Creating new music across cultural boundaries: mbira and string quartet

The exchange of ideas and sounds generated from combining Chartwell Dutiro’s mbira music from the Shona tradition of Zimbabwe with a classically trained string quartet results in a creative practice that defines its boundaries through the act of collaboration. This paper identifies the processes involved in devising new music that merges oral and notated traditions and participatory and presentational performance practices. Neither the string quartet repertoire nor the sacred music of mbira stems from an improvisatory tradition but bringing these two distinct cultural strands together invokes an improvisatory style that questions the conventional roles of composer, performer and ‘master musician’ and the definition of authorship