The first African artist to
record his songs from Ethiopia.
The set of recordings of
songs and compositions by Tessema Eshete constitute one of the earliest
African music documents on shellac discs. They present to the world an
expression of his creativity and his ingenuity as an instrumentalist as
well as a singer and foremost a poet.
The Rediscovery of the
Records Series
Searching for early
Ethiopian commercial recordings Prof. Pankhurst set me on the right
track.. It was the year 2002 when Mr. Tadele Yidnekatchew received me
kindly in his office in Addis Ababa to reveal to me a most exciting
story. His grandfather Tessema Eshete went to Germany in 1908 to be
trained as a driver and auto mechanic for Emperor Menelik. He came back
two years later with nearly twenty numbers of published shellac discs.
Exciting from the aspect
as well, that he could well be the first musician coming from Africa to
Europe to be recorded by an official record company, in this case most
likely Odeon in Berlin.
Nevertheless, until the
moment our knowledge of the historic facts is still very modest. But
what concerns the “objects”, the concrete gramophone records, we are a
bit better of.
There is one single copy
of a Tessema disc in the possession of Mr. Tadele Yidnekatchew, who
himself has become the historiographer of his ancestors, it carries the
signature of his grandfather. It is the kind of intense engaged
biographic research into the personal history of his own family, which
Tadele Yidnekatchew has conducted, that results in an unique
contribution to a more complete Cultural History of Ethiopia. His merits
are invaluable for the study of African music history as well. For all
of that I want to congratulate Tadele Yidnekatchew for what he has
achieved and I want to express my sincere thanks for how he has
supported the research on his grandfather.
Looking for early
recordings in the Institute of Ethiopian Studies museum storage, I had
the kind opportunity to glance through hundreds of discs. I came across
at first one and two and then nearly all of the series published by
Odeon with songs by Tessema Eshete. Each of the 78 r.p.m. gramophone
discs had been signed personally by the artist himself.
Research in Mainz
At the Johannes
Gutenberg-University of Mainz, the Institute of Ethnology and African
Studies, and more particular the African Music Archive (A.M.A.), we have
started to spend some of our research energies into the reconstruction
of Tessema's German stay. When we were able to transfer the shellacs
onto a digital carrier at the I.E.S. (which was jointly financed by the
Mainz Archive, I.E.S. and the family, in Mainz our staff, mainly Nadine
Siegert took care of it. Dr. Ronny Maier and Andreas Wetter, both
African linguists were always helpful in academic questions concerning
the language use and analysis.
In the wake of these
transfers the Mainz Archive also took care to safeguard the other 78
r.p.m. gramophone records of the I.E.S. collection as well for posterity
and for further research. Ato Teshome Desta was willing to contribute
his technical know-how in the process. The joint operation was a hopeful
exercise in the acknowledgement of a common ownership of one world's
cultural heritage.
Anything else would be
reflecting past isolationist and nationalist strategies which we
have all left behind us. UNESCO ask us independently to cooperate in the
preservation of culture and to accept a mutual responsibility. This is
in fact a new approach and the case of Tessema Eshete is showing we
proceed in the right direction.
The Recording Industry
and Technical Innovation
This is great luck for
the Ethiopian and even for the whole African music history. At that
early period recording companies themselves went out to the world to
gather recordings and publish them accordingly to open up new markets
around the globe. In 1900 Odeon recorded already Egyptian artists. HMV
(His Master's Voice) followed suit and the Orient became the first
target, Africa followed. Later with having developed more advanced
technological methods for capturing the human voice and musical
instruments, the recording companies preferred for a while to encourage
the musicians to come to their most modern professional studios in
Europe themselves, to allow for the highest quality. Quality became more
and more a competitive issue within the recording industry. The
equipment at the same time could not yet easily be used as a mobile
studio. This again changes towards the end of world war II.
That is why in 1908 it
was uncommon for an artist coming from an African country to be recorded
in Europe with the latest in technology at disposal. Tessema Eshete
was and one can actually hear the very best of recording quality
comparing it with other recorded music of that period. Definitely it was
better quality than the recordings made outside either by touring sound
engineers or even less professional ethnomusicologists. These actually
used wax cylinders for their “field” recordings. The Odeon gramophone
records are double-sided. This was at the time the latest technological
advance, and for a while even the privilege of Odeon.
Musicians from Africa
Always Up to Date
To stress the point here,
the very first, or at least one of the first occasions, an African
artist has his music recorded and pressed on discs, it is not on any
old-fashioned wax cylinders, but on the most modern technological medium
of capturing sound. This in fact will be only the beginning of an era of
African music that is marked by always being in touch with the latest in
technological development.
Music pressed in
Europe but not on sale there
Usually the finished
product, the pressed shellac disc was sent to be sold in the country of
its origin. There was no market yet, or the recording companies could
not imagine, that thee would be one, in Europe for exotic music. Exotic
music was only of interest for the researcher, like Erich Moritz von
Hornbostel (1877-1935), the founder of the “Berlin School of Comparative
Musicology” who became the head of the Phonogram-Archive in Berlin from
1906 to 1933. Today it lives on as the Ethno musicological Department
of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.
Open Questions
Tessema Eshete came back
with all these records. Did he sell them? How were they distributed? Or
not at all? Did he give them out as presents to friends and music
lovers? How many gramophones were actually available in Ethiopia at the
time? According to his grandson, for around 30 years they remained the
only existing commercial recordings by an Ethiopian artist.
Until today we have not
found any trace of Tessema Eshete's stay in Germany at the time.
As he was accompanied by
Mr. and Mrs. Holtz, who were friends to Emperor Menelik and entrusted
with three Ethiopian young men to have them trained in Germany, Tessema
might have been well taken care of and was not been used as a show
piece of strange “negros”. This was still the habit at world fairs at
the beginning of the 20th century, even up to the forties.
The Cryptic Lyrics
The songs in the “wax and
gold” tradition are highly poetic and cryptic. They are of the quality
of any lyrical poetry worldwide. As his compositions have not been
written down, they might be called “oral literature” or more fashionable
“oratur”. But to me it does not count in particular if written or not,
his sung sentences belong to the corpus of world literature. Until now
we know of people with education who understand the poems, the songs.
One needs the education of a culture that has been largely lost or at
least been pushed aside by more modern media. Tessema Eshete's father
was an Azmari at Ras Mekonnen in Harrar. The son Tessema definitely had
taken up a lot from his father's art. But Tessema Eshete himself never
became a professional singer. He actually later never performed again
with the Masinko. But he wrote poetry that was published by his son
Yidnekatchew – in Amharic – luckily. The only fault is the missing
translation. Something I hope will change for the better in the future.
A translation, or rather many translations are a must. Even though we
are all aware what a difficult task a project like this means. It will
have to be a bilingual edition with an extremely detailed editorial
commentary, line by line, going with it.
Because the songs are an
expression of the contemporary education (“Bildung” in German is far
more fitting, but doesn't have any equivalent term in English), it is
necessary for the adequate appreciation and understanding of the poetry
to acquire oneself the necessary knowledge and depth needed. Therefore
the reading of the poetry, the listening to the songs is an act of
self-education and as such an important factor in the preservation of
historic knowledge. This literary treasure is as well part of our
common world cultural heritage which by this initiative of the grandson
has thus been kept alive and is a constant offer to all of us who are
interested in history, literature, poetry, language and politics to
struggle with it, to grasp it – and even if it is only a tiny bit of
it – we will be grateful for the insights given. UNESCO is promoting
presently a program to appreciate the world's cultural diversity, the lyrical work in songs
or poems by Tessema Eshete are a good example for this.
