John Psathas, emeritus professor from the New Zealand School of Music—Te Kōkī, realised he wanted to create something vast, epic, and monumental, a collective experience of musical performance.

That led to John composing CubaSonic in 2018, a work for more than 300 musicians performing in groups around the outdoor festival site. It was ready to be performed in 2019 but had to be cancelled due to a lack of resources. In 2020, COVID-19 hit and CubaDupa was called off. Finally, this year, it went ahead, with sponsorship from Te Herenga Waka.

The trickiest part of preparing for the project over three years, says CubaDupa director Gerry Paul, was keeping the momentum up, and keeping up with changes in scope. “Luckily, John’s positivity and eternal optimism was a great thing for fuelling the motivation of everyone involved.”

The project team also included Chris Winter, Keely McCann, Kenyon Shankie, Christopher Wratt, Pete Busby, Nick Veale, Shayne Ragg, and Benny Jennings.

“My first thought was to activate the entire CubaDupa site, all the side streets, nooks and crannies, but that was too expensive,” John says. “So we reined it in and focused on Cuba Street. I structured the placement of the bands so that there was a brass band, an air force band, and a percussion group at the centre of each block. The sound was going up and down, and moving back and forward, and jumping around within the blocks.”

John composed music for a tesla coil, named Chime Red, which he programmed using a keyboard to make the sound that formed the basis of the electronica backing track. “We had 60 speakers up and down Cuba Street, and this pre-recorded electronica was moving up and down it, stamping like big boots, and moving in a coordinated fashion through the live performance. The performance was moving past you.”

Nick Veale found his role changed over the course of the project. “In the early stages, John brought me on board as a sound designer, where I built custom synthesiser patches, which led to me designing most of the electronic sounds. Later, I did more administrative work.”

The music John composed was meant to be a riot—a fun, tongue-in-cheek piece—so the emotion expressed by the audience when it was performed in March 2021, with much of the world still under COVID-19 restrictions, took him by surprise.

“People afterwards were telling me ‘it felt like I was in a movie, I felt like I’d been taken out of my normal experience’, and I suddenly realised this impact was because this type of event wasn’t happening anywhere else. It brought that home to me, and I felt incredibly lucky, moved, lonely, isolated—all of these emotions,” says John.

“There was something so human about this amount of people coming together and lighting the whole of Cuba Street on fire for a few minutes,” Nick adds.

The four main staff responsible for sound were deeply emotional as they completed the event on Sunday 28 March. John explains: “They had been awake 60 hours, and they were thinking, after the technical issues the previous day that saw us cancel the performance, that we might not get it to work. We would have had to walk away. So making it work was incredible.”

Dreaming big is something John has been doing his entire career, as one of Aotearoa’s best-known composers. Past projects include composing the 2004 Athens Olympics opening and closing ceremony music, and No Man’s Land, his 2016 university-produced multimedia work that brought together 150 musicians from all around the world to commemorate World War I.

As well as being a former teacher at the New Zealand School of Music—Te Kōkī, John is an alumnus of the University, having completed a Bachelor’s degree, then Honours, and a Master of Music majoring in Composition. He has been a full-time commissioned composer since he was a student.

John credits his ability to nurture relationships for much of his success. This includes relationships with his former students such as Nick, Kenyon, Shayne, and Benny, who all helped him realise CubaSonic. “They are from early cohorts of the Master of Fine Arts (Creative) that I was involved with establishing. They are all phenomenal, and CubaSonic’s success is a testament to their abilities.”

As a full-time composer, he has enough commissions at any given time to keep him going for two years. “I work in my place out at Waitārere Beach, doing weeks at a time, 12–14 hours a day. From July to October this year, I will have had five world premieres around the world.

“I never don’t want to compose. It’s never felt like work. It’s like writing a story—I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I always want to find out what the next part sounds like.”