Muyanga settles old score
His years’ long research into the role of local music in protest is being aired at the National Arts Festival, Kwanele Sosibo writes
As the featured artist at this year’s National Arts Festival, composer, librettist and performer Neo Muyanga and several collaborators will present a series of separate but interlinked works, anchored by his solo performance, Solid(T)Ary.
In this work, he uses various instruments, such as Egyptian and Ethiopian flutes, to reflect on South Africa’s protest tradition over the past 150 years and on its similarities and differences to the traditions of other places in the global South.
There is also the funk jazz improvisatory group titled Works for Trio, in which he plays familiar but transformed music with the aim of achieving “a mood of vibrancy and elation”. The trio includes drummer Andrew Swartz, bass player Peter Ndlala and special guest Msaki.
Muyanga will also participate in Think!Fest, at which he will talk about opera in South Africa’s townships, a theme he has been researching for about a decade.
He will also take part in a concert titled Re Mixing Music with composers Prince Bulo, Lungiswa Plaatjies and Kingsley Buitendag. And he has written a score for the Magnet Theatre production, I Turned Away and She Was Gone.
Muyanga’s musical history stretches back to his birth in Soweto in 1974. He took part in church choirs and took lessons in music theory and physics and, because of the circumstances at the time, left the country and studied the madrigal tradition in Italy.
Shortly after the demise of legislated apartheid, Muyanga founded the guitar-driven soul duo Blk Sonshine with fellow musician Masauko Chipembere, which led to a sustained period of mainstream visibility.
Muyanga’s artistic practice has always crossed disciplines, involving film and theatre scores, operas, exploration of free jazz, as well as the co-curation of the seminal PanAfrican Space Station (PASS) music festival and live streaming website. In its festival format, PASS ran for three years but it has since shifted into global interventions and pop-up collaborations. Muyanga is currently participating in Angazi But I’m Sure, a Chimurenga Dakar session running until the end of May, at which he will present a seminar titled Revolting Songs Can Shield (Sometimes) Against Bullets.
This week, he spoke about Solid(T) Ary’s antecedents in the South African operatic tradition and what more recent iterations of struggle music reveal about the country’s transition to democracy. describing some of that history and interrogating how the political links to our protest tradition are not being made sufficiently.
I will be trying to elucidate some of the archival information that exists to show how the operatic, the disciplined voice, the declamatory voice becomes a viable choice for young people today who live in marginalised communities. It’s interesting to talk about opera in that way because opera everywhere else in the world pretty much means “elitist, white, moneyed pastime”. It doesn’t in this country. this. So I’m not saying so much about the freedom as I am saying about the history.
People are not aware that our choir competitions all, generally, have a slot for arias, at the same time as performing umhlabelo and traditional songs. Choirs are also performing these arias from the 18th and 19th century, quite fluently in fact. We haven’t paid that movement any mind but it is real. In the word is both the term “solid” and the term “solidarity”. It’s a reflection of our protest tradition over the past 150 years.
There, as a solo performer, what I will be doing is abstracting the archive of our protest music. Protest song is not music in the sense that you would play it on the radio or play it in the background as entertainment; it’s never that. It is a statement of intent. I will be performing them solo because I am wondering what those protest songs mean today. It’s an invitation to the audience to gather with me around that.