Suzy Bell
In the light of the West’s insatiable hunger for exotic titbits to feed its cultural appetite, it is inspiring to come across a cross-cultural fusion where integrity has not been compromised.
Music for a Harmonious World is a unique collaboration of the Seventh Day Adventist Student Association (SDASA) Chorale, an amateur gospel group from Soweto, and I Fagiolini, the solo-voice Renaissance repertory based at Oxford University.
It is a sensitive, soulful meeting of two very different composers: the SDASA’s Bheki Dlamini, a Zulu traditionalist, and Roderick Williams, I Fagiolini’s composer.
The tenacity and positive energy of Brett Pyper, who co-ordinates music development projects, has added to the project’s success.
“The pitfalls of cross-cultural fusion are that it’s so easy for one to be absorbed into the other,” says Pyper, who has been working on the project for three years. There is never the guarantee that one or both sides will not be compromised “in the process of trying to get some mix, he explains.
Pyper believes it’s a meeting of two a cappella traditions that bridge “the whole division between European high art and the rest, or professional music making and community music making”.
The whole idea of the collaboration, says Pyper, was to introduce two different groups that represent those traditions to one another.
“They came together simply as musicians rather than as hierarchical entities. The fact that they decided to write for one another was a spontaneous thing, very much music generated rather than ideologically or commercially generated.”
Pyper says there was an “openness, honesty and sense of fun which took the meetings of music beyond the superficial level”.
The two groups’ collaborative efforts have been captured on an album titled Simunye (Gallo Records).”We seem to have got it right,” he says, “as this repertoire has been performed in African churches and the congregations still relate to it as devotional music.
“We have presented it in theatres as music in a more aesthetic, abstract sense and it has gone out as a product internationally. All round people say it has enriched rather than detracted from the two traditions.”
The vocal ensembles, both established in 1986, met during I Fagiolini’s concert tour of South Africa in 1995.
I Fagiolini, which is involved in outreach and development work in the United Kingdom, contacted Pyper as the promoters wanted to do something here. He gave them the idea of collaborating with SDASA, a group firmly rooted in indigenous church music but renowned for its versatility.
“I thought it was a fairly obvious idea, really,” says Pyper, who had at the time become increasingly aware that the richness of South African choral music was not being formally acknowledged on concert platforms or commercially.
Hopefully this collaboration will encourage the inclusion of choral music into concert repertoires in South Africa, where there is a real concern about dwindling attendance numbers.”Almost everyone sings in this country,” says Pyper, “so I don’t feel that just one project can exhaust the potential.”
Music for a Harmonious World will be performed in Durban at St Paul’s church on July 15 at 7.30pm; in Johannesburg at the Linder Auditorium on July 18 at 8pm; in Soweto at the Funda Community College on July 19 at 2.30pm; and in Pretoria at the State Theatre on July 20 at 8pm and on July 21 at 12.15pm