The Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa

Percival Kirby

Description

Percival Kirby was a musician and ethnomusicologist and for many years head of the music department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Between 1923 and 1933 he undertook more than nine expeditions as well as many shorter excursions around South Africa. He was hosted by local chiefs and taught to play the instruments he encountered. He managed to purchase many of them, and this collection, now known as the Kirby Collection, is housed at the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town. First published as Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa in 1934, the book was the culmination of research trips undertaken by Percival Kirby. It became the standard reference on indigenous South African musical instruments. The bulk of the material is concerned with detailed information on the making and playing of each instrument, and is accompanied by a large number of musical examples. This third edition contains an introduction by Mike Nixon, Head of the Ethnomusicology and African Music at the South African College of Music, and new reproductions of the valuable historic photographs, but leaves Kirby’s original text unchanged.

Sujets

• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Ethnomusicology
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781868148288
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF SOUTH AFRICA
Rock painting copied by G. W. Stow, showing a Bushman using seven shooting bows as a musical instrument. From the original coloured drawing in the South African Museum, Cape Town. Photograph by SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM .
PERCIVAL R. KIRBY
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF SOUTH AFRICA
THIRD EDITION OF
THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS OF THE NATIVE RACES OF SOUTH AFRICA
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
www.witspress.co.za
Third Edition Anthea van Wieringen 2013
Photographs As credited
Published edition Wits University Press 2013
Third edition printed in 2013
ISBN (print) 978-1-86814-605-5
ISBN (EPUB - IPG) 978-1-86814-828-8
ISBN (EPUB - ROW) 978-1-86814-829-5
ISBN (PDF) 978-1-86814-606-2
The original edition (printed and published by the Oxford University in 1934) was made possible with the assistance of a grant received from the Carnegie Corporation of New York through the Research Grant Board, South Africa; and the reprint in 1953 by grants from the National Council for Social Research (Department of Education, Arts, and Science), Pretoria, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The second edition was published by the Witwatersrand University Press in 1965.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Cover photograph by A.M. Duggan-Cronin
Text design and layout by Hybridesign
Cover design by Hybrid Creative

Printed and bound by Interpak Books
To
CHARLES SANFORD TERRY
E meritus P rofessor of H istory , U niversity of A berdeen
He wos wery good to me, he wos.
C harles dickens , Bleak House.

CONTENTS
FOREWORD BY MICHAEL NIXON
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO THIRD EDITION
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 RATTLES AND CLAPPERS
2 DRUMS
3 XYLOPHONES AND SANSAS
4 BULL-ROARERS AND SPINNING-DISKS
5 HORNS AND TRUMPETS
6 WHISTLES, FLUTES, AND VIBRATING REEDS
7 REED-FLUTE ENSEMBLES
8 THE GORA , A STRINGED-WIND INSTRUMENT
9 STRINGED INSTRUMENTS
10 BUSHMAN AND HOTTENTOT VIOLINS AND THE RAMKIE
11 SOME EUROPEAN INSTRUMENTS PLAYED BY NATIVES
APPENDIX
ADDENDA
INDEX
FOREWORD
T HE publication of Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa represents an impulse to re-animate the Scottish-born Percival Robson Kirby s important early text in southern African music studies. The changes to the revised third edition include reworking the musical examples, designing the layout so that the discussion and photographs of instruments are near each other, and changing the title; Kirby s original phrase native races has been replaced by indigenous people . This revised third edition affords an opportunity to reconsider a classic, stimulating early study of the material culture of indigenous southern African musics nearly 80 years after Kirby s book first appeared on bookshelves in 1934, and 45 years since it was last published.
Starting as early as 1923, Kirby turned his erudition and powers of observation to studying the music cultures of indigenous South Africans through a series of field trips during university vacations. He developed a project to collect, document and describe examples of each kind of musical instrument in southern Africa south of the Limpopo. He employed photography, ably assisted by Dr W. Paff, and made wax cylinder sound recordings of many performances as part of his method, and also learnt to perform the music. This practice later became standard in ethnomusicology, but was uncommon at the time. The tremendous energy he expended in this work resulted in a series of articles and the first edition of book. He displayed many of the instruments he collected in his museum in the music department at the University of the Witwatersrand, using them in his teaching. 1 On retiring from Wits, Kirby loaned his collection to the Africana Museum, Johannesburg. It remained there from 1953 to 1981, when the University of Cape Town acquired it. Today it is housed in the university s South African College of Music, with the accompanying materials deposited in the University of Cape Town Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Department.
The best way to read this book is in conjunction with viewing the instruments he discusses in this collection, which can be done by arrangement with the South African College of Music.
Kirby must have completed his text with great excitement. It was the first extended, scholarly study of southern Africa s indigenous musics-Kirby s term this- and it laid a foundation for studying music in the region; the many citations of Kirby by succeeding generations of scholars attest to this. A painstakingly written text, it is dense with historical perspectives, closely-observed detail, and a broad range of observations about instruments, music-making, dance and numerous other related subjects. Much would have passed into oblivion were it not for this book.
There is a however to this tale; today Kirby s original title sounds really old-fashioned with its native races . Would it have struck his contemporaries as anachronistic? Is the phrase the native races a blemish that indexes hopelessly contaminated material within? The dated language in the original title foreshadows challenges the contemporary reader will encounter in Kirby s writing. What are these challenges, and how might the contemporary reader approach Kirby today? It is helpful to consider the historical and intellectual discourses current when Kirby wrote. These form part of a larger issue, namely how to approach South Africa s colonial archive, which frequently elicits a response of rejection arising from frustration with the taint of the colonial period in which the archive was laid down. 2
A first step might be to consider the conditions at the time that Kirby approached his subject. There was very little readily available, reliable material on the region s music cultures. His decision to concentrate on the material culture of music was quite likely pragmatic. As it was, to undertake a survey of the musics of the region was a daunting project. He had no facility with the languages, nor a good knowledge of the many local histories he would encounter. These are some of the restricting factors he encountered in his first publication on local musics (1923). In this situation, it makes sense that he should begin his study with a survey of the material culture of music in the form of musical instruments. His work on the tympani book prepared him for studying musical instruments. Kirby began by carefully, apparently exhaustively, convening an archive of travellers accounts and any other relevant sources to provide historical depth through a multiplicity of (mostly outsider) voices and observations through time. 3 This enabled him to place his research in a genealogy.
Kirby did not train in the range of disciplines that succeeding generations of ethnomusicologists would study. We can lament the lack of the empirical fieldwork methods of social anthropology, for example. The result is that we do not find in his work many aspects of the music cultures that he studied and which we would expect today. The reader seeking to position the musics and individual musicians in its precise local, historical moment will come away frustrated at the author s inconsistencies in this regard. The researcher looking for additional information in Kirby s field notes finds that they were written on the fly. There are transcriptions of short snatches and longer passages of music, occasional well-observed drawings of an instrument or a detail, and so on. Kirby typically notes the names of some people he encountered in his fieldwork (identified in nearly every case by a single name), a location, an instrument s name, musical terminology, and a date. This necessitates a great deal of painstaking archival work to bring these musicians into history with, perhaps, a biography, as some of the best South African historical writing has achieved.
Paying attention to the relative thicknesses and thinnesses of data in Kirby s writing can tell us about the nature of Kirby s enquiry. He was interested in the typical instrument and/or performance identified largely in terms of ethnic group. He doesn t ignore the individual or ensemble, but gives insufficient data about his research consultants for the modern researcher to be able to identify these people without considerable pains. He was not alone in this regard, as social science research tended to present anonymous subjects. This remains the practice where ethics require or the individual requests anonymity. But the lack of this kind of detail even in Kirby s somewhat sparse field notes is a loss, which makes it very difficult to place these individual musicians in history. The result is a discourse about the music of ethnic group X, rather than the possibility of considering the practice of individuals. This makes it easy to typify the musics of indigenous southern Africans as tribal , a problematic construction long reinforced by institutional practice and popular discourse. It has the effect of rendering the material depersonalised, and, given the contemporary prevailing trends in South Africa, assigned to an ethnic grouping that functioned as discrete siloes.
Kirby s interest in the big picture took the form of seeing all musics in history passing through the same evolutionary stages along a universal evolutionary path. He came to be heralded internationally as an expert on primitive music , and he added to theories about what constituted primitive music. Kirby was not alone in this socia