Category: Obituaries

Author and playwright Renée dies, aged 94

Neil

We at the library were deeply saddened to hear of the recent passing of Aotearoa author Renée, born in 1929 in Napier of Ngāti Kahungunu and Irish-English-Scots ancestry. After a hard start “she left school at twelve and worked in various jobs” before she found her true vocation in life as a writer, gaining a BA at the University of Auckland in 1979.

Much of her work championed the oppressed and the disenfranchised; humanising working-class people and often having women in leading roles. She wrote over twenty highly acclaimed plays and published many fiction works including The Wild Card, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards.

Her last book, “one of her recent forays into the crime genre,” was Blood Matters, published in 2022.

She documented her own amazing life in her autobiography These Two Hands.

She was a driven author, writing and creating work well into her nineties and beyond, and was as passionate about the things that interested her in those later years as ever.

She has described herself as a ‘lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideas’ and expressed these convictions strongly and clearly in many of her powerful works.

We at the library were proud, honoured and privileged to do several library events with Renée, some of the recordings of which can be viewed on the library YouTube channel. You can find an extensive range of her wonderful work in our library collection.

We wish to extend our deepest sympathies to her family at this time.

In Memoriam: Sir Jon Trimmer (1939-2023)

Corrina
Book cover showing Jon Trimmer mid jump, on a background of a theatre stage.

Sir Jon Trimmer who died on 26 October 2023, was a figure who has been almost synonymous with the Royal New Zealand Ballet for decades. During a professional career that spanned nearly sixty years, Trimmer illuminated stages the length and breadth of the country; his performances in a wide variety of classical, contemporary, and character roles were always unforgettable. His MBE for services to ballet in 1974, and his knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 1999, recognised these achievements. While some dancers may have attracted more star-studded international glory, few can claim such longevity, or be held in such deep affection, as Trimmer. This blog offers a tribute to a great dancer and true man of the theatre who was also a good friend to Wellington City Libraries: when sharing his Stories from the Ballet with our branches he not only brought to life the plots and characters of several ballets, but he also introduced the audience to the significance of gesture and mime as the means of storytelling. Because of his inimitable ability to educate and entertain any age group, Trimmer’s Stories from the Ballet are still remembered vividly by library staff and their children and grandchildren.

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In Remembrance of William Friedkin

Sam

william friedkin exorcism GIF by gifnews

Image via Giphy

William Friedkin, an American film director with a prolific career that spanned several decades, sadly passed away last week at the age of 87. Having been closely aligned with the ‘New Hollywood’ movement of the 1970’s, his formative work included direction of an episode of the anthology series ‘The Alfred Hithcock Hour’ in 1965. He found initial success with the 1971 neo-noir action/thriller ‘The French Connection’, which went on to win 5 Academy Awards. He then directed his most famous film ‘The Exorcist’ in 1973, which has gone down in history as one of the most iconic and influential horror films of all time. Over the next few decades, he made several further films within a variety of genres that received varying levels of critical and commercial success. Check out some of his works from within our catalogue below.

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Cormac McCarthy, a leading literary figure, has passed

Neil

The American author Cormac McCarthy passed recently. He was widely recognised as one of the finest writers of his generation. He wrote twelve novels, five screenplays, two plays, and short stories. His body of work was widely acclaimed both in his home country and internationally, with his 2006 apocalyptical novel The Road “simultaneously harrowing, bleak, powerful and humane” winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. One reviewer even described it as the best book on parenting ever written! Just before his death and sixteen years after his previous novel, he released two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, almost back-to-back. Both are superb examples of his writing. Many of his works were adapted for the screen such as No Country for Old Men which won four Oscars. All the Pretty Horses, Child of God and The Road were also made into notable movies.

It is very difficult to pigeonhole his whole body of work, but he did write books that can in places be described as southern gothic, post-modern westerns, and sometimes with overt apocalyptical overtones. His books are superbly written using sparse attribution and punctuation and often employ graphic descriptions of violence.

He was also a member of American Philosophical Society and even wrote a paper on the nature of human unconscious and the origin of language. He kept his political opinions private, and his books can be interpreted in many ways. One hint as to his political leanings was his secret plan to reintroduce wolves into southern Arizona. He was a deeply private writer who rarely gave interviews or attended public events.

No country for old men / McCarthy, Cormac
“A harrowing novel set in the American West, now an Academy Award winning film starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

 

 

All the pretty horses / McCarthy, Cormac
“John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood. “All the Pretty Horses” is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and a vanished American age. Steeped in the wisdom that comes only from loss, it is a magnificent parable of responsibility, revenge and survival.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Child of God / McCarthy, Cormac
“‘McCarthy is a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters’ Village Voice” (Adapted from Catalogue)

 

 

 

The road / McCarthy, Cormac
“Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, The Road tells the story of a father and son as they journey across a post-apocalyptic landscape that has destroyed most of civilization.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

 

The passenger / McCarthy, Cormac
“Pass Christian, Mississippi, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit–by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, an inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

Stella Maris / McCarthy, Cormac
“Black River Falls, Wisconsin, 1972: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

Blood meridian, or, The evening redness in the West / McCarthy, Cormac
“Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, “the kid,” a boy of fourteen.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

 

 

Suttree / McCarthy, Cormac
“‘Suttree contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’ Times Literary Supplement” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Nobel prize-winning author Kenzaburō Ōe has passed

Neil

The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.

One of the giants of Japanese literature, Kenzaburō Ōe, died recently. His writing dealt with a wide range of ‘big question’ subjects — both on a personal and on a wider societal level. He wrote on subjects such as nuclear disarmament, militarism, and also his disabled son, who in later life became a musical prodigy and an award-winning composer. He said of his son “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son.”

Much of his work had its origins in his own life, such as The silent cry, which is about the impact of war on post-war Japanese society and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. His novel A Quiet Life is loosely about his relationship with his son .

Born in 1935 as the fifth of seven children into an age where the emperor was still regarded as a living god, he lived through the second World War, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent post-war collapse in Japanese society and its economy. In the 1960s, he became more political and was a highly acclaimed cult writer for Japan’s post-war youth. He continued writing late into his seventies, railing against any revival of  Japanese nationalism, nuclear power and war.

Henry Miller once said that in his “range of hope and despair” he was like Dostoevsky. Several critics said of him that, like Faulkner, he created a language of his own.

We have a wide range of his works available in both English and Japanese:

Browse works by Kenzaburō Ōe


Rouse up o young men of the new age / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. K’s wife confronts him with the information that this child, Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things — behaving aggressively, asserting that he’s dead, even brandishing a knife at his mother — and K, given to retreating from reality into abstraction, looks for answers in his lifelong love of William Blake’s poetry. As K struggles to understand his family and assess his responsibilities within it, he must also reevaluate himself — his relationship with his own father, the political stances he has taken, the duty of artists and writers in society. ” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Somersault / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“Kenzaburo Oe is internationally recognized as one of the world’s finest writers. When he won the Nobel Prize nearly ten years ago, he announced that he would no longer be writing fiction–or, if he did, that his future work would be radically different from the highly autobiographical fiction he was known for. Now, with Somersault, Oe has broken his silence and shared with us the result of his artistic reorientation, in a magnificent story of the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Death by water / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“[Kogito Choko] returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase rumored to hold documents revealing the details of his father’s death during World War II, details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel. Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father’s fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm…” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Hiroshima notes / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“Hiroshima Notes is a powerful statement on the Hiroshima bombing and its terrible legacy by the 1994 Nobel laureate for literature. Oe’s account of the lives of the many victims of Hiroshima and the valiant efforts of those who cared for them, both immediately after the atomic blast and in the years that follow, reveals the horrific extent of the devastation. It is a heartrending portrait of a ravaged city — the “human face” in the midst of nuclear destruction.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

A quiet life / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“A Quiet Life is narrated by Ma-Chan, a young woman who at the age of twenty finds herself in an unusual family situation. Her father is a famous and fascinating novelist; her older brother, though mentally handicapped, possesses an almost magical gift for musical composition. The lives of both father and son revolve around their work and each other, and her mother’s life is devoted to the care of them both. She and her younger brother find themselves emotionally on the outside of this oddly constructed nuclear family. But when her father leaves Japan to accept a visiting professorship from a distinguished American university, Ma-Chan finds herself suddenly the head of the household and the center of family relationships that she must begin to redefine.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

The silent cry / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“The Silent Cry traces the uneasy relationship between two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested western Japan. While one brother tries to sort out the after-effects of a friend’s suicide and the birth of a retarded son, the other embarks on a quixoticmission to incite an uprising among the local youth. Oe’s description of this brother’s messianic struggle to save a disintegrating local culture and economy from the depredations of a Korean wheeler-dealer called “The Emperor of the Supermarkets” is as chillingly pertinent today as it was when first published in 1967. ” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Nip the buds, shoot the kids / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of 15 teenage reformatory boys evacuated in wartime to a remote mountain village where they are feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, the villagers flee, blocking the boys inside the deserted town. Their brief attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love, and tribal valour is doomed in the face of death and the adult nightmare of war.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Teach us to outgrow our madness : four short novels / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“Four stories which offer insights into Japanese society are contained in this work by the winner of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature. The title story is a semi-autobiographical account of a father coming to terms with his brain-damaged son.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

The Music and Poetry of Jenny McLeod

Corrina

On 28 November 2022, Aotearoa lost one of its most ingenious and original composers, Jenny McLeod. While it is impossible to do justice to the scope of her creative achievements in this post, tributes by Elizabeth Kerr, Keith McEwing, and SOUNZ  offer fuller portraits of McLeod’s life and work. You can also hear  McLeod speaking about her work in her poetic 2016 Lilburn Lecture, and in an interview on the occasion of her eightieth birthday.

McLeod’s command of the craft of composing became evident in one of her early orchestral works, the Little Symphony of 1963. Written partly in response to hearing Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, McLeod’s piece demonstrates her awareness of twentieth-styles, hinting at Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Bartok, and others. However, the piece is entirely original in its construction and expression. The Little Symphony also exemplifies McLeod’s command of counterpoint and deft hand at orchestration, all of which belie the fact that she was just in the third year of a Bachelor of Music degree when she composed the piece.

From that point on, McLeod’s music encompassed a great array of genres, some requiring gigantic forces with significant community involvement: her Earth and Sky (1968) is a multimedia work involving multiple choirs, a large orchestra, dancers, children, and recorded narration. Similarly, Under the Sun (1970), composed to mark the centenary of Palmerston North included required four orchestras, adults’ and children’s choirs, a five-person rock combo, projected paintings by children from local schools, and the dance participation of the audience.  In complete contrast to these massive, cross-genre works are McLeod’s chamber and solo pieces, including the song cycles Under Southern Skies for mezzo-soprano and piano, and Peaks of Cloud for tenor and piano, and of course, the twenty-four Tone Clock Pieces for solo piano.

Wellington City Library’s classical music collections hold a variety of McLeod’s compositions, as well as her poetry. In this post, we offer a selection of this material, encompassing a variety of repertoire that demonstrates the inimitable craft, innovation, and beauty of her music.

https://www.atoll.co.nz/album.php?acd=223 Portrait with piano / McLeod, Jennifer Helen
A collection of fine music for solo piano and ensembles by Jenny McLeod, this 2021 release from Atoll Records includes performances by several outstanding New Zealand musicians, including pianists Rae de Lisle, Sarah Watkins, and Stephen De Pledge, percussionist Eric Renick, and violinist Andrew Beer. The repertoire spans five decades of McLeod’s creative life, from the exceptional Piano Piece, composed in 1965 while she was studying with Olivier Messiaen in Paris, to the Seascapes for Trio, arrangements of Tone Clock piece VIII and Tone Clock piece XI dating from 2015. The quality of the music and the performances is exceptional throughout, making for a bold and nuanced Portrait with Piano

The emperor and the nightingale / McLeod, Jennifer Helen
The Emperor and the Nightingale is a work for orchestra and narrator, bringing to life Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the same name. The work was commissioned by the Wellington Regional Orchestra (now Orchestra Wellington) for performance at the 1986 International Festival of the Arts in Wellington. In this recording by the NZSO, Helen Medlyn provides a memorable narration of the tale. Pianist Eugene Abulescu performs the Rock Concerto, an arrangement of McLeod’s 1985 Rock Sonata. In the composer’s own words, the Concerto is ‘strongly impelled by the spirit of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Liszt, Debussy, Gershwin …’ who are the ‘distant friends’ alluded to in the first movement of the piece. The central movement of the Concerto, ‘Elegy for Charlie French’ is both tender and austere, before the ‘Latino romp’ of the finale.  This recording is a landmark for New Zealand music and merits a larger audience.

Image reproduced by permission of Rattle Records. https://rattle.co.nz/catalogue/releases/24-tone-clocks24 tone clocks / McLeod, Jennifer Helen
Dierdre Irons and Michael Houstoun perform all twenty-four of the Tone Clock Pieces in this monument to three decades of McLeod’s work and her fascination with Peter Schat’s theory of chromatic harmony that she discovered in the late 1980s. The performances by Irons and Houstoun are nuanced and pellucid, demonstrating both musicians’ longstanding connections with these pieces. As such, this 2016 release from Rattle Records is also an invaluable testament to the artistry of two of New Zealand’s outstanding pianists.

Mutterings from a spiry crag / McLeod, Jennifer Helen
A poet of words as well as of tones, McLeod’s first collected work of poetry, explores the local landscape around her home in Pukerua Bay and comments on international crises. As with McLeod’s music, the  Mutterings from a Spiry Crag the themes are eclectic, witty, expressive, and cerebral. This book is part of the New Zealand reference collection and is not available for loan, but you can access it by contacting Heritage Queries.

 

Talking music : conversations with New Zealand musicians / Shieff, Sarah
In this book, Sarah Shieff has interviewed more than a dozen leading figures in New Zealand classical music to assemble a series of fascinating biographical essays, including a profile of Jenny McLeod.  The reflections of McLeod and her peers on their training and careers offer fascinating personal perspectives on performing and composing. We also read candid accounts of how these artists’ dedication to music has shaped their personal and professional lives in different ways. Shieff’s Talking Music is an engaging, thought-provoking historical record of significant lives in New Zealand music. This book is part of the New Zealand reference collection and is not available for loan, but you can access it by contacting Heritage Queries.

Image from source http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/ B0000E2RL3/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21 and replace B000XXXXXXX with the ISBN10 or ASIN number from the item information on Amazon.New Zealand women composers  
Composer and conductor Odaline de la Martinez directs the British ensemble Lontano in performances of music by four New Zealand women, Dorothy Ker, Gillian Whitehead, Annea Lockwood, and Jenny McLeod. McLeod’s For Seven (1966) dates from her time in Cologne studying with Stockhausen, and the composer described it to Elizabeth Ker as her “high European effort” devised mathematically and structured around patterns of accelerandi and ritardandi. Scored for flute, clarinet, vibraphone/marimba, piano, violin, viola, and cello, Four Seven received its premiere in 1966, before further performances in Darmstadt and Berlin. There was no New Zealand premiere until 1992, but the piece has subsequently been performed and recorded by Stroma. This album demonstrates not only the quality of McLeod’s composition but also the rich talent of New Zealand’s composing women.