Dr. Thokozani Mhlambi and Dr. Katharina Fink on his project "Umgungundlovu Suite for Reed Ensemble"
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- Cluster fellow Dr. Thokozani Mhlambi talks with his host Dr. Katharina Fink about his life, his love for music, his artist fellowship in the Cluster and his latest project - a music-based story set in the ancient Zulu capital of Umgungundlovu.
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Dr. Thokozani Mhlambi and Dr. Katharina Fink on his project "Umgungundlovu Suite for Reed Ensemble"
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
-
Cluster Conversations
- Date
- August 11, 2023
Rights & access
- Extent
- 25 minutes, 36 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 11
Full text
- Transcript
-
[Segment 1/2 | 00:00:00–00:20:00]
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
[00:00:17] Speaker 2: [singing in Zulu]
[00:01:07] Speaker 3: Okay, well, we've just been listening to a piece of music that is actually so close still to our hearts and our minds because we just listened to it, how many days, two days ago, when you, dear Thokozani Mhlambi, our esteemed guest, played a concert lecture at the Castle of Thurnau, which forms part of the University of Bayreuth. And we could all like witness what sound can do. And I think we, in this little shared time and space we have in this podcast, we can talk about what sound and what the sonic can do, is doing, is helping us to imagine. Let's jump right in. My name is Katharina. I'm the deputy director of Iwalewahaus. Mein Name ist Katharina, ich bin die stellvertretende Direktorin des Iwalewahaus, which forms part of the University of Bayreuth. And I'm so happy to be your host for some month because Dr. Thokozani Mhlambi, who's sitting right next to me here, who's a musicologist, a practitioner of sound, an educator, a creator of cultural spaces all over the world, but particularly also in Newcastle, in KZN, in KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa. Yeah, we have some month now, and we had some month before because our friendship goes back like a decade. And we've been doing a number of shows together in different spaces, talking or trying at the things we're trying to do now in the context of the African Cluster here in Bayreuth. So, you're welcome. How has it been to play that weird little castle in a German place with the beauty of your music and the complications of your music?
[00:02:57] Speaker 2: Hello, dear listeners. Yes, it's been quite an amazing experience for me to be here and to get to soak up what is also a heritage of the region in some ways that sometimes we imagine these things about castles and things where we come from, but to be part of that and not to be part of it as some kind of colonial legacy, but to be part of it as a human story. Because whatever your stories are as people are also our stories.
[00:03:39] Speaker 3: And like there's so many things you're working on simultaneously always. What is the, what is the project or what is the, what is the thing you want to do while you're here, while we're having this stretch of a time, which is quite beautiful, like some month to really go into, into one work, one composition, one book? What are you doing? What are you thinking, dreaming about? What's going on?
[00:04:07] Speaker 2: I think for me, one doesn't really exist. One is always multiple, more than one thing, more than because it starts with only one intention. And my intention is to be productively creative and to also connect with the local people and understand what it is that informs them and let that change me as well. And so just being able to walk on the streets of Bayreuth, being able to connect with people in the pubs or in the public spaces is also part of what my process is about. The questions they are asking, their interest in Africa also informs what my shaping becomes.
[00:04:59] Speaker 3: Like that, that multiplicity you're talking about, or the opening to multiplicity, that was something I felt so strong as well in the, in the concert or in the encounter you enabled us to have on Wednesday, of which we listened to a tiny bit in the beginning. Because there's one concept that we've been talking about a lot, which is called hauntology, which talks about the multiplicity of times and ideas about times and temporalities being present at the same time, if the frequency is right, if we are open, if we are able to listen. I'm wondering, you talked about that in your lecture as well, about the ability of music to make many times present and to create time. Can you speak to that a bit, how time and the musics?
[00:05:57] Speaker 2: Well, I must say being there at Thurnau, I felt like I carried all the different epochs of African times. I carried my own present time. I carried the time perhaps of those who came before me, and I carried the time perhaps of those who come after me as well. But at the same time, being there, I was frighteningly very conscious of the times in which the castle existed itself, because my understanding is that one block of it was first built and then gradually other parts were added over different eras and over different people who were rulers of that time. And so I was conscious of those times that were also now coming, and this renovation of the castle that is now in a university context, that's also a different time and a different context. And also having all these people from Africa who are attending the concert through the African Multiple Cluster also blurs that distinction and blurs this, the intention of what the castle might have intended to be. The space might have been a banquet hall at some stage, but we turned it into a concert venue. We turned it into a space of healing and of sharing. And so I think that for me, that concept you just spoke about resonates very deeply.
[00:07:30] Speaker 3: And what you just said about healing, I would be interested in hearing you more about that because the lecture or the, I don't know, I think we need new terms for all of that, or perhaps no term, because it was in German, in English, in Zulu, it was like multiple languages, the sonic. You were talking about the baroque cello and the strings and all of that. So it was such a multiplicity again, to not overstretch that term. But what I wanted to come to, sorry, when you mentioned the word healing, I would be so interested to hear, yeah, just to hear, because you work with concepts from the Zulu language as well that relate to healing and that bring together healing and, like that make a distinction that I think Western epistemologies have brought about, the distinction between this is performance, this is healing, this is music, this is art, this is, all these distinctions fall again into one term. Can you, I don't know. Because we want to talk about that with our students next week as well.
[00:08:42] Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I want to bring it back to Germany and bring it back to someone who's a great inspiration for me from the medieval heretic nun, Hildegard von Bingen. And her kind of aim, from what I understand, for me was to create something that was both dramatic and healing, and also strategic. I remember that one of the things she did was to decide to move her followers and her nunnery and separate from a particular place in order to be strategically located close to where there was traveling, travelers passing by, because she wanted to have her knowledge on healing methods compared with other people who were fascinated by those things. And she wanted the freedom and liberty to be able to explore aspects of drama and religion in ways that the church itself was not willing to accept at the time. And so that fusion for me between this practice, this dramatic practice of trying to illustrate, I mean, sometimes you find her trying to emulate what the devil would look like, and those kinds of dramatic gestures and the combination of that with sound is a very appealing kind of concept for me. And I think that's the kind of practice and things that fascinate me. And maybe those are things that I carried in the performance as I was there, like, okay, I'm now in von Bingen's territory. [laughter]
[00:10:29] Speaker 3: And that is so beautiful what you just said, because on just on the way here to the Cluster of Excellence building where we're located right now, we had a conversation about an exhibition we have up at the moment, which is called We Will Now Go to Kupaza. And where the idea of like that, that knowledge is just, it's just possible to learn and to grow or to deepen if we are in motion. And if we are able to, well, mentally, spiritually, but also with our bodies to be in motion, because Uche Okeke was like, he was very strong on traveling, on always being on the move and really focusing on transition, like inner transition. What would be the song you would play now from all the songs in the world?
[00:11:20] Speaker 2: I think I would play Tribute to Ntsikana.
[00:11:25] Speaker 3: Shall we play that?
[00:11:27] Speaker 2: And so in this tune, I'm imagining myself as Ntsikana, who is trying to bring new ideas into a context where they are little understood.
[00:11:38] Speaker 2: [singing in Zulu]
[00:15:58] Speaker 3: I remember that we met in Cape Town or Johannesburg, and I remember we played some things at the iconic House of Unsako. But before, before, before, what happened? Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where did you grow up?
[00:16:15] Speaker 2: Yeah, I was born in Madadeni, which is in KwaZulu-Natal. And my parents were both teachers. And because my parents were working out of town, I ended up living with my grandparents. And my grandparents were the ones who brought me up in a house where we sang each evening. We would congregate to sing hymns from the Methodist hymn book because the Methodist Church is quite a big, influential church in South Africa. And it has Africanized in various ways, particularly with the Manyano women who wear the red and go pray for everyone on Thursdays. So my grandmother was part of the Manyano movement. And so that kind of filtered into our whole practice at home and how we valued music. My grandparents were great lovers of classical music, such as Handel's Messiah, which is, although it's of European origin, has become like a global anthem because it's translated into Zulu, it's translated into many languages around the world, and it's situated in a kind of community practice of singing, of people singing together. And the community that brought me up was that community where people were singing together. Back then, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika by Enoch Sontonga was not yet the official anthem of South Africa. And so these were songs that we sang rebelliously, and we saw that the people who were freedom fighters in the apartheid movement were holding their fists in the air as a revolutionary sign while singing these great anthems of early African intellectuals such as Enoch Sontonga. And so hearing this music and blaring out and singing and being part of a singing nation, so to speak, was how I was oriented into music. And perhaps I was not even aware that music was anything exceptional because it was so much intertwined with our way of being. And so what happened was that when I was in high school and I went to one of the, what was called the Model C schools, which were the schools that were only for Europeans, whites in South Africa for a long time, and now were beginning to open up and allow black people to come and study. And so when I got there, I was very surprised that you could actually do music as a subject for your end-year exams for high school. And so this fascinated me deeply, and I got into that, and I had amazing teachers who, because every musician needs nurturing teachers along the way, who were open to ideas and allowed us to sing with them and play instruments. And that is where I was introduced to the cello. And I really liked its sound, and I said, "Oh, this is something that I can go far with." I realized that perhaps it was also the idea of exploring. I needed a big canvas to keep me busy and off the streets, [laughter] off the hustle.
[Segment 2/2 | 00:20:00–end]
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: bustle and bustle of the streets and of the all the shenanigans that teenagers go through. And so it became this thing that allowed me to close the the the door to my room and go in and be allowed to be alone. You know, because people understood that you were practicing and so you you allowed time to be on your own. And from there, I was I had to convince my family where where we've never had anyone who went to study music at university. I had to convince them that in spite of doing well in maths and science, that I wasn't going to be an engineer or a medical doctor or a lawyer, that what I really wanted to do was music. And so that's how I ended up going to the University of Cape Town and I studied music there. Um, and my grandmother before uh before she passed away in 2015, she always said that she wanted me she wants me to open the first music school in Madadeni. Mm. So that all the kids from Madadeni can be able to learn music and not feel barred from learning music and musical instruments. So I always kind of carried this uh her wish uh in my in my mind and in my aspirations. Um, but now when I finished school, I encountered a problem because I realized that uh I was bringing there was now the phenomenon of the the the bedroom DJ, which is the the DJ who who makes music on their laptop. And this became like something which gave access to a lot of township kids because they didn't have access to formal music education. So becoming a DJ became an avenue for them that allowed them to circumvent all this tutelage and uh uh in in in initiation and guild guild formats that music is often uh trained in. And so I had to now contend with how am I going to be applicable to these youngsters who think, "No, if I can do it on FruityLoops, then it's good enough." Yeah. And how do I then come with my Western education and my ideas, uh having studied classical music, and make them speak to this environment instead of me trying to kind of take them out of what they're doing and make them do what I want? And so I'm still contending with that problem up until today. [laughter]
[00:02:57] Speaker 2: I've got I've got two things I would still love to know. First, what's the name of your grandmother?
[00:03:03] Speaker 1: Her name is uh her name was Thokozile. Mm. Mhlambi. Maphumulo. Mm.
[00:03:11] Speaker 2: And the second one is, what was the record store that you went to? Was there one record store that you got your things or was there like was there one of the places that are so influential for like the seduction of music? Was there such a place in your personal history of of the loving the music?
[00:03:31] Speaker 1: There was a record shop in Cape Town. Mhm. Called Mabu Vinyls. Mhm. Um, that used to collect uh interesting eclectic electronica music. Mhm. Um, and interesting vinyls from other parts of the world. Uh, and so I remember getting into electronic soundscaping uh uh recordings of people like Boards of Canada, um, and people like uh these uh independent labels of music uh and and records of people like J Dilla. Mhm. These are the kind of records that then uh as a hip student, my friends and I would go on Friday afternoons and go pick out the music and buy one CD or or or one record and then this would be our record for the weekend. Mm. Mm. This was now in the days before when there was still this culture of searching for your music in a a CD shop or a warehouse and having it tangible with you. A tangible thing. Before the great um digital divide that now makes us quite separate from Mm. Mm. Mm. the records we own. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. That's true. I hope I can invite you as well in your time here to come to the Elbphilharmonie music archive. And perhaps to a we have a format called Music Archive Listening Session that is done by our colleagues Alexandra Kuhnke and Lena Naumann, which is so beautiful, where we play the records from the archive. Wow. And we sit together with the music and we talk about what comes to our mind, and then somebody's bringing the next record and bringing the next record. And So this is an invite. I hope I can I think I think I'd like I'd like that.Value Annotations
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