Musical Cultures of E. and S. -E. Africa: Hist. Perspectives

Basic field research in three East and South-East African cultures, 2005-2007, is intended to generate new insights into African pre-colonial and recent music history. The team, directed by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Kubik includes Dr. Moya A. Malamusi (Malawi), Dr. August Schmidhofer (Austria/Madagascar) and various local collaborators. Three areas will be targeted from intracultural vantagepoints (working on the basis of terminology in the local languages): I. Buganda, Busoga, Nkore (in southern Uganda), II. The Lomwe/Shirima cluster (in northern Mozambique), III. Upangwa and Ukisi (in south-western Tanzania). In Upangwa geographically a "retreat area" the ngwaya dance and other unusual traditions survive from the pre-colonial area; in Buganda and its neighbors esoteric court music traditions continue to be practised, while northern Mozambique is a treasury of reinterpreted musical stimuli reaching the East African coast with the Indian Ocean trading network by Omani Arabs and others, from the 10th century on. We intend to explore the possible connecting lines between various historical developments in music, enlarging the findings in Gerhard Kubik`s Musikgeschichte in Bildern: Ostafrika (1982) and more recent contributions such as "IntraAfrican streams of influence" (in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 1998) and Os Lamelofones do Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisbon 2003. Six field-trips will be undertaken in the three areas, each of two months duration. The emphasis of the data collecting process will be on local music history in its social context, individual composition techniques, tonal systems and audio-psychological phenomena. In Buganda and Busoga a special endeavor will be to try and reconstruct aspects of the historical development of specific compositional techniques since the days of Suuna II (ca. 1824-1856), the i.P. (inherent patterns) effect or "auditory stream segregation" and the miko system within an equitonal framework. Local collaborators will be Charles Sekintu Manyolo, and Dr. Albert Ssempeke, court musician.

Basic field research in three East and South-East African cultures, 2005-2007, is intended to generate new insights into African pre-colonial and recent music history. The team, directed by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Kubik includes Dr. Moya A. Malamusi (Malawi), Dr. August Schmidhofer (Austria/Madagascar) and various local collaborators. Three areas will be targeted from intracultural vantagepoints (working on the basis of terminology in the local languages): I. Buganda, Busoga, Nkore (in southern Uganda), II. The Lomwe/Shirima cluster (in northern Mozambique), III. Upangwa and Ukisi (in south-western Tanzania). In Upangwa geographically a "retreat area" the ngwaya dance and other unusual traditions survive from the pre-colonial area; in Buganda and its neighbors esoteric court music traditions continue to be practised, while northern Mozambique is a treasury of reinterpreted musical stimuli reaching the East African coast with the Indian Ocean trading network by Omani Arabs and others, from the 10th century on. We intend to explore the possible connecting lines between various historical developments in music, enlarging the findings in Gerhard Kubik`s Musikgeschichte in Bildern: Ostafrika (1982) and more recent contributions such as "IntraAfrican streams of influence" (in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 1998) and Os Lamelofones do Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisbon 2003. Six field-trips will be undertaken in the three areas, each of two months duration. The emphasis of the data collecting process will be on local music history in its social context, individual composition techniques, tonal systems and audio-psychological phenomena. In Buganda and Busoga a special endeavor will be to try and reconstruct aspects of the historical development of specific compositional techniques since the days of Suuna II (ca. 1824-1856), the i.P. (inherent patterns) effect or "auditory stream segregation" and the miko system within an equitonal framework. Local collaborators will be Charles Sekintu Manyolo, and Dr. Albert Ssempeke, court musician.