Mbira music

I've learned not to worry too much during the Watson-- things will inevitably come together in ways you didn't plan. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't help that process along. Meeting a ton of people, and constantly mentioning your project (even past the point that it starts to sound stale to your own ears) lets you run a better chance of being in the right place at the right time.

This happened in a big way in Durban-- I'd spent weeks trying to speak with Patricia Opondo, the director and founder of the African Music & Dance program at the University of Kwazulu Natal. It turned out that I couldn't reach her because she'd gone to Kenya for the January holiday (and Obama's inauguration). I only managed to arrange to meet her after I'd been in the country for 3 weeks.

It was worth it, however. Although she didn't have any new contacts for me on the traditional isicathamiya or amahubo music I thought I was interested in, she ended up turning me in a completely different direction. While we were talking, I mentioned something about how I'd heard that Zimbabwean mbira music featured a kind of yodeling and meaningless vocable syllables that accompanied the instrument. We talked about it a little, and Patricia offered to introduce me to a Zimbabwean mbira player who was a graduate student in the African Music program.

That's how I met Perminus Matiure. The first day, he talked to me a little about mbira music, played some, and agreed to teach me the basics of how the music was structured and how vocal improvisation fit into it. We started the next day and I ended up taking daily lessons for two weeks. The mbira is a wonderfully mesmerizing instrument, and it was easy to lose myself in practicing it.

As for the actual question of how improvised vocal parts fit into mbira music, it turned out to be quite an interesting one. Mbira music, like lots of music of southern Africa, is cyclical in nature and is participatory-- there are professional mbira players, but everyone at a ceremony where mbira music is being played will join in singing, dancing & clapping. The goal is to create a sufficiently complex, dense musical texture that it fills up every part of your consciousness and allows for contact with the spirit world. The mbira I learned, called mbira dzavadzimu ('mbira of the ancestors'), is a sacred instrument used primarily at religious spirit possession ceremonies.

Thus, one aspect of vocal parts is to fill spaces, to plug holes in the patterns being played on the mbira. However, there's also a second ideal in vocal performance-- singers pick out and sing parts that they hear in the mbira (voice imitating instrument!). Mbira parts are cyclical and interlock different patterns of notes in the two left hand manuals of keys and the one right hand manual. When all three manuals are being played (and especially when two or more mbiras are playing together), it forms quite a rich texture of sound, and you can find your brain picking out various melodic lines in the music, even lines that cross between the right and left hand parts, or that use the overtones of left hand keys (which can be quite strong). Simply put, you listen for these parts and sing them.

The yodel technique that's common in Shona singing seems to be a way to capture the interplay between a high, right hand mbira note combined with a lower note.

This is one post that seems incredibly bare without audio, so I'm embedding a clip of an ensemble of Shona mbira musicians. This isn't one I recorded myself, since I never got to Zimbabwe to hear mbira music in its proper context, but all of my recordings are of just one or two people (me and Perminus, or me and Laina, the woman who taught me another couple songs while I was in Grahamstown). I think you'll get a much better sense of how ensemble mbira playing, accompanied by hosho rattles and singing, works from this clip.