Biographies and Work Analyses of East/Central African composers

As in all world cultures, a composer/instrumentalist in Africa is defined by specialist skills and achievements, rather than the general knowledge which we normally share with the broader social environment. Special insights and skills constitute the individual cultural profile of an artist. To unravel this dimension, case by case, is one of the objectives of our three-year project. Working from field data compiled in more than half a century (actually since 1959 in 88 African language groups) we can now envisage life-long biographical coverage and work analysis of some of the recorded composer-musicians. It is not possible at this stage to represent the entire continent. We have chosen one region, East and South-Central Africa, focussing on selected areas in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi Zambia and Angola. From these areas we have substantial data (audio and video, interviews etc.) to be studied and expanded through further fieldwork. So far, our international team of eight including colleagues from those countries, has identified 46 composer-musicians whom we consider central to our project. The selection was done independently of ratings by the local media whose interests in popularization of music that is accessible to mass audiences have blurred and tended to misrepresent the actual creative resources of the region. Our own sampling follows strictly the criteria of compositional originality and innovation, regardless of genre and style, including the realm of home-made instrument construction and development of special performance techniques, so important in African music. Evaluation of the data will follow methods designed by us to open up lesser known areas of study, such as the compositional use of models rooted in non-verbal transmission of mathematical insights. To represent our data, we will use a variety of notational systems: (1) mnemonics (in phonetic script), (2) European staff notation modified to accommodate African concepts of tonality and timing; (3) cipher notation, (4) kinemic transcription (from cinematographic shots). The biographical assessment of personalities active in composition will focus on individual histories and the relationship of creative individuals with their social environment. Local and inter-regional acceptance of a composer, conflicts, dissidence, family and peer-group pressures, as well as experiences of stereotype threat, gender, age and ethnicist discrimination are some of the themes to be addressed. The historical and comparative part of our investigation will focus on basic African compositional processes (e.g. interlocking of tone-rows, skipping process in multipart composition) and the technique, used to create acoustic illusions, phantom melodies as carriers of hidden texts and as stimulants to improvisatory text development by the artists.

One of the basics in our studies of African music has been to look at the individuals who create it, compose it, discover their personalities and life histories, and thereby obtain insight into the conceptual world behind music making in Africa. This approach has contributed greatly to dismantle the stereotype of anonymous "ethnic" music, that there were in Africa timeless traditions without history. Our project was focussing on East and Central Africa with fieldwork carried out by our international research team in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana and Namibia. Like other research projects in the social sciences, we were also affected by the SARS-Covid 19 worldwide pandemic, resulting in travel restrictions. The Austrian Science Fund has kindly granted us several cost-neutral prolongations of the project. A major result of our work has been reconstruction of the history of composition techniques for the music once played on the royal xylophone entaala in the pre-colonial Kingdom of Buganda, from the reigns of the Kings Kyabaggu and Jjunju in the late 18th century to the reign of King Mwanga II. These compositions have been transmitted by court musicians note-by-note, although they were not written down. Once a theme of this serial music with interlocking tone-rows had been composed, it could not be changed, because of the desired i.p. (inherent patterns) effect, stimulating text associations. I.p. effects are an audio-psychological phenomenon which the Baganda court music composers had discovered long ago, i.e. that audiences construct melodic-rhythmic patterns auditively, phantom melodies not played as such by the musicians, but inherent in a composition. Gyoergi Ligeti (1923 - 2006 ) was fascinated by this phenomenon, and he would have been delighted to learn that we have now been able to unravel a chronology of the last 240 years of composition techniques of this art-composed music. Over 160 compositions are now preserved in our cipher notation system, and they can be reproduced by anyone who wishes to learn the playing technique of the entaala xylophone. Other members of our research team have concentrated on contemporary musician-composers in the region. Alessandro Cosentino carried out fieldwork in Botswana surveying several living composers, male and female, on a variety of local string instruments. August Schmidhofer was first working on a survey of traditions in northern Mozambique, and then in northern Uganda with the blind Acooli-speaking composer-guitarist Faustino Okello on the latter's biography and work chronology from 1962 to now. Yohana Malamusi surveyed instument constructors and composers from Angola living as refugees in Namibia, while Moya A. Malamusi studied performers of the valimba xylophone in the Zambezi valley, Mozambique, and also the media-neglected adolescent banjo-playing street musicians in Malawi, with their songs of social criticism.