“Left seduced, enchanted and spiritually moved.” Daily News, South Africa

“This remarkable record…” THE TIMES

“Audience smiling from ear to ear with sheer pleasure.” Business Day, South Africa

Further personal reflections

Brett Pyper 

I’ve often told people that the project that became Simunye was like thinking aloud; that, for me, it was about posing the question of what it might mean to democratize South Africa’s cultural institutions and musical life. When I first articulated the question to myself, I was a junior music administrator in one of the apartheid-era provincial arts councils, ensconced in the enormous, modernist State Theatre in Pretoria’s city centre (a monument to rather than of culture, as South African composer Kevin Volans has so aptly put it). I soon realized that that particular organization was not particularly eager or equipped to respond to the question, and so by the time I Fagiolini met the SDASA Chorale in South Africa, I had left the public cultural sector and was trying my hand at project co-ordination on a freelance basis.

Seven years later, the old-style arts councils have been disbanded and replaced, the State Theatre has been closed down and then reopened, and I’m a visiting doctoral student in New York. As the collaboration between the two groups has become a chorus of other people’s musical, sociopolitical, and religious questions, I realize that I have reflected on it in writing virtually each step of the way. And so, since Robert Hollingworth has asked me for a new contribution for I Fagiolini’s website, I find myself looking over what I have been moved to write about the project over close on eight years and tracking my shifting (developing?) ideas on such questions as the merits of musical multiculturalism, South Africa’s cultural transformation, and the capacity and limitations of music in effecting social change.

Some years down the line, my critical antennae hover equivocally over an earlier statement like “Although European and African vocal musics have existed alongside one another in South Africa for hundreds of years, there has been very little creative interaction between them.” Now, I would be more inclined to point to the black South African choral tradition as a prime example of creative interaction in its own right, regardless of whether people of European descent choose to respond to it musically or not. But rather than indulging in an extended self-critique of my own existing pronouncements on the project, it seems most relevant here to point out how projects like this one are often, quite literally, a kind of thinking aloud, and that the musical expressions solidified beneath the rainbow sheen of a compact disc are necessarily a kind of sonic freeze-frame that offers a brief glimpse of this broader process.

From where I stand today, I’m inclined to feel that cross-cultural projects such as this one (or rather, “inter-cultural” projects as examples of “good cross-culturalism” are coming to be called in my current environment) are probably better at raising important questions than resolving them. For all the obvious harmony and warmth generated between I Fagiolini, the SDASA Chorale and their audiences, the project has not dispelled cultural and economic differences, but rather been based on trying to find constructive ways of working with them. Some attempts have, of course, been more successful than others. Perhaps that process, in the long run, is as or even more important than the music that such projects produce: creating a context in which people of divergent backgrounds attempt to create something together in spirit of respect and reciprocity that forces them to confront their respective preconceptions and ways of making music. Oxford may not turn out to be so far from Soweto after all; not, at least, in the ongoing cultural conversation of which this project is such an engaging example.

Roderick Williams, composer

Few compositional or arranging projects that I have been involved in have meant as much to me as this, and for a variety of reasons.

I have to admit to having been a little apprehensive about the project when it was first described to me, if only because I had no idea how the musical elements of these two such separate cultures would fit together from a purely practical viewpoint. For one, I did not understand how a group such as the SDASA Chorale could compose their music ‘democratically’ and, recognising how diverse they are culturally, even within their own group, I had misgivings about how quickly we could match our styles of music and music-making to produce anything remotely useful.

I certainly wasn’t prepared for the power and commitment of the way they perform their music. There is a strength and warmth about the SDASA Chorale that communicates across any barrier almost instantly; clearly this stems from the strength of their faith, but there is also a directness and simplicity about the music they sing and the way they deliver it that gives it tremendous force. This made our time together with the SDASA Chorale inspirational on many levels, and I am surely not alone amongst my colleagues in having been profoundly moved by the collaboration. In particular, it has affected the way I see the power of direct communication in music, and I hope it informs the way I now perform music of all sorts.

It was a particular pleasure for me to see the ‘democratic’ compositional process in action, in such pieces as ‘Ah Robin’ (track 2) and ‘Te lucis ante terminum’ (track 13); here the SDASAs developed their music in response to what we sang. They continue to develop it (and so do we) each time the two groups meet.

When I returned to England once the album recording had been completed I was again apprehensive. Although I felt that we had achieved something important, I also wondered whether the music would mean anything at all to anybody who had not been there to witness the whole process. Perhaps the whole thing would just confuse or irritate disinterested audiences. However, it is hugely gratifying that the album has found its fans all over the world and that audiences at live concerts have enjoyed the music and been engaged in the experience as much as we were in working and recording the album back in April 1997.

Robert Hollingworth, Director of I Fagiolini

If there was a single project that changed I Fagiolini, this was it. The fact that the recording didn’t go platinum (although it has sold a very respectable 17,000) is less important to us as musicians than the experience it provided. And to judge that recording as less than a success, as a few radio pundits did, because it failed to live up to their philosophical criteria of what such a meeting should produce is to devalue the process involved for the musicians who took part.

I like Brett’s description of thinking aloud. This is what happened over the four days of musical preparation for the CD in April 1997. The recording reflects that. Perhaps it would have sold more if we had experimented less and polished more, producing a stream of pieces like ‘Ah Robin’ for a more homogenous CD which people could easily hum along to. But instead, you have the raw variety of the project as it was and, rare for a CD these days, a more honest and open result.

It’s not the final word on the subject – just where we got to in the time we had. And the CD doesn’t do justice to the live performance which has been a very emotional experience for those who have shared in it, whether as singers or audiences. But it gives you a feel of the incredible buzz which we all shared while taking part.