Singing was an important aspect of old Maori life and still plays a larger part in it than it does in the life of the average European. The Maori loves singing and sings very well, in most cases being gifted with a pleasing voice and a good ear. Visitors to New Zealand are invariably impressed, and European New Zealanders look upon Maori singing as one of the most pleasing attributes of their Maori fellow-citizens. This is in part due to the fact that most Maori songs today are based on European tunes and therefore are easy for Europeans to appreciate. It was not always so, as the writings of nineteenth-century observers testify. They found Maori singing tuneless and monotonous, and to the uninformed ear real Maori music in the pre-European style are unattractive. Elsdon Best’s description of the Maori song composer’s aim as a desire to present a rhythmical flow of words is an accurate one.
To the European, these songs all sound like chants, the modulation of the voice being confined to too narrow a compass to seem pleasant to him. He has not much use for quarter-tone variations and cannot detect the lengthened and exaggerated vowel sounds, as he seldom knows what the words are anyway. The Maori has a particularly keen ear for vowel length, for the meanings of the words depend more on this than they do in English. Maori singers of old-time songs in chorus, break off at any point to breathe and then join in again, often half-way through a word.
Any subject was fit material for a song in the old days, some indeed being of the most trivial nature. A great many of those which have been recorded, however, are serious in their mode of thought, cryptic in expression, and singularly poetic in concept.
Sir Apirana Ngata classified Maori songs as lullabies, laments, songs of abuse or defiance, love songs, ditties, prophetic songs, chants proper, songs for posture dances, and ritual chants.
Feet stamping in unison, arms extended with fingers quivering, white eyes rolling, tongues protruding, and over all a roaring rhythmic chorus. That is the haka, the vigorous posture dance which symbolises the vitality of Maori manhood. In one form it is the war dance, and of old was performed, weapon in hand, with deadly intent. More often it was used to welcome guests and frequently it was used to express the feeling of a tribe, through words specially composed, on some topic which concerned it—land, food, a quarrel, and a great occasion. It is an element of Maori culture which has fascinated many European New Zealanders, who often perform versions of it at concerts or before football matches to their own great satisfaction.
A woman’s dance which is peculiar to New Zealand is the poi, considered, by Te Rangi Hiroa as the most graceful of all the dances of Polynesia. This is performed with one or more small balls of some light material—dry leaves of raupo, the New Zealand bulrush, is the most common—attached to a cord and twirled in the hand. In the simplest poi dance the poi on a short cord is twirled in the right hand and beaten with the left, and between beats goes through a series of movements touching head, shoulders, and hips. A variation is the use of two pois, and an older and even more graceful form is the dance performed with larger pois on considerably longer strings, this again having single and double variations.
The short poi is performed sitting or standing and is often accompanied by foot movements. One popular form imitates the paddling of a canoe, in another the sound of galloping horses can be heard in the beating pois. It is a dance of precision, harmony, and beauty, nearly always to the accompaniment of lilting song. As the dancers’ costume these days is usually a bodice in red, black, and white taniko with a yellow and black flax kilt, or piupiu, worn over a red underskirt, it is a dance of colour too.
A modern development of the posture dance is the action song, a dance performed by men and women, in which hand and body movements are related to the words of a song. Alan Armstrong and Reupena Ngata, authors of an authoritative handbook on action songs, claim it to be an art form which sums up the whole of modern Maori culture, typifying a harmonious blend of the old and new, embodying the music and poetry which is the very soul of the race. It is a living form of art and one in which European music is successfully adapted to fit words and actions essentially Maori. It is, if New Zealanders but knew it, their country’s most vital form of folk music and dance.
A word on games. Many of them related directly or indirectly to efficiency in the military arts, the posture dance being both recreation and training. So were spear and dart throwing, running, jumping, and wrestling? Swimming and canoe racing were popular sports. Games to develop manual dexterity included ti rakau, in which sticks were thrown from hand to hand in time with music, and matimati, in which players tried to catch each other out in a series of rapid hand movements. Knuckle bones and a form of draughts were played.
Children bowled hoops, whipped tops, walked on stilts, slid down slopes on toboggans, and swung on swings. Kite flying was a pastime many indulged in, kites being built with a light frame covered with dry bulrush leaves; some of these seem too large to have been children’s toys and were in fact flown by priests who found omens in the way they flew.
A toy not seen now but popular once is the karetao, a jumping jack or puppet whose jointed arms were worked by fine cords.
