Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Art of Mbira: Musical Inheritance and LegacyMbira's Restless Dance: An Archive of Improvisation, Vols. 1 & 2

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21567417.66.3.10

2156-7417

Jennifer W. Kyker,

Music History and Culture

Paul Berliner's magisterial new book, The Art of Mbira: Musical Inheritance and Legacy, offers a detailed study of the repertory, playing technique, and musical thinking of Zimbabwean mbira dzavadzimu master Cosmas Magaya. A central figure in his first book, The Soul of Mbira (1978), Magaya worked with Berliner for many decades, serving as his primary mbira teacher and research collaborator. As Berliner reminds readers throughout The Art of Mbira, the mbira dzavadzimu is part of a “memorializing tradition” of music played at religious ceremonies called mapira (x). Invoking this tradition, Magaya tells Berliner, “Once we've completed this study on behalf of our late mbira-playing comrades—leaving it for others who come behind us—I will know that if I die tomorrow, I can go to my grave satisfied” (x). Tragically, Magaya passed away from COVID-19 shortly after these books were published, rendering The Art of Mbira a tribute to his memory as well as a work of careful, extended scholarship.The Art of Mbira is joined by Mbira's Restless Dance: An Archive of Improvisation Volumes 1 & 2, a coauthored set with transcriptions and commentary on thirty-nine songs in Magaya's repertory. These companion volumes are intended as “a distillation of master classes with a world-class mbira player” (1:2). They open with a detailed introduction that summarizes many of the arguments in The Art of Mbira and offer an excellent entry point into this set of materials. All three books are further accompanied by an extensive companion website with numerous audio and video examples (mbiraplatform.org). Together, this large set of materials presents an extraordinary archive of Sekuru Magaya's mbira playing, illuminating the possibilities of long-term ethnographic relationships.While intended for a scholarly audience, Berliner's previous books, The Soul of Mbira and Thinking in Jazz (1994), have been read widely by aspiring musicians in both musical traditions. In response, Berliner specifically designed The Art of Mbira and Mbira's Restless Dance for a diverse audience of “musicians, mbira students, aficionados, teachers, and scholars,” proposing an interpretive framework for understanding the mbira and presenting resources to learn to play dozens of mbira songs (1:2). Indeed, these books and their companion website create possibilities for learning and teaching for students to learn individual mbira parts even without access to an experienced mbira musician. In this way, they hold promise for a flipped-classroom approach to university or community mbira ensembles, in which students would gather simply to play mbira, rather than to learn new material.Organized in four sections, The Art of Mbira offers Berliner's scholarly perspective on what he refers to as “the mbira music system” (Mbira's Restless Dance 1:2). In the opening section of The Art of Mbira, Berliner offers careful, methodical, and detailed discussions of various “components of the mbira system” (10), elucidating subjects that include interactions between the mbira's various left- and right-hand registers, a range of polyrhythmic hand patterns, common melodic-rhythmic figures, and how the dyadic harmonic model for Shona mbira music is transposed and altered in the mbira repertory. Here, Berliner capably moves between hundreds of transcriptions, putting the Herculean task of collecting such an extensive archive to good use. Reading this section of the book, however, is a time-consuming process that entails extensive cross-referencing between Berliner's analysis, transcriptions, critical endnotes, and multimedia recordings. In addition to toggling back and forth between the content in Part A, transcriptions in Part D, endnotes at the back of the book, and related chapters on individual songs in Mbira's Restless Dance, readers will also need to keep a web browser open to access corresponding recordings on the companion website.In Part B, “A Biography of Knowledge,” Berliner charts the development of Magaya's style as a mbira musician, addressing his early relationships with the vibrant community of mbira musicians in his home region of Mhondoro. Written in an accessible narrative style, the chapters in this section offer a welcome break from the technically focused previous chapters, detailing Sekuru Magaya's acquisition of mbira repertory, experimentation with various parts and songs, approach to musical arranging, and perception of other musicians’ playing styles. Part C, “The Application of Knowledge in Performance,” engages Magaya's use of musical vocabulary in the context of performance through several chapters featuring different renditions of various mbira songs, with a special focus on “Nhemamusasa.” The musical examples discussed throughout the book are collected in Part D, “Music Texts,” which is as long as the rest of the book combined.In The Art of Mbira, Paul Berliner offers an intimate, warm, and nuanced portrayal of one of the mbira's most senior practitioners. Before his passing, Magaya was actively involved in music, social development, and indigenous leadership in his home region of Mhondoro. He played and taught mbira within his community; spearheaded culturally focused development projects such as the nonprofit Nhimbe for Progress, which he cofounded with his North American mbira student Jaiaen Beck; and was appointed a sabhuku, or village headman. The success of The Soul of Mbira also gave Magaya international exposure, leading to his active touring and teaching career abroad. Generations of North American mbira students have now studied under Magaya for decades, learning some of the many parts transcribed and discussed in The Art of Mbira and Mbira's Restless Dance. These students will find the enormous, careful, and thorough archive Magaya and Berliner have jointly compiled an invaluable resource, and one that will enable them to continue learning Magaya's style of mbira playing for many years to come despite his passing. For students new to the mbira, Berliner's detailed, clear, and systematic approach to transcribing, recording, and framing individual mbira parts offers a convenient and efficient introduction to the instrument. The video recordings posted to the companion website are particularly useful in this regard, as they allow students to bypass Berliner's somewhat cumbersome notational system entirely in favor of learning in a more aurally focused way.One intriguing question, particularly in a book that sets out to represent an entire musical tradition, is how Berliner's project might have turned out differently had he worked with another mbira musician. As a player, Magaya's strengths lay in his strong, clear, and deliberate approach to mbira music, and particularly his powerful sense of timing, rhythm, and groove. Yet his playing was relatively more straightforward, even more conservative in nature than that of many other mbira musicians, who tend toward a more improvisatory, virtuosic style. While Berliner illustrates how several of Magaya's parts were shaped by his own personal experimentation, for example, many of the parts he played were transmitted directly to him by senior mbira musicians, and he rarely spontaneously interpreted songs in entirely new ways during performance.While this type of playing is certainly common in Zimbabwe, there are many mbira musicians whose deeply improvisatory and virtuosic playing styles can only be grasped through engaging with extended, live performances. Describing his own experiences playing mbira, for example, mbira player Musekiwa Chingodza once told me, “I feel like I will be connected—I feel more like I am a tree which is landed by a bird, but the bird is dropping something sweet. And at times I'll be just sitting, like, ‘Oh, where is all this coming from?’” Joining Chingodza, several other players, most notably Tute Chigamba and Forward Kuenda, play mbira in ways so complex that they do not easily lend themselves to analytical approaches privileging discrete, stable, or fixed mbira “parts.” Rather, their playing suggests that mbira music is more akin to an ever-changing stream of notes, as they continually exercise the various options available to them at any given time through pitch substitutions in all registers of the instrument, note deletions and insertions, rhythmic variations, suspensions and anticipations, and other improvisatory gestures. As such, they may play a single mbira “part” differently every time they approach it, without ever reverting to a fixed or basic version.Considering this type of virtuosic, improvisatory, and ever-changing style of mbira playing, what are we to make of Berliner's insistence on presenting taxonomies of discrete mbira parts and variations? In contrast to Magaya's experiences learning to play mbira primarily through direct formal teaching, many mbira musicians learn to play the instrument through forms of musical transmission that are indirect, autonomous, secretive, and even mystical in nature. Musicians regularly report learning to play mbira by listening to radio broadcasts, “stealing” instruments and independently teaching themselves to play songs they describe as “ringing in their ears,” and receiving instruction for new songs from ancestral spirits through dreams. Indeed, the autonomous learning associated with “stealing” the mbira may constitute the instrument's primary mode of historical transmission. How do we reconcile the preponderance of these indirect, self-directed, and spiritually inspired practices with the type of systematic, part-focused analysis in Berliner's book?By reducing mbira songs to discrete parts and variations, this approach risks reducing creative, dynamic, and organic musical relationships to a mechanistic approach, or in Berliner's words in The Art of Mbira, a “blueprint of mbira operations” (127). While this is certainly one way of approaching mbira music, it is not the only possibility. An alternative approach might conceptualize the ways an individual musician interprets kushaura or kutsinhira playing for a given song as models rather than parts, taking care to observe that a single model can accommodate many improvisatory moves without ever privileging a single, primary, or default part. This approach to mbira analysis, however, would necessitate a different point of departure, working primarily from recordings of live performances featuring two or more musicians interacting through the simultaneous performance of kushaura and kutsinhira parts. Berliner's work, on the other hand, takes the existence of discrete parts as its foundation, working primarily from his own efforts to acquire a body of repertory by learning and cataloguing individual pieces of musical content.While this approach enables Berliner to present a large archive of material in a clear and systematized way, it also risks imposing unnecessary and potentially inappropriate epistemological constraints on mbira music. Indeed, Berliner occasionally notes how Magaya's conception of the music differs from his own, observing, for example, how Magaya “typically responded unhesitatingly to my interest as student and scholar in grasping its most basic principles—that is, ‘understanding’ the music through generalizations about its features and prescriptive rules guiding performance. At other times, however, I sensed his discomfort with this approach. He felt the need to remind me that the music's meaning lay in its details, not in its generalities. As he put it in such moments in The Art of Mbira: Everything I play in this music is situational” (18).In addition to the problem of whether mbira music should be reduced to discrete parts and variations, Berliner's work also raises the question of how growing scholarly interest in the mbira has inadvertently led to the canonization of certain songs, tunings, and musicians. Will Magaya's way of playing, which represents only one among many approaches to the instruments in a diverse field of Zimbabwean mbira playing, come to be perceived by Western scholars, musicians, and students as definitive and authoritative? Given that no comparable work exists on any other mbira player, this appears nearly inevitable as the readily available, extensive body of material compiled by Berliner and Magaya filters out into the world through graduate reading lists, world music survey classes, university mbira ensembles, music textbooks, and community mbira classes.One of the best examples of how this canonization has played out in the past lies in the song “Nhemamusasa,” which, largely through Berliner's work in The Soul of Mbira and accompanying field recordings, has become iconic of the mbira tradition. If nonspecialists are familiar with a single mbira song, it is thus likely to be “Nhemamusasa.” This focus on “Nhemamusasa” persists in The Art of Mbira, which spends several chapters revisiting “Nhemamusasa” and includes complete transcriptions of several of Berliner's early field recordings of Cosmas and Alexio Magaya playing the piece both separately and together. These transcriptions will be immensely useful in making Berliner's early work come alive for students in classes on improvisation, non-Western theory and analysis, and world music. Despite this intensive focus on “Nhemamusasa,” however, some interesting particularities—both inherent in the song itself and characteristic of the Magayas’ unique renditions of it—remain unaddressed in Berliner's otherwise thoughtful analysis.Most notably, “Nhemamusasa” is one of relatively few songs in the mbira's extensive repertory with kutsinhira parts that primarily feature bass notes on the downbeat of the triplet. In contrast, most mbira songs involve at least some sections of kutsinhira playing with prominent off-beat bass notes, played on the mbira's lower left-hand register, landing on the second subdivision of the triplet. It is both possible and likely that the easy familiarity of on-beat bass notes is one of the reasons “Nhemamusasa” has come to be so widely studied, taught, and heard in Western contexts. Yet this type of playing is not representative of mbira music as a whole. Indeed, the way bass notes fall on the second subdivision of the triplet in kutsinhira playing is one of the most distinctive features of many mbira songs and is critical to mbira ensemble dynamics. This fundamental aspect of mbira playing, however, receives little consideration in Berliner's work. While off-beat bass notes are entirely absent in “Nhemamusasa,” this already well-known song once again receives the lion's share of analysis in The Art of Mbira. As a result, “Nhemamusasa” constitutes the central example of how Magaya and his musical associates apply their knowledge of mbira music during actual performance.At the same time, Magaya's individual approach to playing “Nhemamusasa” can be decidedly restrained, almost spartan. As he tells Berliner, his teacher Ernest Chivhanga insisted that one of the various kushaura parts for “Nhemamusasa,” which features prominently in Berliner's recordings, should be played without the type of descending right-hand high lines so characteristic of mbira songs. As Berliner reports in The Art of Mbira, Magaya “has honored the principle ever since” out of concern for respecting the practices and values of his mentors and their musical lineages (113). In the two chapters that present close readings of “Nhemamusasa,” however, there is no discussion of how both Cosmas and Alexio Magaya's playing is constrained by this imperative. As a result, Chapter 20 features an extended transcription in which no high lines are ever introduced by the kushaura player, despite multiple cycles featuring high lines in the kutsinhira part. This is somewhat disappointing, as this chapter is the only section of The Art of Mbira to present transcriptions of two mbira musicians playing interlocking kushaura and kutsinhira parts, illustrating the dynamic musical relationships at the very heart of mbira practice. The second performance of “Nhemamusasa” in this chapter features a different kushaura part, and one that does accommodate high lines. Still, I found it surprising that one of only two transcriptions of musicians playing interlocking parts in this extensive book would feature a kushaura part that is unusually constrained in its inability to accommodate high lines.Particularly given the depth and breadth of the mbira tradition, I found myself wishing Berliner had more explicitly addressed how he selected specific material for detailed analysis. Indeed, the closer one is to mbira music, the more questions are likely to surface as readers work their way through the vast and valuable trove of materials Berliner has compiled. Yet herein lies the primary value of his work—in opening these questions, provoking new directions in mbira scholarship and analysis, and illustrating precisely how difficult it is to grapple with a tradition with this level of musical complexity, social significance, and spiritual depth. As Berliner states in the preface to The Art of Mbira, one of his objectives is “to stimulate further scholarship about distinctive ‘schools’ and personal styles of mbira performance, as well as those associated with Zimbabwe's other rich musical genres” (x). In this regard, he has done us a great service, setting the stage for robust scholarly debate and analytical inquiry. Together, Magaya and Berliner's long-term collaboration has resulted in an expansive musical archive, a thought-provoking perspective that approaches mbira as a musical system comprised of discrete and manipulable parts, and an unexpected tribute to the legacy of one of mbira's senior practitioners, gone too soon.