A Prodigy's Calling

"Ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner has been studying Zimbabwean mbira for more than fifty years. When he first arrived in what was then Rhodesia shortly after the nation declared independence from the United Kingdom, he met Cosmas Magaya, an mbira player who would become his teacher and life long collaborator. This book chronicles the early years of Magaya's life, documenting the master mbira player's journey from child prodigy to established expert. As a child, Magaya was immersed in mbira music through his father's work as a healer and spirit medium. As Magaya grew, so, too, did his world; his performances extended beyond the family compound as his skill and knowledge increased, bringing him into contact with a rapidly changing society fraught with colonial conflict. Following Magaya's childhood, we see how his upbringing guided his journey through the community's social networks and how his early sensibilities, proclivities, and talents shaped his development. At the same time, his deepening engagement with music and the ancestors had unforeseen consequences as he grappled with the overlapping tensions in Rhodesia between Shona cosmology and Christian ideology, rural and urban lifestyles, and the escalating African nationalist struggle and the white supremacist state. Interlaced with tales of his unfolding relationships with family members and mbira experts, accounts of his experiences as a learner teach readers how to listen to the mbira, coming as he did to hear ever-finer details in the music's richly layered patterns and to discover its implicit principles, values, and forms. Berliner's vividly narrated account is accompanied by QR codes that take readers directly to recordings of music as Magaya learns it, and linocut illustrations by South African artist Lucas Bambo bring the narrative to life. Berliner has also included appendices for musicians interested in learning or improving their own mbira playing. The book will be a welcome window onto the transmission of musical culture in Shona society, inviting the reader into the very tradition it recounts"--

Paul F. Berliner is the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Music at Duke University in North Carolina. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Mbira and Mbira's Restless Dance, also published by the University of Chicago Press.