Thoughts on Making the Music for The Head & the Load

Thoughts

on making the music for The Head & the Load PHILIP MILLER

IT IS NOT EASY TO PIN DOWN the process of making music for The Head & the Load. There were many conversations between myself and Thuthuka Sibisi, my musical collaborator. Musical ideas were exchanged before the actual composing began. Everything led us back to the question: how can we find an emotional grammar in the musical language to evoke the many conflicting feelings around this complex and untold history? How can music and sound fill a space of emptiness, a space of silence and of the hidden, overlooked, or deliberately suppressed history of the enormous numbers of Africans who lost their lives as soldiers, porters, and civilians during the Great War? In some sense, this silence gave us the freedom to create a sound world of hybrid and antithetical musical impulses. The dissonance of a new modernism in music was beginning to emerge in Europe. By the end of the Great War, the siren for the end of Romanticism had been sounded and twentieth-century composers, such as Hindemith, Schoenberg, and Ravel were exploring new forms of composition.

But how could the music of Africa “call out” and be heard above the violent cacophony of Europe’s Great War? Amid this tension and instability, we wanted the multitude of voices from Africa to respond to Europe, deliberately resisting the raucous musical soundscapes of the European avant-garde. Whether through an ancient Zulu war chant, the thundering rhythm of a Pedi dance, or a French song by Eric Satie, we no longer would remain silent. Music needed to play a role in the way Africans had served the colonial project and its concomitant Great War. Using techniques of collage and montage, fragments of musical quotations from both African and European repertoires are cut up, reconstructed, and turned on their head, creating multiple readings of the compositions and arrangements, shifting unpredictably between the geographies and histories of Africa and Europe.

An example of this can be seen in the musical tableaux Orders and Commands where the rhythmical snare drum of Schoenberg’s “Nachtwandler,” a song I selected from the collection of his cabaret songs, collapses and morphs into looped patterns of percussive beats and Sprechgesang chants made by the choir, slapping their hymn book covers

(“mpampampa”) in traditional Methodist Church style. Thuthuka and I had often spoken about how we wanted the music not to reinforce a particular expectation of the African musical vocabulary.

We were acutely aware of how often the music of Africa has been filtered and solidified into a series of sound clichés by European composers.

Our intention was to explode some of these familiar musical “earworms.” For the song “Amakatsi” (indoda emkati emlonyeni / the man with the cat in his mouth) we quite consciously quote from the traditional upbeat kwela song (with lyrics by Bham Ntabeni) reinforcing the black soldiers’ sarcastic ridicule of the long sidewhiskers of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Working with the typical “I-V-I-V” harmonic progressions of kwela and using piccolo, a squash box, and strings, this sweet parody of a swinging shebeen song goes sour, undercut with unpredictable interruptions of the violence of a snare’s rim shot collapsing into a dark drum hit, immediately followed by a downward descending glissando of strings, echoing the almost comical sound of the fall of the shell-drop.

However, as composers, we wanted to extend ourselves beyond becoming Foley artists.

Following William’s inclusion of the Dadaist movement in his visual language, the sounds of war, so brilliantly created in the nonsense words of futurist Luigi Nono’s manifesto The Art of Noises with his onomatopoeic phrases (“Tamtoumb! Ratatatata! Fluc-flac-zang!”), also took our compositional process in a new direction.

Is it possible that a British soldier reading aloud from the language manual, Phrases from Swahili to English, and giving rudimentary commands to a Kenyan porter, could begin to sound like a Kurt Schwitters Dadaist nonsense poem to the ears of the Kenyan? Eventually the song climaxes with these lists of words: wuzungu (white man), mulungu (God), iglavu (gloves), etc., furiously being flung back at Europe by the virtuosic singer, Ann Masina.

Our own compositional collaboration also spoke to questions of the expected division of labor between what is considered European music versus African music. In the workshops, over the period of a year, Thuthuka and I found each other’s strengths and developed an intuitive musical language when creating the music. Not necessarily

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in the predicable expectation or assumption that each of us were suited to compose in a particular musical idiom (European avant-gardism relegated to me or traditional African choral hymns to Thuthuka). Both of us have had very different experiences as working composers: Thuthuka formally studied music composition and conducting in the classical repertoire while I am largely self-taught, learning from working in very diverse musical contexts and artistic practices. Our own unique musical worlds both collide and combine in unexpected ways, adding to the complex sound world of The Head & the Load.

We were clear that we did not want to create an electronic war soundscape but rather compose music for the extreme ranges and timbres of our chosen instruments—for example, the highest pitch of harmonicas evoking the sounds of tinnitus, the lowest, darkest bowed notes of the double bass and tuba for the drones of approaching aircraft overhead, a siren of human voices evoking both the wailing sounds of death and an imminent battle warning.

In my initial research, I had discovered that the English Committee for the Welfare of Africans, a liberal philanthropic society based in England during the war, had sent English language hymnbooks along with tuning forks, harmonicas, gramophones, accordions, and banjos to the African battalions so that they could “entertain themselves” during their breaks from marching and carrying munitions. It felt problematic to blithely accept that every African soldier, porter, and civilian caught up in the war, in both Europe and Africa, would be singing sentimental British music hall songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” But at the same time, the knowledge that gramophones had been sent to the African soldiers who were listening to commercial recordings songs of the time (most likely American jazz) inspired me to think about separating the song heard and isolating the actual sound of the recording—the crackles and the jerk of the needle on the grooves of the record. Using unpitched bowing on the contrabass and cello, accompanied by the white noise of the brass players’ breathing and the scratching movements of the skin of the big drum, this “instrumental gramophone loop” begins to be heard in an entirely different context. It stands in for

the slow, continuous walking of the carriers and porters, a rhythmical and infinite loop of staggering and dragging munitions and weapons, with creaking muscle and heaving breath. By using musicians to play these mechanical sound loops of the gramophone with their own musical instruments, we transmute these mechanical sounds to the physical, human pain of the body.

Always seeking an emotional truth in the multiplicity of sound worlds we created for The Head & the Load, the answer in the end is found within the body of the performers and musicians— it is in the human voice and breath which hover and vibrate in the air, it is found in their movements and gestures when playing their musical instruments. This has been my search.

PHILIP MILLER is a composer and sound artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Since 1994, he has worked with his long-time collaborator William Kentridge composing the music for multiple projects, including the seminal film Felix in Exile, the installation The Refusal of Time, the cine-concert Paper Music, and, together with Thuthuka Sibisi, the monumental Triumph and Laments, a processional march for two orchestras and choir, performed in front of Kentridge’s frieze on the banks of the Tiber River in Rome.

Independent projects include his award-winning Rewind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape & Testimony, which was selected for the South African Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Other recent commissions include the sound installation Bikohausen: Steve Biko and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and, with Sibisi, the sound installation The African Choir of 1891 Re-imagined, presented at Autograph ABP in London and at the Apartheid Museum and National Gallery in South Africa.

His score for the HBO film The Girl (2012) was nominated for an Emmy Award.

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