Composer Salina Fisher combines traditional sounds with an orchestra.
I think I have made Salina Fisher blush. I can’t be absolutely certain, because a glitching internet connection means our Zoom conversation is being conducted by audio only, but I have just put it to Fisher that, aged 29, many consider her to be New Zealand’s most important living composer.
“What?!” she says. “That’s a really strange thing to hear.” Fisher’s right, of course, but then so too are those who have showered award after award upon her. A two-time winner of the Todd Young Composers Award (2013, 2014), in 2016 she became the youngest ever winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, our top composition prize. She won again the following year, and should have but didn’t get another for her piano trio Kintsugi. A Fulbright scholarship took her to the Manhattan School of Music, where she claimed the Carl Kanter Prize for the year’s best orchestral composition.
A more reliable indicator of quality, though, is that Fisher’s work is performed constantly all over the world, even though she’s never pursued an international profile.
“I’ve been really lucky that people have wanted to play my music,” says Fisher, who as well as being lucky is also overwhelmingly gifted. “I’m continually amazed when it gets programmed, especially overseas.”
Fisher’s latest, Papatūānuku for Taonga Puoro and Orchestra (“I don’t want to call it a concerto”), gets its premiere closer to home on August 24, during the APO’s In the Elements concert.
Papatūānuku is a collaboration with traditional instrument expert and good friend Jerome Kavanagh. Fisher says it was important to centre the work on Kavanagh’s instruments, rather than writing an orchestral piece then crowbarring in the taonga puoro.
“I recorded Jerome’s puoro and then transcribed them, to understand the pitches and rhythms, inflections and ornamentations he uses,” Fisher explains. “From there I orchestrated around his instruments in a way that supports the puoro and feels natural and, hopefully, nurturing. Jerome is composing and improvising his part, but to write notated music around a non-notated form of music is an interesting challenge.”
Papatūānuku is the third major work featuring taonga puoro with orchestral instruments to appear in this column in 2023. Is this coming together the current direction of New Zealand’s classical music language?
“The movement to revive these traditions plays a crucial role in New Zealand music; these indigenous instruments are unique to this land, and were almost lost forever due to colonisation,” Fisher says.
“I’m drawn to taonga puoro for many reasons including their beautiful sounds and profound connection with the natural world, but at the heart of each collaboration is a deep friendship, and a desire to listen and learn.”
Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, In the Elements, Auckland Town Hall, August 24
First published in The New Zealand Listener, August 19-25, 2023
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