Human Musicality: From Africa to Epirus

After an intense few weeks discussing many varieties of music with Christopher King, I came home to look up some of my books on the subject. I had mentioned to Chris John Blacking's book How Musical Is Man? (1973, 1976). In the preface, Blacking writes:

"Even after a year's intensive fieldwork, I tended to regard African music as something "other"; and this attitude would be reinforced  when I listened to a tape of Wozzeck or some of Webern's music in my tent, or whenever there was a piano available and I could immerse myself in Bach, or Chopin, or Mozart.

It was the Venda of South Africa who first broke down some of my prejudices. They introduced me to a new world of musical experience and a deeper understanding of "my own" music".

At the end of his book he concludes:

"It is necessary to understand why a madrigal by Gesualdo or a Bach Passion, a sitar melody from India or a song from Africa, a Balinese gamelan of a Cantonese opera, or a symphony by Mozart, Beethoven or Mahler, may be profoundly necessary for human survival, quite apart from any merit they may have as examples of creative and technical progress. It is also necessary to explain why, under certain circumstances, a "simple" "Folk" song may have more human value than a "complex" symphony".

Chris King has been thinking and writing about these issues for many years, and his thoughtful sleeve notes to his productions of CDs and LPs of pre-war songs and music of artists as different as Charlie (Charley) Patton and Alexis Zoumbas reveal the depth and originality of his thinking. We must hope that he finds time and funding to carry out more field research and to write his "magnum opus" on aspects of the subject.

In the course of my own career, I have enjoyed, recorded and collected music from many different cultures, in Ethiopia and Kenya. for instance; the tapes and musical instruments I collected are housed in the Horniman Museum, London, so it was a great experience to accompany Christopher King on his recent field recording sessions in some remote mountain villages of Epirus, in Pogoni and Zagori, not far from the Albanian border.

Some shots from my own African musical scrapbook (1971-1977)

 From the collection I made: 

Examples of Nyatiti (Luo bowl harp), Litungu (Luhya), Masenko (Ethiopian)

A poem I wrote in China:


A, ai ge (Sad Song at Simitai)


Below Dead Horse Pass, at Simitai,

The blind musician

Sings Chinese blues.

The sliding notes

(A three-stringed lute,

A snake-skin soundbox)

Recall Blind Willie's

Hoarse gospel wail.

Call him "Blind-Willie

At-the-Wall".

A, ai ge!


****

Another poem, written in Ethiopia:


Masenko


In the mud

of the open market

squats a beggar

with a gangrenous leg.

He fingers and bows

his masenko,

playing the tizita tune.

What music he makes

in his squalor;

what tortuous notes he weaves

on his loom of sad laments.

But for all his afflictions and pleading

not all the refrains he invents

will raise him up out of the mud

or pay for a hospital bed.

So throw him a few cents, my friends,

half of him's already dead,

let him buy himself a bandage

or a final piece of bread;

we'll have him sing a few last songs

before the gangrene spreads.

Admiring his masenko,

we can forget what makes him sing.

Unable to pity a man so ill,

we praise instead his musical skill:

Could Beethoven have done any better

with a single horse-hair string

stretched over a skin violin ?



Addis Ababa,
July 1974.

*****


Another from Northern Greece:


Gaida-Man,
21 April 2000,
Corner of Tsimiski/Aristotelos, Thessaloniki 


The wizened old gaida-man,

Crumple-legged on the pavement,

Tobacco-leaf skin scarred with patches of red,

Playing his bagpipe. Made by hand, played by heart.



A frail seventy-five, a Thracian from Evros;

He spoke broken Greek; his tongue may have tripped

But his fingers were nimble,

The music ecstatic from his squeezed sack of breath.



We gave him four thousand drachmas

For sharing his art,

For giving a glimpse-

The last life-breath of “folk”.

****


A few more from Greece:

The First Lyre 

I know now when the blues was born.

When Hermes stumbled on a tortoise

He thought "That's just what I've been looking for",

And he tore out its flesh with a chisel.

He emptied the shell, scraped the carapace clean,

A natural sound-box, but somewhat obscene.

What other animals did he not hesitate

To murder in the name of music ?

He made two arms from the horns of a goat,

He stripped hide from an ox, stretched it over the shell.

He made seven strings from the guts of sheep,

And tautened them over a bridge.

He shaped a plectron of ivory, another of horn.

When he struck the strings, the sound was sweet.

As Hermes played, Apollo listened,

And at once his anger died.

But the animals howled and moaned -

Not at all the Orphic effect.

Apollo accepted the gift of the lyre,

And composed a hymn of praise.

But the god of music

Could not appease

The spirit of the tortoise.

The sheepgut strings,

The wild goat's horns

And the skin of the ox

Refused to serve his purpose.

He discovered the sound of a desperate Muse:-

And Lyric Poetry was born with the Blues.

"Na ta poume?” Christmas Eve, 1983,

Popular Market, Thessaloniki, Greece. 

Christmas Eve, a Saturday;

Children with triangles,

The traditional carol.

“Na ta poume?” Na ta poume?”

Under the weight of a barrel-organ

From Constantinople

The refugee’s nephew stoops and wobbles,

The relic strapped  like a cross to his back;

He staggers along from shop to shop:

“Na ta poume? Na ta poume?”

Not for him to turn the handle,

To sing the tune his uncle grinds:

He thumps and taps the tambourine,

Palms the membrane so it squeals and moans,

Does oriental dances by the butchers’ stalls,

In the coffee-shops and ouzeris;

The old refugee, long since retired,

Like the listening butcher, the backgammon players,

Still inhabits The City, still walks its streets,

Only stops staring into the middle distance,

Lets hand stop winding laterna handle,

When groups of young Thracian gypsies,

Magpie musicians, faster on their feet,

Always eager to steal a trick,

Sneak round in front, beat him to the best-filled shops,

Playing shrill shawms and beating drums, laughing

As they overtake him

To an audience with coins to throw, -

But they warm no hearts, nor steal the show.

Though the cumbersome barrel-organ must stand outside,

Greeks are glad to see it still alive,

Still decorated in the same old way:

The laterna with its Constantinople label.

It may be cumbersome, but it’s melodic;

The folk-songs have been harmonized:

Byzantine pins on a Roman cylinder.

The shawm-players may make much more noise,

Pied-pipers with their wooden oboes piercing through the din

Of the market-dealers’ Christmas cries:

But they can’t negotiate all the notes

Of “Kalyn imeran archontes”.

They have not walked his Calvary,

The Calvary of the Great Idea. 

December 24, 1983.

*****

Memories of Asia Minor: Improvisation in a Minor Key  

Don’t put down that old bouzouki,

Tsitsani virtuoso!

Explore all the roads,

Extend that taqsim,

Scatter the clouds

That darken each dream.

Take me back to the East

As I move further West.

Make the rhythm more heavy

To lighten my soul:

“We’re refugees all”

Your silver strings scream. 

1983

(Note: Vassilis Tsitsanis died 18 January 1984, in a London hospital).

Next, a kind of post-colonial Aboriginal blues which I performed in 1997 for the Sydney Poetry Olympics in Australia, with didgeridoo accompaniment; the didj was played by talented Aboriginal didgeridoo player Cedric Talbot. For three consecutive years, 1995-1997, I was invited to be one of the judges/adjudicators of the Poetry Olympics; in '97 they asked the judges to perform too, the others being Chin Woon Ping and Jill Jones. In 1995, to launch the first Sydney Poetry Olympics, I wrote and performed an antipodean Olympic ode in praise of Komninos, the "Aussie Pindar" (included in "Corfu Blues", Ars Interpres Publications, 2006), a great performance and cyber-poet. My fellow judge in ´95 was Yusef Komunyakaa. That year the Sydney Writers' Festival organised the opening event at the Opera House (Northern Foyer). In 1996 the Nuyorican# poets, including Dale Orlandersmith and Emily XYZ , took part in a poetry slam at the Museum of Contemporary Art . Together we attempted to judge the best poems and performances for the Poetry Olympics, never an easy matter.

This then is "The Apocalyptic Blues", for didjeridoo accompaniment, a strangely angry-sounding poem which also alludes to the riots that occurred in the USA in the 1960s:

The Apocalyptic Blues
(FAST DIDJ)

In his underground pulpit he's preaching

staining the flagstones with dew;

they're dancing themselves to a frenzy,

the disciples whose minds he once blew.



In his underground pulpit he's preaching

beating the drum by his side;

he prays for the brothers who lived and who died,

- if only the poor bastards knew.

(SLOW DRONE)

In the attic, flames flare up

kindled by an antique tinder.

Oak-beams, once burnished bright,

now wrinkled with pain by the centuries' strain....ing

to produce a single acorn,

bloom and give birth as they burn.


Let nobody weep, let nobody mourn -

we shall all in our turn

be reduced to a cinder.



Ancestral portraits

coated with the dust of generations

once two-dimensioned, bloodless, static,

burst into smiles and howl with laughter,

(DIDJ GETS ANGRY, LOUDER)

rebelling at last against their portrayal

as sad-eyed stoics

staring at the Crucifix

frozen in poses of self-denial.



Only now do they know their painters' betrayal.

(DIDJ VIOLENT)

"Revenge!" cries the oldest and cruellest fanatic:

they will wait no longer for the rainbow sign,

they execute vengeance without mercy or trial.

(DIDJ , STACCATO CRESCENDO)


Only flames and blood are emphatic.

*****

Photo - Axel Poignant, Leading the Dance


*****

A poem from North London:


Our Ethnic Neighbours


"Our ethnic neighbours!"

Snarl the Volvo-owning English couple

Who live opposite the Cypriot Turks

In London N11.

There's a wedding party in the garden;

The discordant oriental scales

Of amplified 'ud and tabla (loud),

Climb all the way to Muswell Hill

This hot Sunday in July.

Poll-tax payers clap and dance-

Windows wide open, I lie on my bed

And listen, restless,

Wishing I could join in too.


*****

Finally, a poem written about animal bells, Halkidiki:

Symphony of Bells

If I could have recorded

The concert of goats’ bells

Chiming and pealing, as the herd moved along,

Tuned to each other, harmoniously tinkling,

Nothing else would I listen to

All my life long.

                Out of two hundred, out of two hundred

                Out of two hundred none rang a note wrong.

Some were pitched deeply and others pitched higher,

True perfect fourths, tuned octaves apart.

And the goatherd he chivvied, coaxed and conducted,

And his calls to the herd were sweeter than song.

                Sweeter than song, sweeter than song

                And his calls to the herd were sweeter than song.

Shimmering sound among the red poppies,

Clanging with crimson in pastures of green;

Goats of all shades of black, white and brown,

On the track through the dunes, right down by the sea.

               Down by the sea, down by the sea,

               Clinking and tinkling down by the sea.

The goatherd’s family followed the herd,

Wife and two children, the field was their school.

Virgilian vision, Theokritan idyll,

Such miraculous music brings it back to us still.

The dangling bells of the billy-goats donged,

And the kids, keeping up, made double the dings.

The pattern of sound was sequenced and planned,

The composer was pulling invisible strings.

Pastoral symphony, magical music,

Music for magic, to ward off evil eye:

Eye of the tourist, caught behind camera,

Eye of the Cyclops, and caster of spells.

Eye of the herdsman within the next valley,

Covetous goatherd, possessing no bells.

               Out of two hundred, out of two hundred,

               Out of two hundred, none rang a note wrong.

He-goats and she-goats,

She-goats and he-goats,

Bucolic notes

Of bells within bells:                            

Idiophones, Halkidiki.