Puhake ki te rangi
(cd & dvd set)
Gillian Whitehead

"In 1989, I heard for the first time, in a presentation given by Richard Nunns, the sounds of the taonga puoro (singing treasures), which spoke to me very strongly of the spirituality of my Maori heritage. I began working with these instruments several years later, and I have found myself drawn to explore in my own language the world of sound that might have surrounded pre-European Maori. Though the function of the instruments was of course very different in that world, I have tried to use them in a way that does relate to their traditional use."

Gillian Whitehead

"Whitehead's scores evoke times when our bush and forest must have seemed like the Garden of Eden, while Richard Nunn's taonga puoro set them in a mysterious landscape, with lilting birdcalls to something altogether wilder.

In a word, indispensable."

William Dart, NZ Herald.

"This is Whitehead at her most dramatically powerful, tempting one to draw analogies with Mexico's Aztec Renaissance and the innovative Carlos Chavez in the 1930s and 1940s. He gave the movement its strongest musical force by integrating ancestral values of pre-Columbian Aztec music with western modernism...This is exactlly what Whitehead parallels with this pioneering CD and DVD in what we can safely call a Maori Renaissance."

Ian Dando, NZ Listener.