String Quartet No. 1 (2025):

The Māori in European Art: Reclaiming the Iconomy of Sound

by Amanda Michelina

When Leonard Bell published The Māori in European Art in 1980, he was documenting more than just a collection of colonial paintings and engravings. He was tracing the European imagination of the Māori — a field of vision shaped as much by fantasy as by observation. In his introduction, Bell remarks on an engraving from around 1800, and a photograph from around 1900:

“The engraver responsible for this image would have never seen a Māori; Piron himself had only the briefest contact. The simplest way for these artists to cope with the ‘new’ was to fall back on pre-existing visual and artistic models, even though these had little to do with the Māori … few, if any, artists depicted the Māori literally and ‘objectively.’ This might have been impossible. European stylistic and thematic conventions constantly came between the artists and any unvarnished recording of the physical and psychological ‘realities’ of the Māori, and thus played a fundamental role in determining how the Māori was represented … the reclining girl (plate 6) who appeared in a number of pamphlets and books in the early twentieth century, was an object for sale. She was one of the ‘sights’ of New Zealand. A genuinely beautiful girl, rather than being presented as an individual human being living an ordinary everyday life, was given an artificial guise that had little to do with the realities of either her own life or that of her people. Yet fictions of this sort, circulated by Europeans for mercenary reasons, were often accepted as ‘real’ by viewers otherwise unacquainted with Māori life at the turn of the century.”

This passage, still painfully resonant today, encapsulates the paradox of the colonial iconosphere: that an entire world could be conjured into existence through artistic convention alone. For those who had never met a Māori person, the engraved image became reality. Art filled in the gaps where encounter failed — but it did so with forms that belonged to Europe, not to Aotearoa.

The Iconomy of Representation

Bell’s insight exposes the underlying mechanism of the iconosphere: the circulation of visual fictions as empirical truth. The colonial archive — its sketches, engravings, and watercolours — is not just a record of what Europeans saw, but of what they needed to see. It constructs a visual economy, or iconomy, that transforms Indigenous presence into symbolic currency.

In the 21st century, many Indigenous artists and researchers have turned back toward this iconosphere, not to reject it outright, but to reclaim and reinterpret it. The same images that once distorted now serve as portals: through them, ancestral lineages, motifs, and relationships can be rediscovered.

My own re-entry into this field has taken the form of sound. My string quartet The Māori in European Art does not depict Bell’s book; it listens to it. It hears the distortions and the absences — the aesthetic filters Bell identified — and translates them into a field of microtonal tensions, a sonosphere of difference.

The Quartet: Five Movements Through the Icosphere of Sound

Movement I — A Glacier Melts

The first movement is written in equal temperament, that defining grid of Western harmony. Yet even here, the players are encouraged to let their pitch drift expressively — to allow small natural deviations that remind us that “purity” is never total. Equal temperament was itself an imperial imposition, a tuning system designed to fit all keys neatly within the same frame. It is the musical equivalent of the colonial map: symmetrical, logical, and indifferent to the irregularities of lived geography.

Here, those irregularities leak through. The quartet begins as though it were playing Haydn, but the harmonic surface begins to shimmer — the result of deliberate expressive intonation that refuses the mechanical ideal. It is a sonic allegory for Bell’s observation that European stylistic conventions “constantly came between the artists and any unvarnished recording.” In my quartet, the same conventions come between the listener and any fixed tonal centre.

Movement II — Uaki Te Awa Kōpaka

The second movement represents the first encounters — not only between peoples but between sound systems. Its principal motif is a rising major seventh, a deliberately unstable gesture that nearly reaches the octave but never closes it. This unresolved interval symbolises what I have elsewhere described as the “comma left at the octave” — the small but meaningful remainder produced by the maramataka cycle when measured against the Western chromatic system.

Here, the major seventh functions as a metaphor for colonial misalignment: the unbridgeable gap between perception and presence. Each repetition of the motif reaffirms the impossibility of equivalence. The octave, like cultural understanding, is always just out of reach. The painting is by Nicholas Chevalier, displaying the exoticist tendencies of artists of the period. Len Bell notes the pattern of the 'European artist of treating the Maori simply as a picturesque adjunct in a display of artefacts.' Of this painting, Bell says that: 'Essential to the meaning and effect of the painting is an implied second party, male and white, who is looking in at the beautiful, languidly reclining Maori girl from outside the picture. She is a colonial possession on display for his delectation.'

Movement III — Mākutu

The third movement dramatises a mākutu, or spiritual bewitchment — an act of psychological and sonic haunting. The ensemble expands to include microtonally tuned harp and guitar, alongside the quartet. These instruments create quarter-tone clusters that destabilise the harmonic ground.

In Bell’s terms, this movement corresponds to the colonial “artificial guise” — the aura of mystery and eroticism projected onto Māori subjects. But here, the mākutu is reversed: the spell is cast back toward the audience, who experience the dissonance of hearing familiar instruments behave in unfamiliar ways. The tuning deviations, about 50 cents apart, create beats and pulsations that make the air itself seem bewitched.

This movement suggests that to be misrepresented is also to be transformed, and that through re-sounding these distortions, one can reclaim agency over them. The colonial fascination with Māori “mystery” becomes a sonic weapon — a form of counter-magic.

Movement IV — Golriz

The fourth movement introduces an unexpected interlocutor: Golriz, a Persian motif derived from uneven intervallic steps. This material is drawn from my comparative research into Farhat’s analysis of Persian scales, where the octave is divided not into equal tones but into unequal, relational ones. However, the cello accompaniment slides around the maramataka cycle, grounding it in the shimmer of Māori music, while imposing a 6/8 pulse underneath a 3/4 metre.

The quartet is explicitly a critique of representation, and the response from mainstream classical was to strongly suggest (read "force me") to add token representation as a way of softening the implicit edge that their music distorted Māori music. The critique is an outgrowth of The Perfumed Garden, so the Golriz movement demonstrates - at her suggestion - a non-representational Islamicate approach to representation.

Persian music, like Māori music, is built upon difference-as-harmony. Its uneven steps, simplified for string quartet, resemble the uneven cultural steps of colonial contact: no two distances are quite the same. This movement is thus a dialogue between two non-European logics of tuning — an acknowledgment that the colonial encounter was never simply binary, but entangled in broader global systems of exchange and imagination.

Movement V — Scorrevole

The final movement, Scorrevole (“flowing”), takes the Persian unevenness and applies it to elements of the maramataka cycle. The texture becomes fluid, a weaving in which each instrument traces its own pathway through shared harmonic light. It is the sound of the archive being set into motion — the still image animated, the reclining girl standing up and walking away from her colonial frame.

Here, the iconosphere becomes a sonosphere, and the colonial “object for sale” becomes a resonant Māori icon via freeing the music from the strictures of 12TET. The ensemble, once divided by tuning, now breathes together across difference.

The Ear as Witness

What Bell showed in visual terms, the quartet attempts to reveal acoustically: that the supposed “realism” of European representation was always an illusion, and that the truth of encounter lies not in objectivity but in relation. When Bell writes that “European stylistic and thematic conventions constantly came between the artists and any unvarnished recording,” he is describing the same process by which European tonality once came between listeners and the living vibration of Indigenous music.

To compose against that grain is not to discard European technique but to hear it anew — to place it within a larger ecology of sound that includes Pacific, Persian, and global microtonalities. The goal is not reconciliation but polyphony: a world in which distinct systems coexist, their dissonances left audible.

Coda: Reclaiming the Iconosphere

The Māori in European Art is thus not only a musical response to Bell’s book but a continuation of its argument. Where Bell diagnosed the aesthetic distortions of New Zealand's Māori iconosphere, this quartet enacts a reclamation of the acoustic field. The microtonal drift becomes an act of truth-telling — a reminder that the most powerful fictions are those that sound correct.

By introducing uneven intervals and non-European logics of intonation, the work transforms the colonial gaze into a relational hearing. It invites the listener to dwell in the gap, the comma, the difference that was once erased. The result is not harmony in the Western sense, but harmony as coexistence — a sonic form of decolonisation.

If, as Bell suggests, the early engravers could only imagine the Māori through borrowed conventions, then perhaps the most radical gesture today is to let those conventions be retuned. In the shimmering spaces between tones, where equal temperament falters, the voices of the ancestors begin to be heard again.

PS: Yes, I'm able to write music as well as Amanda as I was before as Michael. Those rumours that I couldn't write music were persistent, despite my obvious success as a composer and guitarist. The NZSM will provide apologies for being sucked into that view - Jane was dogged by that stigma as well, though she can read a full orchestral score and did all that post-grad US ear training. This was anti-classical guitar bias, plain and simple. Took the same theory papers, and did as well as most virtuosi (aka A-). Got a scholarship in Year 13 based on my compositions. How does it feel to have someone that you called illiterate using dots on the page to prove that their theory makes sense? Dedicated to Ngā Wai Hono I Te Pō, Te Arikinui Kuīni o te Kīngitanga.