Mbaqanga in the Classroom: Teaching Harmonic Function through South African Music

It is, as Aldwell, Schachter, and Cadwallader say, “a rather special piece” (2011, 116). Johann Kuhnau’s Biblical Sonata no. 5 is composed solely of tonic and dominant triads, and consequently it would seem to be a perfect musical example for introducing those harmonies. Yet Kuhnau’s modest composition is far from the only such piece teachers can draw upon. In fact, mbaqanga, a style of South African popular music, is equally “rather special.” It is a treasury of music whose clear harmonic progressions are ideal for teaching chord functions and demonstrating their applicability to music far beyond the Western canon. This article equips pedagogues to incorporate mbaqanga into their teaching of basic harmonic functions. To do so, it provides an overview of the style and its characteristics and then addresses the types of harmonic patterns most commonly found in mbaqanga songs, proposing a transcription system for simple analyses. The article next demonstrates how those songs may be used in the sequential introduction of new chord types and offers suggestions for student exercises. It then addresses two more difficult cases, where mbaqanga songs diverge from common-practice functionality. To conclude it considers the relationship between instruction in voice-leading rules and the diversification of music theory curricula.

The term mbaqanga (a Zulu word meaning “cornmeal porridge”) has been commonly used to describe various South African popular musics since the 1950s (Coplan 2001, 109). It originally referred to a style also known as “township jazz,” which mixed American-inspired swing music with South African marabi, “‘hot,’ highly rhythmic, repetitive, single-themed dance tunes” (Ballantine 1989, 307). This jazz-influenced style of mbaqanga soon faded, however, when the new, repressive measures which the apartheid government enacted in 1960 spurred many jazz musicians to leave the country. Those musicians who remained, such as those who formed the groups Izintombo zesiManjemanje and Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, adapted mbaqanga in response to the government’s mandated reorientation of radio broadcasts towards traditional and neo-traditional forms of music (308). And by the 1990s, the term’s use in marketing had led it to subsume many differing styles and to be combined with other terms, forming compounds such as “soul mbaqanga” and the like (Meintjes 1997, 148–50).

Of the many musics which have been called mbaqanga, this article focuses on songs from the late 1970s through mid-‘90s that share a set of conventions. The pieces are moderately fast, around 100 beats per minute, and are grouped in four-beat measures. They feature vocalists, either in a call and response texture or singing together in tight harmonies. Accompanying these vocalists is a band comprising electric bass, drums, one or more chordal instruments (usually organ, guitar, or both); saxophones are also often present, playing when the vocalists are silent. These performers enter in a set order: the chordal instrument starts, either unaccompanied or with subtle drums, playing a riff which will be repeated for much of the rest of the song. After around three or four measures the bass enters on a pickup beat, and on the following downbeat the rest of the drum set enters; if a consistent bass-drum pulse has not already begun, it starts at this point. Four or six measures later the vocalists start singing; after they have stated their melody several times the saxophones then respond for the first time.

The conventional nature of these songs’ pitch material is particularly pertinent: each song is structured around a succession of harmonies that repeats every two (or occasionally four) measures throughout the entire song. Furthermore, the harmonies invariably suggest major-mode tonality, and departures from strict diatonicity are uncommon. (A lowered scale degree seven does occur with some frequency, but other non-diatonic notes are exceedingly rare. ) Some songs consist of only tonic and dominant harmonies, but most mbaqanga music includes one or two predominant- or subdominant-functioning chords. Those characteristics are what make these songs so useful for introducing harmonic functions in the classroom: instructors can select entire pieces as musical examples and be confident that those songs’ harmonies should present no stumbling blocks to students.

The songs with which this resource engages were all commercially released, but I am not aware of any transcriptions of them. (Nowotny 1995 does include transcriptions of excerpts from several other mbaqanga songs, though.) Working with unnotated musical examples in the classroom may be an unfamiliar practice, but there are good reasons to do so. First, it demonstrates to students that music theory is applicable not just to scores and notated pieces, but to any music they can listen to. More concretely, it also helps students to strengthen the connections they make between their aural skills training and the theoretical content they are learning. Of course, students first learning about tonic and dominant chords do not need to grasp every part of musical texture or correctly interpret the range of syncopations and anticipations present in this music. Instead, I propose using a simple notational scheme to represent the most important rhythmic and harmonic aspects of mbaqanga songs. A beat where a new harmony enters is indicated by that chord’s Roman numeral, a beat where the previously articulated harmony is sustained is indicated by an underscore, and a downbeat is indicated by a vertical line. In addition, important notes in the melody may be represented by scale degrees aligned above the beat where they occur. The Appendix provides a list of these harmonic patterns and of pieces which exemplify them.

The simplest harmonic pattern consists, Kuhnau-like, exclusively of tonic and dominant harmonies. The most frequently found metric arrangement for this pattern scheme allots a measure to each chord, though the entrance of the dominant chord sometimes occurs on the second measure’s third beat. Even before cadences are formally introduced, pieces exhibiting this alternation between tonic and dominant can help alert students to the difference between phrases ending with a dominant-to-tonic progression and those ending on a dominant, followed by a new beginning on the tonic. For instance, the vocal and saxophone melodies in the Soul Brothers’ “Buya Mama Wami” end at the midway point of measures of dominant harmony, which makes it difficult to hear a strong dominant-to-tonic drive. In their song “Amaphutha,” by contrast, the vocal melodies come to rest in tonic-harmony measures and are silent in the following dominant-based measures.

Teaching students about predominant-functioning chords is a particularly useful time to draw upon mbaqanga songs. Consider Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens’ “Kwa makhutha,” which has the harmonic pattern I _ _ _ | I _ _ _ | IV _ _ _ | V _ _ _ _. The opening melody sung by Mahlathini, the lead singer, largely hovers around ^5, but the tight harmonies which the Mahotella Queens sing in response clearly articulate the subdominant and dominant harmonies which the bass line suggests. Harmonic patterns with predominants are not limited to the IV chord: other examples include submediant triads and supertonic chords in all inversions. Furthermore, some pieces include cadential six-four chords between their predominant and dominant chords, which makes them fruitful for inclusion when teaching the cadential six-four.

The addition of a predominant-functioning chord to the tonic-dominant opposition also makes possible complete statements of the tonic-predominant-dominant-tonic phrase model. Some mbaqanga pieces include the entirety of this progression within the scope of their harmonic pattern; such patterns are marked with an asterisk in the Appendix. More frequently, however, the pattern only proceeds as far as the dominant chord. These cases allow the instructor to build on prior discussions of phrase endings in tonic-dominant patterns and to make explicit connections with cadence types when they are introduced. When presented with a given dominant chord at the end of one harmonic pattern that proceeds to the tonic chord at the start of the next, students can debate whether it is an authentic cadence, a half cadence, or no cadence at all.

Because of the small different number of chords they contain and their loop-based repetition, mbaqanga music provides excellent opportunities for students to begin to identify harmonic functions and chord types by ear. In order for students to do this on their own, though, scaffolding can be very helpful. In a homework assignment students can first determine simply whether given excerpts have predominant chords or only tonic and dominant harmonies. Then they can figure out which scale degrees are present in the bass line and thereafter slot those notes into an eight- or sixteen-beat grid. As a next step students can add the scale degrees corresponding to a vocal or instrumental line of their choice, or the instructor can specify the part. And then this framework of scale degrees can serve as a miniature object of analysis: which Roman numerals would account for those pairings of scale degrees, and if there are multiple options, which does the recording sound most like?

Not all mbaqanga songs adhere so closely to common-practice functioning in their harmonic organization. A familiar departure from common-practice norms occurs when a subdominant chord follows a dominant, like in the I _ IV _ | V _ IV _ pattern found in the Soul Brothers’ “Iphutha.” Pieces with progressions like that offer an excellent opportunity for discussion when teaching plagal-functioning subdominant chords. Are the subdominant chords surrounding the dominant more important than it, creating an overall plagal effect of IV to I? Or does the final subdominant chord merely smooth the way between the dominant and tonic, along the lines of what Laitz calls the “embellishing chord” use of the IV harmony (2016, 317)?

A second, more advanced divergence from common-practice style, particularly favored by the Soul Brothers, happens when the chordal instruments and/or vocals draw upon one harmony while the bass suggests another. This happens most frequently at the end of a harmonic pattern that begins with a tonic then a predominant chord. After the predominant the bass continues on to ^5, but the vocals or chordal instruments emphasize ^1 and ^3 above it. This sonority sounds just like a cadential six-four chord, but no resolution to a dominant harmony follows; instead, the harmonic pattern ends on this chord and then loops back around to the tonic. In some cases this situation arises when the chordal instruments play the same ostinato figure in both measures of the harmonic pattern. For example, in early parts of the Soul Brothers’ “Usile” the guitar plays the plays the same descending ^4-^3-^2-^1 line above the bass’s tonic and dominant notes, and in both cases the ^4 sounds like an incomplete upper neighbor to the chordal ^3. In other cases, however, the instruments or voices bring in new, tonic-supporting material above the bass’s ^5. In the Soul Brother’s “Amanga,” for instance, the Soul Brothers’ vocal parts clearly articulate tonic-related notes above the bass’s ^5.

In the appendix I have labeled these six-four sonorities as I6/4 chords to make clear that they are not the usual, dominant-resolving cadential six-fours. In fact, these chords invite discussion about what factors combine to create the impression of a harmonic function. In these cases the overall pitch content and melodic tendencies suggest tonic functioning, while the bass line and its similarity to the conventional harmonic-metric patterns of tonic, predominant, and dominant chords suggest dominant functioning. Instructors may wish to pass over these more harmonically complicated cases, but they offer an excellent opportunity to help students direct their listening to different strands of the musical texture and characterize their effects.

Mbaqanga music has a lot to contribute to the teaching of harmonic functions and diatonic chord types. It is not, however, useful for demonstrating the voice-leading conventions of common-practice music. In these songs parallel fifths and octaves are unremarkable, and I have not discerned any particular patterns in how dissonances are treated. To my mind, this is yet another reason in favor of bringing mbaqanga into the classroom: this music helps make clear to students that while some of the ideas they learn in theory class, like voice-leading principles, are specific to Western art music, others, like harmonic functionality, are much more widely applicable. And as we increasingly diversify the music we teach in the theory classroom, it is all the more important to help our students learn which tools and concepts are specific to Western art music and which ones can apply to diverse musics from cultures around the world.

Works Cited Aldwell, Edward, Carl Schachter, and Allen Cadwallader. 2011. Harmony & Voice Leading, 4th ed. Boston: Schirmer.

Ballantine, Christopher. 1989. “A Brief History of South African Popular Music.” Popular Music 8, no. 3: 305–310.

Collins, Tom. 2006/7. “Constructing Maskanda.” SAMUS: South African Music Studies 26–27: 1–26.

Coplan, David B. 2001. “Sound of the ‘Third Way’: Identity and the African Renaissance in Contemporary South African Popular Traditional Music.” Black Music Research Journal 21, no. 1: 107–124.

Laitz, Steven G. 2016. The Complete Musician, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Meintjes, Louise. 1997. “Mediating Difference: Producing Mbaqanga Music in a South African Studio.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin.

Nowotny, Norbert W. 1995. “Mbaqanga and Mahlathini.” In Papers presented at the Eleventh Symposium on Ethnomusicology, 105-115. Rhodes University (International Library of African Music): Grahamstown, South Africa.

Appendix Scale degrees in parentheses indicate a prominent bass note but no change of harmony above. Asterisks indicate harmonic patterns that end on root-position tonic chords. V6/4 = ^5, ^1, ^3 resolving to dominant. I6/4 = ^5, ^1, ^3 not resolving to dominant. V/^2 = ^2, ^5, ^7.

Tonic and Dominant chords alone

I _ _ _ | V _ _ _ Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Umasihlalisane” The Mahotella Queens, “Safari yangu” Soul Brothers, “Umhlola,” “Siyayi dudula,” “Amaphutha,” “Buya Mama Wami”

I _ _ _ | V _ _ (^2) Soul Brothers, “Inhlonipho”

I _ _ _ | _ _ V _ Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Thonthodi”

I _ _ _ | (^4) _ V5/3 _ Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Noluthando”

I (^5) _ _ | V/^2 V5/3 _ _ Soul Brothers, “Ngihamba nawe”

Tonic, Dominant, and Predominant chords

IV:

I _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | IV _ _ _ | V _ _ _ Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Kwa makhutha”

*I _ _ _ | IV _ _ _ | V _ _ _ | I _ _ _ Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Jive motella”

I _ I6 _ | IV _ V _ Soul Brothers, “Ake niyeke botsotsi”

I _ IV _ | V _ (^4) (^5) Soul Brothers, “Akabongi”

I _ IV _ | V6/4 _ V5/3 _ Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Bon jour”

I _ _ _ | IV _ _ _ | V6/4 _ _ _ | V5/3 _ _ _ The Mahotella Queens, “Awungibhaleli ngani”

I _ _ IV or ^4 | V _ _ _ Soul Brothers, “Hamba ntombi,” “Abantu,”

II:

I _ II6 _ | V _ _ _ Soul Brothers, “Hluphekile”

I _ II6 _ | V6/4 _ V5/3 _ Soul Brothers, “Ngixoleleni”

I _ _ _ | II6 II V (^1) Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Mbaqanga”

VI:

I _ _ VI | V _ _ _ Soul Brothers, “Bazobuya (instrumental)”

I _ VI _ | V/^2 _ V5/3 _ Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Vuya”

I _ VI _ | V6/4 _ V5/3 _ Soul Brothers, “Uthando lwenu” The Mahotella Queens, “Umona”

Dominant followed by Subdominant:

I _ _ _ | V _ IV _ Soul Brothers, “Mkhwenyana,” “Utshwala”

I _ IV _ | V _ IV _ Soul Brothers, “Iphutha” Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, “Hayi kabi”

*I _ V _ | IV _ I _ Soul Brothers, “Mama ka sibongile”

Tonic, Pre/Subdominant, and Six-four chords

IV:

I _ _ _ | IV _ I6/4 _ Soul Brothers, “Umnandi,” “Uxolo,” “Amanga,” “Usile,” “Usizi,” “Isicelo”

I _ _ VI | I6/4 _ _ _ Soul Brothers, “Inhlalayenza”

II: I _ _ _ | II _ I6/4 _ Soul Brothers, “Kwanele,” “Usemncane” “Isigebengu”

I _ _ _ | II6 _ I6/4 _ Soul Brothers, “Inhliziyo,” “Bakhulumela futhi”

*I _ II _ | I6/4 _ I _ Soul Brothers, “Vala umlomo”

I _ _ _ | II II6 I6/4 _ Soul Brothers, “Ngixolele,”

I _ _ _ | II6/4 II6 I6/4 _ Soul Brothers, “Isilingo”

VI: I _ _ _ | VI _ I6/4 _ Soul Brothers, “Kuyesinda,” “Kulukhuni”

Several predominants:

I _ _ _ | IV II I6/4 _ Soul Brothers, “Yimi indoda”

I _ _ _ | VI IV I6/4 _ Soul Brothers, “Imfundo”