A Pianist in Rwanda

one of the ways to think about music is that it reflects the structure of basic thought—a process that synthesizes intellectual, emotional, and sensory experience. Inasmuch as music mirrors patterns of thought, it can serve as a kind of X-ray of our interior dialogue and illuminate ways in which we create meaning.

Harmony-based music, like classical or popular music, is built horizontally in sequences of tension to release, conflict to resolution, doubt to certainty. The music progresses like a narrative, through linear time, to a conclusion. Some music, like some storytelling, is more predictable because the grammar of the harmony is more familiar. And even when the harmony is alien we unconsciously process its meaning because of the nature of resolution and because of its progression through time.

On the other hand, rhythm-based music, like traditional African drum music, is not structured around resolution. It is built vertically in repeated patterns of rhythm and melody layered on top of each other with increasing complexity and tension to form an organic whole. It is sustained in a kind of continuous present and expresses a spiritual and sacred relationship to the natural world. The music doesn’t aim to resolve, does not drive to a conclusion. It doesn’t end. It just stops.

There is a woman in Kigali who pushes a bicycle up a mountain every day. She is barefoot in the rain, and on her bicycle, soaked and mud-scarred, a passenger carries a load of goods. She walks bent forward and unavailable. When she sees me drive by in a car, she averts her eyes. I see her very clearly, though, and her image lingers in my mind in a constant, irrepressible echo. Her task seems impossible to me—Sisyphean. I can’t imagine how she continues or what she is thinking. But gradually I realize that there are different modes of thought and perception, different experiences of life, and liken them to the differences in the structures of harmony- and rhythm-based music. I begin to understand that the relationship to time, to value, to purpose, to ourselves—our basic existential tooling—is not a god-given inheritance but is, like music, a cultural construction. And this leaves me profoundly confused, dangling between two great fictions of existence: mine, in which there is no meaning without resolution, and hers, in which the idea of resolution has no meaning.

Aside from coffee, tea, tin ore, hides, and a few other natural resources, there are limited exports from Rwanda. The Troupe Culturelle Imena, a traditional dance, choral, and drum ensemble, is an exception. It is one of the only cultural exchanges from the country and has graced the stages of Europe and Africa. I was invited to a rehearsal at the group’s studio in the Greenwich Village of Kigali.

Social class can to some extent be identified in Kigali through the geography of the city—the higher up on the hill, the richer. The wealthiest people tend to live at the top of the crests, and many of their homes have protective, un-spoiled views. Fabulous terraces overlook a serenade of nature without the compromise of the clawing human wrestle just below it.

Nyamirambo is a lower- to middle-class district and is located near the bottom of the swing in the valley. It is now the desired neighbourhood for students and a young, growing middle class, but it shares its borders with the less fortunate. The city is remarkably safe, as is the country as a whole. Rwanda also has one of the most balanced legislatures in the world—49 percent of the people in the Rwandan parliament are women.

Nyamirambo has areas of decent housing and accommodation. It is also one of the shopping spots in the city, and its streets are lined with outdoor food stalls and retail stores. There is an inordinate number of hairdressing “saloons.” But along the main street, mostly what is for sale are useless donated items. Artless displays in unlit stone shops of 1980s Italian-style gym outfits complete with mesh, nylon to sweat in, and tassels; T-shirts with big happy announcements in English; used can openers; dumps of old shoes. Bumper to bumper dirt. Much of the merchandise lies in piles on the ground.

The studio in Nyamirambo for the Imena company is in the reverberant conference room of a church. Thirty-five drummers, singers, and dancers re-enact the folklore of Rwanda, from the bucolic “Dance of the Elephants” to the remarkably violent beats of an ancient war call. Stripped to the waist, in elaborate straw headdresses and painted in bold stripes of red, yellow, and green, the men hammer out a complex harmony of intores rhythms. (“Intores” means war, and is also the name of the local brand of cigarette.) Drums were often used like telegraphs, but these beats don’t serve to signal so much as they inject the listener with their temper and spirit. Pitched at the edge of high volume, it is an alarmingly effective performance. When the women perform a dance to the harvest there is not a hint of the “Oh God, I’m gorgeous” of a ballet dancer as they move like the rhythm of water to the hums and murmurs of an ancestral chant.

The Mille Collines has transformed its most corporate room into a house of music with seating, flowers, a stage, and a piano for the concert. The event has attracted about 400 people. Many are diplomats and ngo staff working in Kigali, but there are also local residents. Among them is Joseph. Slim and tender-eyed, he looks younger than his thirty years. He is the assistant administrator of the conservatory and will play a short piano piece. There are very few chances to perform publicly in Rwanda, and after only three years of lessons, though he can play Beethoven’s Für Elise competently and read music, Joseph is nervous. He manages to contain a racing pulse and grinding stomach, and with his usual modest formality slips through the fizz in the room, unnoticed. When Marlene first met him a few years ago he had been out of work for a long time. Though he studied to be an electronics technician, he was being employed at a gas station for $60 a month, supporting his mother and five siblings. Many households in Rwanda are headed by children, some as young as fourteen, but all of them have been forced to write the same autobiography. All of them live with the punishments of survival. “I live for music,” Joseph says. “It gives me life.” He now makes his home right at the conservatory and for $200 a month helps administrate and teach. There are only a few keyboards on which the students can practise. Many of the kids want to learn jazz, the violin, and the guitar, but there are few instruments and no teachers.