Snark

It's easy to make 'Māori music' with some taonga pūoro and an expert practitioner that's been given lots of room to improvise over a bed of orchestral colours. What's shocking about my stuff re: 'sounding Polynesian' is that I'm just using standard Pākehā instruments, and I still get comments about how it sounds like church music from Pasifika people (plus a lot of Māori embraced Pan's Preludes as 'authentic'). I might also add that all this guitar and show bands stuff is an unbroken chain, while it's generally agreed that taonga pūoro has a lot of gaps in the knowledge chain. It's not so surprising that a jazz musician - Richard Nunns - was integral to that revival. -

Much like with my interest in musicals, everyone else forgets about the vernacular and choose to focus on the exotic qualities of foreign cultures.

Hopefully I'll avoid that trap while writing The Perfumed Garden. Btw, vernacular was a concept that I learned from Sondheim, though that was in the context of lyrics rather than music. His music pastiches the vernacular - the party scene in Merrily with Good Thing Going is a good example - but it's not something that people discuss much. - Re: whakapapa, well that was one example. I'm sure there are probably others, but honestly it's not a priority for me. I fell into the Māori culture, and that's definitely where I'm writing from these days, regardless of my whakapapa. I occasionally feel like the token white person, but not all that often.