Editor's Note: The flight to the capital is going out tonight, thereby saving the travelers a 3-day drive! Please pray for Maggie, the last of the team to get some kind of stomach bug.
Salama from Madagascar! This is Josh, writing a few days after the end of the Fihaonam-be Mozika Diosesy Toliara, the first music conference of its kind in the Diocese of Toliara. The conference and culminating Sunday worship took place at the Cathedral Complex on the outskirts of Toliara, a city of around 170,000 people — a little bigger than Joliet, Illinois — on the west coast of Madagascar. It was a great success, and very little went according to plan.
In the months leading up to our trip, we had a series of online meetings with two conference leaders: Alfred, the president of the diocesan music department and a choir director who records original songs, and Rev. Zafy, a priest in Betioky District who served as a translator. They had several goals:
• Music leaders from around the diocese would travel hours to teach one another their original songs, sharing the different styles of their various tribes.
• We'd start writing new songs together, developing Malagasy-penned liturgical music to replace the American and European tunes that fill the current Malagasy Episcopal hymnal.
• I'd teach everyone solfa notation, a form of music writing based on solfege syllables (do-re-mi etc.) Currently most church musicians pick up new songs by ear, and almost nobody uses the staff notation American musicians take for granted.
Goal number two didn't really happen. I'd envisioned us breaking into small groups, each group composing a Psalm refrain or Kyrie or whatever to teach the others. But it soon became obvious that the diocese is already overflowing with Malagasy music — several musicians had sent Alfred new songs in advance — and that simply sharing it could take up most of our time.
DAY 1: WEDNESDAY
The conference participants convened this morning while our team was flying from Amboasary on a nine-seat Mission Aviation Fellowship plane. (Highly recommended mode of transportation, btw. It's safe, reliable, friendly, and fairly close to the scenery. Plus Sue got to sit in the co-pilot's seat!) The diocesan Bishop Samy picked us up from Toliara Airport and drove us to our hotel, a ridiculously nice Indonesian-themed place. Then it was off to the conference to spend a few minutes introducing myself to everyone before starting work Thursday.
OR SO I THOUGHT.
Instead, I was shown to the head table and invited to start leading. Eek! I had no solfa lessons with me and two Malagasy words at my disposal. What I did have were my tablet and a still, small voice telling me to go around the room and take a skills inventory. It turned out we had 28 participants, men and women, from 12 or so different parishes, 11 of whom were ready to share new songs. By overwhelming demand, their top request was to learn solfa. One musician, a seminarian and multi-instrumentalist named Anthony, served as my translator.
(Anthony and I later bonded over our shared love of American gospel and contemporary Christian music. When he said he was a fan of the singer TobyMac, I told him I'd seen TobyMac perform with his rap group DC Talk when I was 12 years old. "Wow, he's a very old man," Anthony reckoned.)
DAY 2: THURSDAY
After devotion and prayer, Alfred taught us all the upbeat conference theme song he'd written. I should have had a leg up on everyone here, since Alfred had sent me a recording two months earlier. I wasn't prepared for the amazing Malagasy music learning process.
Alfred sang a line or two and everyone repeated it. He walked us through all three verses, and then taught us the song's chorus. Every once in a while he'd pause and worry over a line we'd missed, emphasizing the missed notes until we got them right. Then we sang through the whole song, with the young cathedral musicians, brothers Sanda (keyboard) and Manda (drums), accompanying. By the second time through the verse, the group had come up with four-part harmonies. Soon little vocal asides and soaring descants appeared. The group was feeling their way through the song and fleshing out a full arrangement.
This process of learning a song by ear, from scratch, took about half an hour.
Now it was my turn. We started by learning the seven solfege syllables — do re me fa so(l) la ti — with their accompanying hand motions. Then I wrote the chorus of Alfred's song on the white board, and we sang through it slowly, pitch by pitch, writing the first letter of each solfege syllable above its corresponding syllable of the lyrics. Solfa!
Classic solfa notation
The rest of Thursday and Friday stuck to this pattern: someone would teach a song, and then I'd teach a solfa lesson using a Malagasy hymn everyone already knew.
I don't know what I would've done without our previous week in Amboasary. During our visits to the rural churches, I'd recorded several hymn tunes that had really grabbed me, and because we'd sung them in different places, I knew they'd work as familiar teaching tools. If you worship at St. James the Less, get ready to sing these hymns in the coming months! (Without the solfa.)
DAY 3: FRIDAY
At the end of Thursday's session we'd determined that seven more participants still had to share their songs. We'd split them up over the next two days...
OR SO I THOUGHT.
After our devotion, Alfred gave an impromptu and somewhat impassioned talk. Anthony translated for me. Alfred thought we should no longer learn participants' songs, that the purpose of the conference was to learn new music for Sunday's worship service, and we should spend our time on that. I gathered he felt pressed for time.
I wasn't the only one surprised by the change in plans. Albert, a youth leader, songwriter, and dancer from Maroaloky, raised his hand and disagreed. He felt all songs were songs of praise and we should stick to the original plan. Others started chiming in. Nobody raised their voices, but when I proposed that Alfred and I meet privately with the seven remaining song-sharers during morning break, Anthony agreed: "That may help defuse the situation."
I started by apologizing for taking up so much time on Thursday. I acknowledged we had two worthy goals — learning songs from individual parishes, and learning diocese-approved songs for Sunday — and too little time. And then I asked whether anyone would humbly consider not sharing their own songs. As I'd expected, nearly everyone raised his hand. The two exceptions were Arsene, a university chaplain with a piece of liturgical music that fit neatly into Alfred's scheme, and Albert, the dissenter.
To everyone's delight, Albert's song was a total bop, a joyful call-and-response tune exhorting us to praise God with the sounds of guitar, drums, piano, kabosy, valiha, and a bunch of other things I didn't recognize. As we sang, Albert led us in some traditional hand-shaking high-stepping dance moves, and we all finished the song laughing. Alfred loved the song so much he had us perform it during his Saturday choir concert and Sunday's worship service — dancing included.
Participants joyfully learning Albert's song
I though we'd spend the afternoon learning more of the songs on Alfred's list. Wrong again — back to solfa!
For our final lesson, participants called out solfa syllables and rhythmic symbols to notate a popular hymn. Malagasy hymns are trickier rhythmically than Anglican ones, which makes their notation more complex, so I was nervous about this exercise, but the younger musicians picked it up quickly. By the end of the day, I felt we'd gelled as a group, and that anyone who'd find solfa useful in their jobs had the tools to use it.
Final solfa lesson on the whiteboard
You teachers reading this know the magic of seeing students' eyes when they're really getting whatever you're teaching. God granted me that gift during the conference. Not everyone there mastered solfa. But I was clear throughout: solfa is just a tool. Malagasy musicians teaching songs in person clearly don't need it. But for those musicians, like Sanda and Manda, who might someday share music remotely across the diocese, solfa unlocks possibilities. How can we support their efforts?
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY
Finally it was time to share some of what we'd accomplished, at Alfred's choir concert and Sunday morning worship. Somewhere there's video of me praising God with the melodica while Albert leads us all in high-stepping to his song.
Conference participants behind the Cathedral's Gathering Place
No comments:
Post a Comment