As I’m leaving Rod Biss’s house, he points to a Christmas card from his friends Ben and Peter. The card is, at a guess, about 50 years old, not something you’d generally keep, except that Peter is the tenor Peter Pears, and Ben is Pears’ life partner, Benjamin Britten, England’s greatest composer of the last century.
Longtime Listener readers might know Rod Biss, too. He wrote this column for years. Fewer will know Biss as a central figure in New Zealand music publishing. In the 1970s with Peter Zwartz, he founded Price Milburn Music, which specialised in producing NZ compositions.
Fewer still will be aware of Rod Biss, composer. It’s hardly surprising; in close to 70 years – he turns 90 in October – Biss has published 10 works, and several of those were written in the late-1950s, around the time he was a student at Victoria University of Wellington, learning under Douglas Lilburn.
“We never became friends,” Biss says. “There was always a respectful distance, but I remember being in his flat on Tinakori Rd and him showing me the score to his second symphony.”
Biss mostly gave up composing in favour of music publishing, starting in the UK (“I had to earn money”), which is how he came to know Britten. Biss’s shelves are heaving with Britten scores, several of them with personal dedications scribbled inside.
There’s also a folio of musical sketches, clippings and ephemera relating to Biss’s Four New Zealand Bird Songs (2014), which the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra performs with soprano Rebecca Ryan next month. It was written as part tribute to the tara iti, or fairy tern, and part protest at a golf course being built at Te Arai, near Mangawhai, that further endanger one of our most endangered birds. “It upset me,” recalls Biss, a bird-lover since childhood. “So I got in touch with Denys Trussell, who is very concerned with the same sorts of things, and he got sparked up.”
An eco-poet before that job description existed, Trussell agreed to write words to Biss’s lament for the tara iti, and suggested expanding the work to four movements, including songs for the pūkeko and kārearea New Zealand falcon.
Biss didn’t stop the golf links being built – one of the two courses is called Tara Iti, which seems cheeky – but with Trussell he produced what Biss thinks is possibly his most successful piece, with a freedom absent in his earlier, tightly structured music. “I think the Bird Songs are good,” Biss says, “but I almost don’t remember the act of writing them. It was as though I picked them out of the air.”
Dunedin Symphony Orchestra: Bach and the Birds, August 3 and 4, King’s and Queen’s Performing Arts Centre, Dunedin.
