Jenny McLeod ONZM is “one of the most naturally gifted of all New Zealand composers” according to her SOUNZ profile. This interview marked her 80th birthday. Jenny McLeod died in November 2022 aged 81.
Jenny McLeod Photo: SOUNZ - Supplied by composer
Jenny could read music by the age of five, and says that her first composition came to her in a dream. When she awoke, she wrote it down – only to discover that Handel had already written it! (It turned out to be a piece in a piano book of her mother’s that she’d played through sometime earlier.)
After studies at Victoria University of Wellington with Douglas Lilburn and others, Jenny went on to study with three of the great figures of mid-20th century modernism: Messiaen, Boulez and Stockhausen. Jenny returned to New Zealand and lectured at Wellington, becoming Professor at Victoria University at the age of just 29. Jenny left that role a few years later to pursue her interest in spiritual matters.
“For a long time I thought I had to choose between music and God. I thought they were different from each other. What happened eventually was I realized my practicing music – writing of music – was just my way of getting deeper into what you might call divine.”
Jenny’s music has varied from the radical avant-garde through to incorporating rock music styles – and not forgetting a musical/theatrical “happening” Earth and Sky, based on Māori creation poetry.
So what is Jenny McLeod most concerned with in music? What does she most want to express?
“Something authentic. There’s such danger in working with music and writing music. The danger is that we fall into cliché; that we use something that’s just exhausted – worn out. And then the music, whatever we produce is useless – just in the way. With most kinds of music, or most creativity, I would say maybe 95 percent of it is not all that great, and five percent of it is really good. And that’s the bit I want to belong to, and I don’t want to do the other stuff. I don’t want to get ruined - I just want to be clean.”
