April 2022 update
Sympathetic Resonances
Dear group,
here is a summary of recent changes on SR:
Die Kunst des Mbira-Spiels
As you may notice on your next login, there's a whole bunch of
new shared mbira dzavadzimu transcriptions. They come from Gerd
Grupe's book Die Kunst des Mbira-Spiels (The Art of Mbira
Playing) from 2004, one of two major monographs on mbira music
published in German only (Klaus-Peter Brenner's Chipendani und
Mbira the other).
The work contains a significant number of transcriptions from
Grupe's early 1990s research with Virginia Mukwesha (Ambyua Stella
Chiweshe's daughter), the late Chris Mhlanga, Samuel Mujuru, and
from other publications. A PDF version has been available for
download for many years (https://phaidra.kug.ac.at/o:69186).
Recently I had a nice conversation with Prof. Grupe. I asked him
if I could make the transcriptions available to mbira students on
SR. And also whether the mbira players agreed to the publication
at the time and were paid accordingly.
Prof. Grupe gave his consent (many thanks!), provided full
references and limitation of use to learning purposes - which
corresponds to SR's Terms of Use, which everyone agrees to when
registering.
Mbira (micro-)tuning comparison
Mbira maker Sebastian Pott (africanin...@gmx.de) helped me conduct an experiment I've been meaning to do for a long time: Comparing different mbira temperaments side by side. Here is the same mbira with a Bb root key tuned to equi-heptatonic (top), AMI karimba tuning (middle) which Andrew Tracey considered a "typical" mbira tuning back in the 1960s, and Western mixolydian tuning (bottom):
I find it extremely interesting how the different intervals
change character and ambiguity of the pieces. Try out yourself how
the tunings sound with pieces in different modes, or with the same
piece transposed to different degrees. Please share your
impressions (in the forum group; this group here is
announcements-only)!
Take things with a grain of salt though, as only the fundamentals
were retuned - of a mbira that was originally closer to mixolydian
and whose overtones were in tune with its scale. Overtones usually
do not change proportionally when detuning a mbira key.
For instance, one would expect pieces on an equi-heptatonic scale to sound basically the same in all modes, just higher or lower. This is by no means the case - all modes still have an audible character of their own, which can basically only be caused by the overtones.
Editor Goodies 1: Double-click to select rows or columns
Double-clicking a caption cell the entire note row, double-clicking a note cell selects the entire column.
The latter is particularly useful for the next two features:
Editor Goodies 2: Start playback at any point
Simply select more than one cell, and press the Play button. Playback will start from the leftmost selected pulse. If only the cursor is visible, playback will start from the beginning of the part, as usual.
Editor Goodies 3: Shift parts with "←" "→" buttons
I have replaced the former "Set Start" button with two "Shift ←" and "Shift →" buttons, to make cyclic shifting of mbira parts or rows simpler and more visual:
Only selected rows are shifted. Once more, the double-click to select all rows becomes handy if you want to shift the entire part.
Enjoy!
Stefan