Viking Records — A journey through the sounds of the South Pacific

470 master tapes from the Viking label

Explore New Zealand and South Pacific music held in the Turnbull Library’s Viking Sevenseas Collection with Victoria University postgraduate student Xiaotong Yang. This collection consists of around 470 master tapes from the Viking label, Aotearoa’s largest independent label of the 1960s.

How is Viking’s history reflected through the collection? How did the label’s tapes come to be at the Library? What types of music are in the collection? How are we preserving this valuable part of the late twentieth-century New Zealand soundscape today?

Viking Sevenseas

Reflecting on New Zealand's popular music past

Through a combination of words, images, and music, this talk will reflect on New Zealand’s popular music past and celebrate more than 70-years of independent kiwi music-making.

This talk is the result of a summer scholarship co-sponsored by Victoria University of Wellington and Alexander Turnbull Library to enhance the Library’s descriptive records of the Viking Collection and developdata for future academic research.

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About the speaker

Xiaotong Yang was born in Weihai, China, and moved to Wellington in 2015. An alumnus of the Classical Chinese Music Performance Program (Erhu) at Wuhan Conservatory of Music, she graduated from Victoria University of Wellington in 2020 with First Class Honours in Music Studies. She is now studying towards her Master's degree. In her spare time, she teaches, performs and gives public lectures on her instrument, the erhu.