How song and dance harmonise our hearts

These reflections build on Christine Lucia’s analysis of Abdullah Ibrahim’s work over the years — the achievements, the sheer technical mastery — in the Sunday Times (April 7). The upcoming Jazz Festival in Cape Town gives it immediate and particular relevance.

In what ways does listening to great music and watching a graceful and elegant dancer enhance our capability to live more fully and render life’s complexities easier to deal with? Certainly, music and dance, at their best, portray life as complex, multifaceted, and dynamic, marked by the mediation of differences and distances of all sorts. But do they enhance our ability to deal with poverty, unemployment, socioeconomic inequality, and gender-based violence?

Yes, they may not provide direct, practical solutions, but if life is to be more than analysis, description and explanation, it needs enhancement by the evocative and intuitive communicative power one finds in music and dance at their best. After listening to Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela, Caiphus Semenya, Letta Mbulu, Miriam Makeba, Jonas Gwangwa, Sibongile Khumalo, Thomas Chauke, Vusi Mahlasela, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Philip Tabane, philharmonic orchestras, the national anthem, and watching Mzansi Ballet — that evocative and intuitive power stays within us for a long time, and creates a mood and an urge for social cohesion and solidarity in a violent world.

We are moved and persuaded by articulate instruments, voice, and movement to recognise each other in each other, and to acknowledge our common humanity. Without music and dance, what a loss it would have been

Given our history, great music and dance contribute immensely to redrawing social and political relations, and make them work together in a more cordial and responsive manner. They manifest a power that is difficult to locate elsewhere in philosophy, mathematics and the sciences.

They may not heal physical and social wounds, but they enhance our capacity to bear the pain as we experience the beauty of harmony, symmetry, proportion and balance. We can argue that music and dance deepen our capacity for life not through “reason” and “logic” but through sound, voice and movement. There is an immediacy in them, difficult to define, that blends perception, feeling, thinking and behaviour. They do so beneath the surface of things and the daily drama of circumstance. We are moved and persuaded by articulate instruments, voice, and movement to recognise each other in each other, and to acknowledge our common humanity. Without music and dance, what a loss it would have been. Our electoral democracy, with social cohesion as one of its objectives and outcomes, aspires to the condition of music and dance, which dismiss colonial notions of identity as primary difference.

Listening to great music and watching elegant dance movements, we seem to be touched by a magic wand, which makes us stand in synchrony, clap hands, and move together in the open air of aesthetic space. That space is an integral part of democratic politics. Again, listening to Masekela’s Thuma Mina, Mbulu’s Not Yet Uhuru, Zahara’s Nelson Mandela, and Brenda Fassie’s My Black President, to cite only a few, we find within ourselves a new aesthetic, we move from beauty-for-beauty’s-sake and step into aesthetics as politics. Pragmatic or instrumental aesthetics as it were.

Music and dance at their best are thus a liberating force, unbounded by deaf and blind colonial borders. They grant us respite from racism, ethnicity, patriarchy, elitism, xenophobia and fundamentalism. They educate and socialise us on how to define ourselves in relation to others and imagine ourselves in the world.

But we should not be naïve. Perhaps nothing can erase evil in the world, in all its enigmatic and resilient forms; but great music and dance do augment our capacity for happiness and deepen our reverence for life in the midst of all this. Identity is a critical factor in social and political relations, and must be understood as a key actor in the conflict between power and solidarity. Caught between these opposing forces, pragmatic aesthetics help us to negotiate the tension. They advise us to see cultural identity as a historical contingency, a construct.

The project of social cohesion and solidarity would be better served by a vocabulary of synchrony and harmony that avoids categorical distinctions — white, black, male, female, Arab, Asian, coloured, and so on.

Although self and the other are contingent, they are not peripheral. They stand for something deep and fundamental in us. This conviction is brought about by causes and consequences rather than “truth” and “logic”. It is not a passive acceptance of “knowledge”, but an active, living acceptance of experience, perception, sensibility, and consciousness. It is there in great music and dance, and runs counter to reflective procedures that detach self and the other from each other, as rationality, transcendence and metaphysics do. The mind, the body and the heart are inscribed together as aspects of each other, aspects of the same being.

Music and dance change as they move from place to place in time. So they help us function in various fields of experience –  democracy itself depends on this empathic power. It is a basis of fundamental change

This is critical wisdom. If the mind loses its link with the body and the heart, schizophrenia occurs. The disconnection has a negative effect on the self. But because evil is so deep, ruptures will continue to occur, but social cohesion and solidarity bring out something fundamental in us. Significantly, music and dance change as they move from place to place in time, revealing complementary differences and equivalences. So they help us function in various fields of experience — local, provincial, national, regional, global. Democracy itself depends on this empathetic power.

It is because of this power that national symbolic days and heritage sites find in great music and dance a force for mobilising political consciousness and sensibility. Freedom Day, Nelson Mandela International Day, June 16, Women’s Month, Human Rights Day, Heritage Month — these are historic events that find their voice and communicate their meaning through music and dance. Even elegies, loss of loved ones, convey our deep sense of loss, consolation, and recovery.

So music and dance are much more than sensory experience. Aesthetic value is bound up with moral and social value. This has implications for how music and dance should be understood. They are irreducibly individual and social, bringing aesthetic effect into the interactive loop of perception, feeling, thinking and behaviour. That justifies them.

• Prof Nkondo is a member of the Mzansi National Philharmonic Orchestra Board.