Dandemutande

Scored for seven or more players, these tunes have been arranged in the style of contemporary Zimbabwean marimba ensemble repertoire – with soprano, tenor, baritone, and bass voicing. Accessible to younger (adaptable to Orff instruments) as well as college-level ensembles, each piece can be “arranged” according to the ability level of the players – extra percussion can be added and there is lots of room for improvisation.

Contents:

• • Butsu Mutandari (Long Oversize Shoe)
• • Chiro Cha Cho (Shona Wedding Song)
• • Vamudara (The old man is wearing tatters)

The “sequel” to “Three Shona Songs,” Shona Spirit includes three traditional mbira tunes (Mahororo, Nhemamusasa, and Nyamaropa) arranged for marimba ensemble. All the marimba parts in these arrangements are derived from actual mbira parts, and are marked either “kushaura” or “kutsinhira” in order to facilitate the ensemble’s understanding of this important interlocking principle. Scored for 7 marimbists (can be performed on 4 marimbas) and hosho. Drum parts may be added as desired to get everyone involved. As in “Three Shona Songs,” improvisation is encouraged and even required!

Contents:

• • Mahororo (Freedom following victorious struggle)
• • Nhemamusasa (Temporary shelter)
• • Nyamaropa (Meat and blood)

With this book and its two accompanying CDs, Michael Williams endeavors to teach the fundamentals of eight mbira songs (a basic part plus variations) using tablature notation and sample recordings. The basic version of each song is also presented in standard Western musical notation.

Overall, it’s a good physical production. The print is large, the book opens flat, and Williams’ mbira notation is easy to read. The audio examples are slow and easy to follow. For someone without physical access to a teacher, this book is a way to get started, although, as Williams points out, "a real master player (preferably an authentic culture-bearer) must ultimately guide you toward mastery."

The book demonstrates solo parts to songs and makes a mild attempt to describe how to play the classic mbira kushaura/kutsinhira duet, although all of the audio examples are solo. Williams seems to have decided, probably wisely, to leave the complexities of teaching duet playing to in-person lessons with a live instructor.

Click to view sample pages:

The audio CDs accompanying the book are adequate, and a much better choice of medium than cassette would have been. I appreciate the full buzzy mbira sound and am glad that no attempt was made to clean it up. For the most part the audio examples seem do their job and provide an easy comparison with one’s attempts to play from the tablature. When playing the slow examples Williams’ pace is sometimes uneven, which might be his personal playing style, and he tends to hesitate between phrases, which might be a deliberate teaching method or perhaps simply symptomatic of the difficulty of playing slowly. His faster examples occasionally sound rushed. Nowhere in the book does he say how long he has played mbira or with whom he has studied, and I would have appreciated that kind of personal perspective, but overall he seems to be someone I’d enjoy playing mbira with should our paths eventually cross.

One of the risks of publishing such snapshots of a living, improvisational music is that students might assume that the one way that’s being presented is the only way or some "standard" way of playing. Williams emphasizes that these annotated mbira parts and the audio examples are indeed examples and shouldn’t be misconstrued as definitive performance. He provides a discography of nearly forty albums of mbira music, most of them by Zimbabweans, and encourages the student to listen to master players for guidance, which surely every passionate student will do. For each of the eight mbira songs presented here, he cites the published transcriptions and recordings that are his sources so that others can follow in his footsteps.

I found myself wishing that Williams hadn’t used the academic writing style in which the author is absent from his own sentences ("this is way it’s done" rather than "this is how I was taught"). That disembodied voice tends to imply that any point being made is universally true rather than local, personal, or idiosyncratic, and I find that implied authority problematic in a tutorial of another culture’s music. Williams describes how to hold the mbira without suggesting there might be other ways (e.g., with all the left fingers along the left side of the soundboard instead of any of them under its bottom edge); he directs us to learn mbira parts first one hand then the other without mentioning the pleasure and insight that can come from learning both hands at once; he says that all mbira huru are laid out the same without mentioning that many Gandanga mbira have that extra key in the lower-left #2 position (consideration of which complicates any numbered-key tablature system such as this). One place he does succeed in conveying a certain realistic fuzziness is in the introduction to each piece where he often cites more than one meaning to a song or its title as heard from various mbira players. I also appreciate the sidebar quotes from mbira players and the extensive resource listings that point to the wonderfully complex world beyond this simple beginning. And he plays the audio examples in a variety of tunings to encourage the student to embrace that diversity.

Williams has kindly directed his proceeds from the sale of this book to MBIRA, the non-profit organization dedicated to helping Zimbabwean musicians.

Contents:

• • Forward (by Chartwell Dutiro)
• • Author's Bio
• • Author's Note
• • The Mbira
• • Shona Mbira Musical Style
• • Transcriptions/Notations
• • Kariga Mombe
• • Mahororo
• • Nyamaropa
• • Nhemamusasa
• • Kuzanga Listen
• • Taireva
• • Nyamaropa yaChivhanda Listen
• • Bangidza Listen
• • Glossary of Shona Terms
• • Resources (Books & Articles, Recordings, Videos, Internet)

Credits:

B. Michael Williams.