Participant PETER KLATZOW reports on the highlights of Africa’s first International Composers Workshop
SOUTH African composers have learned to accept the fact that there are fat years and lean years. The feast or famine syndrome is dangerous, primarily because the ingestion of so much new music in so short a time can lead to cultural indigestion; the famines that follow the feasts are often long.
Africa’s first International Composers Workshop, from January 27 to February 5 in Johannesburg, ended a 13-year famine. Before that, the Adcock Ingram Festival of 1981 brought together composers, music educationists, performers and musicologists, followed two years later by the First (and last) SABC Contemporary Music Festival, in which a host of local composers heard their works performed.
Thereafter, the drought set in until the Foundation for the Creative Arts found sponsorship from Unesco, the Amsterdam-based Gaudeamus foundation, the South African Musicians Rights Organisation and the SABC. But this time there was a profound difference: whereas before we heard the work of an exclusively white group of composers, this festival brought composers from all over Africa together to share skills, problems and aesthetic ideals.
As discussed at the workshop, the problems of being a composer in Africa varied enormously and included not having time or a place to compose; difficulties in finding words for tunes one had created; abstract problems dealing with structure, development, musical language and style; difficulties with the notation of music; and the relationship of composers to the society within which they work.
Questions of leadership also arose, focusing on the types of musical hierarchy that exist in Africa. Most participants accepted the idea of a conductor or composer being required to set the pace, but in the African tradition leadership devolves on the village inkhokeli who will either know more songs than the others or, as custodians of tradition, will correct errors of style which creep in. For ceremonial occasions he or she may also create new songs.
Mzilikazi (James) Khumalo provided particularly interesting insights into traditional music. Khumalos mother introduced him to the roots of Zulu music but his father, a Christian priest, steered him in the direction of the Western choral tradition. At the workshop, Khumalo introduced various styles of singing: giya, haya and bonga (rhythmic, lyric and praise song), demonstrating that the tonal inflection of a work in Zulu affects its meaning, and that the musical line has to be faithful to the tone of the spoken word.
Andrew Tracey, in turn, revealed that culture and technique go beyond mere sound. His analysis shows that the rhythmic component of African music is divided into pulse, beat and cycle, and he challenged participants to identify different metrical groupings within rapid figurations.
The show and tell aspect of the conference was an important feature. One composer offered New Age minimalism on an electronically amplified calabash, but there was also more familiar Western-tuned music from Vindu Bangambula of Zaire, who received most of his musical training in the Peoples Republic of China. Fascinating, too, was the presentation by Frederick Ngala, a distinguished choirmaster and composer at Kenyas Moi University, who introduced the call and response style found in the music of Kenyas 43 different tribes.
More formal presentations of oeuvres were made by, among others, Jeanne Zaidel Rudolph, Rokus de Groot of Holland, Britains Frank Denyer, Kevin Volans and local jazz musician Denzil Weale. Dr Jacques de Vos Malan spoke on Music Beyond Revolution, a fascinating account of the relationship between music and politics in relation to the concept of avant-gardism in the earlier part of this century.
With the wealth of expertise on offer, I wondered why so few South African musicologists fluttered to the scene. There could not have been a happier hunting ground for anyone interested in indigenous or art music, and the assemblage of luminaries is not likely to be repeated for some time.
The conference settled on a formal resolution asking government to ensure that the new music curriculum includes substantial input from the spectrum of South African composers, and that composer-in-residence programmes be established at schools to enable composers to bring their creative talents to bear on the teaching of music. With all these great victories on the sports fields, isnt it time for our composers to score a few goals too?