The Influence of the Second Viennese School in New Zealand 1940-1974: a Cultural History

Abstract

In 1940 New Zealand celebrated its first 100 years as a British colony. Britain commended its remotest outpost for its successful taming of a primeval landscape into something akin to its own green and pleasant land. However New Zealanders, already aware of their cultural difference from Britain, were ready to shake off its heritage and create a distinct national voice. Believing that the nation lacked a unique cultural foundation, New Zealanders music followers would entertain three separate paths to acculturation – trusting in the inspiration to be found in New Zealand’s landscape and nascent traditions, re-assimilating British or European classical models or joining the revolutionary path cut by the Second Viennese School of composers. Pursuing all paths would be made problematic due to the Second Viennese School polemic, which promised that the twelve-note row method was the universal language of the future and became an accepted part of musicological ideology.

The thesis takes the form of a reception history. Its primary sources lie in the performance of Western art music written between 1900 and 1974 which were performed by New Zealand’s professional music organizations, the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, by University based performance groups and that which appeared in University curricula. The secondary sources are found firstly in the musicological arguments from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including those of the Second Viennese School and secondly in analyses of pertinent reviews and opinion pieces published in New Zealand. The Second Viennese School would act as the most vociferous catalyst for change in New Zealand between 1940 and 1974. It therefore could have been expected to have been assimilated into New Zealanders’ sense of national identity as expressed through Western art music. This thesis pursues its argument by investigating the cultural atmosphere in which the Second Viennese School polemic and music arrived, their impact on local thinking about the role of Western art music in New Zealand and the changing social context in which their argument was made. It reveals the part the Second Viennese School played in creating New Zealand’s cultural identity. This is the first cultural history of New Zealand music to investigate the influence of imported notions on local identity as expressed through and indicated by Western art music repertoire. It contributes to a small but growing number of New Zealand musical histories and biographies.