David Dargie

DARGIE, David. b. 29 July 1938. David Dargie is one of South Africa’s leading ethnomusicologists. He studied with Andrew Tracey at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa (on Andrew Tracey, see African hymnody*). Dargie is also a foremost encourager of compositions by Africans for the church. Of Scottish descent, Dargie is a third-generation South African raised in the coastal town of East London. Following seminary training in Pretoria and his ordination in 1964, he served in New Brighton as a priest until 1965. These were the creative days following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Two of his colleagues at the Lumko Missiological Institute, Fritz Lobinger and Oswald Hirmer, had come to South Africa in the 1950s and Dargie was able to build on their work at the Institute beginning in 1977. They began to encourage the local people to create their own music for the mass in the spirit of the Vatican II reforms. The Lumko Institute began as a language institute for missionaries in 1962. Through Dargie’s efforts, it also became a promoter of indigenous compositions for the liturgy. After leaving the priesthood in 1989, Dargie lived in Germany for several years where he married. He conducted workshops in Germany on African music and facilitated the appearance of Xhosa traditional musicians in Europe on several occasions. In 1995 he returned to South Africa when he was appointed chair of the music department at Fort Hare University in Alice, one of the few universities opened to black South Africans under apartheid. During apartheid, other universities were designated for ‘coloureds’ or Indians only. At Fort Hare Dargie established a music major that put African music at the core of requirements for graduation. By coincidence, Fort Hare is not far from Tyume, the site where Ntsikana*’s followers joined the first permanent mission soon after his death in 1821.

Encouraged by Hirmer and Lobinger, Dargie heard the Missa 1 by Benjamin John Peter Tyamzashe* in 1965, incorporating the music of Ntsikana in the Gloria. Hirmer and Lobinger had commissioned Tyamzashe, the best known Xhosa composer of his day, to write church music and had published the mass through the Lumko Institute. Before this time, Dargie notes that Catholic missionaries were content to follow Protestant models of translation of western hymns into Xhosa. However, totally absurd pairings of text and tune sometimes resulted such as singing the hymn ‘Tantum ergo sacramentum’* in Latin to the tune of ‘My Darling Clementine’. (Dargie, 1989, p. 65). Given the tonal nature of African languages, the entire exercise of translating western texts into Xhosa and joining them to existing western tunes produced many songs that ranged from humorous to meaningless.

The success of church music composition workshops with African traditional musicians eventually led to the formation of a music department at Lumko in 1979. After conducting over forty workshops and refining the techniques used to facilitate them, the Lumko Institute published a book detailing the process for encouraging the composition of new African church music. Workshops for Composing Local Church Music (1983) is a guide accompanied by cassette tapes of actual workshop sessions. This process spread to other regions of South Africa. The Lumko Institute has published over 100 cassettes of music from these encounters, containing hundreds of new songs for the church.

Between 1977 and the completion of his Doctorate in Ethnomusicology from Rhodes University in 1986, Dargie began travelling extensively, conducting church music composition workshops throughout South Africa and in the surrounding countries of Namibia and Botswana. These workshops empowered local musicians to compose music for the liturgy in idioms that spoke from within their cultural context. The first workshop held in 1977 was to obtain songs for a new Xhosa hymnal to be edited by Hirmer. After observing a similar process in Zimbabwe, he met with several South African musicians over Easter week-end in Zwelitsha where he collected 53 new songs. Many of these still are being used today in South Africa: Molefe*’s Amen Siakudumisa* came from this first workshop.

In Dargie’s model, the organizer of the composition workshops serves as a catalyst for the event rather than a performer. As catalyst, the organizer ‘inspire[s] and encourage[s] the people, tell[ing] them about the needs of the church, their service to the church, and their own people, the value of offering their own music to God, the value of preserving their own musical style which God has especially given to them.’ The catalyst also provides texts appropriate for the liturgy, enlists local musicians as a source of inspiration, and records the sessions on tape. Following the event the cassettes and texts are made available to those who attended so that they can learn the music and incorporate it into the liturgy (Dargie, 1983).

The suggestion of liturgical texts provided the context for the music to be composed. The use of recordings rather than written scores only assures that the songs can be learned by those untrained in either Sol-fa methodology or western staff notation. Since most of these musicians learned the music aurally/orally, they were in a better position to transmit their compositions directly to the people without the expense or pretext of needing written music. Music learned at the workshops could be used the next week in the mass.

The sessions develop songs out of spoken words emphasizing the relationship between the singer and God or Jesus, for example ‘Lord, teach us to praise you’, or short acclamations such as ‘Glory to God in the highest’ or psalm responses such as ‘Blessed is the one who walks with the Lord’ from Psalm 1.

The next step is to discover the melody in the words. Since most African languages are tonal, there is an inherent melody in the text. Refining a technique first introduced by Henry Weman, an authority on African church music, and developed by Oswald Hirmer, Dargie helped the people find this melody by speaking or shouting the text as if they were sending a message across a valley from one location to another. In such circumstances, the receiver of the message can decipher it by the exaggerated tones of the ‘melody’ inherent in the text. In a Zulu composition workshop in 1978 where this technique was used, Dargie noted 100% correlation between speech and melody in the songs. This speech-to-song technique was solidified by 1979 in the area of Kavango, in far north Namibia, demonstrating that it is successful across cultural groups and languages.

In composition workshops the group worked out a rhythm and a melody that are intrinsic to the spoken language. Through spontaneous suggestions from within the group, all those present recognize when a melody and rhythm appropriate for the text have been discovered. Harmony is discovered in a similar way, and percussion and dance follow naturally. A single song may have many composers who participated in the creation process, making song writing a communal event. Even those songs by an individual composer find their songs modified by the creative inspiration of singers who contextualize it or who add variations over recurring cycles of the main theme (Dargie, 1997, pp. 10-12).

Lest one gain the impression that all of the songs are short, simple ‘choruses’, individual composers such as Brother Clement Sithole, a Zulu musician, created elaborate psalm settings in a dramatic recitative style with an extended range accompanied by the umakhweyane, a braced calabash-resonated musical bow used by the Zulu (Dargie, 1995). By using the cyclic approach of African composition from this region, other extended compositions develop according to the needs of the liturgy and creativity of the leaders.

In summary, the compositional process proposed by Dargie is communal rather than solitary; inspired by texts appropriate for the liturgy; based on aural/oral transmission rather than notation; derived from traditional musical styles, and includes both the musical layperson and the recognized musician.

C. Michael Hawn

Further Reading

1. David Dargie, ‘Woman with the Baby on Her Back’, East London Daily Dispatch (November 30, 1995).
2. ———, Workshops for Composing Local Church Music: Methods for Conducting Music Workshops in Local Congregations, No. 40 (Delmenville, South Africa: Lumko Missiological Institute, 1983).
3. ———, ‘Xhosa Church Music’, Music and the Experience of God, eds. David Power, Mary Collins, and Mellonee Burnim (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Ltd, 1989).
4. ———, ‘Xhosa Music: The Most Natural Music in the World’, The Talking Drum: Southern African Music Educators' Society Newsletter 7 (May 1997).
5. C. Michael Hawn, Gather into One: Praying and Singing Globally (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003).