Les Todd

Though his musical resources are plentiful, Berliner faces the challenge of imposing a notation system on a tradition that has developed, even thrived, without it. The same focus on improvisation and variation that drew him to the music also makes getting it down on paper difficult, and some believe it may change the music's identity. Erica Azim, founder of the California-based nonprofit MBIRA, first traveled to Zimbabwe in the 1970s as a teenager—about the time Berliner was there. Through MBIRA, she has traveled to Zimbabwe almost every year and has recorded more than 130 musicians, helping to archive a broad variety of music and to provide financial support to musicians and instrument makers.

She has also taught traditional forms of the music to musicians of all levels of ability and from every continent, she says. "I try to discourage my students from notating mbira in any way," though she does allow them to record the music and play it back. "People have been learning this music for a thousand years without notation. Part of it is to use your ears.

"The most ancient version of the tradition is that it comes to people through spirits," she continues. "Mbira players have no idea what they're going to do until it comes out. It's difficult to preserve a tradition like that in its purest form. Our Western tradition is so much about control. This is the opposite: It's about letting go and letting something happen through you." She worries that attempts to transcribe such a fluid form will not do the music justice.

University of Illinois professor Turino, who says Soul of Mbira inspired his own study of Zimbabwean music, argues that pinpointing a specific form to preserve is difficult. "For a musical tradition that has been developing for many years and continues to develop today, all scholars can do is document the work of particular performers at particular points in time," which, he adds, "is certainly valuable." He points out that there are multiple histories and social realities, not to mention musical traditions, in the country and that "traditional" mbira musicians are still composing today, contemporary with jazz artists, religious choirs, and urban guitar bands.

But Jonathan Kramer A.M. '89, an associate professor of music and arts studies at North Carolina State University and adjunct professor of ethnomusicology at Duke, says failing to record the tradition is risky. A scholar of Chinese and Korean music, he points out that, as a result of the Cultural Revolution in China, there are "vast areas of traditional culture that are just gone. We are living in a time of great cultural die-off. They talk about endangered biological species...." He pauses.

Dynamic rhythms: in concert, Berliner and Zimbabwe musicians Magaya and Dyoko introduce audience members to the beautiful melodies and bittersweet lyrics that define mbira music

Michael Zirkle

"Yes, writing it down is going to change it," he says of the mbira tradition. "It's going to fix it, like putting a needle through a butterfly. On the other hand, if you don't do it, it's simply lost." He says our knowledge and ability to recreate the works of great Western composers from Palestrina to Bach is based on written records "that have long slept in dusty attics."

"The fact is that writing it down does change it, but it's already changed. It's changed by the onslaught of modernity with all of its disruptions of new possibilities. You don't want to put societies under a bell jar, but, on the other hand, many of the changes are coming about as aftermath of colonization, the Cold War, and other forces that have a supreme negative effect."

Still, Berliner agrees with Azim that it's important to be careful. He says that in his field, there is a long history of trying to get songs transcribed on a page in a pristine form. That works well with certain modern Western styles of music, where form and song structure are paramount, but works less well with a type of music that is based on variation and improvisation. "We are not presenting the pieces as fixed compositions," Berliner says. "What we're trying to get at is how the music works as a process."

For now Berliner and Magaya's attention is focused on the task at hand, but they have on the back burner two other projects: One will chronicle the way that music is passed down in an oral tradition, using Magaya as an example. It will show how he learned songs, changed them, and taught them to others. "Putting Cosmas' knowledge and repertory at the center of the study, we are exploring the relationship between individual imagination and collective imagination," Berliner says. The second project is an oral history of musicians who died during the struggle for independence.

The theme of the projects is not surprising, considering Berliner's fondness for the metaphor of "man as library." In 2003, as a visiting professor at Duke—he was on the faculty at Northwestern University at the time—Berliner debuted A Library in Flames: A Story of Musicians in a Time of War, a one-man show about the destruction of a Zimbabwean village during civil war. "When an old man dies, a library is burnt down," Berliner says, quoting an African proverb. The piece—part documentary, part art-project, and part memoir—was "meant to pay tribute to artists who have lost their lives in the independence war and in the AIDS pandemic, and to underscore the vulnerability of the oral tradition."

Berliner has "reconceptualized the idea of what an archive can be," says Wong, the UC-Riverside professor. "He's done his research in a country that went through a period of intense violence, through civil war, and that has made him take the idea of preserving memory and repertoire quite literally, in the sense that musicians were dying, and as they were dying, the tradition was literally being lost."

"He doesn't just go out with a microphone," says Wong. "He is treating musicians he works with as a certain kind of archive, a very dynamic archive."

It is the dynamism of the music and the tradition that led Berliner to collect and preserve histories. But, listening to him perform, one is reminded of what brought him to love the mbira in the first place—the beautiful melodies and often bittersweet lyrics. The way the low wail of his voice—to an untrained ear almost indistinguishable from those of the men featured in his field recordings—mixes with the plink and rattle of the mbira is moving. Berliner is at his best when the notes are flowing.

On an early November evening, Berliner, Magaya, and Ambulah Beauler Dyoko, who in the 1960s became one of the first prominent female mbira players, take the stage at the Price Music Center on North Carolina State's campus. The three thumb through several traditional tunes. They use gourd resonators to amplify the music. During one song, Magaya stands and turns so his back is to the audience. He holds the mbira above his head as he plays so the audience can see the instrument and the intricate thumbing patterns. Dyoko sings lead vocals on most songs, her voice rising high above the melodious tones of the mbira. Berliner and Magaya sing the lower background vocals. Their nonverbal calls highlight the music's complex, interwoven melodies.

Late in the performance, Dyoko performs a song that she wrote in the 1990s to promote AIDS awareness. Earlier, as the three rehearsed in Berliner's kitchen, Berliner left the room and came back with a compact disc and laid it on the table in front of Dyoko. It was a copy of Beauler Dyoko & The Black Souls 1994. In the center of the cover was a photograph from the 1970s of a young woman in a pink blouse, holding a gourd resonator and smiling broadly.

That's Dyoko, Berliner said, "long before she was a great-grandmother." On her right was a man in a wide-brimmed hat; to her left, a woman in a purple dress. Other band members had been cropped out. "Those guys are all dead now," Dyoko said, all of AIDS. She pointed to an arm extending into the left side of the cropped photo. That's her son's arm. He's dead, too.

With Berliner's help, the mbira tradition won't die. He's a curator, an archivist, a librarian. After years of collaborative work, he's got Magaya's repertory, in his words, "well tagged and organized."