Saturday, November 26, 2022

The Secret Origins of the Musical Conductor

 From Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker:

As soon as you put aside your books of ‘literature’ and listen to stories as a kind of music, everything starts to change. We all knew that back as kindergarten students, when we sang many of our stories and lessons, but somehow we lose touch with these mind-expanding musical experiences as we grow older.

That’s not true everywhere—in some societies, sung performances of epics and cultural lore have survived into modern times. And here we find irrefutable evidence of the bard or conductor’s rhythmical powers, which border on the supernatural. In such settings, the ground beat underpinning a quest story is entrancing and inescapable. It is the engine that drives the story forward. And—as we will learn in the next chapter—our brains are hardwired to embrace this kind of music.

For example, The Mwindo Epic, a great masterpiece of Bantu culture, is mostly read as a text nowadays. But when Kahombo Mateene and Daniel Biebuyck encountered it among the Nyanga more than a half century ago, the bard was accompanied by three percussionists—and their role was so important, that one of them would eventually get selected as the singer’s successor.

The bard, enlivened by their rhythms, actually dances and mimes parts of the tale. This is more than mere storytelling or narrative enhancement, but a ritualistic transformation built on rhythm. And the story itself is transformative. “In this dramatic representation,” the observers noted, “the bard takes the role of the hero.” Here as elsewhere, the quest is embodied, and moves to the beat. (Read more.)

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