Missa Luba etc

[blissblogger]

calling African music experts, world-ists, field recordings buffs etc:

what is the standing within the cognoscenti of the Missa records? everybody knows Missa Luba as heard on the movie If, but there was a whole spate of them, right?

and what exactly are they, musically? Church-music influenced African plainsong?

i ask because in our apartment buidling people don't chuck out their old bks, records, etc, they leave them in the foyer for other residents, and in a stack of old vinyl i found a record called Missa Kwango by Les Petits Chanteurs-Danseurs De Kenge, on Philips, very attractive cover . Took it upstairs and imagine my disappointment when the vinyl inside turned out to be a scratched copy of the musical Gigi!

 

[arcaNa]

...I have the "Missa Luba"- record, the exact same one used in the film "If..."
It is by (if memory serves me correctly,haven't got the record with me right now) les Trubadours de Roi Badumi... very beautiful cover, beige/earth-toned background colour and stylisized faces in dark brown...(will try and get the scanner to work so i can post up a scan later! it is a beautiful cover... !)

-IMO, the group was an african, christian/catholic music group/choir... African,xtian church music was/is, in my limited knowledge, very much influenced by older african songpatterns, so that the music you'll get will be a fusion of western and african tradition... (i bet the european church people didn't allow any percussion in the picture,though- "pagan" as they definatelt thought it were- but the percussive elements would be transformed/fusioned into the vocal rhythm patters instead, i.e. so you would get something like choral counterpoint- think Johann Sebastian Bach and his counterpoint in the Johannes Passion, for instance- different voices working against each other in distinctive patterns, intertwining, working together, driving each other forward, and parting again, only to meet again....beautiful.)

-don't know anything about the "other" similar records, but have heard that re: the music, it was pretty much the same...have yet to find out the name of the composer,though...won't surprise me if the composer wasn't African... i think there was a choir from Nairobi who did a more recent recording of it, but the "famous"/more critically acclaimed version of the piece is definately the one used in the Anderson film, AFAIK....
(-will try and find out more later! my stepmother is an musician and musical therapist specialising in african music, so i'll try and ask her for a more comprehensive view.)

 

[redcrescent]

Not an expert on this, but a missa/misa is a Catholic mass performed in a particular style of indigenous music, and the Missa Luba is a mass sung in a Congolese style, with Latin words (this being before the 2nd Vatican Council, which allowed the use of other languages for rites of mass).
In 1953/54, a Belgian priest named Guido Haazen, deeply impressed by the beauty of Congolese/Bantu vocal music, set up a choir and percussion group made up of teachers and students from the Kamina central school. Called "Les Troubadours du Roi Baudoin" in honor of the Belgian king (whose personal property the Belgian Congo was at the time), they recorded the original version (a section of which is included in the If OST). Apparently, although different sections are meant to be performed in a particular musical style, there are no written notes, so there is room for melodic, harmonic and rhythmic improvisation.
If you are interested in this and other missa performances, have a look at this CD/DVD, which includes the original missa luba recordings by Les Troubadours, a modern performance by a Kenyan choir, as well as the Misa Criolla (written by Ariel Ramirez, an Argentine, and usually performed in the Christmas season) and the Misa Flamenca (from southern Spain).
There are other misas, like the Misa a la Chilena (from Chile, written by Vicente Bianchi) and the Misa campesina nicaragüense ("Nicaraguan peasant mass"), which is particularly interesting because its lyrics deviate from the usual fare to include lines such as (I'm translating very badly here): "Lord, have Mercy, not with the class of oppression which oppresses and devours the community, but with the oppressed!" and "without fear, denounce injustice... suffer imprisonment and exile...fighting the oppressor." Calling Pilate a "Roman imperialist", the text reaffirms the belief in a struggle without surrender "to defend the people from the exploitative regime."
Quite a bit of lyrical subversion, then, going beyond the usual exhortations of love and forgiveness to give a more progressive, combative message inspiring/inspired by Marxist liberation theology...but I digress...