I began playing the piano when I was
nine years old, and very quickly found that playing music was an outlet for my
emotions, feelings I could not have articulated but that I felt intensely when
I played beautiful music. There is
something very powerful and life-affirming about expressing yourself in this
way. Recently I’ve found that other
people in some very unlikely places are having this same experience. One of the places is a garbage dump in Paraguay and the other is in the Republic of Congo
in Central Africa . These stories are from two of the poorest
countries on earth, yet in each instance, the power of music allows people to
transform their lives and find hope.
In Kinshasa ,
the capital of war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, 200 musicians and vocalists
gather almost every evening to rehearse some of the greatest music ever
written. They leave the poverty and
hopelessness of their lives for a few hours to rehearse Bach, Mendelssohn,
Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Armand Diangienda is the unlikely conductor
and founder of this group, the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra. After he lost his job as a commercial pilot
twenty years ago, he decided to form an orchestra. The only problem was that he had no
instruments, no musicians and he didn’t know how to read music. Driven by his passion to create an orchestra,
he taught himself to play the piano, the trombone, the guitar and the
cello. He recruited the first few
orchestra members from his church; they in turn brought their friends and the
group grew in size. The few available instruments
had to be shared until more were donated or salvaged from local thrift shops
and repaired. When violin strings broke,
replacements were constructed from bicycle brake wire. I was amazed to learn that hundreds of
musical scores were copied out by hand; individual parts were deciphered by
listening to the piece over and over again on CD. As the orchestra grew, every room and corner
in Armand’s house was filled with practicing musicians. In 2010, two German film-makers came to the
Congo to make the documentary “Kinshasa Symphony.” The film so inspired two German opera
vocalists that they travelled to Kinshasa to give master classes. Working with the Congolese vocalists, they
were moved to see how the singers’ faces changed when they sang their music –
how they closed their eyes and were transported to somewhere else by the beauty
of the music. Two of the singers who lived
ten miles away in the countryside walked six days a week, 90 minutes each way,
to be at rehearsals. These singers were
asked by Bob Simon on 60 Minutes when they had joined the orchestra. They answered, “November 8th,
2003.” Simon asked, “Why do you think
you remember the exact date?” They responded,
“…it’s like a birth for us in this symphony orchestra, so it’s a date we can’t
forget.”
The inspirational stories of the Recyled Orchestra in Paraguay and the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra
in the Congo
illustrate the incredible power of music to lift peoples’ lives and give them
meaning. Both stories were told by Bob
Simon on 60 Minutes and can be found on the internet.* I strongly encourage you
to listen to the amazing stories of these people and their music. You might also want to learn about a unique
system of music education for disadvantaged children in Venezuela called “El Systema” in Changing
Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music byTricia
Tunstall. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which
is performed in part by the Kinshasa Orchestra on the 60 Minutes program, can be
found in the CD collection in our library, along with many other beautiful and
inspiring works of music.
* The easiest way to find the two programs referenced in
this article is to google
“60 Minutes and
Congo” and “60 Minutes and Paraguay.”
