OPINION: Off to the side, someone calls, “Stop talking, start singing.” They’re addressing Melissa Lee, Minister for Economic Development, and for Ethnic Communities, who is giving a speech. I can only agree.
We’re in Spark Arena, where more than 10,000 people have gathered for the opening ceremony of the World Choir Games (WCG), the result of four years’ work to bring 11,000 singers from 42 countries to Auckland for the world’s biggest competitive choir competition.
It’s appropriate and important that a government minister is here. WCG is a serious event, the biggest on the international choral calendar, and a 10-day celebration of the possibilities of the human voice and the power of music to bring people together.
If nothing else, the number of camera crews lining the arena attests to WCG’s significance; this is an opportunity to show the world what we can do at a major event won by Auckland ahead of Lisbon and an opera-house-wielding Sydney. Additionally, there’s public money involved. Of the games’ $11m budget, central government, via MBIE, contributed $7m.
The occasion, then, demands government presence. That it’s Lee, the Minister for Economic Development, rather than Paul Goldsmith, the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, is instructive. In Aotearoa, events like these get over the line by playing up the economic benefits.
As much has been said about the $10m in GDP and 67,000 visitor nights the games will generate as the fact that some of the world’s best singers are here. A ministerial statement proclaiming ‘World Choir Games to boost Auckland economy’ sits on the Beehive website. That’s exactly where it should be.
Where it shouldn’t be is in a speech to an arena packed with excited, jetlagged, increasingly fidgety singers. Lee is a confident public speaker, but she barely mentioned music. She mentioned sport plenty of times, though, and her words could have come straight from her ministry’s home page – does a chorister from Asia, Africa or Europe need to know about our solid future-events pipeline?
Would a Uruguayan second alto care about the sailing? Lee did correctly point out that the World Choir Games represents the government’s biggest investment in a single arts event. She didn’t say it was the previous government’s initiative. Perhaps she decided her opportunity was better used by urging people to spend their money here, and then telling them New Zealand has some rugby coming up.
It would have been easy not to do this. Speeches are part of the deal at opening ceremonies, and thankfully other dignitaries got it right. Games president Günter Titsch’s honest attempts at Māori pronunciation were warmly received. Auckland deputy mayor Desley Simpson, who’s leading a council choir at the games and is a long-time supporter of the arts, was classy and appropriate, and praised all the right people. Games director John Rosser stepped from the conductor’s position – where he’d just led his own Viva Voce choir – to the speaker’s lectern, clearly and delightfully high on the adrenaline.
The ceremony, choreographed by World of Wearable Art director Malia Johnston and designed by Rowan Pierce, was appropriately musical. Don McGlashan and Hana Mereraiha’s official song, Te taukaea tangata – Breathing in, breathing out, was accompanied by images of Aotearoa New Zealand, while Eden Mulholland’s composed score was unabashedly epic. But it was the more nuanced choral music and, in particular, the Pasifika and kapa haka elements, plus a welcome from representatives of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, that caused national pride to swell.
These are things that make our country unique. To see and hear the appreciation of people from all over the world (9000 of the 11,000 participants travelled from overseas), most of them with no context for South Pacific culture, makes you realise and lament how rarely we express collective pride in our country’s artistic achievements on this scale.
The music – and there was plenty of it – was rousing, of course. How could it not be? There were thousands upon thousands of trained voices in the building. This night of all nights was the time to play to that perfectly pitched crowd.
The World Choir Games is on at various venues around Auckland until Saturday July 20. www.wcg2024.co.nz
