|
From the ceiling of Paul Berliner's office hangs what, at first
glance, appears to be the prehistoric skeleton of a pterodactyl.
The imposing artifact seems out of place, given that Berliner is
an ethnomusicologist, not an archaeologist. He is quick to explain.
|
Selections
from Paul Berliner's field recordings
RealPlayer required, Broadband connection
recommended.
Recording
samples courtesy of
Nonesuch Records.
|
The skeleton, he says, comes not from a dinosaur but from a pilot
whale. In the late 1960s, between completing his master's and beginning
work on his Ph.D., he worked as a music teacher in the public schools
of lower Cape Cod. One afternoon after work, he was jogging on
the beach, and, from the surf, a grainy rock caught his eye. He
began to dig. Rock became bone, and bone became pilot whale, long
buried in the sand.
It took Berliner three days to dig up the skeleton, but only a
single leap of imagination to recognize its possibilities: In his
musician's hands, the skeleton became a whale-bone marimba, an
instrument played with mallets like a xylophone. The various sizes
and thicknesses of the bones gave off different pitches when struck,
and he integrated the instrument into a unit on whale songs.
The museum-like relic, which now hovers over his desk in the basement
of the Biddle Building on Duke's East Campus, is oddly appropriate.
For the past thirty-five years, Berliner, now Arts and Sciences
Professor of music at Duke, has been engaged in a preservation
project of his own: collecting, recording, and transcribing the
Shona mbira music that is indigenous to Zimbabwe. An oral tradition
passed down from generation to generation for some 1,000 years,
the music has been threatened in recent years by an array of powerful
forces that include revolution, civil war, the AIDS pandemic, modernization,
and religion.
The Shona people represent a Bantu-speaking ethnic group that makes
up more than 80 percent of Zimbabwe's population. Shona musicians
play many traditional African instruments, including marimbas,
drums, and the mbira—a keyboard instrument consisting of a wooden
soundboard, metal keys that are plucked with the thumbs, and rattles,
usually made of shells or bottle caps. It is often placed inside
a "gourd resonator" for amplification. Mbira music is
played for pleasure and has been used as a vehicle for social commentary.
But its primary use is in Shona religion, which is based on the
worship of ancestral spirits. The music of mbira ensembles is believed
to play a key role in helping mediums become possessed by the spirits.
The measure of a musician's skill is based in part on how quickly
the medium becomes possessed.
In the 1970s, when Berliner made his first trips to what was then
the British colony of Rhodesia, native Africans were involved in
a struggle for independence against white minority rule that had
been in place since the end of the nineteenth century. Spirit mediums
were often consulted by revolutionaries, and they and mbira musicians,
seen as their abettors, fell into disfavor with the government.
Some were killed. Others lost their lives in the civil war that
followed independence in 1980. "You see the vulnerability
of oral traditions in the face of the destructiveness of war," Berliner
says.
In more recent times, Zimbabwe has been beset by other types of
destruction. The AIDS pandemic has been especially prevalent and
deadly in Southern Africa. The United Nations Joint Programme on
HIV/AIDS estimates that more than 20 percent of adults in Zimbabwe
are HIV positive. Add to that modernization, urbanization, a wave
of foreign and domestic popular music, the demonization of Shona
religion by some Christian churches, a deteriorating health system,
the abject poverty that has come to haunt Zimbabwe over the past
several years—unemployment currently stands at around 80 percent,
and the country's inflation rate ballooned last year to 1,000 percent—and
the indigenous tradition faces what amounts to the perfect storm.
Berliner's task, as he sees it, is to help the culture ride out
that storm by translating oral tradition to written, by capturing
on paper not only the music, but also the stories of the musicians
that play it and the people who listen. To that end, he has enlisted
Cosmas Magaya, a Zimbabwean mbira player who was one of his early
instructors and has been a frequent musical collaborator over the
years. "We're interested in helping to preserve the music's
oral repertory and creative practices, which have been made vulnerable
by multiple tragedies that have befallen the country," Berliner
says. When an art form is perpetuated purely as an oral tradition,
he says, "a break in one link of the chain means that the
collective knowledge of the community is potentially lost forever."
Berliner first fell for the mbira while a graduate student in
the world-music program at Wesleyan University. Although his research
initially focused on jazz (an interest that he has maintained,
even publishing a book, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation,
in 1994) he studied, on and off, with a visiting artist from Zimbabwe
and ended up writing his master's thesis on the karimba, one type
of mbira. "I was so deeply moved by the music," Berliner
says, "I decided to go to Africa to find master players to
instruct me." He first traveled to Zimbabwe in 1971. There,
he commissioned several teachers, including Magaya, then a young
member of renowned mbira player Hakurotwi Mude's band, Mhuri yekwaRwizi.
Mude, says Magaya, instructed band members to treat Berliner just
as they would any up-and-coming player. "He didn't want us
to treat him with baby hands."
Berliner began to develop relationships with musicians around the
country and learned not only about musical technique but also about
the history and culture of the tradition. He says this was particularly
difficult for him, a white American, during a period of struggle
against a white, colonial government.
In the introduction to his book The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe, he describes the process of learning
the names given to mbira keys by an elder mbira player, Mubayiwa
Bandambira. Over a four-year period, he made three visits to Bandambira,
who first told him the keys had no names. Then he created a system
so elaborate and full of conflicting information that Berliner
became frustrated trying to understand it. At the end of the third
visit, as Berliner was preparing to give up, Bandambira smiled
and said to onlookers, "Well, it seems to me that this young
man is serious after all. I suppose I can tell him the truth now."
Magaya recalls that it was strange to see a white man so interested
in the indigenous music and people. "When I first met Paul
in 1971, I wasn't sure what he really wanted," he says. But,
over time, he came to understand the enthusiasm and love that Berliner
poured into his work.
A trumpet player by training, Berliner found the mbira difficult
at first. The instrument is physically demanding, even when played
for short periods. Religious gatherings, or bira, sometimes go
on all night, and mbira ensembles that perform during the ceremonies
are expected to play consistently and with power for hours on end.
Berliner "had some very sore thumbs," Magaya says, laughing.
In addition, trying to analyze and understand a strange style of
music that was never transcribed presented Berliner with a formidable
challenge. He found that songs, consisting of kushaura (lead) and
kutsinhira (following) parts, tend to cycle in ways that make it
hard to locate a clear beginning and end. They are polyrhythmic,
meaning that different musicians perform different rhythms simultaneously.
The music also relies heavily on improvised variation to common
rhythms. Over the course of the year, he began to develop a basic
system of notation, hoping that he could practice songs he'd not
yet memorized when he returned home.
Berliner's research in Zimbabwe became the basis for his dissertation,
which provided the core of Soul of Mbira. During those trips, he
also collected field recordings that were released on two albums
that supplement that book.
While other scholars had written about Zimbabwean music and made
field recordings, Berliner's work—which describes, in great detail,
the techniques and significance of mbira music, as well as the
culture from which it emerged—was notable for the way he connected
with the people and reported from inside the community. And though
it was first published more than twenty-five years ago, it remains
a model study within the ethnomusicology community.
"When I wrote my dissertation [on Andean music], I had Paul's
book on my desk," says Tom Turino, a professor of musicology
and anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "I
wasn't following the format or even the theoretical points. I just
love the way he wrote about the people he worked with. It's a classic
study." Turino, who went on to write his own book about Zimbabwean
popular music, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (2000), teaches Soul of Mbira in an undergraduate survey
class of African music.
"There are ways of talking to people," says Deborah Wong,
an ethnomusicologist and professor of music at the University of
California Riverside who studies Asian and Asian-American music. "It
haunts all of us, trying not to treat people as bits of information—information
we want them to give to us. Paul sets the bar really high, the
way in which he only writes from a base of long-term friendship
and relationships of the people he studies."
• continues on
page two. |
