My bachelor’s thesis is finished, and it’s up on the Research Catalogue now. The full exposition is here. Below, the thesis in a nutshell.
The thesis asks how one rhythm from the Sukuma Bugobogobo tradition, a ngoma from western Tanzania, can be documented, transcribed, contextualized, and re-interpreted as a new concert work without losing what made it Bugobogobo in the first place. The field work happened in Mwanza, with Bujora Cultural Centre in Kisesa as the key heritage site, and Bwagamoyo Agriculture Centre in Bagamoyo, where I watched the tradition performed.
Mr. Rubasa Fumbuki, a Sukuma custodian I interviewed for this research, described ngoma as “the assembly”: instruments, dance, song, and the occasion itself, folded into one thing. That changed how I thought about the whole project. I stopped treating Bugobogobo as a pattern I could pull out and notate. It’s a living work ngoma, tied to labor, to youth, to a collective energy that a page of notation can’t hold on its own.
It mattered when I got into rehearsal, too. Part of the thesis argues for keeping secular work traditions like this one separate from ritual forms, and for dropping a label like “Tanzanian folk music” that flattens both into one vague category. Rehearsing the piece with a multicultural ensemble that had never encountered Bugobogobo backed this up: call-and-response, oral demonstration, repetition, movement, and a limited amount of notation got the groove, the timing, and the ensemble feel across better than notation alone ever did.
The finished composition keeps the source tradition’s rhythmic DNA and gives it room inside a contemporary concert setting. The transcriptions, the interviews, and the reasoning behind every choice are in the full exposition, linked above.
