Music education – starting with the schools

When we talk about music learning and teaching, we often focus on the universities – but undergraduates have to come from somewhere, and in truth the crucial foundations of music – appreciating it and making it – need to start at school. So if your diary for Tuesday November 8 has space, you might consider dropping in on the South African Music Education Colloquium, happening at the Wits Humanities Graduate Centre in the South West Engineering building.

New potential textbooks are emerging...

Convened by guitarist, teacher and music researcher Billy Monama, the colloquium has the ambitious aim of exploring ways to “fix music education in Black schools”. So, what are these problems that need fixing?

Under apartheid, many dedicated Black teachers struggled to keep the intellectually open teaching of the humanities alive. The racist regime sought to whittle down Black education to only that needed for those destined to be, in Verwoerd’s words, “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, imprisoned by unchanging, “tribal” identities.

When apartheid ended, the new ANC government tried to move towards what the Freedom Charter had called “opening the doors of culture”. Unfortunately, the education side of that involved importing from the West an over-complex version of OBE (outcomes-based education) requiring physical and teacher resources simply nonexistent on the grossly uneven post-apartheid school landscape.

What the much-maligned Curriculum 2000 that resulted did have, however, was a nicely integrated structure. A generous component of arts and culture teaching was put into dialogue with all the other subjects, from history to maths, to which it can contribute.

All kinds of babies were thrown out with the bathwater when the state rethought Curriculum 2000. OBE had a valid core principle: teaching and assessment need to support learners in practically and creatively knowing and doing. That went back to the old Matric model of stuffing kids with too many, not necessarily useful, facts they can vomit all over a final exam paper. And when the unrealistic resource demands and impossible, incomprehensible jargon of Curriculum 2000 got the boot – as they deserved to – so did that neat integration of arts and culture content.

Alongside all that major back-pedalling, music education specialists were genuinely striving to develop a music education curriculum model that was more practical, and did reflect more of the musics of South Africa’s majority population. Its current incarnation is the CAPS Grades 10-12 curriculum (https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/caps-grades-10-12-music) That introduces Indigenous African Music (IAM) and jazz alongside Western Art Music (WAM) as options, and suggests that whichever of the three streams a school opts for, it ought to take at least a cursory look at the other two.

Well-resourced, fee-supported schools chug along much as they always have done. With teachers mostly themselves trained in WAM, that’s what they mostly teach, with perhaps a sprinkling of Abdullah Ibrahim and Miriam Makeba. If parents can pay extra for additional instrumental lessons, their children may encounter a private teacher who brings even more diversity into the mix. (And then again, they may not.)

Many subject specialists feel the IAM and jazz streams remain under-and inconsistently specified, and that, conceptually, the three-genre model separates what should be integrated, forgets the musics of other South African demographics and lags behind a genre-fluid contemporary music scene.

But for many township and rural schools, those are abstract debates. Heroic teachers everywhere work hard to keep school music going without libraries, internet, music-rooms, instruments, materials or specialist music-teacher training and we should remember and praise their efforts.

Gauteng does better than some other provinces. Its Music Magnet Schools, at least in theory scoop up the talented to concentrate them in better resourced learning environments. (That doesn’t deal with the less talented kids who nevertheless could benefit from learning about music.) In theory too, the majority of Gauteng schools have internet connectivity to make up for the lack of a library – in the Eastern Cape, under 25% have.

In neglected, impoverished school districts, the teacher frantically photocopying maths pages at their own expense for a lesson under a tree, within smelling-distance of the pit latrines, has far more pressing matters than music on their agenda.

Meanwhile there remain huge bureaucratic and budget barriers to many music practitioners – the archivists and scholars of the South African culture of sound – getting into the schools to teach.

Under a tree, where are the music rooms? Pic: Antonio Muchave

The materials situation is far better than it used to be. Monama’s own book on South African guitar styles, Carlo Mombelli’s bass book, biographical histories like Sam Mathe’s From Kippie To Kippies, the new South African Real Book and more are now starting to appear. If there were budget to purchase them, and training support so teachers could make the best use of them, foundations for a South Africa-focused music appreciation curriculum for all learners do now exist, far more than at the start of this millenium.

And the research keeps coming in on how useful music teaching is for all learners. Students involved in music learning do better across the curriculum – not just in arts subjects. (Maybe Curriculum 2000 had something, after all?) Music appreciation builds the demand side that will keep the domestic music industry going long-term. And music can inject self-pride, collaboration and joy into learning.

Joy might not be examinable, but our children deserve that, too, from their schooling.

For all these reasons – the aspects of the current situation that need revisiting, as well as the existence of schools where a full music programme remains a distant dream – Monama’s colloquium initiative is timely and relevant.

Whether you’re a policy-maker, scholar, teacher, learner or parent, if you have experiences and insights to share, try to catch that Wits event.

Ari Sitas’s giraffes hum a powerful decolonial statement

“It was time,” felt poet, lyricist and scholar Ari Sitas, “to deal with violence against nature” ( https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-10-25-of-giraffes-and-humming-in-the-afroasian-seas-ari-sitas-in-conversation-with-jade-gibson/ ).

Sitas is discussing the project Giraffe Humming ( https://www.insurrectionsensemble.com/giraffe-humming ), the latest from the Insurrections Ensemble ( https://www.insurrectionsensemble.com/ ), which debuted in performance around this time last year and was launched as an album this August.

One of Benjamin Haskins’ giraffe animation puppets for the production

Insurrections started life as the vehicle for collective musical/theatrical/poetic/ conversations between South Africa and India, but those national boundaries have stretched with every project; the incarnation for this recording also included contributors from East Africa (Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and Ethiopian violinist Salamawit Aragaw) , Singapore (poet Alvin Pang) and China (erhu scholar Ying Li and pipa master Daiguo Li). From South Africa, as well as Sitas and Wits scholar Dilip Menon, the contributors included pianist/composer George Mari, scholar and multi-instrumentalist Sazi Dlamini, percussionist Tlale Makhene and string player Bryden Bolton, as well as many on the visual and production teams.

Giraffes, it turn out, do hum to one another at night ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aqIbCMY1k0 ) and their spokesman on this recording is Bolton’s double-bass. These particular giraffes, two of them, were sent in 1440 from the flourishing Malindi Kingdom on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast to Bengal. There, the fabulous beasts were seen by Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who suggested forcefully (he was accompanied by a large imperial fleet) that one should be sent on as tribute to the Ming Dynasty Yongle Emperor.

Already that story represents the rich networks of flows, interchanges and political relationships in the Afro-Asian seas that are completely absent from allegedly “mainstream” histories of the world. (There are more erased historical layers, particularly poignant today, when you learn – though the project does not mention this – that Zheng He was originally born into a high-ranking Muslim family, and captured and castrated in his early teens when Yunnan Province was conquered and incorporated into the early Ming Empire.)

But those significant, hidden flows and interchanges between peoples have been the daily bread of the Insurrections Project since it began. They form the prologue to this hour of music and poetry, which describes the dawning of human-centred history, the fragmentation of continents into polities, and the emergence of the concept of “foreigners”.

What’s new about Giraffe Humming is the extension of its longstanding exploration of liminality to the boundaries between humans and nature: as one track asks “Where does the human end/Where starts the flower?”

Decolonisation debates have, until recently, often carried far too much mechanical Marxism, with its excess baggage of Nineteenth Century scientific positivist evangelism for the heroic discourse of “Man against Nature”. That echoes still, in Gwede Mantashe’s blustering tirades against environmental concerns. But in truth violence “against Nature” was always integral to the playbook of the predatory and privileged. Before the arrival of class, conquest and colonisation, people usually tried to live in harmony with nature. What could be more emblematic of that than the tale of, in Sitas’s words: “look giraffe, catch giraffe, fold giraffe in a box, dispatch it to China. Simple”?

Those are the participants, and that’s the discourse. But what about the music?

Insurrections’ projects have never been simple musical fusions: a few idioms from one tradition hung like doorknockers on the dominant sounds of another. Their subversions of “foreign-ness” are achieved by complex layering, with sounds (of languages, instruments or musical idioms) de- and re-contextualised by what underpins, wraps, or dialogues with them. Out of that technique comes an implicit assertion of other ways of seeing, knowing and representing the world: a multiplicity of equally valid epistemologies and thus a powerful decolonial statement.

The tribute giraffe and keeper at the Ming Court

Sometimes that’s underlined by poetry or lyrics ( https://scroll.in/article/1008820/head-held-high-not-pride-but-need-to-survive-three-poems-from-the-libretto-of-giraffe-humming ); sometimes the tones and pulses say it all.

And Giraffe Humming doesn’t sound like theory set leadenly to music. Rather, it’s a collection of melodies fresh to the ear: some celebratory, some – the giraffe passages – ineffably sad, some grounded in rough experience, some sensual, some programmatic – those last, especially, in the various invocations of sea journeys. There’s stuff you might dance to, stuff smooth and slippery as water and stuff so richly-textured you can almost feel it under your fingers. Listening to Giraffe Humming reminds us that borders – whether between genres, sounds, nations, ideas or categories of life on Earth – can also be doorways.

Mr Entertainment – writing a complex musical life

How do you write a life? What makes a good biography? Some readers like their biographies spicy and scandal-laden; some want dry, encyclopedic barrels of facts; some prefer works of literary imagination on the Geoff Dyer model, exposing more about the writer than the subject.

Add the word “music” to “biography”, make it a South African artist of colour, and the question assumes greater complexity.

The biography of a creative figure – musician, poet, painter – can’t just describe a life. It has to offer at least some insight into the why and the how of the creativity. What inspired them? Why that style or instrument and not this one? What were their aesthetic drivers? All that is made doubly hard by the scant public record about such figures. Under apartheid the erasures were motivated by racist disbelief that Black artistry had any intellectual component. Now, they are driven by the cultural hegemony of the global West and its platforms. Ironically, more – though usually still not enough – survives if you comb through local media from then, than if you search the same sources today.

Those research lacunae are among the reasons it took music scholar Dr Paula Fourie around 10 years to complete her comprehensive biography of Taliep Petersen, Mr Entertainment. (https://www.loot.co.za/product/paula-fourie-mr-entertainment/ppyv-7735-g590?referrer=googlemerchant&gclid=Cj0KCQjw4omaBhDqARIsADXULuWXnuqSygzXzSVm4eNqyscyQFJP2yKF7gY4IWYcf8eUK-zl3xJqgMYaAtk9EALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds )

Though it would have been unfair to his talent, Petersen might have remained a hugely respected but essentially Cape Town musician had it not been for the dramatic circumstances of his murder aged only 56: his then-wife was one of those convicted. That put him into headlines worldwide, and it would have been tempting for a biographer to go the highly marketable drama and scandal route.

Thankfully, Fourie does no such thing.

The musicologist, currently a Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University’s Africa Open Institute had developed a scholarly interest in Cape Malay choral singing. She told Cape Town music writer Warren Ludski (https://warrenludskimusicscene.com/2022/04/15/taliep-petersen-first-book-to-detail-life-of-our-mr-entertainment/ )

“It was at a competition in the Good Hope Centre that a colleague of mine from the university pointed to an empty chair and said, ‘that’s where Taliep Petersen used to sit’… That plastic chair stayed with me after I went home. Its emptiness spoke very loudly in the packed hall (…) I had started to think – perhaps there was a figure active in the Cape Malay Choirs whose life I could research for a biography. One day just as I awoke, still groggy from sleep, the name ‘Taliep Petersen’ was in my head, as if it had floated up from a bubble in my subconscious and lay there, fully formed, waiting for me to awake. I had never met Taliep, never even heard him perform. But I knew that day I wanted to try to write about him.”

So although Mr Entertainment is about Petersen’s life, it’s also about a tradition and a community, about relationships, hopes and dreams. Fourie’s 50-odd interviews provide what paper archival records cannot: the texture of conversations, the quirky turns of phrase, the emotions of speakers as they re-live experience. What she conveys about her interviews demonstrates how respectfully she listened. She reflects back and seeks for clarification, watches and notes expressions and gesture. Her ability to communicate in Afrikaans, the language of most of her sources, shines a light on the nuances of their narratives (with translations for those of us who can’t do that).

All of this could serve as a primer for other, less skilled researchers and interviewers – both journalistic and scholarly – who think it’s just a matter of pressing “record” for bald transcription later.

Most biographers and many readers are prey to what Bourdieu called the “biographical illusion.” Real lives are usually lived in messy, sometimes incoherent and probably simultaneous or recursive ways. For the sake of readers and the researchers who may follow, a biographer usually does some “straightening out’ of that tangle into a coherent sequential story with an identifiable beginning, middle and end.  Those waypoints, Bourdieu asserts, are imposed on the life, not how it is actually lived.

Fourie manages the negotiation between structure and messiness nicely.

First, she grounds everything in solid research, with ten pages of end-notes backing her 350, footnoted, pages of text. Then, she does sufficient straightening out that it’s easy to see the timeline unfold, and to place personal events in the context of the history of community and cultural oppression that was their context. The book could take a useful place on music and social studies curricula, because it makes those contextual connections clear, in an un-forced but vivid way.

But there are also times – and the way she deals with the murder is one – where she simply lets complexity breathe and does not try to rearrange that information to impose a neat explanation.

Taliep Petersen

Fourie’s tender handling of complexity extends to her consideration of Petersen’s material. As a musicologist, she is well aware that in some representations of Malay vocal music and its descendant genres – from practitioners, promoters (and most egregiously often from the media)  – deep, spiritual roots and intricate codes of subversion are often in contention with gurning, gap-toothed stereotypes.

By never masking her own presence and role in the biographical process, she has a vehicle to express the unease that the power relationships implicit in every placing of the music generate.

Mr Entertainment can be read on multiple levels. It’s a life story – and a wonderfully readable, hugely entertaining one, given the fluency and sharpness of its sources. It’s certainly history and an important addition to the archive. And it’s also an autobiographical account of a scholarly journey: learning the man, his milieu, and its music through the lens of who this writer is. We need more authors to explore this space, and more publishers to publish them.

Carlo Mombelli’s Lullaby for Planet Earth: a trio explores the sound-world

Nobody in South Africa should need an introduction to the work of bassist Carlo Mombelli, whose new project, Lullaby for Planet Earth (https://www.clapyourhands.ch/product-page/carlo-mombelli-lullaby-for-planet-earth ) launched in September.

Carlo Mombelli

The man is “South Africa’s premier avant-garde bassist” – a label I’ll return to – former playful concert master of the anarchic Prisoners of Strange, a Wits prof, a composer for stage and film, the author of music books, and a collaborator with musicians as diverse as Egberto Gismonti, Lee Konitz, Charlie Mariano, Adrian Mears, Siya Makuzeni, Mbuso Khoza and the late Duke Makasi and John Fourie – in Abstractions – and Miriam Makeba…and yadda, yadda, the list goes on.

No disrespect to Mombelli and his distinguished collaborators, but that list – and especially that label – don’t (except in signaling sonic diversity) tell you much about what a new project from him will sound like.

“Avant-garde”? To some people that’s an instant turn-off, warning of harsh, screeching, dissonant, industrial sounds or hipsters spouting incomprehensible gallery-speak in a high-priced, exclusionary space. Its original meaning – simply, those who advance first – has got buried under some deeply classed (and often raced and gendered too) baggage.

Mombelli has indeed often gone first in certain musical directions. Wholly improvised creations were there in Abstractions, and unexpected sounds from industrially-produced objects – plastic squeaky toys and bits of PVC piping, for example – did emerge from the Prisoners’ bandstand. But that was never the sum total of any of that music. Mombelli told a journalist that he was influenced “by everyday sounds” and that those could be “tonal as well as atonal.”

And every album, before and since those days, has been different from the last.

Wolfgang Muthspiel

In recent years, Mombelli’s music has gravitated more towards the personal, meditative mood and subject-matter that was always part of his palette. (What could ever be more personal than the Prisoners’ exile song of longing, Me, the Mango Picker?)

2018’s Angels and Demons presented that mood at its rawest and most uneasy, as the bassist-leader faced down and reconciled with upsetting family history. The two albums are linked most strongly by a reprise in this new one of the 2018 track Athens, then, the epicentre of the album’s emotional force.

The vibe of Lullaby for Planet Earth, recorded in Basel in 2021 is quiet, measured and softly textured. It’s a trio outing, and Mombelli’s collaborators are Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel and Spanish multi-instrumentalist Jorge Rossy, heard here on drums and vibes. Neither is a stranger to collaboration with other string players: Muthspiel has worked with guitarists such as Ralph Towner; Rossy with Charlie Haden.

Jorge Rossy

There’s a chamber-music feel, not only in some of the almost-classical harmonic progressions Mombelli has crafted but in the intimacy of the collaboration. You can feel glances caught between players and their translation into subtle shifts in tone, as in how, this time, the emotions of Athens are carried and shaded by Rossy’s vibes.

Sometimes, Muthspiel’s guitar is the foreground voice, with Mombelli’s bass creating the ground, in the manner of a classical passacaglia. That’s what happens in the title track, which opens as a stately, minor key melody, then halfway through picks up a more fragmented modernity and urgency before returning home.

There are two versions of Clouds: in the first, the bass is the ground again, framing guitar and vibes; in the second its the guitar underpinning a gorgeous bass solo. In the closer, Compassion – the Hug, the hymn-like melody and effects-toned impro are grounded on cyclical digital loops: the contemporary and industrial are transformed into something altogether gentler and more at peace before spinning off on cymbals into outer space. It’s serious music in the best sense: that is, worth serious listening.