February 2022 Update

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Sympathetic Resonances

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Feb 17, 2022, 4:42:16 PM2/17/22

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Dear all,

it's been a while, and I hope you are doing well and had a good start into 2022!

Learn mbira dzaVaNdau with Solomon Madhinga

It is my great pleasure to finally announce this 5-piece introductory course to the Ndau mbira, taught by Solomon Madhinga from Chipinge. Each piece comes with videos, audio recordings, lyrics + translations, and transcriptions of all variations in the video.

http://symres.org/ndau_course

You will likely need an mbira, and Solomon is happy to make one for you. He sells them for USD 250 (international price without shipping; locals please inquire). Telling from many videos and the three mbiras which I bought last year, his building style and quality are very consistent.

The course itself is free, just comes with a request to consider a donation. Both donations and mbira purchases support Solomon's teaching activities at the local cultural centre, as well as our overall objective to make this marginalised type of mbira more popular locally and internationally.

For me as someone who spend most of my time learning the nhare (like I guess many of us) getting started with the Ndau mbira has been a fascinating and rewarding experience. I can only recommend it! Most songs are harmonically simpler than the Shona mbira, but much more varied and cunning on the rhythmic side. While the right hand often plays the ostinato core of a song, the left thumb is free to improvises across three octaves - which is excellent training for someone like me who is stuck improvising mainly with the right hand. Playing this mbira feels much closer to drumming, it is about rhythmic sophistication, and I find it much easier to improvise convincing lines on the spot on its hexatonic scale (at least that's my illusion).

Latest good news is that even more material is on the way: Andrew Tracey will publish his long postponed article on the mbira dzaVaNdau in the upcoming issue of African Music, and we are working on making all of his transcriptions available on SR.

More matepe samples

I've added samples of two hera made to order by Josam Nyamukuvhengu for Andrew Tracey in the 1970s/early 80s. TIC 418 resembles Saini Madera's tuning; TIC 295 is slightly higher and resembles the Zonke family's tuning.

Safari playback bug

Audio playback is still broken on recent updates of Apple's Safari browsers (MacOs and iOs, whereas iPadOs seems to work). According to the issue tracker audio library emploayed by SR (howler.js) this is an Apple bug which they fixed already, but so far it did not make it into any new Safari releases. Until then, please use Firefox or Chrome / Chromium-based desktop browsers.

What is Kaleidophony?

Who does not know the beauty of hearing mbira pieces in different ways, depending on where in the cycle you anchor your sense of downbeat and tonal center? Yet I find it quite difficult to talk about it with non-mbira players, and even with players I'm sometimes not sure if we talk about exactly the same thing.

So I thought making a video about it, which then became two, one focusing on rhythm, the other on harmony. The latter you can watch here, the first one I decided to redo (follow the SR Youtube channel for updates if you're not on FB).

On a related note, have you checked out the Starting Point of the Day feature yet? You can activate it in your user preferences, where you can also set your preferred playback tunings.