The nature of the research

The starting point for this research has been a musicology that is a historiographic, culturographic, dialogic, and locally oriented tradition. The researcher brings in some of the ‘quality assessment’ that North Atlantic science has successfully developed for  description and qualitative research, and, where wanted, the informed, third-person view needed to abstract to some degree from the complete and complex ‘local data’. All this fits into a research design with collaboration and co-development focused on local goals: the description and history of the local culture, and analyses of how things work around music.

Translating or emulating

The ways of working used in this study aim at achieving a little more ‘translation’ and a little less ‘appropriation’. A brief excursion into Renaissance translation typology will be helpful.

Translatio, imitatio and aemulatio

To make classical works, and contemporaneous works in other languages, accessible to a wider public than just scientists, writers in the Renaissance began translating/rendering these works into the vernacular. This was called translatio. When skilled, the translator progressed to imitatio. They did not produce a faithful copy in the words of the vernacular language but attempted to follow, and make variations on, the intentions of the illustrious predecessor. The highest stage of translation was the aemulatio: the writer endeavoured to surpass the predecessor. Because the writer lived in a christian society, fully aware of the bible and the true god –advantages they felt they possessed over the classical predecessors– they could, in order to surpass them, introduce a christian parallel to the classical original and thereby alter it quite thoroughly.¹See Warners (1956).

Whether based on christian motives, as in this example, or on scientific ones, as in the cases I am aiming at here, aemulatio seems to be an in-born North Atlantic preoccupation. But, we can try. In the terms of this excursion, my intention is to try to aim at imitatio based on dialogue as the highest stage. If we do so, the dialogue about the intentions of the local actors becomes a central issue in the research.

A consequence of this stance is that not too much attention is given to critical reviews of musicological literature, more especially thought, on every new subject: this site is not about musicology. Ways of working used are described as far as they pertain to the ‘quality assessment’ mentioned above.

This will not diminish Kofi Agawu’s grievance²Agawu (2003: passim).: the music is still represented by a ‘non-African’ and, more importantly, by someone trapped in North Atlantic thinking. The choice then, considering the quantity of cultural research in Zambia by ‘Africans’, is, however sad this situation may be, between hardly any representation and this type of representation.

Also, some (North Atlantic) readers might find this site a little odd since colonial, western economic, and similar influences are not presented as very large, nor are they highlighted. My argument is not that these influences are small or that they do not play in the background, but that the vantage points of those in Chibale involved in the research, and the situation in Chibale provided no reason to specifically highlight these influences.