Le 29 juin 2017
de 16h30 à 17h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Martin Scherzinger
The valorization of African sonic timbre has a long history. For example, various ethnomusicologists have associated the timbre of matepe and the mbira dza vadzimu with the spiritual cosmology of the Shona. Mbirists frequently report that their instruments issue sounds unplayed by them, as if inhabited by spirits. Performers such as Forward Kwenda and Dumisani Maraire, for example, report that the mbira should be played in a way that is directed by the ancestral spirits alone; encouraging a hands-off approach approach to performance, in order to permit the music, in the words of Hakurotwi Mude “to sound like a flute”. Ethnomusicologists connect the rich harmonics of these instruments with accounts by performers about the way mbira “voices” speaks back to them by soliciting sounds beyond the imagination of a single human player or voice. This paper argues, in contrast, that the encounter between the Euro-industrial musical ear and certain kinds of African music tends to valorize its timbre and rhythm in ways that may bear little relation to empirical realities. As a result, the audile attentiveness to timbre and rhythm alone tends to hear right through melodic and harmonic processes attendant to this music, in particular their fractal-like logic.
