Across Te tai o Rehua: Writing for the taonga pūoro of Aotearoa

I grew up in Whangārei, a small town in the north of Aotearoa/New Zealand, studied at the universities of Auckland, Wellington, and Sydney; then, from 1967, studied privately with Peter Maxwell Davies in London on a casual basis for a couple of years. I lived in Europe, based mostly in England, for the best part of fifteen years, working mainly as a freelance composer. After the death of Don Banks, I was invited to Sydney in 1981 to help Graham Hair in the newly founded composition school at the Conservatorium of NSW (later the Sydney Conservatorium) and taught there for ten years or so. I spent increasing lengths of time back in New Zealand, and, after holding a residency with the Auckland Philharmonia for two years, moved permanently back to Aotearoa, working again as a free-lance composer, with homes at the far ends of the country, on the Otago peninsula in the south and in Ruakaka, north of Auckland. A lot of my work over the last twenty-five years has involved taonga pūoro—the singing treasures or musical instruments of the Māori people of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I am of Ngai Terangi, Whakatōhea and Tūhoe descent.