Victor Gama

Victor Gama was born with Portugese parents in Angola, a country that was ravaged by a bloody civil war. As a composer, musician and instrument designer Gama has a keen interest in Angolan music. He developed the Pangeia instrumentos series, a series of acoustic instruments, sound equipment and systems designed and built to experiment with form, sound and music. Gama also composed several songs, also with Kronos Quartet. Gama over the years gathered music from various Angolan provinces. This resulted in the Tsikaya project, the first digital music archive of Angola, supported by the Prince Claus Fund. This project aims to stimulate the creativity of musicians and their music to promote awareness of traditional music and to prevent it being forgotten and preserved for future generations in Angola. The project comprises a website and a CD whose proceeds will benefit mostly the musicians and their communities. http://www.victorgama.org/

Zapp 4

Zapp 4 (formerly Zapp String Quartet) is a band with a string groove that combines improvisation, imagination and passionate solos. Zapp 4 stands for an energetic live act that sparks. With their compositions they reach a diverse audience. In 2005 the quartet won the Kersjes Prize. The band is always looking for new musical challenges.http://www.zapp4.nl

Web Project Tsikaya

http://www.tsikaya.org

http://www.powerofculture.nl/nl/actueel/2009/oktober/tsikaya

The Prince Claus Fund and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts combine forces in an international art programme that brings art and culture from all over the world to Amsterdam in a series of special activities. Interesting individuals from around the world come to Amsterdam and highlight topical issues through fashion, art, photography, film, music and dance.

Rio Cubango is Victor Gama's second piece in the series "Music for Rivers" of which Rio Cunene, composed exclusively for the Kronos Quartet, was the first. Both pieces are intimately linked to the recent history of conflict in Angola.

Rio Cubango is composed of a series of pieces that are largely inspired on the music of children that Victor Gama recorded in the province of Cuando-Cubango during the conflict years. Gama noticed that children transformed everything they could find on battlefields around their villages, from empty artillery shells, ammunition boxes to Kalishnikov magazines, into toys and musical instruments. 

In Rio Cubango, Gama tries to capture the minimalistic nature of their music while exploring elements that are characteristic in Angolan traditional music such as call and response, certain rhythmic patterns and the inventiveness of musical instrument making. 

The piece is composed for three of Victor Gama's own musical instruments from the Pangeia Instrumentos series, string quartet and children's instruments made out of military scrap materials that Gama collected in the south of Angola in recent years. 

In contrast with Rio Cunene, which was a 15 minutes piece, Rio Cubango is specifically composed as a multimedia concert in two parts of 40 to 45 minutes each. In the first part of the concert titled "Portraits of who we are", Rio Cubango starts with a piece for acrux, one of Gama's instruments, and a children's song. This is then followed by solo pieces for toha, a type of harp that Gama has designed and developed over the last ten years, followed by pieces for toha played in a duet with harpist Salomé Pais Matos. This first part of the concert ends with a last piece for toha and string quartet introducing Zapp4 string quartet from Amsterdam.

The second half of the concert "Like rivers in the sky" starts with a solo piece for dino, another of Gama's instruments, followed by a piece for string quartet, dino and recorded song. The concert continues with a series of pieces for string quartet played by Zapp4 and ends with pieces for children's instruments and string quartet.

PROGRAM

RIO CUBANGO - composed by Victor Gama

1st part "Portraits of who we are"

piece for acrux and recorded song

solo pieces for toha

duo pieces for toha

piece for toha and string quartet

2nd part "Like rivers in the sky"

solo piece for dino

piece for dino, string quartet and recorded song

pieces for string quartet

pieces for string quartet and children's instruments