The harmonic series

YOU HUM IT AND I’LL PLAY IT: Multi-instrumentalist Hemi Porou plays a few chords during the interview. Picture by Liam Clayton

Hemi Porou is a familiar face outside Countdown where he regularly busks but if anyone marches to the beat of his own drum, guitar, double bass, euphonium, bagpipes, it is the Gisborne multi-instrumentalist. Hemi talks to Mark Peters about the physics of brass, the harmonic series and the people’s instrument.

When the Gisborne Choral Society and Civic Orchestra members needed a double bass player for their performance of Beethoven’s Mass in C Major last year, the call went out for Hemi Porou.

He was easy enough to find. Hemi busks regularly by the Countdown entrance which is where he was collared for the role.

His own double-bass was in bits, he said. The choral society’s musical director Gavin Maclean managed to borrow one but the problem was it had never before been bowed, says Hemi. Only plucked.

“But it responded and did the job.”

A bigger challenge was afoot though. He had only the dress rehearsal to get up to speed with the Baroque genius’s difficult composition.

“I had the music but never saw it until the dress rehearsal. Luckily, I sight read. I spent more time getting the clothes together, and the black tie that disappeared into my beard.”

Hemi is probably best known to most people as the about-town singer-guitarist. In fact, he is a multi-instrumentalist who plays a range of music. Baroque, classical, jazz, reggae, rock — Hemi sails across all of them. There are no genres, he says. There are only eight notes and two of them are the same.

His usefulness to choir, orchestral, jazz and rock groups made him the musical town bicycle, he says.

“I don’t call myself a specific instrumentalist, just a musician. Right now I call myself a busker. I don’t see the need for any other term. I like the image and I like the freedom of it. It’s viable.”

Hemi took to music as a Kaiti School student when a children’s Out of Schools Music group performed at the school. Prior to that he had no involvement in music, no particular passion for it.

“I saw a clarinet player and thought ‘that’s what I want to do’. Luckily, the neighbours had a clarinet. Mum sought out lessons for me.”

Hemi found he didn’t enjoy the formality of learning music though. He preferred to learn by ear; his love affair with the clarinet didn’t last. He took to guitar-playing in the playground “like everyone else”.

“That was a wholesome way to learn. For a short time I was totally free but in 1993, when I was 10, I started learning electric bass and that required me to read music.”

Reading music for bass meant he couldn’t read treble clef, the range of notes above middle C. He was stuck on bass clef until he was 15 which is when he discovered another instrument to learn, he says.

City of Gisborne Pipe Band major David Andrew, who taught art at Gisborne Boys’ High School, ran lunchtime bagpipe classes.

“I had an admiration for bagpipes. The opportunity to learn them came up so I took it. That’s how I do things.”

Hemi’s multi-instrumental ability is illustrated, literally, in two of the late Graeme Mudge’s murals. The musician appears on the riverside wall of the City of Gisborne Pipe Band’s room in Palmerston Road and on The Band Room wall in Childers Road.

Learning treble clef notation made brass playing possible. Hemi’s interest in the trumpet didn’t begin with lunchtime lessons at school though. It began with physics which was taught by science teachers Fraser Grout and Peter Derby.

“I was in physics and took the problem ‘how does a brass instrument work?’ to Mr Grout and Mr Derby. We drew a chart of how the brass works, of the harmonic series.”

A harmonic series is the sequence of sounds, pure tones, represented by waves. These mathematical curves are known as sinusoids.

“I was interested in the scientific explanation and in learning brass. The harmonic series applies to all instruments. To play brass you need a lot of harmonics. With guitar you can get by with one.”

The first brass instrument Hemi took up was the euphonium, a large, baritone-voiced brass instrument that looks a bit like the tuba, except the tuba has a larger tube diameter and has a lower pitch than the euphonium which derives its name from the Ancient Greek word for “sweet-voiced”.

In his 20s, Hemi got more into contemporary music.

“Anything that’s not formal music I call contemporary music.”

Singing is an inherent ability “in a sing-along way” that makes everyone a potential instrument, says Hemi, but it comes with side-effects.

“Since changing my breathing and singing technique I don’t get sick.”

Once again, learning to sing did not spring from a drive to do it but out of a kind of Hobson’s choice.

“At Ilminster I was given the choice as to whether I wanted to go swimming or join a choir. I didn’t want to swim, or join a choir, but singing was easier than swimming.

“Our syndicate teacher, the late Heather Hata gave me a solo part as the Trojan priest Laocoön. To this day I can’t swim, but I can sing — so maybe I could holler for help.”

Along with the busking Hemi gets the occasional paid gig but not often. He used to play bass with the Irish Rover Band but most appearances are voluntary. At the Te Ha Art Awards in 2016 Hemi accompanied on harpsichord singer Madeleine Jones as they performed Handel’s Ombra mai fu, from Serse, and V’adoro pupille, from Giulio Cesare, also by Handel.

Then, with only one day to rehearse the double bass part for Beethoven’s bloody difficult Mass in C Major, he seemed to have even more of a handle on it than on the Handel.

Because baroque music often comes with a lot of counterpoint — notation that is harmonically interdependent while independent in rhythm — the challenge is to decide whether to go with other musicians or against them, says Hemi. That is, follow what you hear or follow what is written.

“You can hear something and you think you might be late but you’re not — you’re hearing something else. You have to guess whether to go with people or against them. I can see what’s meant to happen from my instructions but with the instrument there is no point in time. You have to hear and ignore it.”

If a fresh trumpet or soprano had been introduced the day before the concert, the performance could have been all over the place. The bass is really good at fixing things, says Hemi. Everyone else can ride on top of it.

“It stabilises everything. You’d be top heavy without it. It works from the bottom up. It’s the same for reggae and everything else. The essential-ness is bass but it’s a bit subliminal. You can feel it before you hear it.

“Whatever I learned about music I put it into busking. After all the instruments I’ve played I’ve gone back to the guitar, the people’s instrument.”