Individual Histories of East African Musician-Composers

On October 7, 2009 Gerhard Kubik celebrated the 50th anniversary of the start of his African work. Realizing that the separation between "historical musicology" and "comparative musicology" is artificial and inapplicable to the African panorama, he has combined historical and comparative methods in his studies of African music. Inspired by the earlier work of American jazz and blues researchers during the 1930s and 1940s who had begun to assess historically a kind of music that was also mainly orally transmitted, he put a focus on the individual creative artist. It was his policy to visit and revisit important musician-composers at least every few years, when possible, to put on record their compositional developments and the changes effected. Our project envisages the systematic exploration and recording of the life histories and work development of a number of 20th to 21st century instrumentalists and composers in a broad region of East Africa covering parts of Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique. Previous data gathering by Kubik and other members of our team in this region will be expanded by renewed fieldwork, rediscovering elderly musician-composers with whom contact was lost, and, in addition, write the histories of those composers who were recorded in the past, but are no longer with us. In ethnomusicology, this is probably the first broad regional investigation of this kind to be undertaken in sub-Saharan Africa. Thereby we hope (a) to gain new insights into the compositional techniques employed by these creative individuals across their life-spans, and (b) restore East African individual musician-composers to their legitimate place within the international panorama of creative personalities in music, irrespective of notational systems or modes of transmission.

Our approach during the project was guided by the idea of a stronger focus on the individual composer/musician in African societies and creativity-stimulating factors in their life histories within the broader context of musical enculturation: how the individual reacts to societal pressure and stimuli, coping with them in a creative manner. Our approach contrasts with some still prevalent stereotypes about anonymous "folk music", or age-old "traditional music". To obtain information and get access to important musician-composers we first took random samples of musical activities in different regions. We were guided by casual information from locals about individual personalities in instrumental practice, song and dance. In fieldwork spread over two years we then embarked on studies of the life histories of prominent composers identified by their communities, male and female, 13 from Mozambique, 15 from Malawi, 9 from Tanzania and 9 from Uganda. Special attention was given to gender divisions in musical practice, e.g. the nkangala mouth-resonated musical stick reserved for women and taboo for men. Occasionally, the documentary materials obtained cover half a century, such as in the case of guitarist Faustino Okello, born 1942 and first recorded in 1962 by one us in Kampala. With over hundred hours of video documentation and archival materials it is planned by our research team to write up individual biographies and analyses of compositional styles. Thereby we also hope to encourage national and international awareness of the work of these composers.