kagablog

take a bow… and shove it up your arse! eish. i guess sometimes the line of defence against pedants is to be more anal than them… i know, i use it too. unfortunately when one does that one runs the risk of sounding like a bit like a poephol too.

e.g.: very few people in kzn speak isixhosa. if nishlyn ramanna, as a durbanite, were familiar with any so-called “indigenous south african language” other than his own, it would be more likely to be isizulu - which actually *was* taught to me in a so-called “white” government school in eighties kzn. so, in fairness, i have to observe that you are making the same kind of uninterrogated statements that you lambast ramanna for, back at him.

funny you remark about the absence of ululation: trevor steele-taylor repeatedly held me back from ululating during the last couple of pieces in the first half. in particular, i felt that the one with sazi dlamini that you mention compelled a response, and i felt uncomfortable keeping quiet! trevor said it was an inappropriate context and i supposed he was right, given that he’s a lot more experienced in attending these sorts of erudite event than me, so i kept schtumm. in fact, i suppose i asked him whether he thought i would be out of turn because i sensed it wasn’t entirely appropriate too. it’s ironic given that it was durban, supposedly the biggest, most vibrant, cosmopolitan city at the heart of the zulu kingdom!

the audience response certainly was subdued; even without other bow project performances to compare it to i noticed this, but i don’t believe the blame for this should fall squarely on the audience (and there were plenty of us under 50 - definitely journalistic license you are using here!).

my reserve was largely because michael blake seemed very uptight that night, getting up to fiddle with stuff between pieces (pardon the highly inappropriate PUN). it was also clear that there was a recording taking place - you were sticking up in the midst of us with a camera skimming our heads. people who are sensitive to this sort of thing - and many of the people in the very small audience seemed to me to be connected to the music department, so might well be - often hlonipha the camera by remaining as unobtrusive as possible so as not to ruin the quality of the recording. they don’t do this to the same extent if it’s purely an audio recording because they can’t SEE it happening as obviously… remember that hilariously consumptive cougher on that otherwise exquisite sviatoslav richter recording of lizst’s transcendental etudes from the 50s?

you might argue that in other auditoria the audience paid the camera no mind, BUT i would respond that the venue in durban happened to be howard college, the university’s law building. it has always felt stuffy to me. people are terribly polite in there. i used to watch lunchtime concerts there on mondays while at UND at the end of the 90s, and even those, which were very informal, felt contained and academic. this is mainly because, i think, the propriety of the building rubs off. seriously. i used to go and read in the Howard College law library when i wanted peace and quiet, purely because students respected the rule of silence there more politely than they did in the main campus library.

one last comment: i must say i did feel the separation between mantombi matotiyana and the nightingale quartet keenly too. it did feel awkward seeing the quartet and mantombi performing on the same stage all night, yet at all times separate from each other. though i didn’t read anything racist into it at all (i read it more with a kind of call-and-response idiom myself), i would personally have loved to hear them play something all together to dissolve that sense of compartmentalisation - in fact i was almost expecting that resolution. it could have been a fascinating experiment, and it would have smashed any possibility of dorks like ramanna reading apartheid into the evening.

however, because of the way the evening was structured, without the quartet and mantombi ever playing together, i think it is understandable that mantombi could have come across as having been put there to perform the “reference pieces” for each subsequent nightingale quartet version. this would make her performance read as curiously museumised in some way: in a sense as the “traditional” rendition faithful to “the great nofinishi dywili”’s original (which, of course, is an impossible notion, and one which would render mantombi’s iteration subservient to nofinishi’s), provided as an antecedent or an ahistorical backdrop for the bow project compositions. the dialogical aspect might have been better highlighted by a confluent performance of everyone on stage so that at some point they inhabited the same space and time, the *NOW*, more explicitly.

ok, enough dissent. i just feel that your response was not measured enough to RE-BUTT that truly shitty review effectively.

cherry bomb