The video was directed and edited by John Chrisstoffels, who shot the stained glass windows and tile mosaics in Christchurch’s Anglican Cathedral.

Search our catalogue for music by The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience.

Find out more about  NZ Music Month at Christchurch City Libraries.

• Explore our music pages.
• Browse our profiles of Kiwi musicians.
• Search our catalogue for New Zealand music on CD and resources about New Zealand music.
• Discover Christchurch music on CD in our collection.

The Aotea Ladies’ Dish-Can Band, 1919.

• Our heritage images of music
• Our Flickr
• More local images on the blog
• Browse our image collection

Doris is a well-known designer and founder of the New Zealand Fashion Museum.

Journalist Josie McNaught chaired the session.

The big problem with black is it’s an ambiguous colour.

Doris talked about post-Treaty New Zealand, Queen Victoria in mourning, and the “interplay between dying and dyeing”. She showed an image of Victoria and her young family, six of the nine children dressed in black. But Prince Albert is in the photo too, so this puts paid to the idea that Victorian black was all about mourning her lost husband.

The Dyeing story is a fascinating one. When dyes were natural, a good dark black was difficult to achieve – and very expensive. Black was a “colour only affordable for the well-to-do”. It indicated status and wealth. Mauve was the first colour achieved with the new artificial dyes – it was years later that a good black was achieved.

Doris had great historical images to illustrate her point that black was “the colour of loss, also the colour of gain”. This applied to Maori as well as Pakeha. She showed how the traditional funeral practice of wearing garlands of leaves met the practice of wearing black.

Airini Tonore (Donnelly) was used as an example – Doris showed a photo of her in stunning, highly decorative black clothing.

In the 20th century, black was also seen as sensible or daring. It was a popular choice for the flappers of the 1920s, but also for hard working housewives.

After the late 40s and 50s though, it virtually disappeared. Hollywood and Elizabeth II both promoted a more optimistic colour palette. Easy care synthetic fabrics and washing machines helped too. Black retained its role as a colour of formal occasions and uniform. Doris pointed out how it is the colour of both traditional authority and its antithesis:

law, church, politics, business, beatnik, biker, rocker, punk, gang, the school uniform …

Doris looked at the black singlet as “shorthand for Kiwi blokeness” – Fred Dagg – but also the colour of our villains – Bruno Lawrence in Wild Horses, Jake the Muss, fetish wear in Angel Mine.

And the All Blacks? Doris says the New Zealand Natives rugby team who went on tour in 1888-9 were the first to wear black.

In the fashion arena, commentators on NZ designers have touted: “New Zealanders have a darker outlook, less showy offy and more intellectual”, and “edgy gothic sartorial wit”.

The session finished with a 2011 design by Shona Taiwhiao that brings together so many elements of black – loss, status, authority, haute couture, a sense of belonging, the fashionable and the sensible.

Some image of black in fashion from the Christchurch City Libraries collection:

• Read our posts from Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2012
• Go to our page on the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2012

Featured is a selection of Maori  music including haka, poetry and traditional  songs.

Alongside this the site features sounds  from every continent, showcasing important genres such as reggae, Bollywood, Arab swing jazz, neo-traditional and much more. You can find traditional genres like flamenco, klezmer, zydeco and fado,

I particularly enjoyed the search feature which gives options of instrument category or genre. Each categorey is divided into a huge number of sub-categories which contain something as regular as a drum, or something unexpected like a bowl, to more obscure items such as a mirliton.

The home page has a Featured section displays a view of sliding titles giving you the change to stumble upon something new. As well there is an advanced search feature and playlists created by users.

This site is a great addition to the library Source collection of databases. Its has an amazing variety of music if you are looking for something with a unique cultural sound. Browse and enjoy!

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Christchurch’s Bicycle Band claimed to be the only one of its kind in the world. Joshua W. Painter (d. 1944), a well-known distance and trick cyclist, and his brother Fred started the bicycle band in 1895. It was really an offshoot of the already established Christchurch Professional Brass Band. The men held instruments in one hand and steered their cycles with the other, and they rehearsed in the open ground of Barracks Square, Hereford Street. Left to right, front row: H. Woods, T. Dalton, A.J. Watts; second row: G.H. Gordon, W. Crawford, F. Hopkins, F. Painter; third row: F. Taylor, A.W. Gordon.

Circa 1900

Bicycle Band inaugural performance at Ellerslie International Flower Show, 9th March, 2010.

Bret Painter, great grandson of Fred, had the idea to reform the band and drew together an intrepid bunch of bandsmen and women from Canterbury Brass and the New Zealand Army Band

• Find out more about New Zealand music stuff
• Explore NZ Music Month events at Christchurch City Libraries
• Enter our NZ Music Month competition and go into the draw to win an iPod Nano.

Charlotte Wood at AWRF 2012

You learn a lot at a festival – and not just about the authors either. For starters you learn which of your colleagues can pack away two Eggs Benedict at breakfast and who is the really fleet-of-foot team mate who gets lost in a crowded room if you take your eyes off her for even a second. But it is also true that you discover a whole slew of writers you’d never even heard of  before. My reading “find” of this Auckland Writers and Readers Festival has to be Charlotte Wood.

Charlotte Wood is a rising star of Australian fiction. I attended the festival event “An Hour with Charlotte Wood” having read only one of her books: Animal People. Suffice it to say that I will now be reading all her novels. She is one very observant, highly intelligent lady. What I noticed in particular is that she thinks carefully before answering any question put to her. She does not do glib.

Animal People takes one of the characters (Stephen) from her previous novel The Children and follows him over a single day in his life. Wood found using this twenty-four hour time span a useful device which she likened to a  “mini ticking bomb”. Stephen is like a 39 year old adolescent. You know the type, you will have dated them, you may even have married one. He has family issues – it’s not that he is estranged from his family, but he is evasive. The big question for Stephen is:

How do you remain an adult with your family? The problem in families is that we all remember events differently and your memory can be what you become but it can also be completely wrong.

Stephen has an awful day in which he sets out to break-up with his lovely girlfriend. His whole day degenerates into a series of  “trapped and escaping” events. He seems to be in some kind of crisis:

He’s having a meltdown – an internal collapse that no-one else can see.

Maybe this doesn’t sound like fun to you, but in Wood’s hands it is. She is so perceptive and so humourous. I left the event and quickly bought The Children, stood in the long signing queue and gushed when I got to her: “You are my find of the fest. I loved Animal People and I want to love this book too!”

“No pressure then” she said, signing with a flourish and a smile.

He is most famous for his singing of Schubert lieder and thanks to the magic of libraries and the internet you can hear and see him performing still. Christchurch Libraries has a great collection of his work.

There have been many obituaries which detail his life – like  this from the Telegraph. Perhaps the best obituary is to listen to him perform the beautiful song An die musik

To music

Oh lovely Art, in how many grey hours,
When life’s fierce orbit ensnared me,
Have you kindled my heart to warm love,
Carried me away into a better world!

How often has a sigh escaping from your harp,
A sweet, sacred chord of yours
Opened up for me the heaven of better times,
Oh lovely Art, for that I thank you!

‘Stand Up’, Christchurch rapper Scribe’s first single, comes bookended with excerpts from his soon-to-be signature tune — ‘Not Many’.

Read our profile of Scribe.

Find out more about  NZ Music Month at Christchurch City Libraries.

• Explore our music pages.
• Browse our profiles of Kiwi musicians.
• Search our catalogue for New Zealand music on CD and resources about New Zealand music.
• Discover Christchurch music on CD in our collection.

The Guardian has praised Pietari Inkinen as ‘a conductor of bold, sure-footed intelligence’ and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra as ‘a fine, responsive unit’.

This third volume in Naxos’s series presents the dramatic and highly popular Symphony No. 2, which emerges from the northern mists, cultivating a pastoral atmosphere along the way, to reach a grandiose, heroic finale. One of Sibelius’s best loved compositions, the Karelia Suite presents a series of musical tableaux based on stirring episodes from Finnish history.

• This album (and over 69,000 more) is available online for free from anywhere with your library card number and PIN.
• Listen to free online music from Naxos Music Library and the Source.