KEY POINTS:
It was the whale sighting that did it. "One afternoon I was on the beach in Rarotonga and this humpbacked whale jumped out of the water right in front of me, flipped on to its side and disappeared," says Auckland musician Dudley Benson. "I took that as a sign that I'd done the right thing."
At the time, Benson was on his way to attend the debut of the first piece of music he has composed for an international arts festival. The former Cantabrian, who has been described as "an indie, chamber-pop choirboy", was asked to compose a piece for Wassermusik, an international festival in Berlin, which would raise awareness of water as an increasingly rare commodity. And he ended up writing a song about whales.
But it had been a somewhat fraught process - as is only natural when you are on the other side of the world, recording your first album, preparing a national tour and composing a ditty for an international festival for the first time in your career, all at the same time.
"What they wanted was a perspective from someone in the Pacific," Benson says.
The festival featured more than 20 musicians from as far afield as Russia, Brazil and the United States and he was asked to join in after a chance meeting with German electronic-music artist Barbara Morgenstern during the AK07 festival last year.
Morgenstern, a fan of Benson's music, happened to be conducting the choir for July's Wassermusik festival.
Benson, whose choral, almost classical works with just a touch of pop sensibility have been described by enamoured reviewers as sophisticated, beguiling, compelling and eccentric, started off thinking he might work with some New Zealand poetry.
The temptation to make a grand, dramatic gesture was there. "Yes, that's what you would expect when you hear you are composing for a choir of 36 people in Berlin at an international festival," Benson says. "It would have been easy to get carried away and write something really biblical. But I got the feeling that other composers from other countries would be doing that. So I ended up doing something quite playful instead.
"Whales came into it because when I think about problems with the sea, whales were one of the first things I thought of. It also seemed like the sort of thing that was worth saying in an international forum."
Benson didn't know a lot about whaling but decided his opinion wasn't that important. "I felt like I understood both sides but the conclusion I came to was to celebrate them [the whales] while they are still here."
So, in the midst of everything else that was going on in his musical life at the time, Benson came up with a song about whales and emailed it away to the other side of the world. Occasionally, he would get progress reports from Morgenstern. And there was one minor problem - or maybe cultural misunderstanding might be a better description.
"Some of the choir members had a problem with the line `hop on board, I will give you a ride on my Nisshin Maru', which is really the whaling ship of the moment. Basically, they had a little problem with the irony," Benson says.
Benson and his partner arrived in Berlin just in time for the final rehearsal of the choir at the House of World Cultures. Later that week, it was performed alongside several more international choral compositions onstage to an audience of several hundred.
And rather unexpectedly, the whole experience wasn't quite as grand as one might have thought it could be. Turns out that contributing to international arts festivals is not necessarily a life-changing experience.
"It's easy to imagine how amazing this could all be from your tiny flat in New Zealand. And while the choir was competent and correct, I wasn't sure about their dynamic or warmth. What it did do, though, was make me profoundly aware of the enormous strength and capability we have in our own choir [the one Benson toured New Zealand with in April]. It was a great lesson and one that I think applies to the arts in general in New Zealand," Benson says, referring to the fact that New Zealanders are occasionally guilty of undervaluing their own abilities in the cultural arena.
In the end, Benson says the festival provided just the first outing for what is a rather adorable song about whales.
"When you write a piece of music it is never an inanimate object. It can be picked up at any time, by anyone, and shaken up," explains Benson, who hopes to arrange the piece to be used by New Zealand children's choirs. "I feel like, in the future, Whales will continue to do its job in other contexts."
