Jenny McLeod: calling the tune
A review of Jenny McLeod: A Life in Music by Norman Meehan
Composer Jenny McLeod created Prosaic Notes from an Unwritten Journal in 2016 for the annual Lilburn Lecture, an event marking the late Douglas Lilburn’s birthday. In this whimsical verse account of her life and career, she asked, humorously, “Do I really have a ‘Voice’? Don’t ask me! To me I’m always me…”.
Writing a biography of one of this country’s most brilliant, inventive and unpredictable composers, Norman Meehan succeeds magnificently in capturing McLeod’s eloquent, witty and individual voice. She wrote throughout her life about her motivations and influences and was interviewed by numerous writers and scholars.
Meehan has supplemented this rich source material with study of her music and many conversations with McLeod between 2019 and her death last year. Weaving multiple threads together, he creates the vivid tapestry of her life in a substantial and insightful read.
By her 30th birthday in 1971, McLeod had taken the exceptional musical talents evident in her school years to studies at Victoria University, on to Europe for study with the biggest names in contemporary composition, Messiaen, Boulez and Stockhausen, back home for a teaching role at Victoria and, soon afterwards, appointment as Professor of Music. She’d already composed some of her most famous works, including her “high European effort”, For Seven, and the sensational large-scale community work, Earth and Sky.
In his biography, Norman Meehan has captured Jenny McLeod’s eloquent, witty and individual voice.
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press
In the first half-dozen chapters of his biography, Meehan covers McLeod’s action-packed early life brilliantly, drawing an engaging picture of her character. Her trust for her biographer is clear throughout the book. She shared with him her deepest, most spiritual thoughts and he honours her voice, quoting judiciously from sources and revealing her lovely chortling humour and lifelong mistrust of authority.
The section on the chamber work For Seven, which she composed while homesick in Cologne, demonstrates the biography’s accessible analysis of McLeod’s compositions combined with colourful accounts of her personal circumstances. Meehan writes about the work’s complex construction and inspiration, her own ambivalent attitudes, its European reception and New Zealand connections.
For Seven’s links with the very different Earth and Sky are shown in the following chapter, my favourite. In 1968, with palpable excitement, we, her admiring students, drove by van to the premiere in Masterton. Meehan captures Earth and Sky and its creation in stirring writing, including the visceral impact of the performance, the cultural dilemma later presented by McLeod’s use of Māori creation poetry and the resolution of that issue with the blessing of the Whanganui iwi.
McLeod’s controversial life choices in her 30’s are handled with sensitivity. Appointed youngest-ever Professor at Victoria University aged 29, she held the position for six turbulent years, a period involving suspicion of intellectual positions, challenging relationships, and a lot of drug use. Rock music became the soundtrack to her life. “Jenny’s search for meaning became a central preoccupation for her during the 1970’s,” writes Meehan.
In 1976, having encountered the philosophy of Guru Maharaj Ji, she joined the Divine Light Mission, resigning her professorship soon afterwards. For several years, the mission played a major role in her life as she did a “spiritual walkabout”, travelling extensively in the US. Eventually, increasingly unhappy with life with other devotees, she left. Meehan ends that chapter with McLeod’s self-deprecating humour. “I was having a wonderful, marvellous, idiotic time…if I was such a fool that I didn’t know all that, I needed to learn it,” she wrote.
The biography turns adroitly from this restless time to her more settled years, 40 of them, in the cottage at Pukerua Bay that became both her composing studio and beloved home with an ocean view. The story includes the people in her life, commissioners, musicians and friends, and the quantities of concert and film music that McLeod created there in the 1980’s and beyond. She achieved many successes, but some of it at a cost. Her rock-influenced language appealed to audiences but proved ultimately a creative dead-end. Facing despair and a major composing crisis, she needed a circuit breaker.
It came with an invitation to a contemporary music festival in Louisville, Kentucky, with a performance of For Seven, more than two decades after its European composition. There, McLeod met Dutch composer Peter Schat and his ‘Tone Clock’ theory, and a door opened to a creative approach that sustained her throughout the rest of her composing life. “The 24 Tone Clock pieces constitute my most personal, independent and intimate music,” she explained in her Lilburn lecture. Meehan’s detailed chapter on the Tone Clock and its links to her wider oeuvre is another highlight of the biography.
The final chapters of this beautifully constructed story include McLeod’s close relationships with and adoption by Ngāti Rangi, the devoutly Catholic Maungārongo whānau. Starting with her He Iwi Kotahi Tātou for the NZ Choral Federation’s Sing Aotearoa gathering in Ohakune and leading to her opera Hōhepa, this association also enabled her acceptance of herself as a composer and a sense of her craft as her faith.
A scene from New Zealand Opera’s production of Jenny McLeod’s opera Hōhepa
performed at the Opera House in Wellington, March 2012.
McLeod told me once “people looking from the outside probably think I’ve gone like a blinking zig-zag.” In a final Epilogue, Meehan uses her words to draw together the people, places and music of her life. “I arrive more or less back where I started but with an understanding that all is and was always well…ah, the cosmic braided river.”
Jenny McLeod: A Life in Music by Norman Meehan (Te Herenga Waka University Press) Purchase link here
This book review was first published in the NZ Listener, issue October 21, 2023.