Sally Blundell
Jenny McLeod: A life in music by Norman Meehan (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 396pp, $50
‘I have not followed outer things, am not interested in success, fame, glory,’ mused composer and former professor of music at Victoria University of Wellington Jenny McLeod. ‘It may have looked as though I was influenced by someone or something “out there”, but I was always actually following my own inner response to whatever it was.’
These words, told to writer and composer Norman Meehan not long before McLeod’s death in 2022, sum up the career of one of New Zealand’s most gifted and personally driven composers. McLeod was awarded Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1977 and a Composers Association KBB Citation for Services to New Zealand Music in 2008, but as this long, generous and informed biography suggests, we don’t know the half of it.
In her 2016 Lilburn Lecture, a whimsical, poetic, musical reflection on her life, McLeod gave a brief overview of the sheer scale of her work, ranging across conventional concert music, high modernism, pop music, Māori choral works, hymns, film soundtracks, libretto and poetry.
Here, Meehan takes a longer route, drawing on conversations and correspondence with McLeod (she also commented on the manuscript) as well as letters, interviews, reviews, poems and his own considerable expertise—Meehan has written books on jazz musicians Paul Bley and Mike Nock and New Zealand jazz.
He begins with McLeod’s birth in Wellington on 12 November 1941, and the family shift to Timaru six weeks later. True to the book’s subtitle, ‘A life in music’, even at this early stage he scans the landscape for possible musical influences: neighbour Pip Harding, who later played with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; a Chopin-playing Dutch woman who stayed with the family; a visit by the Southgate family, including a young William Southgate. Most importantly, the large black musical notation on the wall above the blackboard in her primary school classroom. ‘I had never seen these strange marks before’, she tells Meehan, ‘but I knew instantly and for sure they were for me’. The young McLeod, we are told, learned to read music in just one hour—‘it was like a language that I already knew,’ she said, ‘an inborn proclivity’.
By the time the family moved to Levin in 1954, McLeod was playing organ, piano accordion, recorder, drums and clarinet at church services, weddings, funerals, country hall socials, talent quests, and the Kohitere juvenile detention facility. At 15, she picked up a guitar, improvising 1950s pop songs with her brothers in the front room at home. As she explained in the Lilburn Lecture, ‘To me, it was all one huge tradition, a riotous profusion! And all of it mine!’
In the summer of 1960, she attended the annual Summer School of Music at St Peter’s School outside Cambridge. It was a revelation, said McLeod: ‘heaven on earth’. She abandoned her ‘sensible’ plan to be a teacher to enrol in a Bachelor of Music at Victoria University, studying under Douglas Lilburn, David Farquhar, Margaret Nielsen and professor of music Frederick Page.
There are glimpses here of a free-spirited, determined young woman riding a motorbike, smoking ‘like she’d invented it’, and immersing herself, through her friendship with Fred and Evelyn Page, in a world of music, art and literature (she tells her family the Pages were her substitute parents—‘They took it very well,’ she said).
But Meehan holds us on the compositional track, applying his analytical magnifying glass even to her student work. In ‘Cambridge Suite’ (1962), he identifies Leroy Anderson, Benjamin Britten, Bach and Bartók as influences: ‘There might be a whiff of Debussy in there, too’.
When McLeod hears the work of avant-garde French composer Olivier Messiaen, she is transfixed. ‘I loved the colours. I hadn’t the faintest idea how he made them but I knew I would like to know how he did that.’
This single-mindedness—‘Motivation like I’ve never seen,’ said her brother Craig—runs through this story. Meehan tracks her path to Paris, where she studies under Messiaen, then to Basel to attend a course led by Pierre Boulez, then to Cologne to learn under Karlheinz Stockhausen. Cologne is ‘cold and grey and intolerable’; Stockhausen ‘egotistical’. Her chamber work, ‘For Seven’ (1966), was well-received, but McLeod was unsure. Amongst all this busy humming avant-garde world, she wrote, ‘I wonder really where I fit in.’
An invitation to substitute for Page while he was on sabbatical was McLeod’s ticket home. This was the Sixties: postgraduate seminars extended from the lecture theatre to Oriental Bay beachfront or the pub; ‘free love’ was in the air; the badges of feminism rattled the halls of academia. By this time, McLeod was a ‘journeyman composer’, writing for theatre and national radio. She did not feel hampered by her gender (although she later acknowledged the neglect of woman composers), nor did she buy into Lilburn’s desire for a distinctly New Zealand music: ‘I think you should just be trying to write music that is truly yours, and it will be New Zealand music because you’re a New Zealander’.
Again, Meehan frames his subject within a musical context: Stravinsky’s music had become ‘part of her musical DNA’, as had a ‘kind of Bartókian language’. Anton Webern and Schoenberg were ‘under her musical skin’.
For her 1967 work Earth and Sky, commissioned for the annual school music festival in the Wairarapa, she created an extravaganza of mime, speech, movement and music in a heroic enactment of Māori creation stories. The performance ended with 30 seconds of total silence, then a standing ovation. It was, wrote former student and friend Elizabeth Kerr, ‘a sensation’.
In 1970, McLeod, then just 28, became New Zealand’s youngest-ever university professor. As head of music, she advocated for more community-based music, more non-Western music, more pop, more … everything.
When commissioned to write a work for Palmerston North’s centenary year in 1971, ‘she barely slept,’ said pianist and tutor Bruce Greenfield. ‘That’s when I fell in love with her, really’ (they married in 1973). For some, the sheer spectacle of Under the Sun eclipsed the music. For playwright Bruce Mason, New Zealand ‘ceases forever to be a provincial society’ after the production.
A witty conversationalist, an ‘omnivorous reader’, a regular user of cannabis and hallucinogens, a devotee of Ji Maharaj’s Divine Light Mission—McLeod was anything but provincial.
In 1976, she left Victoria to go on a ‘spiritual walkabout’. She wrote pop songs, played keyboards, and sang backing vocals, seeking a musical language that was, Meehan quotes, ‘more articulate than the strange or beautiful effects, gestures and noises of the avant-garde’.
Greenfield was baffled—at this stage, their marriage was falling apart. McLeod, however, was sanguine: ‘Everything I do,’ she admitted, ‘I do to extremes’. Meehan’s more circumspect: ‘A cursory examination of the facts of the period suggests Jenny was spiralling gently out of control.’
There’s an almost audible sigh of relief when, in 1981, McLeod bought a tumbledown cottage in Pukerua Bay that would be her home for the next 40 years. From her perch above the sea, she launched into her most productive period, including the 1983 ‘Sun Festival’ extravaganza on Wellington’s waterfront, the award-winning soundtrack for The Silent One, and a concert piece for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s 40th anniversary.
As the endless deadlines began to take their toll, she met Dutch composer Peter Schat. McLeod was inspired by Schat’s Tone Clock theory of chromatic harmony and by Schat himself (she described Lilburn and Schat as her two ‘great loves’).
She translated his texts, wrote books and adapted his principles to her compositions. McLeod’s Tone Clock pieces, Meehan writes, present a more nuanced colour palette than her earlier work: ‘Monet’s aqueous canvases replacing the bolder colours of Matisse cut-outs’.
In 1993, an invitation to write a piece for the Sing Aotearoa festival in Ohakune revived her enduring interest in te ao Māori. ‘He Iwi Kotahi Tātou (We are One People)’—Meehan doesn’t delve into the later politicisation of Hobson’s phrase—was an ambitious piece performed in the local high school. Meehan glances over the apparent ‘shortcomings’ to focus on the humility McLeod brought to the commission.
By this time, McLeod was spending more time in Ohakune, building close friendships with members of Maungārongo Marae and the Māori Catholic church.
When a commissioned history of Ngāti Hau warrior Hōhepa Te Umuroa was canned, she applied her research to a chamber opera. Hōhepa comprised 52 scenes, including waiata and haka, in less than two hours—as director of the Wellington production Sara Brodie said, ‘It goes by like an absolute rocket’. Again, reviews were mixed, with one critic describing it as a ‘great but flawed opera’. Again, Meehan rescues her. It was the response of Māori attendees at the dress rehearsal, he writes, that mattered most to her—when McLeod saw their tears, she knew ‘what I said was good, was right’.
‘An artist’s life,’ writes Meehan, ‘can be made comprehensible when examined in the context of their work. Conversely, an artist’s creative output, when viewed through the lens of their experiences, often becomes more vivid and colourful.’
This book is a balance of life and art, personal insight and musical scrutiny. There are tantalising glimpses of McLeod’s grandfather, John Halford Perrin, carving the wooden horses for the Foxton Beach merry-go-round; Lorna, a devout Methodist who ‘wore a leather jacket, drank shandies and smoked cigarettes’; her father Ronald, the ‘quietest man she had ever known’.
But art wins. Family life, relationships, McLeod’s drug-taking and spirituality are scaffolding for her compositions, which Meehan explores with perceptiveness and excellent writing. Her NZSO concert piece, for example, is ‘energetic, propelled by relentless low strings and punctuated by dramatic gestures from massed brass … the central section, a kind of bucolic waltz, does get going a bit but on the whole the mood is elegiac’.
Of her European work ‘For Seven’, Meehan points out the abrupt shifts, dark textures and abstract sounds, but ‘it is music that is easy to listen to, not at all po-faced.’
The last chapter, focusing largely on the Lilburn Lecture, drops this momentum; however, overall, Jenny McLeod is an engaging and important insight into a remarkable creative life and legacy.
SALLY BLUNDELL is a freelance journalist and writer in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury. She was books and culture editor for the NZ Listener and a judge (fiction) in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is also the author of Ravenscar House: A biography (Canterbury University Press, 2022). She was runner-up as reviewer of the year in the 2021 Voyager Media Awards.
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