Film: Kinshasa Symphony
‘A New Image Of Congo’
Since colonial times, Congolese music has enjoyed a worldwide reputation, flooding radio stations both with original works those and influenced by Congolese rhythms and musical styles. At the same time, following a tendency visible throughout the continent, many Congolese filmmakers got their start in the cinema world with shorts or features, both fiction and documentary, that focused on the music of their country or communities of origin.
Kinshasa Symphony (2010) could be included in a parallel movement of foreign filmmakers who have been visiting the country to witness its musical vibrancy firsthand. Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer’s documentary is now available on DVD, after a successful appearance in international film festivals. The Democratic Republic of Congo has gone through many changes in the last few years; nevertheless, its dynamic cultural production remains a crucial characteristic of the country. The increasing migration from the countryside into the city, due to economic factors or with the purpose of escaping ethnic conflicts, has made Kinshasa a chaotic metropolis. Together with Brazzaville, located on the other shore of the Congo River, it forms the third biggest conurbation in Africa, just after Cairo and Lagos, with a population of more than 10 million people and growing social inequalities. The Congolese capital is a vibrant artistic center, with such esteemed institutions as the National Institute for the Arts (INA) and a myriad of artists and critics working in multiple disciplines. No doubt this joint work has helped in the shaping of Kinshasa as a reference point for artistic production, both nationally and internationally.
Many directors from within and outside the country, with Mweze Ngangura at the fore, have portrayed the cultural vitality of the city since Congo—still known at the time as Zaire—declared its independence from Belgium in 1960.
In their own words, the film’s German producers were led to twenty-first century Kinshasa “to offer a new image of Congo.” The primary recipient of this European film with African themes and protagonists is the Western audience at the fashionable film festivals around the planet. Kinshasa Symphony is the result of a collaboration between Claus Wischmann, responsible for more than forty television screenplays about classical music, and Martin Baer, a longtime lover of Africa and the cameraman for the film. It is an emotional story for all audiences, attractive without wounding sensibilities or raising uncomfortable political, social, or economic questions. The interviews highlighting the selflessness of the orchestra members, fast cutting, and a succession of urban scenarios that manage not to fall into a distancing contemplation, but instead provoke emotional engagement, are the strategies used by the filmmakers to present the Symphonic Orchestra of Kinshasa as a microcosm of the ferment of the present day Congolese metropolis and its inhabitants. This orchestra, still the only one playing classical music in Central Africa, was founded in 1994 by its director Armand Diangiend, an unemployed pilot and grandson of the founder of the kinganguist church. With the help of Albert Matubanza, he has managed to keep it alive. The impossibility of acquiring new instruments in the country forced the latter to become a makeshift builder of musical instruments, learning the trade as he went along to provide for the orchestra’s needs. This task, born of necessity, is now his life’s calling.
Immersed in the chaos of the city, the Symphonic Orchestra of Kinshasa is a diverse amateur group that finds inspiration in composers such as Händel, Beethoven, Mozart or Verdi to transcend the penury, joy, and contradictions of local reality. Kinshasa is a metropolis in constant movement, a paradigm of unbridled African urban growth, as well as the hometown of 200 musicians looking for shelter in “the only symphonic orchestra in the world composed entirely of blacks”, as one of them says. Along with footage of rehearsals and a final concert, the filmmakers present the group through selected stories of some of its members. We get to know a young tenor trying to turn his rap-fan friends on to classical music; an autodidact violinist who explains on a local television station what an octave is, and plays a musical fragment right afterward, surprising everybody with his mastery; a violinist and a flautist, both devoted mothers and hard workers, stealing time from their sleep to practice; Joseph Masunda, an ingenious electrician, hairdresser and violinist, who saves the rehearsals from excessive interruption by blackouts; a young girl from the choir who struggles with her roommate to get time to practice because she only feels “complete” while singing with the orchestra.
The uniqueness of the orchestra and the personal narratives of the protagonists are an easy way to pander to international audiences without entering into analytical complexities. They mix interviews with local footage and picturesque shots of the orchestra members over a disorganized backdrop of the city, and with the constant murmur of Beethoven’s Ninth as soundtrack, Kinshasa Symphony reaches its goal of showing “a new Congo”. We hope future films will help to build a more accurate and complex representation of the country.
Living in the West, we are used to assimilating and analyzing foreign music with our own theoretical tools; the present documentary has managed to turn that tendency upside down, showing the reception of classical music in Kinshasa, where everyday instruments and musicians can only carry on through constant reinvention. Once more, we understand that in art, dialogue is the only way to richness and creativity, and that communication between human beings is an indispensable weapon to demolish monolithic ideas, confront ideological inflexibility, and bring an end to the curse of closed circuits of cultural production.
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'Kinshasa Symphony':
An Ode To Musical Joy
In Central Africa
An amazing new documentary film is a must-see not just for music lovers, but for anyone who needs to see the nourishing power of the arts and human connections.
Kinshasa Symphony takes us into the everyday lives of the members of a most unlikely ensemble: the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, located in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place ravaged by war, endemic poverty and corruption.
The constant hassles and logistical problems these amateur musicians face should give serious pause to those of us leading far more privileged lives in music. They tackle big pieces — like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Orff'sCarmina Burana — out of sheer love, learning their instruments and craft as they go.
Conductor Armand Diangienda founded the orchestra in 1994 after losing his job as an airline pilot. Never conservatory trained, he calls himself "just inquisitive by nature." He named the ensemble after his grandfather, Simon Kimbangu, a political icon in Congolese history, who also founded a Christian sect that went on to become Africa's largest independent African church.
When Diangienda first gathered 12 young people who wanted to learn to play the violin, he had only five instruments: "One of them would play for 20 minutes, and then pass the violin on to the next one." When violin strings broke, they replaced them with brake cables from old bicycles. When they needed a C trumpet, they cut up another instrument. And when they needed a bell for another trumpet, they transformed the wheel rim from an old minibus.
Albert Nlandu Matubanza, the orchestra's manager, also makes many of the orchestra's instruments himself. Years ago, there were many more instruments available in Kinshasa, but as Matubanza ruefully notes, a lot of them were stolen. Out of necessity, Matubanza has become a self-taught luthier; he took apart his own bass to figure out how it was made, then started making stringed instruments to equip the orchestra.
The group's open-air rehearsals are frequently punctuated by the noise and noxious clouds of dust and diesel spewed by cars and trucks passing along Kinshasa's unpaved streets. Electrical outages are frequent — so much so that the orchestra has a routine to deal with the annoyance. One of the group's violists, Joseph Masunda Lutete, knows to step in immediately: "When there's a power cut," he says, "I just drop my instrument and go start the generator."
The film's narrative arc takes us to their performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in an empty, dirt-filled public square. But what is most revealing, and most gripping, is to see how these musicians deal with the impossible reality of Kinshasa, made possible every day by its hardworking, creative and tenacious people. One of the most wrenching segments follows Nathalie Bahati, a flutist and single mother, as she struggles to find a $40 per month apartment to keep little more than a roof over the head of the young son who accompanies her everywhere, including to her rehearsals.
The joy they take in their music-making is what gets them through. As the orchestra's concertmaster, Héritier Mayimbi Mbuangi says, "When we're working on the music, there are no limits. It's like a staircase: You go up, and up."
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Kinshasa Symphony
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