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What’s a young professional musician to do when her body fails her? Klara is learning mbira and karimba, to play especially when her body doesn’t want to play violin. An introduction from Mark: High level musicians dedicate their body, their time, their soul, and years to their art. They are driven by the dreams of the greatness they have touched in their musical experiences, and they invest their very lives to this god of music. But what happens when their body fails them? When pain and debility make their work and ambitions look like one of God’s great jokes? Many musical instruments are quite physically demanding: guitar, upright bass, piano,

Conscious attention can bring many benefits to you and your music Photo by Glen Davis. Kalimba by Andrew Masters What is mindfulness?  For me, mindfulness is being as present as I can be to the moment that is unfolding.   Consider music as a sort of plow that is able to cut a furrow through the present moment.  Good music invites the listener to become entrained in that furrow as the musical plowshare cuts through the unfolding succession of present moments .  Good music, happy, sad, or otherwise, can be a great comfort as it can largely take us from whatever pathway we were wandering down, and instead directs our

Surging in popularity now, kalimbas arrived long ago and then all but vanished French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret depicted many scenes of Africans in Brazil, including these images with Kalimba! (From Decio Gioieli’s CD) Kalimbas had been common in many, widespread places, having come along with Africans when they were torn from their native lands by slavers. How and why kalimbas disappeared is a sad and complicated tale. Today, the kalimba is more popular than ever. People all over the world are creating original, unique kalimba designs. People everywhere are doing exactly what the people of Africa always did with the kalimba over the last millennium: adapting it to play their own musics. The

You can learn to create your own variations! Some of the variations I created to accompany Wa Kalulu I have written before about how much fun it is to find variations that work with traditional African kalimba music. This article elaborates on this subject, and how I went about creating my own variations, first by improvisation, and then later in composition inspired by those earlier improvisations. Even in the case of songs such as “Wa Kalulu” for which only a standard part notation exists, we can create essentially infinite variations to go along with this music. All it takes is two karimba players, one with a good grasp of the

Playing without looking helps you improve in so many ways Archival Practice Tips Part of what is so great about playing the kalimba is that it is all right there in front of your eyes.   You can see the entire instrument, all its notes, all that it can do, in one glance.  You might not understand it yet, but you can easily see that it is understandable.  Map the shorter kalimba tines to higher notes and the lower tines to lower notes.  Simple, right? But an even more important tip I can give you is to NOT look at the kalimba as you play. In this tip we are going

A huge shipment just arrived from South Africa – here is what happens next Most of the kalimbas I play – and consequently, most of the kalimbas I sell – are Hugh Tracey Kalimbas, made by African Musical Instruments (AMI) in South Africa. When I started Kalimba Magic in 2005, I ordered about 200 kalimbas, and it took about six weeks from when I placed the order to when they arrived at my door. Now, I order over 1000 kalimbas at a time, and it takes six to nine months for the kalimbas to get here.  Why so long?  Supply chain issues, more orders from other folks, bigger orders, exchange

Your creations can mean a lot more than you think Off Loom Weaving by Patricia Holdaway, c. 1978 “It looks like something that used to be incredibly beautiful that a huge beast started to claw at,” my friend John said when he saw the new piece of art I was hanging on the wall in my college dorm room.  My mother had just mailed me one of her off-loom weavings, and I proudly hung it on the wall. Later, my roommate’s cat actually would pull out the lower-hanging clumps of yarn, thereby fulfilling John’s prophecy. Over the 35 years that I have had my mother’s weaving hanging on various walls,

Can you really pay attention to two things at once? You can, but it’s a skill you have to cultivate When I was 24, I finally learned how to talk and play guitar at the same time.  Until then, when playing guitar, I could hear what was being said, and could understand it, but I could not speak or even answer simple questions.  Why could I not speak and play guitar at the same time?  I suppose the “music generation” part of my brain overlapped too much with the “speech generation” part of my brain.  And how, exactly, did I learn to speak and play at the same time?  And

They say you can only think of one thing at a time – kalimba requires you to think of two things at a time! When I was 10 years old, my father said “I’ll give you a dollar if you can go 10 seconds without thinking of a brown bear!”  I jumped up from the dinner table, went to stand in the corner, and started chanting “White bear! White bear!” and got a huge laugh from my whole family. But truth be told?  I was actually thinking of brown bears the entire time I was trying to fill my mind with images and words of white bears. Playing kalimba is