Music is more than the food of love for the winners of the Most Successful Project funded by the Arts & Culture Trust — it is their staple. The Field Band Foundation (FBF) and the Buskaid Soweto String Project (BSSP) share an award open to all projects that have been partly or wholly funded by the trust since 1996.
Even sports fans have seen and heard musicians from the foundation in action. Young players from the foundation’s brass bands took to the field before games in the cricket World Cup this year.
‘We want good bands, not cute little bands,” says the FBF’s dynamic national director Retha Cilliers.
The fact that the foundation is succeeding is emphasised by the guest of honour at this year’s FBF National Championships — legendary South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who will play along- side one of the bands at Soweto’s Orlando Stadium on October 4.
In just six years, the FBF has established 17 bands in five provinces, with 2 700 children taking part. By January 2004, there will be 19 bands operating across 295 schools. Cilliers says that if the foundation had more funding, ‘the number would be 10 times that because every town wants a band”. That is understandable, given the added value of the FBF’s social development programmes, one of which, the HIV/Aids Peer Educator Project, has trained 250 counsellors.
Cilliers says that 2003 has been a year of consolidation, with FBF’s ‘good people on the ground” receiving training in organisational, leadership and financial skills. Financial probity, innovative social programmes and the joy of music ensure the sweet sounds of the foundation.
It has also been a busy 2003 for the BSSP, which took part in the Newhaven Festival of Arts and Ideas held in the United States in late June. The first week of July saw the launch of the project’s third CD, Tshwaranang (Unite). The project bought a house opposite its teaching facility in Diepkloof, which will augment training space and enable it to establish an instrument repair workshop, where instrument repair apprenticeships will be given.
Reflecting on the project’s growth, founder and moving spirit Rosemary Nalden says: ‘The rise is meteoric in a way, considering how long it takes strings playing to develop.” The project has 50 young musicians, to which another 30 have just been added. The increase is possible because the BSSP has a squad of new instructors thanks to its teacher-training programme for senior students.
‘It’s also been a time of transition,” Nalden notes, ‘from the first tertiary studies student leaving to go abroad and another [group] taking over. There always seems to be a leader ready to step in.”
Nalden believes that ‘just as important as the playing is how a child emerges as a leader and role model.” BSSP violinist Samson Diamond, now studying in Britain, is the first in what is sure to be a long line of examples for the project’s younger musicians to emulate.