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Paul Berliner has devoted years of scholarship
to preserving traditional Shona mbira music by creating a written
record of the indigenous art form. Still, teaching a few Duke students
the old-fashioned way, through oral tradition, can't hurt. Over
the course of his academic career on the faculties of the State
University of New York at Geneseo, Northwestern University, and
now Duke, Berliner, Arts and Sciences Professor of music, has developed
an undergraduate course based on the subject of his own research.
The course, taught once a year, mixes discussions of Shona culture
and history based on his own experiences and relationships in Zimbabwe
(he literally wrote the book on mbira music) with musical experimentation
and instrument building.
In Berliner's basement office in the Biddle Building on East Campus
last spring, six students gathered in a circle on mismatched benches
and chairs. In their hands, they held a karimba, a basic form of
mbira. On shelves and file cabinets around the room were various
African drums and gourd resonators and rows of compact discs. Berliner,
picking at his karimba with his thumbs, talked about mixing vocals
with instruments in an improvisatory situation. The students followed
along on their instruments.
He told them to sing, "urombo," a Shona term for poverty
or misfortune. "Orombo," they intoned. Berliner's voice
rang out above the rest.
"The audience will think, What is this 'urombo?' " he said. "Is
it a personal trouble? Is somebody making a social critique?"
Then he added "Chemutengure," an onomatopoeic word for
turning wagon wheels—those of European pioneers coming to establish
the colony of Rhodesia, he said. "Chemutengure," they sang.
Over the course of a semester at Duke, students learn to play four
basic songs on the karimba. Berliner works with them to develop their
repertory, experimenting with different vocal patterns as they become
accustomed to the feel of the instrument.
In a workshop on the side, with the help of graduate student Todd
Hershberger, Berliner's teaching assistant, students build their
own karimbas using instructions included in Berliner's seminal work,
The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe.
They chisel out a soundboard, hammer steel wire on an anvil to form
keys, fasten them under a metal bridge that has been bolted down,
and shape and fasten scrap metal that gives the mbira its traditional
rattle.
On a warm spring day, Berliner and his class slip out the side door
of Biddle and take up class on benches on the lawn in front of Branson
Theater. For those who arrive late, the professor leaves an orange
Post-it note on his office door, "mbira class outside," scrawled
in a messy professorial hand.
Berliner, dressed in a casual button-down shirt and sandals, his
Australian bush hat perched on a head of gray curls, passes around
an mbira that belonged to the famous Zimbabwean musician John Kunaka.
Students note that the keys have a lot of give. As they pass the
mbira around, each taking a turn on it, Berliner grins and says,
to no one in particular, "It just sings, doesn't it."
—Jacob Dagger
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