Ethnographies of the Vernacular in New Zealand Music: Tramping Club Singsongs and the Māori Guitar Strumming Style

Abstract

This work presents two ethnographies of the vernacular in New Zealand music. The ethnographies are centred on the Wellington region, and deal respectively with tramping club singsongs and the Māori guitar strumming style. As the first studies to be made of these topics, they support an overall argument outlined in the Introduction, that the concept of "vernacular" is a valuable way of identifying and understanding some significant musical phenomena hitherto neglected in New Zealand music studies. "Vernacular" is conceptualised as an informal, homemade approach that enables people to customise music-making, just as language is casually manipulated in vernacular speech. The different theories and applications which contribute to this perspective, taken from music studies and other disciplines, are examined in Chapter 1. A review of relevant New Zealand music literature, along with a methodological overview of the ethnographies is presented in Chapter 2. Each study is based upon different mixtures of techniques, including participant-observer fieldwork, oral history, interviews, and archival research. They can be summarised as follows: Tramping club singsongs: a medium of informal self-entertainment among New Zealand wilderness recreationists in the mid-twentieth century. The ethnography focuses on two clubs in the Wellington region, the Tararua Tramping Club and the Victoria University College Tramping Club, during the 1940s-1960s period, when changing social mores, tramping‘s camaraderie and individualism, and the clubs‘ different approaches, gave their singsongs a distinctive character. Chapters 3–5. The Māori guitar strumming style: a self-taught, accessible, and versatile accompaniment used widely in Māori music since the 1940s. The ethnography includes interviews from the Wellington region about the use of the Māori strumming style for party singing, a field study undertaken with the kapa haka group Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club (Wellington), and a survey of the style‘s use in New Zealand recorded music and its reception in public discourse. Chapters 6–8. Both ethnographies show accessible forms of music-making being shaped in numerous ways through participants taking a vernacular approach. Although they also reveal that this approach may be subsumed by other musical values, in each case the special value of the vernacular is clear: with tramping club singsongs, it enabled these informal events to embody the liberties trampers craved in post-World War II life; and with the Māori guitar strumming style, it has helped Māori people for many decades to sustain their social values and cultural identities as an indigenous minority under pressure. Both studies highlight the liberties the vernacular bestows upon people to directly make-their-own music to suit changing circumstances. Conclusion. The ethnographies are supported by additional appendices on a CD-ROM, including listings of tramping-singsong repertoire, selected tramping texts, musical-instrument import statistics, and a discography, while a CD and DVD provide selections of archival sound recordings, and ethnographic audio and video.