Representation of the findings

All who try to represent the music of others, experience the problem that particularly the details and nuances – grasp of which is often felt to be the soul of a long and intensive period of immersion – can not sufficiently be brought forward in the forms of representation common in musicology. 

No need for reacting to this by coming up with the n^th overview of the ‘crisis of representation in musicology’. This has been done adequately by others¹See for instance Barz & Cooley (1997)..

The form of this site has the purpose to somewhat reduce the degree of reduction that characterises a book about music. Apart from the fact that a book is not accessible for the people in Chibale and surrounding areas, the words about music require dramatisation in other, not rarely more effective forms: song text and other texts, sounds, images, and links. Yes, but what about the linear structure of a book? For the reader who does not want to be sent into the wilds within a few clicks, linear stories are offered in the overview articles that can be found in the menus. These stories are mirrored at many places by music, texts, photos, films, cases, maps, lists, tables, elaborations, and the like.
Feel free to take the other route: just jump around and see what’s on. The snake in the grass then is that the text ‘supposes’ that the reader is aware of the overview.

It only remains to be feared that the typical reader will combine an aversion for reductionism with a lack of willingness to read ‘a book’ from the screen;-)

The old and the new, the flexible and the tenacious

The articles are written in the present tense though the focus always is on the whole research period (1981-2013) and the periods before that that were part of living memory in Chibale during the research period. I do not wish to suggest any a priori continuity, or ‘unchangeability’, over these periods but writing in the past tense would suggest too much that the past periods have “ended” and that much is different in present-day Chibale. No, old and new interlock. As becomes clear in the articles on this site, the flexible and the tenacious are part and parcel of Chibale culture. See for an example the relation between the structural and the changeable features of music.

Languages used

The 1977 approved orthography is followed (Zambian Languages: Orthography Approved by the Ministry of Education. Lusaka: NECZAM). The c (ch in names) is pronounced as the ch in ‘child’ before all vowels; ng’ is pronounced as the ng in singer; ng is pronounced as ng’ followed by a g as in garçon. Fusion of the vowels at the end of a word and the beginning of the next word is represented by the resultant vowel, for instance kukafye cila for kukafya icila.

Most words in ciLala have a long and a short version. These versions are used depending on linguistic and other circumstances. For the ciLala terms on this site the short form is used. And, for the sake of clarity, ciLala terms are given in their singular form, except when they are used in plural form only.
Referring to persons is done in various ways in Chibale. Especially women are called ‘wife of’ her husband or ‘mother of’ one of her children. BanaMwape means wife of Mwape and mother of Mwape. Bamuka-, spouse of, can refer to both wife and husband though the latter is more frequent. Bashi- in names means ‘father of’. If the name of a person is composed in this way, the word concerned is written as a prefix. BanaSibilu (the mother of Sibilu), bamukaNdubeni (the spouse of Ndubeni) and bashiBupe (the father of Bupe).

Quotations of people in Chibale who contributed to the research are in English though the language used was ciLala. When their ciLala is rich or idiomatic as to our subject, the ciLala version of quotations or particular concepts is given between brackets or in notes. Central terms and analytical and categorical terms that are hard to represent in English with one or two words are given in ciLala while a hover is provided that gives the explanation of that term in English.