THE BOW PROJECT
Reimagining Nofinishi Dywili's
traditional uhadi bow song performances
NewMusicSA's BOW PROJECT continues to have an afterlife several years after it was conceived by Michael Blake for the New Music Indaba in 2002.
THE PROJECT
The project invites composers to transcribe one of Nofinishi Dywili's performances of a traditional uhadi bow song, arrange it for mezzo-soprano and string quartet, and compose a paraphrase or reimagining of the music for string quartet alone.
In concert the transcription is preceded by the original song performed by the legendary bow player and singer Madosini, and followed by the paraphrase.
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THE STORY SO FAR
- A pilot phase with pieces by Martin Scherzinger and Andile Khumalo launched the project at the New Music Indaba in Grahamstown in 2002 (see New Music Indaba 2002).
- The success of the first phase resulted in eight more commissions in 2003, six of which were completed and premièred at the New Music Indaba in Grahamstown and Johannesburg (see New Music Indaba 2003). Composers in this phase were Paul Hanmer, Philip Miller, Mokale Koapeng, Julia Raynham, Lloyd Prince and Matteo Fargion. The SABC recorded these for future broadcast...
- The complete collection was presented again at the 2004 New Music Indaba (see New Music Indaba 2004), and in 2005 a further four pieces were commissioned, including a work by Jürgen Bräuninger and Sazi Dlamini which combined the bow player and string quartet for the first time in this project. Robert Fokkens and Derek Gripper delivered the other two pieces. The 2005 performances were broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Hear and Now along with highlights from the 2005 Indaba (see New Music Indaba 2005).
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THE BOW PROJECT HAS DRAWN PRAISE FROM THE CRITICS
"If you needed a reason for having National Arts Festivals, then the Bow Project provided it." (Gwen Ansell, Cue)
"Most exciting, perhaps, is The Bow Project, a celebration of the uhadi bow music of the Eastern Cape...this is compelling repertoire...I have no doubt that several of these pieces will make it big in the US and Europe...pieces from The Bow Project are bound to become important." (Mary Rörich, Mail & Guardian)
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SPONSORSHIP
Sponsorship from the project's inception has come from the Distell Foundation for the Performing Arts, for which NewMusicSA is enormously grateful. Without visionary sponsors, such projects would not even get off the ground.
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2006
2006 has seen performances in Germany and the "Cradle of Mankind" in South Africa.
Mokale Koapeng's string quartet paraphrase Komeng — based on Uyeyezolo — toured Germany in May with performances in Ulm/Donau (14 May), Würzburg (15 May) and Dresden (16 May), played by the European Music Project of Berlin. The second concert was broadcast on German radio on 29 October.
Meanwhile back in South Africa a few days earlier, local diva Sibongile Khumalo made her Bow Project debut singing two of the transcriptions (with string quartet) of Nofinishi's songs: Matteo Fargion's Nguwe l'udal' inyakanyaka and Paul Hanmer's uTsiki. The companion string quartet paraphrases were also heard: Fargion's String Quartet No 4 and Hanmer's Ntwazana.
The performance took place in the Sterkfontein Caves — the Cradle of Mankind — near Johannesburg on 25 October.
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2008: BOW PROJECT GOES TO THE FAROE ISLANDS
NewMusicSA collaborated with the ISCM Section in the Faroe Islands, and Bow Project pieces by Mokale Koapeng and Julia Raynham were heard at Summartónar, the local contemporary music festival, in July 2008. For the first time also, composers from another country contributed bow pieces. Composers living and working in the Faroe Islands — Kristian Blak, his String Quartet No 5 and Atli Petersen, his Virtual Snowflakes (String Quartet No 2) — composed paraphrases on uhadi bow music.
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THE BOW PROJECT 2009: SOUTH AFRICAN TOUR AND CD PRODUCTION
To mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of NewMusicSA (South African Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music) last year, South Africa joined forces with the Faroe Islands ISCM section to take the Bow Project on a tour of South Africa and make a CD recording. The tour was sponsored by the Distell Foundation for the Performing Arts, the National Arts Council of South Africa and the Faroe Islands ISCM section.
Legendary uhadi performer Mantombi Matotiyana from Cape Town and the young all-female Nightingale String Quartet from Denmark performed the uhadi songs of Nofinishi Dywili and the string quartets by South African and Faroese composers respectively, and were well received by audiences around the country.
The tour itinerary covered several thousand kilometers:
| 19 July | Concert (Nederburg Concert Series, Manor House, Paarl) |
| 21 July | Concert (Miriam Makeba Hall, Unisa, Pretoria) |
| 22 July | Concert (Atrium, Wits University, Johannesburg) |
| 24 July | Concert (Howard College, UKZN, Durban) |
| 26 July | Concert (Odeion, UFS, Bloemfontein) |
| 28 July | Lunchtime Concert (UFH, Alice) |
| 29-30 July | Recording Sessions for String Quartet (Grahamstown) |
| 31 July | Concert (Beethoven Room, Rhodes University, Grahamstown) |
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Recording was completed in two days in Grahamstown at Corinne Cooper’s Sonic Arts Studio, and editing and mastering, as well as design and documentation of the cover, was completed in August 2010.
Kristian Blak, who spearheaded the tour and CD production, travelled along with his wife Sharon Weiss, and the party was completed by Aryan Kaganof, distinguished filmmaker and writer, who shot 40 hours of film with a view to editing a film in the near future.
The day prior to the Alice concert saw the musicians visit Ngqoko, Nofinishi Dywili’s village in near Lady Frere. The string quartet played to the women of the Ngqoko Cultural Group and they performed in return, as did Mantombi. It was a very special experience for everyone to take the project back to its source, as it were. Nofinishi died in 2002, ironically just before the project was launched, but it remains a lasting tribute to her memory.
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The Bow Project has been hailed as one of the most important South African musical projects ever. Gwen Ansell wrote in Cue, the National Arts Festival newspaper, in 2002 at its first outing:
If you want a reason for having national arts festivals, the Bow Project provided it.
Reviews during the tour were equally enthusiastic:
It addresses music’s capacity to bridge the chasms that seem to separate modern and traditional, spiritual and secular, or Western and African/Asian cultural spaces.
Breaking musical barriers – this is often mere code for some experiment in which exotic elements (a mouthbow, a kudu horn, a gourd shaker) are pasted on to otherwise highly conventional music to give it World Music marketability. The end products are about as far from genuine experimentalism as London is from Lagos. But genuine attempts to break down genre barriers are being made. One is the Bow Project heard yesterday at Wits in Johannesburg. Rather focusing on the performance externals of Xhosa women’s song and bow music, the project treats the tunes as intricate compositions, and unleashes the imagination of other composers to create variations on their internals: structure, harmonics and rhythms.
Dis ’n vreemde ervaring om die twee wêrelde op een verhoog te sien... Dit is moeilik om spesifieke komponiste in hierdie beperkte spasie uit te sonder, want elkeen het iets anders met die oorspronklike musiek probeer doen. In Paul Hanmer se Ntwazana kry ’n mens ’n meer informele, “maklik om na te luister”-gevoel en Matteo Fargion se Strykkwartet No. 4 het sterk duidelike Afrika-ritmes gebruik. Dit was ook die première van Theo Herbst se Umhala wasetywaleni (Wat maak jy?) vir strykkwartet en klankopname, ’n werk wat musiekgrense uitdaag. Dit is afgesluit met nog ’n première: Michael Blake se Strykkwartet no. 3 (Nofinishi), ’n kort en stimulerende slot vir ’n interessante, uitdagende musikale ervaring.
A feeling of universal harmony is created as Matotiyana moves to the music of the String Quartet and vice versa. To hear the collaboration of new classical and that of traditional bow music allows one’s mind to be set free in another time and place... This is a winner with both audiences as they can learn about one another’s music.
It was fascinating then, to experience what for me was ultimately a striking spiritual distinction, laterally, across a cultural spectrum: a juxtaposition of aligned worlds continents apart yet demonstrating the equality and quality of value of culture and cultures that span this spectrum... At some point in one of the final pieces of the evening (Blake’s String Quartet No. 3 (Nofinishi) 2009) it suddenly felt as if I was listening simultaneously to each musician separately! It was an astonishing experience and I wondered if this was somehow intricately wound round, into and from the presence of Mantombi - she certainly responded with her arms and body! Four individuals bound together by an entangled weaving of musical notes contributing along a time-stream of precision and fluidity. And this was where the second ‘magic’ of the evening took on a zest all of its own!
The Bow Project is a double CD, recorded on the TUTL label as FKT044 and released in the Faroe Islands. The CD will be launched in South Africa on 16 October 2010 at the University of Stellenbosch at 18h00 prior to a concert of Terry Riley’s IN C. The speaker will be Dr Stephanus Muller, director of Domus (Documentation Centre for Music at the University of Stellebosch). CDs will be on sale and wine will be provided by Distell.
The first CD contains 12 of the Bow Project reimaginings for string quartet – 10 by South African, and 2 by Faroese, composers. The second CD contains digitally remastered performances of the Nofinishi Dywili originals, in the same order in which the quartets draw on their material. These were originally recorded in the field by Professor Dave Dargie during his research in the 1980s and 1990s. Each CD concludes with an electronic remix.
The booklet contains an introduction by Michael Blake, who devised the project, and an essay on Nofinishi Dywili by Dave Dargie, as well as notes by the composers.
Also see: The Bow Project Tour 2009
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Michael Blake presented a paper The Bow Project: Composers Reimagine the Bow Songs of Nofinishi Dywili at the Symposium on Ethnomusicology at ILAM, Grahamstown in 2004. It is published in the proceedings of that conference (ILAM, 2005). Copies available from ILAM.
A transcript of a round table discussion The Bow: South Africa's Weapon of Culture held at the 2003 New Music Indaba is published in NewMusicSA, Bulletin of the ISCM South African Section Third/Fourth Issue, 2004/5 & 2005/6 (NewMusicSA, 2006). The round table consisted of Michael Blake (chair), Matteo Fargion, Paul Hanmer, Philip Miller, and Julia Raynham. Copies are available from NewMusicSA: see NewMusicSA Bulletin No. 3-4 2004/2005 Contents for details.
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NOTE
NewMusicSA welcomes requests to present the project at arts festivals, arts centres and on concert series around the country. Contact: .
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