Cross-cultural connections: Berliner, above left, and musician Cosmas Magaya collaborate on documenting Zimbabwe's indigenous music

Les Todd

If Soul of Mbira was a first step toward describing the Shona mbira tradition, Berliner and Magaya's current project is a great leap toward preserving it. The project, which they see culminating in a book or series of volumes, encompasses thirty-five years of collaborative playing and research. It will examine the mbira and Shona culture from several angles, analyzing the music itself (they have 700 pages of music transcribed), discussing how it is produced and passed on orally within the Shona culture, and explaining their own process of developing and perfecting a system of notation.

"The way we preserve the music [traditionally] is by teaching it to our sons and daughters," says Magaya, who has taught mbira to his own son and daughter as well as legions of students. "But by documenting it, you make sure it can live for many years."

Magaya spends up to five months each year traveling and performing around the world, and, during each trip to the U.S., he tries to set aside a month or so to work on the project with Berliner.

In mid-November, the two are sitting in Berliner's kitchen, in a one-story house less than a block from East Campus. Piled on the table are manila folders containing drafts of musical transcriptions dating as far back as 1971 and Berliner's first trip to Zimbabwe. In front of Berliner are two three-ring binders, one containing part of the manuscript of the work in progress; the other, updated transcriptions of the music. Both are bristling with colorful Post-it notes, each containing a question or point of clarification to go over with Magaya.

Magaya: mbira master

Michael Zirkle

As Berliner silently reads a note he has penciled on one page, Magaya idly thumbs the basic kushauru, or lead, part to the song "Nhimutimu." Magaya has large hands, surprisingly smooth and free of calluses. Berliner wants to check a variation on the song he heard Magaya play during a residency at Stanford University five years ago. Carefully consulting his transcription, Berliner plays through the song. Magaya, mbira tucked under his right arm, leans back, brow furrowed. Finishing a line of music, Berliner says, "We'd talked about adding that as a substitute."

Magaya lets the music sink in. "Yes, that is fine."

Berliner tries out two more substitute lines that the two had discussed during a visit in 2005.

"I still prefer the first one," Magaya says. He says he thinks the others may have arisen during a performance in which he was responding to other players' variations.

It's common, Berliner says, to discover that variations he hears in the music are not the primary versions of a song. Sometimes, as in this case, they turn out to be unique to an ensemble performance. At other times, they turn out to be mistakes in the notating or reflect temporary preferences of the musicians. That creative process and the resulting variations that arise in different situations is "exactly what we want to capture," he says. The book will include primary versions of the songs, as well as secondary versions with explanations of where and why they might have been played, to give insights into the minds of the musicians.

On any given day, they will spend eight to ten hours hunched over notes, Berliner playing back music he transcribed last time to make sure the notation is clear and it sounds right, and Magaya approving or tweaking it. It's grueling work, but both agree that it's worth it. Only by going over songs hundreds of times, Berliner says, can they reveal "important concepts that will never be directly verbalized within the culture." They are now in the home stretch, completing a final round of edits to the music. Berliner plans to finish cleaning up the rest of the manuscript by the end of the year.

Berliner believes the longevity of their research will give it weight. "There is very little continuity in the documentation of African oral traditions," he says, making longitudinal studies difficult. "There has been a lot of great recording work, but it's been done disparately, largely by researchers working with various musicians in different regions." What Berliner has recorded during his six trips to Zimbabwe and various tours of the U.S. and Europe, as well as his collaborative work with Magaya, amounts to thirty-five years of data.

"This allows us to explore questions about the development of personal styles and about musical continuity and innovation using real data in a way that was not possible before."

In the kitchen, Berliner is back to his notes, looking for a conversation about a version of "Nhimutimu" by the legendary musician and mbira-maker John Kunaka. He finds a note about an arrangement Magaya played that combined "Nhimutimu" with another song, "Mandarindari." During a research session in the 1990s, Magaya told Berliner that he had first heard the arrangement on one of the two recordings that supplement Soul of Mbira. But in 2004 they came across a transcription indicating that the arrangement had in fact been a part of Magaya's repertory as far back as 1971 and had simply slipped his mind over the years.

"Cosmas forgot it and relearned it from Soul of Mbira without realizing it," Berliner says. This phenomenon of forgetting and relearning songs and variations, the idea of a sort of revolving repertory, is common in the oral tradition, but, because of the loss of so many musicians and contemporary threats to the tradition, there is a real risk of losing key parts of the repertory forever, Magaya says.

Thus, the goal of the project is to "in a substantive way represent the mbira tradition," says Berliner. "It's not just to document the musical structures and forms but also the process by which the structures are composed." He and Magaya want to "show the generative processes in order to show how creativity works in the tradition."

The project serves a dual purpose. First, it makes a record for native Zimbabweans and ensures that their tradition will not be lost. After independence, Berliner was invited back to Zimbabwe by the country's Ministry of Education and the Zimbabwe College of Music to help develop an ethnomusicology program focusing on indigenous music to supplement the existing Western curriculum. He and others have noted shifts in taste, especially in urban areas, away from traditional music toward a variety of cosmopolitan styles.

Second, as a result of the project, the tradition will become more accessible to music lovers outside Zimbabwe. "For composers, it will provide a treasure of ideas," he says. "This samples the imaginations of the great Shona composers who, over hundreds of years, have cultivated and refined the mbira repertory."