The New Music Indaba — an arm of the National Arts Festival — aims to present local and international music composed in the past 20 years. A feature of this year’s programme is Phase I of its Bow Project, celebrating the uhadi bow music of the Eastern Cape.
“The bow is a traditional instrument — the most ancient instrument we know of,” says Professor Andrew Tracey, director of the International Library of African Music.
In 1978 Nofinishi Dywili, an uhadi bow player in Ngqoko in the Transkei, was discovered by Professor David Dargie of the University of Fort Hare. He was fascinated with Dywili’s technique and made it the focus of his doctoral thesis. The resultant publicity meant that Dywili and a group of players from Ngqoko took part in concerts around the world. Dywili recently died at the age of 85, but her group continues to play for international audiences.
Dr Michael Blake of Rhodes University’s music department, the director of the Indaba, heard Dargie’s lectures and his recordings of Dywili and was inspired to showcase the music at the festival.
As part of the project, South African composers Andile Khumalo and Martin Scherzinger were invited to “reimagine” Dywili’s music.
“The idea was to use these landmark recordings of Nofili on the uhadi as a basis for new music. Michael immediately recognised the tremendous contemporary value of this idiom and suggested we ‘respond’ to this extraordinary sound-world in creative terms,” says Scherzinger, now a professor at the New York’s Eastman School of Music.
“The aim of the project is double-edged,” says Blake. “We’re preserving music, but taking it forward, with one foot in the past, and one in the future.”
In the next two years more composers will be invited to take part in the project. Each composer will be asked to set one of Dywili’s songs for a small group of instruments plus vocal soloist, and to compose a short instrumental “commentary”.
This year a lecture-demonstration by Tracey will precede a performance by Madosini, the well-known uhadi bow singer, followed by the works of Scherzinger and Khumalo.
The idea is to capture the project on CD, and to present it at festivals around the world; an idea that has already attracted interest from France’s Festival Octobre-en-Normandie.