The coming-of-age story of a master musician in mid-twentieth century colonial Rhodesia as he learns his community’s most cherished art, all while navigating profound social transformation.
 
Ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner has been studying Zimbabwean mbira for more than fifty years. When he first arrived in what was then Rhodesia after the nation declared independence from the United Kingdom, he met Cosmas Magaya, a mbira player who would become his teacher and lifelong collaborator. A Prodigy’s Calling 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 society fraught with decolonial conflict.
 
Following Magaya’s childhood, readers will learn 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 was affected by overlapping tensions between Shona cosmology and Christian ideology, rural and urban lifestyles, and the escalating African nationalist struggle and the white supremacist state. While Magaya’s story reflects profound social changes in the nation, it is also a story of musical apprenticeship. Readers following Magaya’s discovery of ever finer details in the music’s richly layered patterns will enhance their ability to hear mbira music’s forms, variations, and sonic qualities. Linocut illustrations by South African artist Lucas Bambo bring the narrative to life, and Berliner’s spirited storytelling is accompanied by QR codes that take readers directly to recordings of music as Magaya learns it. Appendices for musicians interested in learning or improving their mbira playing complement the story of Magaya’s early life. Inviting the reader into the very tradition it recounts, the book offers intimate insights into the relationships among music, Shona cosmology, and colonial politics in everyday life.
 

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.
 

Preface

Part A: Childhood Lessons, 1953–63
1. Ritual Foundations
2. A Teacher Arrives
3. Musical Foundations
4. Variations and Beats
5. Interlocking
6. Growing Pains
7. Magaya Village

Part B: Teenage Growth, 1964–71
8. The Mbira and the Cross
9. Unseen Hands
10. Advanced Student
11. Early Professional Trials
12. Crisscrossing the Country
13. Keyboards, Tunings, and Resonators
14. Seasoned Players and Connoisseurs
15. Conflicting Practices

Part C: Maestro
16. The Mighty River
17. Invention
18. The Art of Noticing
19. Recognition
20. Coda

Part D: Music Texts
Appendix 1. Guide to Mbira Staff Notation: Representing Mbira Compositions
Appendix 2. Chapter Musical Examples
Appendix 3. Guide to Mbira Box Tablature
Appendix 4. Beginners’ Guide to Playing Eight Mbira Compositions

Part E: Supplementary Material
Appendix 5. Descriptions of Audio Examples from Selected Interludes and Chapter 20 (Berliner Early 1970s Field Recordings, Mondoro)
Appendix 6. Rhodesian/Zimbabwean Place Names and Current Names/Spellings
Appendix 7. List of Lucas Bambo’s Linocut Prints
Appendix 8. Cosmas’s and Musical Associates’ Extended-Family and Clan Relationships

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index