During students’ September study break, we travel for 9 hours from Johannesburg to the Venda chieftaincy of HaMakuya in a remote rural area in Limpopo province. Wits Music’s seven-year partnership with Tshulu Trust has involved ethnomusicology student fieldwork (Mashionake, 2009) and student service learning since 2012.
Tshulu Trust “aims to enhance local economic development by assisting community members to utilize their natural and cultural resources sustainably” (Berman & Allen, 2012, p. 82). Their “anchor initiatives are Tshulu Camp and the HaMakuya Homestay Programme” (Berman & Allen, 2012, p. 82) – both significant spaces and sites of learning for students. Students learn through critically reflecting on their experience of “cultural exchange immersions” (Allen, 2011) in three-day village homestays, co-facilitating school music workshops and being exposed to a social-cultural environment that is usually foreign to them. While students often come to question their own economic, race, and class positions, they also experience the potential of collaborative music-making to enhance cross-cultural communication and understanding.
The intentions and methodologies of the Community Music interventions are underpinned by the need to respond to a very specific context – one that brings South Africa’s diversity, inequalities and complexity into sharp relief.4
4 In terms of social, educational and economic inequality, for example, South Africa still has one of the largest disparities between the rich and poor in the world. Although apartheid legislation was rescinded in 1994 with the advent of democracy, many of its deep-seated structural inequalities, its trauma and violence, remain. In education, the situation is especially critical. See for example Report on Rural Education (Department of Education 2005);
Violence in Schools (Burton 2008); The Toxic Mix (Bloch, 2009); Spreen & Vally (2010) for the nature of the current ‘crisis in South African education’.
“The songs were interesting and our rainbow was beautiful”
In considering the impact of the project, I was struck by children’s written responses that powerfully express what the music workshops meant to them. I use these as a basis to discuss the values and significance of collaborative music-making in children’s educational environment.
Children gave written, verbal and visual feedback to questions (in their home language of TshiVenda), such as: “In what ways are the music workshops different to your usual lessons?”; “What was it like for you to make and play your instruments in the musical story?” and “Tell us something that you did this week in class that you have never done before”. The following responses are written by primary school children aged between ten and thirteen years, for whom answering questions, expressing their feelings or thoughts, or giving feedback, is unfamiliar.
“I liked it because it is my future as I can be a big person through it” (the music).
“It helps our brain to think”.
“One of these days we will become something because of this activity”.
“The songs were interesting and our rainbow was beautiful”.
“I feel happy because I played an instrument I made for myself”.
I suggest that the responses indicate significant learning and growth in these children’s lives and that this significance is contextually determined. “Being a bigger person through music” suggests the potential for community music engagement to realize potential and enable children to experience choice, control and possibility through collaborative musical participation. The children’s responses also imply that such positive experiences were very new to them.
The importance of new learning experiences for these children needs to be understood in terms of their educational and socio-economic circumstances. Rural northern Limpopo is a microcosm of the deep contradictions of South Africa society, the legacy of apartheid inequalities, tribal, and gender politics. Considered a national poverty node by the South African government, unemployment is estimated at 90%, the matric failure rate is about 80% and there is little economic development or access to basic services. Most people rely on social grants to survive. However, HaMakuya cannot only be described in terms of deficiency and poverty.
Richness and Poverty; Music and Education
Part of the contradiction one confronts as an outsider is between the community’s material poverty and their cultural wealth and resilience, including a striking visual culture, and Venda traditional music made famous by John Blacking in Venda Children’s Songs (1967) and How Musical is Man? (1973). There are however disparities between children’s musical environment and the quality of their education.
My experience visiting schools in this area is that education is impoverished. Though often well-intentioned, teaching remains authoritarian and rote-learning is prevalent.5 In the domain of children’s musical play, though, there is a clear expression of agency and voice, and evidence of a range of musical and multimodal capacities. However the musical skills and learning embodied in children’s musical games are seldom recognized in formal education; music-making in informal contexts also doesn’t impact classroom learning. In a South African contexts, quality musical arts education is unlikely to be present in schools like these, but the situation is very different in private and good government schools in urban areas, which do offer music and arts education. Although a national Creative and Performing Arts curriculum exists, its content, interpretation and implementation are problematic (see Harrop-Allin & Kros, 2014).
Music making outside formal institutions is however ubiquitous: in choirs, gospel and popular music bands, traditional and religious settings. However, in many schools there is a “dislocation between school music education and the diverse and rich musics that form the fabric of South African’s social, religious and cultural lives”
(Harrop-Allin, 2011, p. 156). From a pedagogical perspective, the challenge is therefore how to recruit musical practices and the capacities they embody, for transformative learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2005; Harrop-Allin, 2010, 2011, 2014).
Recognizing Venda’s unique music as potential educational resources is therefore essential for the community music project.
Each year (2012-2014), the school gives us permission to work with grade six and seven classes for six days (during school time), linking workshop content with aspects of the curriculum. In order to connect with local music, a traditional music expert and translator (who is also a musician) taught traditional songs, dance and children’s games appropriate to the musical narrative created with the class. The inclusion of musicians from HaMakuya can be viewed as a “community music approach” where local musical knowledge and expertise is acknowledged, where ‘indigenous’
musicians play a facilitator role as musical leaders with whom children can identify.
My students and I learn from them, while they are exposed to an alternative teaching methodology in a process of co-creating musical knowledge.
“When the rain came”: Creating a musical narrative
We aim to create a space of active engagement with learning, rather than the passivity that characterizes most rural classrooms; to enable children to participate in an imaginative, experience and build group cohesion through collaborative music-making. The intention is also to create a learning environment where children’s musicality and contributions are acknowledged; a space for validating their music by bringing existing musical resources into the classroom.
The project comprises a series of workshops that “explore the facilitation process as a mechanism of engaging participants in creative music-making” (Higgins, 2008, p.
5The reasons for this are complex and deep-rooted, but are partly because of teachers’ own poor education and training in Bantu Education, which was a key mechanism of the apartheid state (see Cynthia Kros’ Bantu Education and the Seeds of Separate Development, 2010).
326). Our facilitation encourages free exploration, while challenging participants to listen carefully to each other and learn to work together musically. This approach “is a way of working with people that enables and empowers [them] to carry out a task or perform an action [and] encourages people to share ideas, resources, opinions and to think critically” (Prendiville, 1995, cited in Mullen, 2002).
What follows is a description of the 2012 workshops. We employed the form of musical storytelling, as social issues, problems, family and economic concerns are often articulated, interrogated and communicated through musical stories in Venda society (Kruger, 1999). We The workshops used this familiar musical narrative structure and we co-constructed a drama and music narrative with the grade six children, who contributed by adding their own songs; we taught them new ones and local musicians included traditional elements. Tshulu Trust tasked the Wits team with exploring how music and drama processes can contribute to children’s environmental conservation awareness. Although the initial aim was “environmental education” it became clear that children first needed meaningful learning experiences that enrolled them in their own learning and creativity, before any action and responsibility regarding wider social and conservation issues could be addressed.
Instead of preaching to children about “picking up litter”, we focused on developing capabilities required to understand one’s impact on the environment. These include the ability to make connections, understand cause and effect, take responsibility for one’s actions, imagine alternatives and solve problems. Although one can’t say that participatory music-making necessarily develops these skills, the outcomes of the workshops demonstrate shifts in attitude, and especially, changes in children’s experience of themselves as active, thinking people, who are able to make a difference, and whose voices count. I suggest that children had an embodied experience of “I can”, realizing their place in the community through feeling and hearing the place of their sound in the ensemble, using the Venda tshikona pipe ensemble dance as a metaphor.6
Children constructed instruments from waste materials to connect to the idea of using available resources sustainably. Children used their home-made guitars, shakers, bottles and scrapers in a series of sound exploration exercises that eventually communicated a story called “when the rain came”.
Beginning with the immediate physical and material environment, children were asked to notice what was outside the classroom: the trees, dry, hot weather, birdsong, the sounds of goats and cowbells, other children shouting, the heat, smoke from fires, a blue sky and dust. They became the dry baobab trees in the drought in vivid tableaux and created sound pictures to depict drought and heat.
6 Known as the “Venda national dance”, Venda tshikona pipe ensembles are fascinating for their musical structure of “one person one note” where “a good performance depends on the musical co-operation of the team” (Blacking, 1967, p. 28). Each person plays one of a set of heptatonic pipes, each with a different length and pitch, which organised into small groups that create descending melodies that interact with multiple melodies produced by other groups of pipes. The resultant melodies are layered with the fundamental drum pulse, alto and tenor rhythmic patterns, as well as the rhythms produced by dance steps. The layered textures create a complex polyrhythmic instrumental music John Blacking describes as “an audible and visible sign of a social or political grouping”
(Blacking, 1967, p. 23).
Children explored the sound possibilities afforded by the instruments they had made, creating soundscapes that evoked time and place, in keeping with Murray Schafer’s
“reconception of everyday sonic environments as soundscapes” (Veblen, 2008, p.16).
Beginning sounds, songs and stories of heat and decay developed into a story of a rainstorm, rainbows and new growth. At appropriate points, familiar songs about the landscape, trees, and birds were incorporated. The story was told with narration in TshiVenda and children dramatized their own stories of poisoning during bad times, and of the goodness brought by rain. We integrated a simple version of the tshikona pipe ensemble dance, which is believed to bring the rain (which it did).
Children’s musical and participatory learning was particularly evident in the subtlety and sensitivity of their rainstorm sound pictures. The attentive listening and working towards a common musical, expressive goal, and even the evocative use of silence, was a process that took six days. The story ended with rainbows and after much practice, children’s imaginative group rainbow body sculptures became the central metaphor for analyzing their learning and the significance of the workshops as a community music intervention.
Children’s musical learning, participation, and agency
In terms of children’s learning, there were several shifts. A significant change was children’s increased participation as they moved from silence and fear (of being wrong, asking or answering a question) to demonstrating a willingness to contribute, respond to, and ask questions, offering musical and story suggestions. Their musical learning included an increased sensitivity to sound and the ability to play a range musical of musical roles. Children were able to adopt musical responsibilities like starting a song, keeping an ostinato pattern, adding melodic or rhythmic accompaniment or playing the ngoma drumbeat that drives the tshikona dance.
Children learnt how to focus and sustain a musical process, to practice and re-practicing in order to achieve a satisfying, rewarding performance.
Learning new songs, in different languages and constructing instruments increased children’s musical range and sound palettes and expanded their musical horizons by being exposed to new musical forms and styles. Furthermore, using familiar songs in a new creative context represented a form of applied learning, of experiencing alternative possibilities in the application of knowledge to next creative contexts.
Regarding environmental learning creating the musical, dramatic narrative required the development of cognitive capacities: making connections between events and actions, understanding cause and effect, learning how to solve problems together and predicting “What happens if?” Socially, children moved from non-co-operation with their peers to close collaboration in order to “make a rainbow”. The workshops modeled musical risk-taking and children experienced the importance of their musical contribution to a meaningful whole. They realized that “What I do matters” through an embodied experience of their one note contributing to the tshikona ensemble. They learnt responsibility through taking on musical responsibilities.
“It is my future - I can be a bigger person through this music”
In their written questionnaires, children responded by saying they “were happy because of the new things they had learnt”; how much they enjoyed learning songs in
other languages; that the workshops were “interesting and good for our bodies” and
“made our brains think”. They mentioned that there was “much respect” shown and how proud they were of making their own instruments and playing them. Many said they “didn’t know how to make a rainstorm” (before), but now they did, communicating a sense belief in themselves and their abilities. Through successful participation, children felt some control and experienced their own agency. Their voices were heard – both literally and metaphorically.
One child’s statement that “it is my future – I can be a bigger person through this music”, suggests the performance of possibilities through experiencing musicking where everyone’s contribution is valued; where the possibility of growth and development is embedded in the musical experience.
When asking how participatory musicking creates opportunities for personal growth, group cohesion and community development, linking “empowerment” (an oft-used word in the South African development discourse) to possibility and choice is generative for understanding the purpose of community music in an educational and social context like HaMakuya. Children’s responses and their participation reinforced how creating new music in an accepting, imaginative learning environment, enabled an embodied experience of empowerment even if it cannot effect material empowerment. As Roger Mantie (2008) argues,
Music education may not be the most effective tool to deal with inequities in material distribution or political power. It can, however, help improve social equality to the degree that students are empowered with the belief that they can be musical. (p. 481)
Realizing their own musicality, experiencing possibility, imagining alternatives and futures are aspirational capacities that development theorist Arjun Appadurai (2004) argues are learnt and embodied in cultural processes. Appadurai advocates a rethinking of culture as “the capacity to aspire” in contexts of poverty and development. Viewing children as “agentive” and harnessing the power of music to build aspirational capacities may be a way for Community Music interventions to contribute to social development.
Contributing to social change? The values of student service learning in community music
The main agenda of community engagement is to “strengthen the relationship between higher education and society through a greater commitment to social responsibility” (Allen & Berman, 2012, p. 78). As a form of community engagement,
“service learning through the arts” promotes social leadership, which in the HaMakuya project implies developing students as facilitators and participants in arts-based activities designed to benefit the community. Through a combination of experience, reflection and improving practice, students demonstrated a range of learning, particularly a deeper understanding of the complexities and contradictions of South African society and education.
The project develops students’ critical and reflective thinking, increases their self-awareness and self-awareness of their impact on the world. It assists in developing
community musicians who can adapt to the needs of varying and challenging contexts. Student reflections suggest an expanded awareness and experience of music’s power to effect positive change. Musically, students learn a range of teaching and facilitation skills and how to respond to the needs and level of the group. In terms of academic learning, students connect Community Music theory and practice, because principles of inclusion, non-judgment and participation are practiced in the classroom.
Further student learning comprises cross-cultural engagement, knowledge of indigenous musical practices; an awareness and understanding of rural community development and educational challenges in schools. They express their desire to use their own musical skills in the service of others. Student learning outcomes like these suggest that the Community Music course and its applied, experiential learning helps to facilitate leadership skills within an arts development context, so that students
“develop the desire and capacity to become agents for positive social change”
(Berman & Allen, 2012, 79). Student responses highlight the importance of developing a culture of civic and social responsibility as opposed to a culture of individuality that may characterize professional arts degrees.
Integrating Community Music into the Wits music degree may be viewed as a response to South African Higher Education’s community engagement agenda.
Through practicing a “socially responsible music education” and developing musical leaders as “change agents” in service learning projects, Community Music may begin to contribute to South Africa’s social development and transformation.
Acknowledgements
The HaMakuya Wits community music project is made possible by funding from the National Lottery Distribution Fund (South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand strategic planning fund (2013) and Tshulu Trust. I would like to thank Tshulu Trust staff, as well as the teachers and children from Tshikalange Primary School in Guyuni for allowing us to work in your school and for welcoming Wits students and staff into your community. I acknowledge Lara Allen who introduced me to HaMakuya and founded Tshulu Trust. Wits Community Music students’ participation and insightful reflections contributed substantially to this project and this paper.
References
Allen, L. (2011). The HaMakuya homestay programme: An assessment of the value of immersion-style homestays for the achievement of inter-cultural understanding. Conference poster presented at Community Engagement: The changing role of South African Universities in Development, 8-9 November, East London, South Africa.
Appadurai, A. (2004). The capacity to aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition. In V. Rao & M. Walton (Eds.), Cultural and public action (pp. 59-84). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ash, S. L. & Clayton, P.H. (2004). The articulated learning: An approach to guided reflection and assessment. Innovative Higher Education, 29(2), 137-154.
Bartleet, B. (2012). Bridging universities and Indigenous Communities through Service Learning Projects in Music. In D. Coffman (Ed.), Transitioning from
Historical Foundations to 21st Century Global Initiatives: Proceedings from
Historical Foundations to 21st Century Global Initiatives: Proceedings from