Ancients Songs of South Africa
The Ngqoko Cultural Group
The Ngqoko Cultural Group appeared recently at the Skirball Center in New York in their first American tour, presenting Ancients Songs of South Africa. The group preserves indigenous South African musical traditions, in particular, the traditions of the Xhosa culture of the Eastern Cape. While the larger company has 15 members, this touring group consists of six women and one man, the director, Tsolwana B. Mpayipheli.
They entered through the audience, from the back of auditorium. The opening denied a split between performer and audience; these singers are us. The women wore glorious blue and yellow dresses (blue and white on one woman) and head scarves, with Mpayipheli in a white caftan.
During some songs, the singers were accompanied by traditional instruments:
the uhadi, a bow with a calabash resonator
the umrubhe, a mouth bow
the umasengwana and the igubu, drums
the inkinge, a bow with tin resonator
the isitolo-tolo, a jaws harp
…and also by the harmonica, not traditional in Africa but which, Mpayipheli
explained, is included to please westerners. Traditional African instruments
are not usually played together, but the company sometimes breaks with tradition
and plays them simultaneously.
The singing was extraordinary, wonderful - euphoric and soothing. Even the ballads sounded like hypnotic chants. We learned that a chorus is greater than the sum of its voices - it has a collective life of its own. Sometimes the voices began timidly and intensified. Sometimes they faded out at the end of a song, and sometimes they just stop, but they never punctuated the ending like most European music.
Mpayipheli told us that this singing is not music because it has no written notes and no beats. I disagree. Music doesn't have to be written down, and there are European traditions without beat, such as Gregorian chant. These African songs are music of the first degree. The singers hummed, murmured, whistled and clapped their hands, sometimes shaking their hands and shoulders, sometimes stamping their feet in polyrhythmic ecstasy. The music varied from simple unison to polyrhythmic complexity. When they sang with an instrument - or instruments - accompanying, the vocals sometimes took to the background, giving an unusual depth to the sound, a sense of aural spaciousness.
The Ngqoko Cultural Group feature overtone singing, a traditional manner of vocalizing also known as throat singing. It sounded less like the throat singing of Asia had I expected. It shared the harsh, brittle quality of the Buddhist monks' voices, but it was deeper. Mpayipheli told us that they mix it with more familiar vocals "in order to make it pretty". And here's the lesson: there's more to music than prettiness. A further clue to understanding may lie in one of Mpayipheli's comments: "We put our complaints to music," he told us.
Indeed, the director's notes were helpful throughout the performance, given in a beautiful and lyrical, if not always intelligible, accent. African English is itself music. He would sometimes tell us the point of the lyrics. The song with the harmonica, for example, is about the dancing of a disabled woman. But I wanted more translation of the lyrics - is there a refrain? Indeed, are there verses? There was a bit if dancing during the course of the evening, and I would have liked to see more of that as well.
We're enormously grateful to The World Music Institute, which presented this great concert. At a mere 75 minutes, it was intensely enjoyable, satisfying, educative. We applaud The Ngqoko Cultural Group for keeping this tradition alive. We want more of it - more of all the magnificent musical traditions that are threatened by cultural globalization.
- Steve Capra
May 2008