Gillian Whitehead

Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead (born 23 April 1941) is a New Zealand composer.

She is of Māori Ngāi Te Rangi descent.

Her Māori heritage has been an important influence on her composing.

Whitehead was born in Hamilton in 1941.

The daughter of Ivan and Marjorie Whitehead, she is of Ngāi Te Rangi descent.

Her father was a music teacher and conductor of the Waipu Choral Society and her mother played the piano.

She began composing early, making clear to her mother at age 17 that she wanted to be a composer.

She studied at the University of Auckland from 1959 to 1962, and Victoria University of Wellington in 1963, graduating BMus(Hons) in 1964.

She then studied composition at the University of Sydney with Peter Sculthorpe from 1964–65, graduating MMus in 1966.

That same year she attended a composition course given by Peter Maxwell Davies and in 1967 travelled to England to continue studying with him.

Pakuru (1967), for baritone and ensemble, is based on Māori sayings and the seasonal cycle.

She worked in London composing and copying music for two years and then with the assistance of a New Zealand Arts Council grant worked in Portugal and Italy from 1969 to 1970.

For the next seven years she continued freelance composing, principally based in the United Kingdom.

She first read about them in the 1970s and used them for the next 20 years.

From 1978 to 1980, she held an English academic post, having been during that time Composer in Residence for Northern Arts attached to Newcastle University.

In the 1980s when she moved to Sydney she used squares but much more freely and later pieces combined prime numbers and squares in a more integrated way.

In 1981, she returned to New South Wales, to join the staff of the Composition School at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

She was Head of Composition for four years.

Other works with Māori themes include Ahotu (ō matenga) (1984), Outrageous Fortune (1998), Hineraukatauri (1999) and Hine-pu-te-hue (2001).

Whitehead has used magic squares in her composition, also used by Peter Maxwell Davies and others.

In 1989 she was Composer in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington.

She began to incorporate taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instruments) in her work in the 1990s after meeting Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns.

She took up the Mozart Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1992.

Another opera, The Art of Pizza (1995), was commissioned by Chamber Mode, a Melbourne opera group.

Set in a Sydney shopping mall it looks at the situation of refugees.

She left the Conservatorium in 1996.

Since then she has spent most of her time in New Zealand, mostly in Dunedin.

From 1998 to 2003 she was president of the Composers Association of New Zealand.

Outrageous Fortune (1998) was commissioned by the Otago Commemorative Opera Group, Te Atamira Whakamaumahara to mark 150 years since the founding of the city of Dunedin and Otago province.

During 2000 and 2001 she was Composer in Residence at the Auckland Philharmonia.

Her major orchestral work, The Improbable Ordered Dance, written during the Residency won the 2001 SOUNZ Contemporary Award.

In 2005–2006 she was the Composer in Residence at the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University.

She was the first Composer in Residence to stay at the Lilburn Residence.

In 2009 Whitehead was one of the 2009 Henderson Arts Trust artists-in-residence in Alexandra.

Whitehead has written a wide range of music including works for solo, chamber, choral, orchestral and operatic forces, most of them direct commissions from performers and funding organisations.

A number of her works have been recorded for commercial release, including a CD of her chamber works by Wai-te-ata Music Press and a recording of her opera, Outrageous Fortune.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra commissioned Whitehead to write a piece to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook's arrival in New Zealand; she produced Turanga-nui (2018), referring to the name of Gisborne and Cook's landfall there.

Her Lilburn Lecture in 2019 examined how she uses the sounds of taonga pūoro.

In 2020 she wrote a piece especially for the baroque ensemble Juilliard451 from the Juilliard School of Music in New York who toured New Zealand.

Since her time in London Whitehead has used Māori themes in her work.