The yearly Indigenous Choral Music Choir Festival took place earlier this month in the Langeberg and attracted choirs as far as Cape Town.
The choirs that participated were hosts Zolani Youth Choir (Zolani), Bomibethu Youth Choir (Ngqubela), Dira Foundation (Ngqubela), Heavenly Sound (Cape Town) and the Luxolo Gospel Choir (Zolani).
Many local choirs have along the years benefitted from the festival, as it addresses social cohesion, positive entertainment for the youth, holds musical workshops on various music related topics, empowering conductors on how to better their repertoire.
This year, as usual, participating choirs were “brilliant, as they wow’ed the audience” with their collaborative songs composed by some of the guest conductors.
The festival started with a music workshop conducted by Sivuyile Scott from Port Elizabeth, composer, singer, arranger, and music teacher at Masifunde Youth Development Centre in Walmer.
He commissioned a song for this festival called “Woza Sivuminguma” (come let us sing) followed by a mental health presentation awareness by Lisakhanya Mhlaba, who is a motivational speaker.
Lunathi Ncamani a choral conducting junior lecturer at Stellenbosch University conducted a workshop on how to use the body and voice for full effectiveness of sound production. He is also the conductor of Ingoma Hout Bay Choir, which does television commercials for Shoprite He also runs workshops for teacher development courses on music for the Western Cape Education Department.
Merna Gubuza, Director of Choral Guide, a vocal specialist and conductor worked on music interpretation and vocal technique. She befriended the Zolani Choir when on tour in the Eastern Cape, where she was giving Nelson Mandela University voice students a master class.
She has been working with Zolani on interpretation and vocal technique.
Leon Starker, conductor of Cape Town Youth Choir, also joined in with a music lesson on the inception of music. She also demonstrated how people used to sing. This was followed by staff notation sight reading, in which he also touched on overtones and different qualities in terms of timbre the voice has.
Sabelo Mthembu worked with the festival choir in his arrangement of “Ujesu Unobubele Ngam” (God cares for me). He is the conductor of Quava, a choir based in Johannesburg.
The choir wished to thank all its sponsors for investing in the programmes.
This programme was supported by Western Cape Cultural Affairs, Cape Winelands District Municipality, Langeberg Municipality, and Ashton Kelder. Local wine farms provided welcome drinks for the event, Zandvliet Wine Estate, Van Loveren, Bon Courage and Weltevrede Wine Estate.
If anyone wants to be involved in any way in the programme Odwa Mvunge, the choir’s founder and conductor can be contacted on 081 555 3789 or o.mvunge13@gmail.com.
