kagablog

i feel compelled to respond to dr. nishlyn ramanna’s review in the sunday tribune of august 2 2009 of the bow project concert that took place in the Howard College Theatre on friday, july 24. This concert has already been reviewed on the kagablog by helgé janssen, and i would urge all readers looking for a more balanced account of the event to click this link.

Mr Ramanna starts getting it all wrong in the second paragraph of his review when he writes of composers “transcribing an uhadi bow song”. “Uhadi” is the isiXhosa word for a bow with a calabash and hence the sentence should read “transcribing an uhadi song”. dr Ramanna clearly hasn’t done his homework, he is not au fait with the meaning and correct usage of the word that is central to an understanding of this project. This sloppy, ungrammatical use of words extends, unfortunately, to the thrust of his argument as well.

In the third paragraph he once again writes about “the uhadi bow songs of the great Nofinishi Dywili”, which is the equivalent of writing “the calabash bow bow songs”. I make this point again, not to be pedantic, but to be explicit. If one is to make the kind of accusations that dr Ramanna does in his review, then one needs to build one’s house on solid foundations. One needs to know what one is talking about, and to talk about it in a manner that is above suspicion. One suspects however, that Mr. Ramanna is not at home in uhadi territory, that he has not conducted an etymological research into the word “uhadi”, that he does not know that the word refers to the opening, the hole in the calabash, through which the musical notes resonate. This hole is a form of nothing and it is nothingness to which the word “uhadi” is related.

dr Ramanna’s twice repeated grammatically incorrect use of the tautology “uhadi bow” betrays his lack of comprehension of the meaning of the isiXhosa word “uhadi”. One can’t blame him for this, after all he is “old enough to remember the South Africa of segregated schools, beaches and living areas” as he so poignantly puts it. It is highly unlikely that he would have learnt much isiXhosa at school and the blame for that we can lay squarely on the apartheid system of segregation, it certainly isn’t dr. Ramanna’s fault that he does not understand isiXhosa.

But as a writer of a review that is published in a newspaper, even a provincial one like the Sunday Tribune, dr Ramanna has a duty to his readers - not to mention to the artists he is reviewing - to do his homework. When he writes about feeling uncomfortable “with the separateness of uhadi stage left, and super-blonde string quartet stage right” this reader is baffled. Where was Mantombi Matotiyana supposed to sit? In the midst of the Nightingale Quartet? On their laps? dr. Ramanna doesn’t leave us with merely a sense of his uncomfortableness however, but he goes on to add that he couldn’t help finding this seating arrangement “a tad Bantustan-ish.”

Wow.

Here is a leap that one wouldn’t expect. It’s an intellectually lazy turn but one that is grossly irresponsible and potentially very damaging. One that needs to be rigorously interrogated.

I happened to tour with the Bow Project filming a documentary about this extraordinary musical event. I was present when Michael Blake made the decision to place the Nightingale String Quartet right of centre stage in order to place Mantombi Matotiyana equally in the spotlight, and, on a deeper metaphorical level, in order to showcase two distinct musical traditions equally. Blake’s vision of the uhadi tradition as an art music equal to the western composition tradition is controversial and groundbreaking. He has taken the uhadi out of the realm of ethnomusicology and foregrounded its use as a compositional tool. The placement on the stage serves to realise this radical foregrounding, in itself a break with the “Bantustan tradition” of separate development which would place the String Quartet representing Western Art music centre stage and allow the uhadi player only a marginal presence in the context of anthropology rather than music as such.

In fact the real “Bantustanish” experience of the evening was in the audience, over 95% so-called white (with the exception of course of Mr. Ramanna himself) and, with the exception of Jurgen Brauninger’s delightful daughter, hardly a person under the age of 50. Nowhere else during the tour was the reception of the Bow Project so muted, so stiff, so utterly colonial. I agree with Mr. Ramanna that the performance in the Howard College Theatre tended towards the limp. I don’t believe however, that this was because of any defect in the compositions, but rather due to the atmosphere generated by the Durban audience. Ms Matotiyana’s exuberant ululations were greeted with ululatory responses in Tshwane and Jozi and even in Bloemfontein (!). Unfortunately such enthusiasm was not forthcoming from the reserved Durbanites who hardly even responded to Sazi Dlamini’s momentous performance of his and Jurgen Brauninger’s composition Jiwé. That this performance did not blow dr. Ramanna’s socks off I can only attribute to the fact that his shoes must be laced too tightly.

Finally, in his review of the Bow Project, dr. Ramanna makes the perplexing error of comparing a live performance to a documentary film. As the Dutch say this is like comparing apples to pears and is not very useful at all. He ends with what I presume to be a nod towards my beloved Rilke’s advice to the young poet not to write unless the writing is informed by “a deep, unshakeable necessity.” It would not be too uncharitable of me to suggest that dr. Ramanna heed his own advice in future.

Aryan Kaganof
24/09/09