TOI ART AT TE PAPA LEVEL 5 I TEPAPA.NZ/TOIART
TŪRANGAWAEWAE:
ART AND NEW ZEALAND
Toi Art, 2018. Photograph by Maarten Holl, Te Papa
by CHRISTOPHER MOOREC
hris Maclean’s A Way with Words
(Potton and Burton, $49.99) is a book
in search of an identity. Maclean has
made valuable contributions to local
non-fiction since the 1980s. His “unambi-
tious” baby boomer’s memoir promises
much but delivers little.
He writes that working on the memoir
was useful “only once I had understood
the importance of detachment”.
He has achieved this goal admirably
throughout 210 pages of carefully con-
sidered prose before placing each of his
books in a chronological catalogue pinned
down like so many butterflies in a collec-
tor’s cabinet.
It is all rather cold. I failed to discern
any hint of a writer’s essential fuel – thatpotent blend of passion
and excitement.Peter van Drimmelen is
a violist, not a violin-
ist. For a professional
musician, the two-
letter difference is vital,
especially when you
have played with some
of New Zealand’s best ensembles and
participated in 750 performances of Bee-
thoven symphonies. In Driving for Music:
The Orchestral Memoirs of a Bus-Driving
Violist (Writes Hill Press, $35), van Drim-
melen explores a life and career that took
him from post-war Netherlands to New
Zealand. Clearly a man with a sense of
humour and the nose for a passing anec-
dote, van Drimmelen plays events and
people con brio, especially when he writes
about a musician’s life on the road. His
book is written from the heart of someone
whose entire life has been bound up with
music. The result is affectionate, warm,
amusing and eminently likeable.To end on a musical note, Peter Hoar
charts the complex but fascinatingquestion of how New Zealanders once
listened to music in The World’s Din: Listen-
ing to records, radio and ilms in New Zealand,
1880-1940 (Otago University Press, $45). It’s
hard to imagine a world without CD play-
ers, Bluetooth and streaming, but Hoar
provides insights into a much earlier tech-
nological revolution launched by the first
public demonstration of a phonograph in
Blenheim in 1879.
From that moment, New Zealanders
were hooked on audio. Music broke out
of the drawing room and concert hall to
become increasingly democratised. Hoar
writes vigorously about this comparatively
recent history in a book that is not only
an enjoyable read but a relevant one as it
travels from hissing wax discs to the first
flickers of the television age. lLost for words
A writer’s memoir
grasps for meaning.
NZ NON-FICTION