Recording African music in the field
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1955
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481557 , vital:78564 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v1i2.250
- Description: With the steady increase in the number of persons of Africa who own and operate small recording machines the technique of recording African music, as opposed to any other kind, is coming under discussion.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 1955
The state of folk music in Bantu Africa
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1955
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481655 , vital:78573 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v1i1.219
- Description: We Europeans are at a great disadvantage in talking about African music. Unlike most other members of this Conference we do not represent or discuss our own music but that o a people radically unlike ourselves among whom we live. It is only because we have found that the African is pathetically incapable of defending his own culture and indeed is largely indifferent to its fate that we, who subscribe wholeheartedly to the ideals of our International Council, are attempting to tide over the period during which irreparable damage can be done and until Africans themselves will be capable of appearing at our conferences as well-informed representatives of their own peoples.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 1955
Recording in the lost valley
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1957
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481567 , vital:78565 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v1i4.463
- Description: By kind invitation of the Director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institution, Lusaka, Mr. Henry Fosbrooke, and by the Curator of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum at Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, Dr. Desmond Clark, the recording unit of the Library visited the valley of the Zambesi to record some of the music of that section of the Valley Tonga tribe -which will be forced to leave their riverside homes when the waters of the Kariba Dam begin to rise next year, 1958.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1957
African music within its social setting
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1958
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481491 , vital:78557 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i1.531
- Description: The social setting of present day African Folk Music varies from that of the most remote tribes tucked away in the vast forests, almost oblivious of the outside world, to the homes of the towns people, some of them in the second and third generation of urban families, often of mixed tribal parentage and forming a new lower and middle class of skilled and semi-skilled industrial workers. There is a corres¬pondingly wide range of musics to be found on the Continent from the most complex folk melodies and rhythms to the simplicities of imported dance music.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1958
Report on the I.L.A.M Nyasaland recording tour (May 7th to June 30th, 1958)
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1958
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481589 , vital:78567 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i1.538
- Description: Our first objective on this tour was to discover what music might still be available in the two Southern districts of Southern Rhodesia, Chibi and Gutu, on our way up to Nyasaland via Fort Victoria and Salisbury. To test the prevalence of local music we went to two of the regions where I had first recorded in 1931, twenty-seven years ago, the one at Chief Takawarasha’s kraal, Chibi, and the other at the Alheit Mission, Gutu. In both places there were several African people who clearly remembered my previous visit and some wrho possessed my recordings which were made at that time and had been pressed and published by Columbia. Since most of the 1931 artists had already died, they were especially delighted to have their voices still on discs and they expressed their belated understanding of what we were doing for African people through our recordings which, they said, they had not appreciated at the time.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1958
Towards an assessment of African scales
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1958
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481675 , vital:78575 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i1.522
- Description: It would appear from the evidence of certain writers on African musics that there still remains much confusion about the subject of African scales and modes. A tenacious misconception continually occurs, namely that African scales or modal systems are but an imperfect imitation of, or striving towards, the western system. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. It is with the intention of opening the subject for dis¬cussion by members of the Society and others interested in this aspect of musicology throughout the African world that this short article is now written.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1958
Bastutoland recording tour, November 19th to December 3rd, 1959
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1959
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481502 , vital:78558 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i2.591
- Description: Each territory in which the Library records examples of indigenous music presents its own characteristics and its own propositions. Both demand special consideration and understanding. For the short period in which the recording unit is active in the country of the tribes concerned we live intensely in the atmosphere of local society, ruler and ruled, teacher and taught, each with their special contemporary problems, the more so because the nature of our research gives us a background of similar conditions from other regions where we have been to collect music.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1959
Recording tour of the Tswana tribe
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1959
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481578 , vital:78566 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i2.590
- Description: Based upon the story of that part of the great Zambezi Valley in Southern Africa which has recently been submerged beneath the waters of the Kariba Dam.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1959
The future of music in Basutoland
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1959
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481622 , vital:78570 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i2.582
- Description: There is a popular impression among the general public that folk music is a thing of the past and of no modern importance. This no doubt arises from a misconception of the function of music in society and also from the notion that the practice of European folk musics is a revivalist art, and, therefore, African music must fall into the same category. This is far from the truth which, in this case, is hidden under a mass of false assumptions and prejudices.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1959
The lost valley: a feature programme or broadcasting
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T , Tracey, Peggy
- Date: 1959
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481633 , vital:78571 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i2.588
- Description: Based upon the story of that part of the great Zambezi Valley in Southern Africa which has recently been submerged beneath the waters of the Kariba Dam.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1959
Kamba carvers
- Authors: Tracey, Andrew
- Date: 1960
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481698 , vital:78577 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i3.611
- Description: You generally find the carvers on a street corner, sitting under a tree out of the hot sun, behind the neat rows of their carvings arranged on a mat, and it may be any¬where from Francistown to Jinja; the scene is the same. Their round, dark faces, their soft language with its th sounds, and above all the distinctive lines of their carvings mark them out as members of one of the enterprising tribes of Africa, the Kamba from Machakos, to the south east of Nairobi, in Kenya. These people travel over most of central Africa to sell their work, from Southern Rhodesia to the Sudan (not, however, the Portuguese territories), and in addition their carvings stock most of the curio shops all over Africa and are to be found both in America and Europe. Behind them is the Akamba Handcraft Association in Kenya, a society which looks after and promotes their interests and is run entirely by the Kamba.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1960
Mbira music of Jege A Tapera
- Authors: Tracey, Andrew
- Date: 1961
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481720 , vital:78579 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i4.705
- Description: Jege A. Tapera, when I knew him in 1961, was a clothing factory worker in Bula¬wayo, Southern Rhodesia, but, first and foremost, he held himself to be a murid^i n>em-bira, an mbira player. The African inhabitants of the Bulawayo area belong mostly to the Ndebele tribe who do not possess the mbira, but there is also a considerable number of Shona-speaking people resident in Bulawayo itself. Among these, only a very few players of the mbira are to be found, perhaps because Bulawayo is well outside Mashona- land; only two were well-known—Matheu Zvimba, a Zezuru njari player from the Zvimba reserve near Salisbury, and Tapera, who is of the Nohwe clan of the Zezuru tribe of the Shona peoples. He was born in about 1905 in the Mangwendi reserve, fifty miles east of Salisbury in the Mrewa district of Southern Rhodesia, of a Rozvi father and a Zezuru mother.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1961
Tina’s lullaby
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1961
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481665 , vital:78574 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i4.710
- Description: The Library was recently requested by Dr. Ruth L. Bartholomew of Paine College, Augusta, Georgia, U.S.A., to assist her in placing an old Negro lullaby which had been handed down by succeeding generations of an American family in that city who were keen to find out from which part of Africa the song might have come. The first transcriptions of the song on paper which she sent us had proved baffling, and so we asked Dr. Bartholomew to send us a tape recording as she said that it was still remembered and could be sung by an old lady of over eighty years, Mrs. Johnson, who was a member of the family.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1961
A case for the name Mbira
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1962
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481469 , vital:78554 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v2i4.703
- Description: It is perhaps strange that one of Africa’s most important small musical instruments should suffer from an incorrect naming at the hands of many ethnomusicologists and museum keepers, those who should be most concerned to give it its rightful name and place in the catalogue of this continent’s instruments.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1962
The arts in Africa: the visual and the aural
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1962
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481600 , vital:78568 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v3i1.734
- Description: For the purposes of this paper the title “ The Arts in Africa” is interpreted as the Arts of indigenous Africans only. Of all the people living south of the Sahara, over eighty percent, four out of every five persons still live in the country and not in towns or industrial areas. Consequently, about four-fifths of all African arts can still be classed as rural. A s with folk arts the world over, African rural arts play an important part in creating public opinion and upholding social disciplines.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1962
The development of music
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1963
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481611 , vital:78569 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v3i2.830
- Description: Of all the arts in Africa music is perhaps the most widely spread, the most narrowly subdued, and the most highly misinterpreted. The very word “music” has often a strangely forbidding and even frivolous con¬notation. When the attribute “African” is added to it, aversion may be complete, as the picture they jointly evoke may on first impact leave the impression of a meaningless or sinister “abstract”, unless we care to reverse the painting in its frame and see what is indelibly written on its back by the artists.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1963
Three tunes for ‘Mbira dza Vadzimu’
- Authors: Tracey, Andrew
- Date: 1963
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481820 , vital:78588 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v3i2.828
- Description: The Mbira d^a vad^imu is the oldest known form of mbira to be played by the Shona people of Southern Rhodesia. Parts of ancient mbiras, probably of this type, have been found at Zimbabwe; early travellers report that Shona chiefs kept large mbira bands; it is the only type of mbira that is — or was — played by all the Shona peoples; the equiva¬lent instrument is also played by two neighbouring tribes of the Shona, the Venda of the northern Transvaal (mbira de^a), and the Korekore of northeastern Southern Rhodesia (madebe d%a mbondoro). Everywhere it is associated with the worship of the spirits. > (vaehpmu, mhondoro), which is a certain sign of at least some degree of antiquity.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1963
A plan for African music
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1965
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481480 , vital:78556 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v3i4.1059
- Description: There are so many kinds of music in Africa that, as usual, it is advisable first to define one’s terms. For the purpose of this paper, the music under discussion is the compositions of indigenous, sub-Saharan, African people, and without recognisable foreign influences. This music shows the same integrity, logic, sensibility and originality as their own languages. Like their languages, a single variety of music-making may be found only within a limited area, but taken together, the different varieties are found to share certain common characteristics which justify their inclusion under the title of “African music”. All of them are contemporary, continually evolving, well founded in past practice, clearly understood and performed by everyone in each local group, though rarely by outsiders. Unfortunately, African music does not yet share the great advantage already enjoyed by African languages of being relatively easy to write down on paper, and to read back again once it has been written down. Here is the missing link between authentic African music and formal educational practice.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1965
A prayer for my countrymen
- Authors: Butler, Guy F
- Date: 1965
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/458771 , vital:75770 , https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA00284459_102
- Description: New Coin is one of South Africa's most established and influential poetry journals. It publishes poetry, and poetry-related reviews, commentary and interviews. New Coin places a particular emphasis on evolving forms and experimental use of the English language in poetry in the South African context. In this sense it has traced the most exciting trends and currents in contemporary poetry in South Africa for a decade of more. The journal is published twice a year in June and December by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA), Rhodes University.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1965
I.L.A.M. recording tour
- Authors: Tracey, Hugh T
- Date: 1965
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/481513 , vital:78560 , https://doi.org/10.21504/amj.v3i4.1066
- Description: The Library undertook a brief recording tour of South West Africa and the north¬western Cape regions from May 11th to June 19th, 1965.Accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Crena de Longh and my veteran African assistant, Daniel Mabuto, we travelled from Johannesburg on the 1,100 mile-route across to South West Africa through Kuruman, (the site of the famous early mission station from which David Livingstone set out on his first African journeys) and Uppington in the Cape Province, into South West Africa via Karasburg, Keetmanshoop and Rehoboth and on to Windhoek, the capital. Here the necessary formalities were accomplished before starting in the northern section.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1965