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The slight, soft-spoken composer was at
Radcliffe’s 34 Concord Ave. Colloquium Room to give an audience
of 70 a primer on Ethiopian contributions to world music — and
on his own contributions as a transnational composer. (Mulatu
originated a jazz fusion form known as Ethio-jazz. He recently
composed music for the soundtrack of director Jim Jarmusch’s
2005 “Broken Flowers.”)
Early on, Mulatu wanted to be an engineer. But he went to high
school in North Wales, where a rich arts curriculum allowed him
to uncover his talent for music. “I found my calling there,” he
said.
Then came more music schooling in London, before Mulatu moved to
Boston, where in the late 1950s he was the first African student
at the Berklee College of Music — “the only place in that time,”
he said, to study jazz.
After further training in New York City, and more than a decade
in the West, Mulatu moved back to Ethiopia, where he survived
decades of civil war and the vagaries of changing political
regimes. Mulatu taught for a living, though he was pressured out
of one university job for promoting “imperialist music.” He also
pioneered a groundbreaking radio music show in Addis Ababa and
traveled frequently into the countryside to perform.
Today, the 67-year-old composer considers part of his musical
mission to revive and improve upon the traditional instruments
of his country. Modern groups are recording music based on
Ethiopian rhythms and musical themes, said Mulatu, but none is
reawakening the potential of traditional instruments.
For one, he pioneered the idea of increasing the number of
strings on the krar, a bowl-shaped six-string lyre traditionally
made of wood, cloth, and beads. He upgraded the instrument — now
commonly amplified — to eight strings, then to 12.
If traditional instruments are limited, young players will turn
to more versatile Western instruments — and lose a sense of
their own culture, said Mulatu. There are ways to alter and
improve the old, he said, without compromising the tonal
qualities that underlie Ethiopian music.
The composer’s own signature instrument is the vibraphone, a set
of graduated aluminum percussion bars that resemble a marimba or
a xylophone. In Mulatu’s hands, said Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “the
vibraphone becomes the dawal” — the resonant “bell stones” that
call the faithful to prayer at Ethiopian churches. (Shelemay,
also a Radcliffe Fellow this year, is Harvard’s G. Gordon Watts
Professor of Music and a professor of African and African
American studies.)
After his Western training in music, Mulatu made a study of the
complex layering of regional Ethiopian music traditions. It’s “a
very diverse and a very [musically] rich country,” said
Radcliffe Fellow Steven Kaplan, a professor of African studies
at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the presentation, he
praised Mulatu for delving into lesser-known musical traditions
among tribes in southern Ethiopia.
The composer once brought musicians from four different tribes
together in an Addis Ababa television studio and orchestrated a
cross-tribal fusion performance. Clips from that filming were
among the several musical and video interludes played or shown
during the Radcliffe event.
To the Western ear and eye, the wind instruments were
captivating. They included long trumpetlike wooden horns called
malakat and end-blown flutes that each produce one pitch and
together a complex melody.
The ideal way “to explore multiple forms” of music, said Mulatu,
is through jazz.
Performance opportunities like the one in Addis Ababa also give
obscure musicians (many of them farmers) artistic exposure
beyond their villages, he said. “These people have been deprived
of being heard in the world, or even their own country.”
Performance is also one way of bringing Ethiopian music into the
modern age, and to “give identity to modern Ethiopian music,”
said Mulatu. “I’ve been writing music here to come up with that
identity.” He described the Radcliffe experience — with its
opportunities for reflection, collaboration, and composition —
as “one of the best years of my life.”
Mulatu is writing music for an electronic opera, and the first
section of it will premiere in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre April
14. “The Yared Opera” will blend the old and the new, and
incorporate traditional chant texts in Ge’ez, the Ethiopian
liturgical language.
Part of the opera score was sneak-previewed on DVD for the
Radcliffe audience. It’s based in part on the chant of St. Yared,
the founder of Ethiopian church music thought to date back to
the sixth century. Mulatu hopes future performances will feature
live musicians in concert with the electronic version, and
staged at the rock churches of Lalibela, a holy city in northern
Ethiopia.
While at Radcliffe, Mulatu is also working on an oral history
project with Kaplan and Shelemay. The two scholars have recorded
11 sessions with him so far, including the Feb. 27 presentation.
Kaplan and Shelemay sat on either side of him, and alternated
asking questions.
The oral history sessions, including DVDs and recordings, will
be added to a new collection on Ethiopian musicians in the
United States that Shelemay is assembling for the Library of
Congress. She called Mulatu an “ambassador” for Ethiopian
artistic tradition.
The premiere of the first section of Mulatu Astatke’s ‘The Yared
Opera’ is part of a free performance of his works by the
Either/Orchestra at 8 p.m. April 14 in the Sanders Theatre. The
concert is the final note of an April 13-14 Ethiopian Cultural
Creativity Conference at Harvard, which features scholarly
presentations on the visual, musical, and literary artistic
contributions of the Ethiopian diaspora. For details, visit
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Interent Repression in Ethiopia
