Houston Classical, Inc.’s Post

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at Queens College, Komani. It’s an extraordinary school and I’m still trying to put my finger on precisely what it is that makes it so. I have never had such an engaged and responsive audience. I concluded my talk and was about to hurtle off to another engagement when someone said: ‘Hang on, the boys want to sing for you’. What happened next (iGwijo) is not unusual at Queens or at any of the traditional Eastern Cape schools, but it was so exceptionally evocative and moving that I have been unable to think of much else since then. As I drove my bakkie home through a landscape of aloes, acacia and koppies, reliving the joyful, rhythmic chanting singing, the deep male voices, the movement of 500 bodies in effortless unison I found that I couldn’t stop weeping. My reaction made me curious. What was going on here? I definitely wasn’t sad. I began to grasp that I was unutterably moved by the depth of the connection I had felt with 500 singing teenagers I had never met before. I wondered if it was just me? I am after all very deeply rooted in the rural Eastern Cape. I have a clan name (ndikhulele emaXhoseni, after all), my late father (UZanethemba) matriculated from Queens. IGwijo was really the background soundtrack to my uncommon childhood on a trading station in the former Ciskei. Was I just being sentimental? So I began to think and read about iGwijo and found 100’s of new video clips on YouTube. Almost every video moved me to tears. But not just me. My husband, Peter, too. This wasn’t his life’s music. There was something odd and powerful going on here.  "Gwijo is a practice of collective singing deeply embedded in South African Xhosa culture that takes the form of call and response (“I say something//You say something; I hear you//You hear me; We’re in dialogue together”). Because Gwijo uses no instruments (other than human voices), it could be described as a cappella. Gwijo songs have traditionally been sung by the amaXhosa people of South Africa to accompany weddings, funerals, initiations, and other sacred moments and rites of passage. Part of these songs’ potency resides in their being so cathartic across a range of human emotions: they can express joy, determination, and victory, but also devastation. A Gwijo ‘performance’ can celebrate, protest, resist, or reclaim. Ultimately, though, it draws on the power of the collective to attain a kind of fierce grace, a coming together in intensity." (An extract from Gwijo: Healing Anthems for South Africa (jeremydetolly.com)

Ofelia Valdez-Yeager's essence is beautifully captured in this Los Angeles Times story. Read more about the incredible life and service of a beloved community hero: https://lnkd.in/emqbmP7A

Join us in DC! National Guild for Community Arts Education

The first sunrise of the new year at Babson College! Happy 2024 to all our community members.