Abstract:
The thesis will show that a distinctive New Zealand voice in the arts may be found not in an
"essence", as has sometimes been suggested, but at chronologically specific intersections of
discourses. Each of the six works I examine has been made in New Zealand and is a mixture of
music and language. As generic hybrids, combinations of music and language make appropriate
objects of study for a thesis that explores a specific local dialogue between the 'mixture' and the
'essence', the 'hybrid' and the 'authentic', the 'indigenous' and the 'exotic', the 'local' and the
'imported', the 'centre' and the 'periphery.'
Like acquisitive magpies, New Zealand artists constantly collect and select their material. They
sift, save, reject and synthesise, and in so doing they create new combinations out of old
ingredients. One of the characteristics of New Zealand poetry is that it has often been combined
with music. There have been many collaborations between poets and musicians since colonial
times. These collaborative texts occupy a complex space between art forms, just as New Zealand
artists negotiate between orientations, positioning themselves between different cultural
traditions. In its own process of selection, the thesis selects six works for close analysis which
represent not only different periods but also different forms of synthesis. Each work represents
'New Zealand', yet what this means in practice is different in each case.
