The Texture of Silence explores the interface between composed and improvised music and visual art. It brings together various indigenous southern African musical instruments, jazz language, graphic notation for music and the visual explorations of artist Mzwandile Buthelezi. Across disciplines, these three artists use this project to explore both fixed ideas and spontaneous responses and in this way create new music. In a space dominated by male jazz ensembles or dated classical repertoire, this trio concert aims to complicate what “composing” means, to tease out the less common creative spaces – where nyungwe-nyungwe meets charcoal, where musical bow frequencies hum around guitar lines, where dense harmonies follow moving line.
Composers: Cara Stacey, Keenan Ahrends, Mzwandile Buthelezi
Guitar: Keenan Ahrends
Piano, nyungwe-nyungwe, umrhubhe, umtshingo: Cara Stacey
Visual art: Mzwandile Buthelezi
Videography: Romy Brauteseth, Marcus Wyatt