Launch: 18h00, 16 October 2010, University of Stellenbosch
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) |
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.
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.
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