There’s something musty about fundraising ‒ the ghosts of New Zealand past. A meat raffle, a forlorn box of chocolate bars left melting on the staffroom bench, a kid at the door with biscuits in the hand and embarrassment in the eyes.
Leilani Aaron Woodmore took a different route: she won the Waiata Tira category of Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand’s national choral composing competition, Compose Aotearoa, with He mele a ka Ikaika, a musical setting of words in te reo Māori and Hawaiian. Not bad for a 16-year-old.
The $2000 prize is welcome. Woodmore has music fees to pay and a forthcoming tour by the NZ Secondary Students Choir, of which she is a member.
“We don’t get a lot of sponsorship,” says Woodmore’s mum, Rebecca, a former chorister and the daughter of one. “It’s an opportunity that’s so worth doing, so we find a way to make it work. You pray and it comes about in ways you weren’t expecting.”
Woodmore wasn’t expecting to win a national composition contest, or to receive the cash that went with it. The Year 12 student just wanted someone else’s opinion about whether He mele a ka Ikaika was any good.
“I hadn’t set te reo text before,” she says, “I was excited about getting feedback on my composition. To find out I won – I’m still trying to process it, it’s really weird.”
The judges didn’t think so; instead, they praised the work’s assured writing.
“There were some really beautiful tone colours created through the combination of the harmonies and language sounds,” says Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand’s Lee Martelli-Wood, also noting that the judges liked the interesting cross rhythms.
Woodmore is pleased with the interplay of rhythms, too, which come from male voices chanting in Hawaiian – Woodmore has whakapapa to Hawaii through her father – and females singing in te reo Māori.
“There’s a rhythmic disconnect between the two parts, which gives an idea of floating. The te reo signifies light shining over everything.”
Despite a musical background – choral singer from age 6, pianist from 10 – Woodmore has little formal training as a composer, and much of what she knows about music theory she’s picked up from her piano teacher.
What’s better, singing or composing?
“It’s not right to say it’s comparing apples to oranges but they’re different ways of expressing my musical self,” Woodmore says. “When I’m composing, I express my own musical ideas and musical self in its purest form, which is incredibly beautiful. But even more beautiful is the ability to share that musical world, and that comes in performance.”
