JERUSALEM -- SONATEN
Seven notes of a musical scale as seven place-names on the Whanganui River
In September 2014, I accompanied some good friends up the Whanganui River Road to Jerusalem/Hiruharama—a remote township which is enshrined in New Zealand literary history as the site of a commune established by poet James K. Baxter in the late 1960s [see Carcanet blog October 3]. I had visited the settlement a few times back in the 1990s when my aunt Rita, a nun in the Home of Compassion order, was living there. I remember listening to Heinrich Biber’s ‘Rosary Sonatas’ on the car stereo during those earlier journeys up the unsealed road.
The violin presented, for me, an opportunity to revisit both Biber’s violin sonatas and that particular road trip—90 minutes each way from Whanganui township. Of the seven Whanganui River towns named on the violin, four are Maori transliterations of European places:ATENE – Athens
KORINITI – Corinth
RANANA – London
HIRUHARAMA – Jerusalem
Those proper nouns form a seam of visual music around the edge of the instrument. They also appear on the front of the violin, along with three towns which bear their original Maori names: Whanganui, Parikino and Matahiwi. Together the seven place-names echo the seven notes of my imaginary musical scale, as played by H. I. F. Biber on scordatura violin. In my memory of this landscape, the sound of car-tyres on gravel verge, and wind through a half-opened window provides the bass continuo; the song of tui and fantail mimics the mid-air manoeuvrings of Biber’s violin.The building on the rear of the violin is based on the church at Hiruharama, here transplanted to the middle of the Whanganui River, with a range of limestone hills, the Paraparas, in the background. The seabird flew in from some recent paintings I have done of outlying New Zealand islands. The title of the painted violin, Jerusalem / Sonaten, echoes the title of James K. Baxter’s great poetry collection, Jerusalem Sonnets (1969, and also Biber’s ‘Rosenkranz Sonaten’. The initials, J. and S., on the pegbox, denote not only the violin’s name and the title of Baxter’s book, but also the name of another great Baroque composer for solo violin, J.S. Bach.
Thanks to fellow travellers: John Dennison, Michael Schmidt and Angel from Manchester, and to Sr Sue Cosgrove from the Home of Compassion. Commissioned by Arohanui Strings, a charitable organisation which funds music lessons for disadvantaged children, the violin was sold at auction on October 29.
Gregory O’Brien
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