ICTM Conference Part 2

I apologize for the delay in the second part of this post!  I have managed to catch my first African cold!  I’ve been somewhat bed-ridden and I cannot readily access wifi from my room where I’m staying.  But a number of colleagues here have helped me find good South African medicine.  All the brands are obviously different, but I think some of the active ingredients also have different names here.  It is just so cold in Grahamstown this week, and no buildings have central cooling or heating.  The cold just never ends!  It is down in the 40s Fahrenheit each night and is very windy and dry.  Makes it tough to get better when you just can’t ever warm up!  But I’m feeling much better today compared to the first days of this week.

So the conference began with presentations in East London.  We then were bussed to a town called Alice, which is the location of the main campus of University of Fort Hare, our host.  We only stayed there during the day one day and then moved on to Hogsback, which is a really beautiful mountainous region in South Africa.  Though it was winter, most of the time it was warm enough to leave the space heater off.  It was quite mild, almost like Appalachia in the late spring (intentional Aaron Copland reference).  The lodge where I stayed was called "Away with the Fairies," and all the buildings were named after characters in Lord of the Rings by Tolkein!  Supposedly (although he is of English descent) he was born only a short distance from Hogsback, and the mountains in this area are cited for helping to inspire him to write about "Middle Earth."  Don't be too jealous, Mom!

There is a hot bath built into the mountain side for guests at
Away with the Fairies.

By this time in the conference, I had made friends with some really cool people presenting at the conference.  Pictured left to right here are Marie-Christine Parent, Zack and Jocelyn Moon (a married couple from Seattle!).  Here we are standing outside our hostel in Hogsback enjoying some coffee we brewed in our own filter in our room.  Here the default is instant coffee, so if you want actually brewed coffee, you must specify “filter” coffee.  But even then it isn’t always good or cheap.  So these friends and I invested in a portable filter that mounts on a mug, as well as some of our own coffee to use to make really strong, good coffee.  It was a bonding moment!

Jocelyn Moon is a PhD candidate for Ethnomusicology at Univ of Washington, presenting on a trend of learning Zimbabwean Mbira music via YouTube.  Pretty cool!  Her husband, Zack, is an accomplished musician and a “dependent scholar”- he has no post-secondary degree but is incredibly learned in ethnomusicology, as well as an avid performer.  The coolest part about these guys is that they are both presenting in Tanzania at the conference to which Diane and I are going!  Then they are going to the same festival in Chamwino, TZ, and then are also going to Zanzibar afterwards!  Finally, they are going to Zimbabwe to do preliminary interest research on Mbira music.  Point being, we have almost the exact same travel route up until I go to Kenya and they go to Zim, but we never met until we got to Africa!  It is exciting to have two American travel buddies to just be able to relate to and hang out with.  And they’ve both traveled in Africa before, so they also have some experience.  I am so thankful for them!! 

There were lots of great presentations in Hogsback about Ethnomusicology & Public Policy, a university with a ground-breaking Bachelor’s in African Traditional music & dance, and others.  Our last night there, we even got a presentation from Dave Dargie again on a special tradition of overtone singing that is currently only carried on by two women, as far as experts know.  It was a cool experience! 

The conference closed up and we headed out to Grahamstown, where I’ve been for the past week.  Grahamstown post to come!!!