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New Zealand Studies: A Guide to Bibliographic Resources

7. Music

7. Music

Bibliographic work on New Zealand music has grown rapidly in the past 15 years but, overall, bibliographic control is fragmented.

Philip Norman's Bibliography of New Zealand Compositions 1940-1982, published in a second edition in 1982, provides good coverage of published and unpublished compositions (and recordings) by members of the Composers' Association of New Zealand (CANZ). The substantial holdings of printed and manuscript scores held by Radio New Zealand's Music Library are listed in its Catalogue of New Zealand Compositions (1984). These two provide a reasonable coverage of current serious New page 18 Zealand composition, but there is no comprehensive listing of published New Zealand music. Printed music is required to be deposited under the compulsory deposit legislation and is listed in the current National Bibliography. Bibliographies by Freed (1967, 1968 and 1972) Merz (1972) and Egan (1967), the last two unpublished, provide some retrospective coverage, but predominantly of serious music.

The demand for New Zealand serious compositions is small, but strong. Because of the size of the market very little reaches the printed page, so one of the objectives of recent bibliographical work has been to identify and locate manuscript scores which can be borrowed or copied. With the aid of the xerox machine a trade in manuscript copies has developed and is likely to continue to flourish in the foreseeable future.

The National Library maintains as a card file the National Union Catalogue of Music Scores, which includes published and a few unpublished New Zealand scores. Sound recordings of music are covered (but not completely) by the Australasian Performing Rights Association's Recorded Compositions by New Zealand Composers (1965), by Peter Merz's Tocography of music by New Zealand Composers' published in Studies in Music in 1974, and the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand's annual Complete New Zealand Record and Cassette Catalogue which lists all currently available records issued by the major distributors (New Zealand works are a minor component). Although the compulsory deposit legislation does not cover sound recordings they are listed in the current National Bibliography.

The papers of musicians and the archives of musical organisations, few in number to date, are listed in the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts. Research materials being added to the Archive of New Zealand Music at the Alexander Turnbull Library are notified regularly to scholars by a selective list of acquisitions published in Crescendo. Theses on New Zealand music are included in the Union List of Theses ... and reported to the Register of theses on musical subjects accepted ... at New Zealand Universities' published since 1967 in Studies in Music (University of Western Australia). New Zealand entries are regularly submitted to the RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.

A Bibliography of Writings about New Zealand Music and Musicians, compiled by Ross Harvey, is scheduled for publication by Victoria University Press in 1985.

Music collections in New Zealand are listed in volume 4 of Rita page 19 Benton's Directory of Music Research Libraries (1979), and Dorothy Freed has compiled a Directory of New Zealand Musical Organisations published by the National Music Council in 1983. Nevertheless, for any serious research in New Zealand music the card indexes in the Auckland Public Library, the Alexander Turnbull Library, the University of Canterbury Music Department and the Hocken Library are essential. The unpublished bibliographies on musical subjects compiled by students at the New Zealand Library School are in several instances the only bibliographical work in the field.