Crescendo of polyphony

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Peter Phillips on a Zambian chamber choir which decided to perform Byrd, Tallis and Tippett

Rhythm is the innate talent of these singers, which makes the measured and undemonstrative backbeat of polyphony all the more unfamiliar to them. Perhaps we associate their native music-making with Gospel songs, though these are largely an import from the American south. The music one hears on the streets is that of whole groups of people sitting together, often in the back of pick-up trucks, singing in harmony to percussion instruments. The musicians of the New Apostolic Church, led by Simon Kalommo, are currently engaged in putting together a new hymn-book, which will appear both as something for local use, and as part of a pan-African project involving all the neighbouring countries. It is hoped that this will set a new, specifically African standard for congregational singing, rather in the way the New English Hymnal did for the Anglicans a century ago. All the hymns are being newly composed, with the defining characteristic that the music, published with the words, will not involve intricate part-writing but exciting rhythms. When I guessed that the proliferation of languages in southern Africa might be a problem, requiring the faithful to sing words they didn’t understand, Simon said it was no different from them having to sing in Latin. Quite so.

Vox Zambezi is under the auspices of the Lusaka Music Society but is the brainchild of Dr Paul Kelly, a gastroenterologist at the University Teaching Hospital of Lusaka, the largest hospital in Zambia. As a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow he is engaged in research as much as in practice, though in a country like this every doctor is needed in the consulting room. I am not familiar with hospitals, which meant I was unprepared for this one. The worst of it was the children’s malnutrition ward (the hospital doesn’t have an Aids ward, having decided there is no point). The best was watching Dr Kelly perform an endoscopy on a young female volunteer to understand better why host defences sometimes fail. In his day job, Kelly is hoping, among other things, to challenge the Western belief that certain kinds of digestive cancer are more prevalent in industrialised societies than in underdeveloped ones — he has found them in far younger patients than is normal in the West. In the evenings he marshals these singers, sings second bass with them and fixes everything. The next thing he is fixing, after making a recording with me, is a tour to the UK this June with support from the Wingate Foundation. Such initiative in such circumstances is what makes the world revolve, and his colleagues in Vox do realise how lucky they are. When I asked what gave him the idea of starting the group in the first place, he quoted something I have heard several times before in differing contexts: years ago the Registrar of Societies in Zambia declared that classical Western music was not for the common people, it was an irrelevance. The poshest version of this kind of high-handed, inverted paternalism that I ever encountered was when the Secretary of Chamber Music New Zealand stood up in front of an Australian audience and declared, ‘New Zealand people do not like early music.’ Out of such irritations good things can come.

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Paul Potts

May 6th, 2008 5:36am Report this comment

Dear Peter Phillips

Do come to Swaziland, where choral singing, next only to football, is the major national sport. Frequesnt competitions, the winner of which will, if they can raise the money, go to an Eisteddford in Wales.

Indeed, in Urban South Africa, at least Johannesburg (="Gauteng" - the place of gold}, choral competitions have a unique format. The favourite repertoire is Bach, Handel and Verdi, what happens is that the "away" choir starts the proceedings. When one of the home crowd wants them to stop, he, or more often she, marches up to the stage and deposits a small some of money. The choir must then stop until someone else brings another, larger sum, and so on, until another away choir, or even the home choir gets on stage. During the day, the money raised can be quite large. It does not usually go to "charity", but to the funding of the singing of classical music, to the choirs themselves. You might call them "subscription concerts".

Paulo

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