“When you move to a new country, it’s not just furniture, crockery or family treasures that come with you – it’s the language, the music and songs, and family stories.”
For Auckland-based composer Louise Webster, being commissioned to write a work – the piano quartet shifting worlds – for this year’s Martinborough Music Festival is a homecoming of sorts. Despite never having lived in Wairarapa, Louise has strong family roots in the region, dating back to her great-great-great-grandparents, Alexander and Elspeth Sutherland.
“My paternal grandmother talked a lot about the Sutherlands and the MacLeods, so it was certainly something that was alive for her,” says Louise.
“As I’ve got older, I’ve become more interested in the family history. In 2010, I visited the clearance village in Scotland they came from. It got me thinking about them leaving the land and coming across the world to a land they don’t know at all.”
Having been forced off their own lands in Caithness, in 1839 the Sutherlands left Badbea, a clearance village on the bleak wind-swept cliffs above the North Sea, and travelled to Aotearoa.
Alexander Sutherland was eventually allocated land to farm east of Martinborough, occupying
Ngāti Kahungunu lands acquired by the New Zealand Land Company.
“The Sutherlands were cleared off the land by English landowners, who replaced the traditional way of life with sheep farming. Paradoxically, they came to New Zealand and, with the colonisation process, were part of a similar process here,” says Louise.
“I was fascinated by the story and how it must have been for them arriving on the foreshore.”
Louise was also inspired by a book of songs from the north of Scotland, transcribed by Margory Kennedy-Fraser, who, in the early 20 th century, collected and recorded the original Gaelic songs of people living in the villages. Some of these have been incorporated into the work.
“When writing the work, I was trying to imagine the sound world they would have carried with them – the inner worlds they carried and the outer world of a completely new environment.”
Louise Webster’s work will be premiered at the Festival concert at 2pm on Sunday 21 September
Louise Webster’s work will be premiered at the Festival concert at 2pm on Sunday 21 September, preceded by a discussion with artistic directors Wilma Smith and Donald Armstrong about how the Wairarapa has inspired her work. Tickets at
www.martinboroughmusicfestival.co.nz
