Juliet Palmer was born on the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand in 1967. She completed a performance degree in clarinet and a Master’s in composition at Auckland University. In 1990, Palmer moved to New York to work with composer-performer Meredith Monk. She completed her PhD at Princeton University in 1999. Palmer’s teachers and mentors include Louis Andriessen, Jack Body, Michael Gordon, Brian Ferneyhough, Paul Lansky, Annea Lockwood, Steve Mackey and Julia Wolfe. Palmer moved to Canada in 1998. Palmer’s music has been performed around the world by renowned artists. She uses diverse media and her compositions range from chamber music to multimedia installations, dance, music theatre, opera and symphonic works. Palmer is also a member of the interdisciplinary collective urbanvessel, a company-in-residence at Toronto’s Theatre Centre.

Programme Note, W is for

I grew up performing Maori action songs without understanding the words, watched the British 'Black and White Minstrel Show' on television knowing nothing of slavery, played Debussy's 'Golliwog's Cakewalk' having never heard ragtime, and learnt to speak French through the songs of Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. All this while living in New Zealand.

Recently my curiosity was sparked as to the origins of those Maori action songs — a hybrid form combining traditional movements, borrowed Western melodies and Maori lyrics. It seems that I owe my encounter with them to an enthusiastic physical education specialist in the late 1940's who introduced them into the public school system along with Maori children's games, noting that they were 'exceedingly good for the body of the pakeha' (non-Maori).

W is for is my response to that early time spent dancing and singing in a language which we were never taught to speak. The text is an excerpt from a Maori-English dictionary. It begins at waka (canoe) and passes through wakainga (true home, far distant home) and warawara (yearning), arriving finally at wareware — forget, forgotten, forgetful. The final line comes from the Belgian singer Jacques Brel’s ballad ‘On n’oublie rien’ — you forget nothing.

Credits: Juliet Kiri Palmer
Creator: Juliet Kiri Palmer
Subject: W is for
Date Created: 1999

Interview, Palmer’s Cultural Influences: New Zealand to Canada

“My musical influences are wide-ranging: what holds it all together is a dedication to playfulness. Particularly New Zealand qualities of my music might encompass a love of the voice and a clear desire to communicate through song. A sense of music in the body, felt as much through your feet as your ears. A respect for music as ritual. A desire for simplicity and clarity.” – J.P.

Palmer only began to use cultural elements of her New Zealand heritage once she moved to Canada. “I needed the geographical distance,” she explains, “to be able to approach traditional Maori musical forms and create my own response to them.” W is for, the composition featured here, was the first work in which she deliberately explores aspects of this culture.

Unique to New Zealand culture are the Maori vocal forms of recitative and ornamentation. Influences found in W is for include call-and-response structures of church music; songs and dances of the Maori people she experienced growing up; action songs (which Palmer describes as “a hybrid form combining traditional movements, borrowed Western melodies and Maori lyrics”); vocal ornamentation of the pao, and vocal inflection and overlapping vocal lines of paatere songs composed by ‘slandered women’.

“I’m interested in music that isn’t what it seems to be,” Palmer says in the interview with Paul Steenhuisen (WholeNote magazine) included here. “We live in an age where geographic and temporal realities are constantly colliding. Those kinds of juxtaposition permeate my music… to me it seems inevitable.”

Credits: Dr. Mary Ingraham
Creator: Dr. Mary Ingraham
Subject: Juliet Kiri Palmer | W is for
Date Created: 2007

Photograph, Maori Group

Maori group photographed circa 1910. The unidentified woman in the foreground is performing a pukana. Men behind her (perform a haka?). Some hold firearms. Occasion, location, and photographer, unidentified.

Credits: Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, must be obtained before any re-use of this image; timeframe information: Part of McDonald, Marjorie Ingram, 1894?-1974 : Maori portraits and New Zealand scenes (PAColl-0477)
Creator: Unknown
Subject: New Zealand | Maori Group | Dance | Haka
Date Created: 1910

Magazine Article Excerpt, Composer2Composer

Steenhuisen: One consistent factor in your pieces in that they constantly look outside of themselves.

Palmer: Absolutely. For me to sit down and play a chord on the piano, starting at the beginning, and to go from there plucking pitches from some beautiful pure soundworld hovering around me... I don’t work like that. There will be something that strikes me in my everyday life.

Take the sound in Mother Hubbard. The computer part all comes from one little audio clip of the Quebec Summit protesters that I found on CNN’s website. The other sound is a burst of digital distortion which my computer added somewhere along the line. What pulled my ear to that particular clip was the incredible emotional depth in such a flattened sound. The sound quality is really wretched, but there’s this amazing sense of so many people gathered together to fight the huge machine of corporate globalization. Just the sounds of their voices and their drumming were incredibly moving.

More recently I wrote a piece for l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, and was sandwiched between Stravinsky’s The Firebird and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. I ended up writing a piece called Buzzard, a hideous-looking bird that doesn’t even sing. The music is completely scavenged from those two pieces.

Credits: Steenhuisen, Paul. Composer2Composer; WholeNote, Volume 9 #4, 2003. 26-7.
Creator: Paul Steenhuisen
Subject: Juliet Palmer
Date Created: 2003-12

• Magazine Article, W is for (PDF 1824 KB)
  

  This article written by composer Juliet Palmer for musicworks in Summer 2002 is a detailed description of influences on her composition W is for. The article includes illustrations and photographs depicting aspects of her native New Zealand culture, excerpts of poetry and Maori songs, and other inspirational ideas for the work. The article first provides background information on the musical elements in W is for, then provides a description of the composer’s growing interest in her cultural identity, how and what she researched in order to reflect her cultural heritage in this piece, and finally, specific elements of the final composition, including a copy of the text and a musical excerpt. An important feature of this article is the inclusion of a musical excerpt from the traditional pao of the Ngaati Tuuwharetoa tribe that served as the structural and melodic foundation of W is for.

  
  Credits: Palmer, Juliet. W is for; musicworks #83, 2002.
  Creator: Juliet Palmer
  Subject: W is for | New Zealand | Maori
  Date Created: 2002